Boats

            Boats have, for some reason or other, occupied my idle moments and sometimes my waking moments for as long as I can remember. My earliest memories of boats go back to when I was just 4 or 5 years old in Finland. We were on a family visit to the farms of relatives in the interior of Finland which at the time, the late 1940's or the turn of the decade, were only accessible by water transport. Finns for generations had travelled throughout the country by large lapstrake rowboats. The likes of these boats have never been seen in North America.  These boats could transport whole extended families with 10 to 20 men rowing. Imagine the power and speed with 20 men rowing and often competing with other families as the whole village, for instance, was rowing to church. My earliest memories were of being transported by one of these boats to a relative's farm. My cousin, some years older and used to living on the water, snatched up some pieces of water lilies and fashioned a little pig for me. I remember being impressed.

            Fast forward to New Westminster. In the mid-1950's, the waterfront in New West was an active, vibrant commercial place. The large docks on Front Street still had the commerce that deep sea freighters brought from all around the world. Front Street still had ship chandleries that flourished during the gold rush as did Jones Tent and Awning from who you could still get an arctic sleeping robe that was good to -50 degrees Fahrenheit but you needed a dog sled to carry it. As boys, we used to wander on the docks and talk to sailors from everywhere. The small craft dock, behind the old CPR station at Columbia and Front Street, was home to a large part of the Fraser River gill net fleet as was Annieville and Brownsville, across the river. Here we could get fresh salmon and herring by the bucket full. For that west coast delicacy, the oolichan (eulachon), we just had to drop a dip net in the river when the run was on. We boys would bicycle down to Leeder Creek, where the Port Mann Bridge is today, and go out on the log booms and dip for oolichan, fish for salmon, or sturgeon which had to be at least three feet long before one was allowed to keep it. I remember a 700 pounder which was caught and the news photo in the Columbian paper had half of it in a station wagon and half hanging out.

            In those years, when the salmon were running, the river was open for commercial fishing at least once a week for several days and the river would be full of gill netters from Mission to the mouth and into the Gulf of Georgia.  Gill netters would race upstream, get into position for next to set and drift down with the current, playing their net off the drum and across the stream. Hopefully, with a good set, the net floats would begin to sink below the surface, indicating fish in the net and time to start reeling in before the current took you into a downstream bridge. Boats could play the net from the stern or from the bow (but not both) and sometimes someone had a just an outboard engine powered pleasure boat with a commercial license and he would work the net from the side of his boat, but mostly they were stern pickers with bow pickers coming in later years.

            I went to look at a stern picker that was moored at a small float at the mouth of the Coquitlam River. You had to drive on the dyke around Colony Farms which was the farm for Essondale Mental Asylum, later Riverview, and Colony Farms is now long gone and has been replaced by the Forensic Psychiatric lock up. Any way, that little boat had a clinker built hull, a little flat head six engine with a car rear axle driving the net drum. The boat was old but still sound and was being offered for $300, boat, license, and net.

I was just heading off to work for the Federal Department of Fisheries so declined to buy but within that year there was a reduction in the fishing fleet with a Federal buy-back scheme and the price of licenses went up by tens of thousands of dollars.

            In 1966 or 1967, Gordie Breckon who also worked winters at the New Westminster railway station, had salvaged a 40' troller which had sunk on the north coast. He raised it and then had the old wooden hull sheathed in steel. Gordie, his wife and young sons fished with the Wendy Belle out of Prince Rupert and socked away enough to build a brand new troller. The boat builder was on the dyke in Queensborough, just up from the Queensborough Hotel. That dyke on the Annacis Slough was a warren of boat related activity. A few doors east was a welder who made anchor winches of all sizes and welded up aluminum masts and ladders and deck boxes. Across the dyke was an older man who made his living by making troll poles for the troller fleet. A little further down the dyke was Nelson Brothers Fisheries fleet maintenance yards and still further people lived in dyke-side homes with their boats moored on the river or were building their sailboats, fishboats or houseboats.