Fishing for Freedom: Life Lessons Learned by a Young Coastal Fisherman in the Summer of '64

By Larry Sparks

At age 16, young Larry Sparks is spending his fourth consecutive summer as the crewman on his father's 48-foot coastal gillnet fishing boat. In one sense, he is learning a trade. But in the summer of '64, he is reaching a peak in his physical powers and has a deep-seated desire to learn more about who he will grow up to be, so he invests his thinking time by investigating the fundamental rules and principles of adult living and of the very business his father is in.

He tolerates the boredom of traveling hundreds of miles on the ocean, always ready to meet the physical challenges of being a commercial fisherman in daily combat with the salmon he needs to catch in order to achieve financial security for his family, and he faces the sometimes dangerous adventures that the sea always provides mariners of all stripes as they challenge nature at her elemental best.

Not only is Larry's story interesting even to non-fishermen, it is filled with the kinds of daily escapades that may very well equal those of Mark Twain's immortal Tom Sawyer -- except that Larry, inhibited by the very solitary nature of his work, has a great deal of trouble finding the Becky Thatcher of his dreams.

But does he find her? Read this book and find out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Larry Sparks
• Release date: Mar 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9780985375119

Larry Sparks

For economic reasons, Larry Sparks continued to fish in Alaska for another ten years after 1964. He gillnetted and purse seined out of Bristol Bay and Kodiak and also continued to fish in Puget Sound. In case you are wondering, Larry did captain his own boat. Thereafter, except for a brief three-week vacation job in 1991 on a 120-foot salmon tender, M/V King Oscar, Larry did not return to southeastern Alaska. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in history and political science at Western Washington University, as well as an MBA from Seattle Pacific University. Larry began an onshore business career at the Boeing Commercial Airplane Company in October of 1974 and continued to work for the same company until December of 2005, holding down positions in both finance and procurement. During his 32-year career at Boeing he worked in various capacities on every commercial aircraft program, as well as on the B-2 military bomber. The skills he developed as an independent business person at an early age did not automatically transfer easily into the corporate world. Whereas independent commercial fishing centers all decision making on the fisherman himself, large corporations like Boeing value teamwork and decision making compromise, and the best solutions are frequently the result of long and difficult negotiation. Naturally, Larry was initially quite frustrated by this; nonetheless, he managed to keep the values he learned as a young fisherman—an independent spirit and a love of fundamental principles—and he retired with a feeling of great satisfaction that has carried over into the busy life he leads today. Larry continues to work in the aerospace business as a consultant and is involved in local civic affairs. He has been married to his wife, Janice, over twenty years, and together they raised her son. They spend half of each year in Cannon Beach, Oregon and the other half in Chandler, Arizona.

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Fishing for Freedom

Copyright 2012, Larry Sparks. All rights reserved

ISBN 978-0-9783751-1-9

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to the Sparks family (Earl, Dagmar, Bernell, and Joanne). It is about believing in the American dream. If you are honest and work hard, remain determined and persistent, and endure life’s challenges, you will be successful. Always have a plan and never give up on your vision and dreams.

Acknowledgments

I must acknowledge the unlimited patience and love of my wife, Janice.

A heartfelt acknowledgement to my Dad, who exemplified in all his actions and deeds the persistence and endurance to work always toward a better tomorrow.

And a special thank you to my editor, Paul McNeese. His intuition and insight to this memoir was invaluable.

Another Alaskan Adventure

Larry, do you have your bags packed yet? We don’t want to miss high tide in the channel.

Yes, Dad! Dad wants to make sure we leave at high tide because the Swinomish channel is shallow and narrow and can be difficult to navigate at low tide. Our boat, M/V (Marine Vessel) Rae-Jo is tied up at the public boat dock in La Conner, Washington. The Rae-Jo is a 48-foot gillnet fishing boat, and we’re headed for southeastern Alaska.

The cloudy day is symbolic of my mood, which is depressed, indeed. What? Not every 16-year-old teenager gets to pack his bags and travel to Alaska by boat.

My dad (his name is Earl) is a commercial gillnet fisherman, and he’s anxious to climb aboard the M/V Rae-Jo.

