Bluebacks and Silver Brights: A Lifetime in the B.C. Fisheries from Bounty to Plunder
408
Bluebacks and Silver Brights: A Lifetime in the B.C. Fisheries from Bounty to Plunder
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Overview
A captivating memoir set during the pinnacle of West Coast fishing
More than a history of the Vancouver fishing industry, Bluebacks and Silver Brights is a collection of great adventures set on the Pacific coast. With dozens of salty tales of hardworking and hard-living fisherman and fish industry workers, this is Norman Safarik’s story of West Coast fishing from the Gulf of Georgia to Prince Rupert, with a detour to New York’s old-time fish markets. With wisdom and insight, Safarik’s story is also an ecological warning, recalling the lost bounty of Canada’s natural resources of a century ago, and their possible extinction today at the hands of government mismanagement and overfishing.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770901834 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 08/03/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
ALLAN SAFARIK, was born and raised in B.C. Allan’s works include All Night Highway (1997), How I Know The Sky Is a River (1999), and Bird Writer’s Handbook (2003). In 2003, he won the John V. Hicks Manuscript Award for Literary Non-Fiction and in 2005 he won the Saskatchewan Book Award for poetry for When Light Falls from the Sun. Allan Safarik lives in Dundurn, Saskatchewan.
Read an Excerpt
Bluebacks and Silver Brights
A Lifetime in the BC Fisheries from Bounty to Plunder
By Norman Safarik, Allan Safarik, Emily Schultz
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Norman Safarik and Allan SafarikAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-183-4
CHAPTER 1
AFTER THE CATCH
The salmon as we knew them sixty years ago in British Columbia are virtually gone. I doubt the salmon runs will ever return to anything close to their original strength. Too many streams have been destroyed by urban encroachment or by the clear-cutting practices of the logging industry. Fifteen years ago, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans issued a bulletin claiming five hundred streams were destroyed and hundreds more had five or six hen fish — as they put it — returning to spawn. Each stream has its own subspecies of salmon that have adapted to the strength of the flow in that particular stream over thousands of years.
When a salmon run is extinguished, it is almost impossible to replace this run with fish from another waterway. People are under the illusion that salmon hatcheries can repair the damage, but there is no such simple solution. Hatchery fry are not as elusive as wild salmon fry, so they become easy prey for predators almost as soon as they are released. The damage to creeks and rivers could be repaired over time, but the cost of such an undertaking would take an enormous financial commitment, one that our society would undoubtedly reject. Clear-cut logging and salmonoid enhancement — reversing the decline — are not compatible and never will be, because streams go dry without an adequate tree canopy to hold back the snowmelt.
We cannot sustain a fishing industry with one run of salmon that allows a commercial fishery only one or two days fishing per week over five weeks of the year. The coho and spring salmon runs that were the backbone of the trolling industry are on the endangered list, and the pinks show in numbers only every three or four years. In the past, the season for coho opened the first of April and was closed at the end of February. The springs and chums were open twelve months of the year. Now the season opens in July or later and ends about the middle of September except for a few days of gillnetting in the Fraser River to clean up stragglers not strong enough to reach the spawning grounds.
Ten years ago, contractors would not deliver logs under twenty inches in diameter because they could not recover the cost of delivering them to a mill, so they buried, burned or dumped them into the ocean when nobody was looking. Is it possible that the forestry department was unaware of this practice? Now it is common to see trucks coming out of the bush loaded with broken ends and timber that is only five or six inches in diameter. Once logging was an honourable, romantic way of life that made British Columbia prosperous. Today, because of modern logging techniques, many loggers have become displaced people removed from the industry that sustained them and their families. Suddenly the public has become appalled at forestry practices, and so individual loggers and their families have paid the price.
