The more I drove the more confused I became.  For a while I followed roads that look vaguely familiar,  all the while trying to keep what I thought was a westerly heading.  In my gut I was starting to wonder if something was seriously wrong with what I thought I knew.  But really, there was only one main road going to Sooke.  You couldn’t go wrong!  Could you?

I had not seen any signs pointing the way to our destination, but still I drove stubbornly on, secure in the knowledge that there was only one road in, and one road out out of the place, and  eventually I’d get there!  At last we saw signs ahead.  Dumbfounded, I read,

“WELCOME TO BRENTWOOD BAY”.  

I had driven the entire way, east instead of west!  Hey!  I never claimed to have a good sense of direction.  But I’m proud to say I’m now a full-patch member of that very exclusive club directly  influenced by “Mossman’s Law”.

Rule #1:  If you’re going somewhere, assume you’ll end up somewhere else.

A HUNTING WE WILL GO

 (The Gold Standard for Mossman’s Law)

In the eighties, Bill lived in Nova Scotia, and he commuted by car each year to the BC coast, to fish for the four or five months the commercial season was open.  Each year on the way home, he would make a layover in Edmonton, Alberta, at a friend’s house.  

He arrived as usual one evening, and during the course of the conversation, Bob asked if Bill would be interested in making a short hunting trip, along with his neighbour, Larry.  The plan was to hook up with a group of friends, about an hour north of Edmonton.  Bill was in,  and they arranged to leave early the next morning in order to meet the others there at 7 AM.

Bill’s car was loaded down with gear, dirty clothes and various items taken off the fish boat, that he needed to store at home, so his car wasn’t available.  Bob’s car was practically out of gas and it was too late to find an open gas station the night before.  By default Larry’s car was chosen to travel in.

The next morning at 5:30 AM, the three of them piled into the car in gleeful anticipation of bagging themselves a nice batch of ducks.  Winter meat.  It all sounded good.

They were just outside of Edmonton, right in front of the Fort Saskatchewan Federal Prison, when a tire blew.  Larry climbed out of the car and prepared to throw on the spare stored in the trunk.  Unfortunately it was also flat.

The other two had no choice but to hitchhike back to Edmonton to get gas for Bob’s car.  The plan was to come back for Larry, take the flat with them, leaving Larry’s car at the side of the road until the trip was finished. The tire could be fixed at a service station after the hunt was over, then continue home with both cars.

It was now 6:00 AM.  Bob and Bill stuck their thumbs out and tried to flag down a passing motorist.  Nobody stopped.  Too late they realized, trying to hitch a ride in front of a Federal Prison was a tricky proposition.  Finally at 7 AM a car stopped.  The driver looked a little nervous and, after telling the man where they wanted to go and why, they rode in silence.  

Bob, evidently, could stand the silence no longer.  Intent on mayhem,  he spoke up, asking Bill, “Do you have the gun?”

The car swerved a bit.  Bill looked at Bob incredulously. “What?”   

Bob repeated the question, “Do you have the gun?”

“Don’t pay any attention to him!” Bill tried to reassure the driver, “He’s just goofing off!”

The man was noticeably perspiring now. “W-w-where did you s-s-ay you wanted to go?”  Bob gave him his address.  They arrived in record time, the doors still swinging open as the driver sped away, tires squealing.  

Bill couldn’t believe his friend.  “What the hell did you say that for?”

“I dunno.  Made the trip interesting.”

Bob’s car had just enough gas to make it to a service station where they filled up and headed back to Larry.  It was now 8:15 AM.  Larry was waiting patiently in front of the prison.  The spare was tossed hurriedly into the trunk of the parked vehicle, and the flat likewise into Bob’s trunk. All of them piled into Bob’s car, and off they went to the rendezvous.  The rendezvous had long disbanded.

Since they were there anyway, the three of them   decided to do a little hunting on their own, in spite of the setbacks.  Why waste the trip?  By 9 AM they were positioned in a cold, boggy marsh waiting for the prize to fly over.

Quack, quack, quack, quack!  Ducks!  BLAM!!  BLAM!!

OK, one duck, but a good shot that landed in the marsh with a splash.  Bob was elected to go get it.  Hopping from one dry hummock to another, he managed to get near enough to reach it.  Barely.  

As he strained to get hold of a feather or two, his foot slipped off the hummock and in he went.  But he had the duck, and held it, triumphant over his head as he waded back.  “Got it!! 

Upon closer inspection the duck turned out to be a small one, but better than nothing.  A few more would up the poundage count nicely.

