Skiff Sunday

They got one regulation right. No fishing on Sundays, June through August. Unable to work, we took the day for ourselves in the skiff, to see what we might salvage. Picked up the traps on Trial Point I hauled off the rocks last October, scanned the shorelines for Dave's buoys lost to knives, props, and other circumstances. Ended up finding two bundles of gear belonging to other fisherman, but not a whole lot of Dave's, so those'll wait on his float for reclaimation. Did find a lobster crate though, which is the universe bringing balance- someone recently stole one of Dave's. A very nice time, though it ended up being the death of my camera, which fell victim to the water in the bottom of the skiff.

The Right Words

Like most people, I find learning something new to be semi-fraught with frustration. Looking at it superficially, sterning is not the most obvious thing for me to be trying my hand at. I am smallish. Have generally worked at some sort of desk. I didn't grow up around boats, really. Oh, I'm an old hand at rowing- but running an outboard, tying knots, slinging around traps... ha. Welcome, Morgan, to the shallow end of your aptitude pool.

Last Friday found us setting two loads of traps- high tide was running at about 5 am and 5 pm, so those hours found us at the town landing, him in the boat receiving traps, me on the dock unloading them from his truck and passing them down. The traps are fished in pairs, and the order in which the traps are loaded makes a difference. At this point I had helped him take up most of his 800 traps last fall, and had then helped him put in the few hundred we'd managed to make time to set this spring. And yet. I still couldn't tell sink rope from float unless they were different colors. And I couldn't remember which had to be loaded first. It was all chicken and egg to me. While he can be very impatient with himself, fellow fisherman, his boat, and his gear, Dave is generally very patient with any sort of student. But at this point, at 5 am, on the third load of traps, after god knows how many seven-day work weeks, his patience was wearing thin.

"I'm sorry, I just don't know how to explain it better..."

My mood wasn't any better- I was feeling utterly inept. In almost everything academic, I've been a quick study, but all things mechanical, I am a drooling idiot. I don't know the jargon, I might get the big picture, but the little things escape me. I forget things easily if they aren't repeated daily.

After a while he says "The ones without the toggle in them. I need the ones without the toggle in them first."

No matter my trap dyslexia, no matter how bad I am at telling float from sink, I can definitely identify trap with a toggle attached to its coiled warp. I can also identify a trap without toggle.
We didn't say much, but quickly the process was smoother.

Later that night, dead tired, and about to get in some curative cuddles before dinner- the ones we were hanging on for all day, the phone rings. Cue the ex-wife ranting about how Dave needed to go find out who took her leaking propane tank- and why didn't he already know? For twenty years he has been letting her method of communication roll off his back. Her bizarre demands (it is still his job to deal with her problems?) coupled with her tone (strident puts it lightly) just raises his eyebrow and cues his selective hearing. I haven't had the time to learn that response, nor do I think it would ultimately be my style. I heard, as loudly as if the phone were up to my own ear, completely irrational demands. Which a.) makes me irritated and defensive, and b.) makes me want to set very clear boundaries. As to point b., I worked with a lot of poorly parented kids, so what can I say?

I wanted him to tell her exactly what she could do with her expectations. The more I listened, the more any sort of potential for an evening of relaxation slipped away. By the time he got off the phone, having somewhat placated her, I was strung out in the very special way that can only be brought on by intense ex-spousal contact. They are his boundaries to build, but they affect me, whether I like it or not. And whether he likes it or not.

I was, perhaps, visibly riled up. Which engendered his question "are you mad now?" One for emotional honesty, I replied "yes." So he rolled over to go to sleep. And I took a breath, and asked him to fill me in on whatever information he had managed to glean about his daughter who was having boyfriend trouble. That was what prompted the call- she was returning one he had made concerning their daughter. The opening line opening was literally "oh, whatever, she's fine- you need to find out who fucking took my propane tank..." To my overtures, he ruefully responded "nope, you're mad at me, and you don't want to hear it." And rolled over to his sleeping side.