The boat is ready for the long journey north to Alaska. But I’m not. Why? I just want to work in the strawberry fields, bail hay, do chores for some local farmers, and play American Legion baseball. However, the family’s finances are more important than my personal desires!

It is time to once again to go commercial salmon fishing. At 16, it’s not my first time on this job. In fact, to one extent or another I’ve been doing it since my first trip out into Puget sound with my dad. I consider myself a veteran fisherman, no longer a ‘cheechakoe’ (an Indian word for greenhorn). This will be my fourth year battling the amoral seas and pursuing the elusive salmon; Sockeye, Pink, Coho, Chinook and Chum.

This is the story of that summer’s adventure—and of the life lessons I learned in those short three months.

June 5th, 1964

The hard core reality that I was going to spend another three months on my dad’s boat didn’t really hit me hard until the very last day of school. That was June 5, 1964. My junior year of high school was over. As everybody was turning in their books, my buddy Marv said to me, Larry, don’t chase too many women this summer!

Thanks, Marv, If I’m real lucky a mermaid might swim up to the boat. But otherwise, there’s no worry about my getting too involved with the gals.

Like Marv, some of the other guys also thought that the reason to go to Alaska was to chase girls, so they, too made remarks . . . and I had to remind them that fishing, in my experience, was all work and no play. But I don’t think I ever convinced them . . . but so what?

Working on the Rae-Jo was nothing new for me. I’d been going on short commercial fishing trips with Dad, two or three days at a time, out on Puget Sound, since I was nine. And the last three summers in Alaska had been no picnic; we worked very long hours, with little sleep, and I got paid the family labor rate, somewhere between $100 and $400 for the whole time, depending on how well we did during the season. At the end of a good season I might be paid $400, depending on condition of family finances and the price of salmon at the dock. With all the long hours, and in this year of 1964, I would have been happy with minimum wage of $1.25 an hour.

During the winter and spring months of any given year, most of my Saturday afternoons were spent cleaning, scrubbing and painting the boat and helping to fix any mechanical problems.

Here’s something I learned (that you probably don’t know): If you put rusty cable links in a plastic pail and pour in a six-pack of Coca-Cola, all the rust will dissolve within two weeks? Yes, sir, it works every time!

During the winter of 1963 and ’64, Dad and I, with the help of Erwin Otis, a local mechanic, replaced the boat’s old, rusty fuel tanks with larger, stainless steel tanks and installed a new Cummins Diesel. The Rae-Jo now could travel to all the way up to Ketchikan without refueling. As the old financial saying goes, There comes a time in any business when you must spend money to make money. In the fishing business, it’s often difficult just to make enough money to pay the cost of your boat’s upkeep and fuel.

The new engine gave us a combination of range, dependability, fuel economy and raw power. The boat’s new 125-horsepower engine was capable of propelling the Rae-Jo very comfortably at eight to ten knots (nautical miles per hour)—roughly equivalent to about 8.5 to 11.5 miles per hour of land speed—when moving with the tide at a nominal 1600 revolutions per minute (rpm). And we could even go a lot faster in emergency situations because we could safely kick up the engine speed to well over 2500 rpm.

The Journey Begins

Before I start in on what happened and how I felt about it all, let me tell you a little about this business of commercial fishing on America’s northwest coast and how it looked in 1964.

In both our home fishing grounds—Puget Sound and up in Alaska—the three primary methods of commercial salmon fishing were

1) gillnetting,

2) purse seining, and

3) trolling.

A gillnet consists of a monofilament net that is held on the surface by a line of cork buoys, drops downward into the water, and is weighted with a lead line. A gillnet is attached at one end to the fishing boat and is usually controlled by a hydraulic assembly that rolls the net off of and onto a drum that it mounted at the stern of the fishing boat. The net itself, when laid out into the water, is free at one end. A floatable buoy that carries a white light with nylon line is attached to the end of the net on a three- to five-foot line. This light is critical because the fisherman needs to follow the direction the net is drifting.

The salmon, which usually swim close to the water’s surface, swim into the net and are caught by the gills or get tangled up, and they are manually removed from the net by the fisherman as it is retrieved into the boat at the end of what is generally called a set—a variable period of time during which the net is simply trailed behind the slow-moving boat.