It was the last duck that ever flew over their heads that morning. One o’clock came and went. Finally, Bill announced that he’d had enough, he wanted lunch, and he definitely had to get back on the road.

Cold, wet in Bob’s case, and hungry, they piled back into the car and, with the duck, headed to the nearby town.  A hot lunch and a few beers sounded good.  

They dropped the flat off at a service station for repairs on the way.  Bob, his mind on beer and lunch, opened the trunk, hauled out the tire, closed the trunk and rolled said tire into a service bay.  Then he got back in the car and reached for the ignition … no keys.  They’d been locked in the trunk.  That hot lunch seemed farther away than ever.

“You don’t happen to have a spare key do you?” Larry asked hopefully.

“My wife’s got it.”

“Call her!”

“She’s not home.”

But Bob was full of bright ideas.  He removed the back seat, climbed into the trunk, thereby retrieving the keys.  

Earlier that day they’d spotted an old pub on the way into town.  They decided it would make a good spot for lunch.  It looked a little worse for wear but those were usually the kind of places that served good hearty meals.  By 3 PM the three weary hunters of ducks finally sat down to what they came for.  A hot meal.  Beer.  

Bob settled into the booth and sighed gratefully.  Off came the coat and the bootlaces untied, leaving his sore toes wiggling happily.

Finally, near 4 PM, sated and refreshed, they decided it was time to pick up the repaired tire, deal with Larry’s stranded car and head home.  Bill was getting anxious to be on his way east to Nova Scotia.  The tab was paid and the trio pushed through the swinging doors and down the wooden steps to the street.  Bob was the last one through the door and, as it swung shut, one of his still-untied bootlaces caught in the door sill.  His foot jerked back abruptly as the top half of his body flew forward. 

By the time Larry and Bill turned to see what the commotion was, Bob was already hanging, posed in a very awkward downward dog on the stairs with his face in the dust.    

They were back in Edmonton at 5 PM.  History does not tell us who got to keep the duck.

Rule # 2 - If you  have  certain expectations, you can expect triple of what you didn’t.

PART I 

LIFE WITH FISHERMAN BILL

GREEN IS THE COLOUR

Bill was a commercial fisherman on both east and west coasts of Canada for the majority of his working career. As a young man, he’d owned his own gas station, and then gone around the world on a research vessel owned by Columbia University, as a chief oiler, which gave him his taste for sea life.  After that He’d worked as a longliner, dragger, and lobsterman, but at the time I met him, he was a BC commercial fisherman with his own troller, catching salmon off the north west coast of British Columbia.  

He’d given me a few photographs taken a few years back when his oldest daughter Jill first fished with him, and I’d shown these to my parents long before they actually met him.  My dad, being an avid sports fisherman himself, was instantly smitten.  

We decided I would work as his deckhand.  Both of us had gone through divorces, leaving neither of us much to start over with, and working as his deckhand would pool the resources.  That, and I didn’t want to be separated from Honey for three to four months at a time.

Sunshine, fresh sea air.  It all sounded good.  I think I gave the term “green” a whole new meaning.  I’m not talking about that eco-friendly term either.  

When I crossed the Hecate Strait for the very first time in 1992, on our way to the Queen Charlotte Islands (since then, they have been re-named with the traditional First Nations name of Haida Gwaii)  the water was an impossibly calm, watery glass table.  It was almost eerie.  Clueless me, I thought this would be a piece of cake, never giving Mossman’s Law a second thought.  Life was grand!

We reached the Charlottes and made a stop in Skidegate.  A cable had come off its block at the top of the mast, and tangled with another wire attached to one of the trolling poles.  The low tide allowed the pole to be lowered down to Bill standing on the wharf, so the wire could be untangled, while my job was to climb the mast to the top, and hook the cable back over the block.  

I took a hard look at the itsy-bitsy footholds on the mast that led to the block.  But, this was all part of deck-handing, so gamely, up I went.  From the deck it didn’t look that high, but from the top, to which I now fanatically clung, I was very far removed from solid ground.  Down on the wharf Bill looked ant-sized.  However, I had a job to do, so I got to it.  

I grasped the wire, heaved with all my might, and was in the process of slipping it over the block, just as the wake from the passing Skidegate Ferry set the Blue Eagle to jumping like a rodeo bull.  The lowered pole did some crazy bounces on the dock and Bill danced back, letting go of the wire.  I wrapped both arms around that cold aluminum and hung on, one foot firmly in the flimsy foothold, the other flapping free in the air. 