We killed fifty million bison for their hides and tongues in a period of fifty years. In the past seventy-five years, logging has removed more than half the timber from British Columbia and the salmon resource has almost been killed off. Trees and salmon are invaluable resources that should be harvested for the benefit of everybody in the province. However, one valuable resource should not be destroyed for the sake of exploiting another resource. We should guard our assets and demand responsible behaviour in all of our primary industries. Progress should not be allowed to diminish our ability to naturally recover from exploiting our renewable resources. Where habitat is destroyed through careless or illegal use by ruthless individuals, the punishment should fit the crime. Too often in the past, huge companies have been given only token fines for despicable activities. Wherever habitat is destroyed, the damage should be repaired promptly by those responsible for the destruction.
Most people cannot comprehend the vast runs of salmon that once inhabited all the waters on our Pacific coast. Millions of salmon were taken with primitive equipment that would be laughed at now. Each year millions of fish were caught, and every stream that was even a couple of feet wide had salmon spawning in it. Salmon entered streams like the Seymour, Lynn, Capilano, Indian, Coquitlam, Stave, Nanaimo and thousands of other similar creeks and rivers on the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island and other places in the province. Spawning salmon were so thick at times in the late fall that schoolboys played games catching them by hand and releasing them back into the teeming masses.
Today, hundreds of streams in British Columbia are barren. Hundreds of other streams have disappeared because of industrial, mining, urban or agricultural development that has filled them in. The salmon resources were abused by a number of factions. At times salmon was treated as a pest because it interfered with industry. Sand and gravel were indiscriminately removed from creek beds to use in cement for construction projects. Spawning grounds were debased and devalued for future generations. The cyclical nature of a resource-based economy in the decades following the war set the clock ticking on the destruction of salmon habitat. The forest industry has damaged almost every watershed in our coastal areas. Many creeks are still suffering from the legacy of logging camps. These camps often blocked up creeks to provide water for camp purposes. Scores of these dams remain, no longer in use, fouling streams so salmon cannot reach spawning grounds.
Pulp mills, slow, methodical poisoners of water resources, were located near and depended on large quantities of fresh running water for their processing. This was another secretive industry that operated with few controls, with the blessing of the government and without adequate assessment of damage done to fisheries resources. Who knows what lurks in the history of that industry. Hydro dams have also contributed to the demise of our salmon stocks, as have irrigation demands, and road and railway construction. Streams that once sustained enormous runs are now considered a success if six or eight hen salmon are found in their waters.
Throughout Canadian history, fisheries bureaucrats and politicians have consistently managed to bungle every aspect of fisheries conservation on both the East and West Coasts. Their astounding legacy of mismanagement continues unabated to this day. The major issues on the West Coast — habitat destruction, pollution, overfishing, over-large fleets, herring roe fisheries, fish farming and lack of faith between nations in negotiating treaties and regulations — remain unsettled.
Science has given us much information about the ocean and the creatures that inhabit the depths. However, when applied to solving the problems of various fisheries, this knowledge has never added up to much. Canadian federal fisheries predictions and policies generated by the experts have resulted in a series of sad failures that have haunted the West Coast fisheries for decades. After several years of catastrophically low sockeye salmon numbers, the 2010 Fraser River run of over twenty-five million fish, the biggest run in history, caught the experts by surprise. The cycles of salmon returning to spawn in the river systems on the Pacific coast are an age-old process of harmony and balance. This sudden unexpected return of millions of fish during one strange year produces more questions than it answers about what has happened to the fisheries over the long haul.
Caught between lobbyists from sectors in the industry and environmental groups, the federal government had become less transparent as time passes, gagging government biologists and stonewalling the public. In August 2011, Kristi Miller, a fisheries scientist, told a federal inquiry that government officials close to the prime minister of Canada prevented her from addressing the media about the research she conducted into the 2009 sockeye failure. (Ten million sockeye were expected to return to the Fraser River, but only one and a half million showed up.) A Canadian Press report, posted on August 25, 2011, quoted Miller as saying: "I learned only through the inquiry process that the decision of not allowing me to speak to the press after the Science paper came out of the Privy Council Office and not from DFO."