Awesome. A long day, all we wanted to do relax together at day's end, and because of one phone call, we end the day unhappy. He is tired, and falls asleep, leaving me alone with my mood. I am tired, and do not fall asleep. Because now I am even more upset that Dave has ignored my attempts to move through my mood and to bring the evening back to normalcy. Pretty much all I wanted was for him talk to me, and to get back to sleepy limb-entwinement. Even when discussing the stressful stuff, we can generally do it well, in a mellow and reflective style. But we can't do that with either back turned.

I got up. Moved to the couch with my iPod and a comforter. And my cat. Contemplated going out for hike but realized I was way too tired physically for that to be a good fix. So I cocooned myself, and waited for my mood to go through metamorphosis. And for Dave to wake up.

He woke up just as I was beginning to doze. Comparatively puny as I am, he did not see my shape in the crumpled covers on the couch, and thought I had gone outside. He grabbed a beer and went to check the garden, and by the time he came back in, I had moved up to the bed where I hoped to get actual sleep. The cat (who had been giving me the requisite cheering cuddle) had left me when Dave had opened the door, so the couch had lost its charm.

So there we were. Me all catless and tired, him with a broken beer bottle. Both miserable. We curled up again and worked on definitions.

Prior to this night he assumed that when I am feeling any negative emotion he is to absolutely leave me alone. Sadly, I have two modes of crankiness, each needing opposite antidotes. When I am "annoyed," as when he repeatedly asks me what I writing (invariably I am writing something long-winded, so each time he asks, I am still writing the same damned thing I was writing when he asked five minutes prior), he should leave me alone. Or possibly he could put food in front me, and quietly back away. Irritability on my part has to do with tiredness, low blood sugar, and yes, repeated questions. It is trifling, and given a little bit of space (and a snack), I quickly swallow it. I don't like being irritable. When I am upset, it is over a particular and generally important issue: I want to work through things, preferably sooner rather than later. I don't like being upset.

So that was that. Is Morgan annoyed? Leave her alone. Is Morgan upset? Don't leave her alone. As to determining which diagnosis applied, he need only ask. When I am annoyed, he does get that one free question.

We quickly fell to being glad we were done with miscommunication for the day, and joined forces to determine the much more pressing matter of what in god's name we'd have the energy to prepare for dinner. Then to sleep, then to another 5am load of traps.

As to the propane mystery? A new friend of hers had loaded it onto his truck, so he could load it onto his boat, to take care of it for her.

Staring at Uncertainty -or- Rubbernecking at Wrecks

On of the potential side-effects of being a stern person is bait-box vision. Which is somewhat like tunnel vision, only bleaker. Yesterday was like that.

Technically, I could have been working at my job on the mainland- it was the penultimate day for teachers and support staff, but as it was make-up exams, I was able to convince the principal that it would be much more sensible for me to be out on the water (joining the ranks of the sprung students who stern) than to be sitting in an empty classroom. So it was a bonus day, hooky, a stolen trip.

And it was a gorgeous morning. Clear, calm. On the ride down to the dock, however, we did come across what one citizen now calls "an event that marks the beginning of summer on IAH": a vehicle totaled in some overt act of drunken driving. We passed this year's stellar example- a truck belonging to a construction crew. It had the appearance of an abandoned wreck, but we backed our own truck up, to check and make sure there wasn't anyone in it. They'd run well off the road, fetching up on a boulder. That was good, because it slowed the impact of the tree. So the hood was only dented in about a foot and a half. It was, as we suspected, abandoned.

The blood wasn't too bad, some soaked into the passenger seat, some spilled on the ground. Dave, a born story-teller, instantly assumed doom. I diagnosed a busted nose on the part of the driver. Unpleasant but hardly fatal. The fallout would be more about public humiliation than harm.

So we tisked, wondered if the driver (we could guess the culprit) went off for treatment, and headed back to work. We did meet Ed (awake? Sober?!!) at the landing and shared the news- Dave talking about the blood everywhere, me hedging his description with my theory. Later in the day we saw Ed at the store (awake, not so sober), where he crowed "Girl, you were absolutely right! Broke his nose!"