The cork line will generally consist of a half-inch hard nylon line, sewn right into the net and along which are spaced a series of 6 inch-circumference cork buoys (today they are generally covered with brightly colored plastic) that float the net along the water. The lead line, which weighs down the underwater side of the net, is also made of a hard, nylon material with lead weights sewn into it at intervals. The net itself is nylon or monofilament, and the size (diameter) of the mesh is specified by fishing regulations (sufficient to catch salmon but large enough to let smaller fish escape by passing right through). Each mesh element is made up of a diamond-shaped rectangle. The diameter and number of these diamond-shaped elements from one side of the net to the other will determine the depth to which the net will drop into the water (this limit is imposed so as to protect fish and other species that live on the ocean bottom and to avoid catching species of fish that swim deeper than salmon are accustomed to swimming). In Puget Sound, for instance, there is no mesh depth regulation, while Alaska limits the total depth of a gillnet to 50 or 75 meshes, depending on the area fished.

Purse seine boats use a heavier net, similar cork and lead lines, but the lead line also has rings sewn into it. A heavy line is passed through the rings. One end remains attached to the fishing boat, while the other is tied to a smaller boat, called a skiff, that tows the net in a circle for a predetermined amount of time, eventually arcing around back to the main vessel, where the skiff end of the line is tied to a winch on the larger vessel that goes through a power block, forming a purse out of the net that prevents the fish from escaping. The crew pulls in the net through the power block and lifts the fish on board.

The third category of salmon fishing boat, the troller, uses fishing lines with a number of lures, plugs, spoons along them. This bait is dropped into the water and is controlled as to depth and speed of passage through the water by the amount of line played out and the speed of the boat itself. Trollers use downriggers to keep the lure or spoon at desired depth and also travel at specific speeds, depending on the type of salmon they are stalking. Trollers do their own preparation for market right on bard, cleaning each fish and icing down the catch with a view to selling them to the fresh fish retailers such as markets and restaurants.

There is also a category of fishing boats called trawlers or draggers. These are very different from the salmon boats. They fish for shrimp and other bottom fish. Their nets are fabricated as very heavy webs into which the fish are scooped and then pulled up to either in the stern or alongside the boat and brought aboard by powerful hydraulic lifters and booms.

How about lobster fishing in Puget Sound or Alaska waters? There is none, for the simple reason that there are no lobsters to catch. So you won’t see those small, colorful lobster boats in the Pacific Northwest. However, there are crab fishermen in certain locations along the Alaska, Washington and Oregon coasts. Their means of catching their prey is by using huge crab pots that vary in size and shape depending on the species of crab they are fishing for.

June 6th

That year, June 6 was just another Saturday work day, because it was opening day of the fishing season. It was the start of the fisherman’s quest for financial freedom. Dad and I both hugged my sister, Joanne as we got ready to leave for the harbor at La Connor, about 25 miles away, where our boat was docked. Mom got into our car to drive, because she would need the car while we were gone to take her to work and to shop and for all the other things she’d be doing over the summer until we returned. Dad took his place in the front passenger seat, while I slid into the back seat next to four large, brown duffle bags. And off we went.

It was going to be a full summer of 16- to 18-hour work days of fishing, including me keeping my dad out of trouble. He was a hard working, tough, honest, and determined man, but when it came to the whiskey bottle (McNaughton’s was his favorite liquor), the bottle won every time. Once he got to drinking he didn’t stop until a day or more later. But one thing, for sure, was that he never drank while our boat was underway. In fact, at any given moment aboard the Rae-Jo he seemed like (and was) one of the hardest working and soberest skippers in the business.

He tended to get a little repetitive during those times when he had a few drinks in him, though. And his stories never changed—and they were all stories about surviving in the 1930s economic depression or his naval experiences in World War II.

The first stop along the way was always the Safeway store, where we bought the usual basic food items—bread, butter, meat, potatoes, some fresh and canned vegetables, coffee and cookies—just enough to last two weeks, which was how long it would take us to reach the fishing port of Ketchikan, Alaska.

On the Rae-Jo, there was not a lot of storage for food. Everything was very compact, including a bunk bed that folded up and latched to the hull (and that we used mostly for storing clothing), two small bins on the bottom starboard (right) side of the forecastle (the narrow front end of the boat—we called it the foc’sal, two