When the swells died down I spent a few minutes persuading myself to stay up on the mast and get the wire properly in place. I got praise and compliments from Bill when the job was done, thereby passing my first test as deckhand.

We then proceeded through the narrow Skidegate  Channel that separated the two large islands that comprise Haida Gwaii, to the fog-enshrouded west side of Hippa Island, just in time for THE  OPENING, (referred to in this manner, because each and every commercial fisherman holds this event as their own version of Mecca).  

Bill had still not managed to fix either the sounder or steering mechanism at their secondary locations in the rear cockpit, before we left home.  So, being primary deckhand, I was assigned to the wheelhouse to watch the inside sounder, and steer the boat, while Bill stood in the cockpit at the stern, to haul lines and bring in the fish.  His instructions were, “Steer around the shallow spots and stay on the tack.”  

…  um .. Shallow spots?

Although I didn’t know it yet, this was not enough info.  I wasn’t even completely sure what the term “tack” meant.  I also didn’t know there were hundreds of massive pinnacles in the waters off Hippa Island that rose sharply to within a few feet of the surface and then fell, equally sharply to hundreds of feet deep.  Think many pointy church steeples submerged underwater.  Mossman said nothing about pinnacles.  It would have helped.  Maybe.  Then again, maybe ignorance is bliss.  

Dutifully, I kept an eye on the sounder’s image .. and watched the bottom rise steeply on the screen.  Perhaps I should turn the wheel ... which way? ... left? ... nope, bottom’s still rising! ... right, I’ll turn right! .. oops, there’s a boat in my way! .. and the bottoms still coming up … wa-a-aay up!  I started screaming. 

“BIIILLLL!!”

“Turn in, turn in!” Bill hollered at me from the stern.

“What??”  

Never mind tack, this was a term I had never heard before.

I turned the wheel to the left again, but apparently not “in”.  Bill’s voice reached an octave higher.  “Turn IN!!!!”

I turned to the right.  The bottom dropped out of sight.  Aha!  “Turn in” means turn right!  Got it! 

A few minutes later the bottom rose again on the sounder.  I heard the instruction from the stern, “Turn out!!”

“WHAT??” … wait a minute … if turn in means steer right, it stands to reason that turn out means steer left!  Right?  So my educated guess had me turning left.  

Bill’s voice went up another octave.  “TURNOUT!! TUUURNNNOOUUUT!!!”  Spit flew.  My theory was shot to hell.

This went on, over and over until, fed up, and my post abandoned, I stomped back to the stern to match Bill’s octave and decibel.  “I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE HELL TURN IN AND TURN OUT MEANS!!! 

The darling man, in all his accumulated wisdom, had never bothered to fully explain these fisherman’s terms which, had I known, would have been so much easier on my poor, frayed nerves.  “Turn in”  simply  meant  turn  towards  the  nearest shoreline, and “Turn out” meant turn towards open water.  Well why didn’t he just say so?!

To complicate things further, I had the job of cooking meals in the galley, with the floor pitching wildly underneath, all the while, watching the sounder and steering.  The spaghetti I made for lunch that day was topped with Parmesan cheese, the smell of which promptly drove me outside, to lean gasping over the rail.

My ignorance made that first day of fishing, my own personal day of hell.  Bill hollered at me.  The heaving rollers made me queasy enough to kill any pleasant thoughts I may have harboured in anticipation of this lovely experience.  No matter how I steered that boat, those pinnacles  evoked screaming headlines in my head.  ‘WOODEN BOAT SPLINTERS ON ROCKS! TRAGIC END!’  I’m not sure if the term “multi-tasking” had been coined at that time, but I certainly learned what it meant.

Rule #3 - If the kitchen floor moves, you may not be at home.

RABBITS’ FEET WON’T BE ENOUGH

One day, quite by accident, I opened a can of Pacific Evaporated Milk upside down.  You’d think the world had come to an end.  

Without warning, Bill got a crazed look in his eyes I’d never seen before, and he ordered me to fire the can overboard immediately!  It was almost full and I refused.  ‘Waste not, want not’, was how I was raised.  His eyes went a little wild, and I thought for a moment that I was the one going into the drink.  

I learned very quickly that a can opened upside down on a boat - according to him - was extremely unlucky.  Into the Pacific that can of Pacific went! However, the next time I opened a can upside down, I ripped the label off so Bill wouldn’t notice that he‘d be having a spate of bad luck in the near future.  I’m a rational person, after all.

Rule #4 - Rabbits’ feet don’t work.  Lying through your teeth does.