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.