The tragic story of the wild salmon in British Columbia is the result of a legacy of abuse and mismanagement. Its final chapter may be written in the annals of history in a science-fiction scenario. Growing farmed fish on our coast is akin to growing wheat in flowerpots in Saskatchewan. The reduction of the trolling fleet has meant the demise of quality hook-and-line-caught fish for fresh fish markets. Free-ranging wild fish that swim for their lives are being replaced on restaurant menus and at fresh fish markets by cheaper farmed fish that are raised on pellets and antibiotics. Hundreds of thousands of farmed salmon, afflicted by diseases that are unknown in wild fish, are raised in confined net pens. Thousands escape each year and swim in the same waters as the wild stocks. In August 1998, fisheries biologists indicated that DNA testing had found evidence, for the first time, of naturally spawned Atlantic salmon in the Tsitika River on Vancouver Island. A year later, juvenile Atlantic salmon were discovered in Amor de Cosmos Creek about thirty miles north of the Tsitika River. These were shocking developments for the many scientists and experts who said it couldn't happen.
What does this mean to the wild stocks? Only time can answer that question fully. Is it possible that after all the hard lessons learned, we will risk the future of the wild stocks of salmon by creating an industrial incubator that will increasingly nurture and release genetic weaklings and freaks at a frightening rate into an already complex environment? Science is too important to be left with the scientists. As one writer has put it, "What we're seeing is the beginning of a biological invasion." Thoughts of disease, predation and disharmony come to mind. The greatest watersheds in the universe stripped of their biological material and memory. Wild fish being replaced by aliens from another ocean, bringing disease, or massive colonization and generations of new competitors for food and space in an already declining environment. How can we risk taking a chance when the blueprints for disaster are already on the table?
I have seen the salmon so thick in the Seymour River that they were crowded to the edges of the stream, moving slowly up current with their backs sticking out of the water. By the middle of September even a blind man could have caught fish with his hands. The salmon were a solid mass like a dark cloud at the mercy of every predator. In my years around the river, I never saw anyone molest the fish at this stage of the season. Now the fish are gone and so is the river as a salmon stream and recreational resource. Nobody wants to swim in or even visit a slime-and-junk-filled creek that has only four or five inches of water in it. In British Columbia the salmon are gone from creeks and rivers because their habitat has been destroyed by land speculators, builders, logging, pulp mills, mines, industries and overfishing. Poor resource management policies and lack of regional and international co-operation have exacerbated the problem. No resource should be abused or harvested to the point of extermination.
The smell of progress is bound to reduce our quality of life in an aesthetic sense if we are to keep up with consumer demands. It would be ideal to have plenty of hydro power, full employment in the woods and a strong industrial and manufacturing base. However, you can't eat a kilowatt, an ingot of aluminum or a two-by-four. Even a bucket of herring would look pretty good to a person who has not eaten for a few days.
CHAPTER 2TERMINAL CITY
I began working full-time for my father's company, Vancouver Shellfish and Fish Company, in 1936, after attending high school in the depth of the Great Depression. My parents, John Safarik and Emilie Safarik, née Petrak, had come to Canada at different times early in the century from landlocked Czechoslovakia. Ironically, my father, a butcher by trade from a country with no access to the ocean, had by the mid-thirties firmly established himself in the fish business.
Father was a Slovak born in 1888 in the village of Keof near Bohuslava about ten miles from Brno in Moravia. His parents were small landowners who raised livestock and eventually had a family of thirteen children. At that time Czechoslovakia was a part of Austria, which was allied with Hungary, Germany and Turkey. War clouds were threatening and young men were facing the prospect of being drafted into the army. On a whim, John decided to join some of his friends who were headed to the New World. In 1906, at the age of eighteen, John arrived at Ellis Island in New York City with hundreds of other immigrants. From there, he went to work in a steel mill in Pittsburgh. His passage was to be paid out of a work contract; passage overseas and room and board were provided in addition to one dollar per day for a six-day work week of twelve hours per day on a one-year contract. When his contract was up, Father moved to Chicago where he worked in the Armour meat plant. Eventually, he travelled by rail into Canada. He worked for a short time on a farm in Saskatchewan before he moved on to Seattle and then to Vancouver. The day he arrived in Vancouver he obtained employment at the Burns slaughterhouse.