But writing about wrecks was not my point. My point was that it was a beautiful morning, and that new bait bags suck to work with. The way Dave purchases bait bag material, the mesh is machine made- one infinite and compact length of bottomless bag, cut by the company and spooled, then cut into shorter lengths by the fisherman, and clamped with a hog ring at one end. The finished product is a royal pain in the ass to open for the first time. I like my bait bags like I like my jeans, a baseball glove, or apparently my men- nicely broken in. But since it was my job, I got to it, keeping the thought "this fucking sucks" to myself. Dave said it for me a few minutes later when he came back to bait a few.

The bait itself was a good news/bad news sort of thing. It was getting a bit old, but being Canadian and therefore not as stringently regulated for size, the herring was comparatively little, and easy for small hands to shovel into the stiff pockets with their narrow openings. The bags began to pile up in the fish box beside me, which was satisfying, but peripheral. My main view was the bait box.

Incidentally, for a country that seems to quietly have its shit together, Canada's fishing regulations are miserable and almost non-existent. As a disgruntled American, I want to hold the place up as a utopia, but their lack of fishing regulation, be it for herring or lobster, pisses me off. More bait into the bag...

One thing I have noticed while working with piles of dead fish, is that bait juice is actually kind of pretty. Stay with me here- I swear it would make an excellent nail polish color, as long as you didn't name it for its inspiration. It's a shade of taupe, and because of the fish oil released, when it eddies and whirls it looks like a molten precious metal.

Though today, this oil, full of fatty acids people buy as health supplements, reminds me of other oil, increasingly unfit for consumption. When work gets tedious on the boat I lose myself contemplating the bait- the patterns in the juice, the iridescence of the scales, the geopolitics and ecological/economic ramifications of herring: when work gets tedious on the mainland, I lose myself in the net. Where I recently looked at images from the blowout in that other Gulf.

It was about the time my mind cycled around to the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, that we reached our first pair of traps. I was reminded that my job is not just about baiting bag, after bag, after bag. The point, and the payoff, is finding out what is in the traps. The shift in my duties brought my gaze out of the bait box, back at our bay. Where the sky and water is blue, the spray off the boat is crystal. I can't fathom our shores draped in a deadly sludge. And none of us can understand how a government which can fine fisherman around 25k for an apparent oil sheen around their boats and disallows Dawn on board (though everyone still carries it for cleaning up at day's end), does not seem to have paid much attention to off-shore drilling risks, and allows emphasis on chemical dispersant (Dawn). Wells vomiting up crude do NOT get dry heaves, unless you take a geologic view of time. Dismal thoughts for a bonny day. Switching my attention to the traps was a welcome distraction.

Our first pair offered up a male hard-shell lobster- a monster just on the legal side of the gauge- not quite so big that he had to go back for breeding stock. I kissed him on his salty carapace. This is not the good part of the fishing season, and what little we do get over the course of the morning is primarily v-notch females, eggers, and shorts. All go back over the side, curses from Dave and well-wishes from me. We probably got more sculpin than lobster.

We kept three of them, Dave slamming their heads against the boat for a quick kill. Near the end of the haul, when we've wound our way up to Moores Head, we feed the eagles. Between Moores Head and Trial Point, there's a nest, and both eagles flew down to Dave's whistle. The day's setbacks (a lost pair, cut by some anonymous jerk's prop, and unsuccessfully grappled for; another pair dragged and stove up by careless neighbor) lost their grip on his mood. "We fed two eagles!!!" With that, the storm clouds were swept from his face, and his day was once again on better footing. We went into Stonington to sell while the price was still on the high end of low, and before there would be two prices, one higher for the shippable hard shells, and one lower for the more delicate shedders.

My mood did not improve greatly, except to be glad that Dave's cleared up. The fresh air, the sunshine, the pleasure of having the boat under me, and my mind free to wander was all undercut by where my mind was wandering. Here comes summer, like a trap up through the water- I guess we'll just see what it brings.