My mother, Emilie Petrak, was born in 1900 near Prague. She came to Canada with her family when she was nine years old on the steamship Montrose sailing from Antwerp. After a stormy early spring crossing that took two weeks, they arrived in St. John, New Brunswick, and boarded a train for the long journey to New Westminster, British Columbia. Emilie's father had purchased a parcel of land in Newton from the CPR through a Czech bank. Unfortunately the land was covered with timber and proved to be unsuitable for his purpose of starting a small farm.
My parents met at a Czech picnic in Stanley Park. On December 18, 1916, Mother and Father were married in a simple ceremony in Christ Cathedral in Vancouver with only a few family and friends in attendance. She was sixteen and he was twenty-eight. It was a lasting union that endured for almost sixty years.
They moved onto an acreage on Eton Street at New Brighton on Burrard Inlet where they kept milk cows, calves, chickens, ducks, geese and horses, which my father doctored and resold, and a dozen suckling pigs that he bought at the farmers' market near Main and Hastings. The milk cows were kept mostly for our own use. Skim milk and buttermilk were fed to the hogs and chickens. Mother sold the butter. At the East End acreage Father built a killing room with a cement floor and running water. He sold veal, pork and lard to butcher shops, restaurants and to Woodward's Department Store. Mother grew a large garden, took care of the fowl and raised me and my two brothers, Edward and John. As my father gradually got more involved in the fish business, the land became useful as a grazing pasture for the horses he used to pull his fish wagon.
In 1917, John Safarik and his partner, William Steiner, opened the Vancouver Shellfish and Fish Company on the Gore Avenue fish dock. It was a long, successful partnership that saw them relocate to a new location in 1926. They became charter tenants at the Vancouver Harbour Commission Wharf on the waterfront at the foot of Campbell Avenue. This wharf with its enormous fish sheds, which eventually housed many fish companies, was an unloading facility with an ice house and berthing slips for fishing boats. The Vancouver Harbour Commission Wharf became commonly known as the Campbell Avenue fish dock. By 1936, my father had replaced his horse-drawn fish wagon with a truck and our family had moved to a new location.
Long before dawn each morning we travelled west from our house on North Penticton Street in the oldest area of Vancouver, Hastings-Sunrise, on our way to Campbell Avenue fish dock on the harbour. We followed Powell Street beside ribbons of railway tracks that passed along the waterfront. The fish dock was located beyond the tracks and behind the massive brick expanse of the British Columbia Sugar Refinery.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bluebacks and Silver Brights by Norman Safarik, Allan Safarik, Emily Schultz. Copyright © 2012 Norman Safarik and Allan Safarik. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface vii
After the Catch 1
Terminal City 7
The Trawlers 13
The Man from New York 20
The California Con Man 26
Live Cod 28
Spanish Pete 34
The Lutafish Eaters 42
The Backman Boys 47
Littlenecks 51
Peddlers 61
Fishmongers 77
Bluebacks 83
The Carriage Trade 90
The Industry Flounders 94
The Fishermen's Ball 99
Von Arnim 107
The Gambler 110
Stradiotti Brothers 124
Monsters and Money 131
Fish Cops 135
The King of Fishmongers 141
The Trade 144
The Hagers 150
Chickens and Whales 153
Mac and Bob 171
Cannery Row 179
Shoot Up at Campbell Avenue 183
Big Fish and Big Business 190
Malcolm McCallum 216
Dr. Ballard 230
Off with Their Heads 238
Reds Bearing Lobsters 247
A Blue Suit and a Red Rose 257
Of Sea Lice and Lieutenant-Governors 269
Charlie Walcott and the Annie Tuck 286
The Shah's Agent 311
How the West Coast Was Won and Lost 316
Thieves and Cash Buyers 329
The Vanishing Fishery 338
Appendices
Pinks, Crustaceans and Morning Herring 347
The Ocean Kings 357
A Brief History of Salmon 360
Letter to the Commission on Pacific Fisheries 366