much-needed time with his darling.
After he left, I pulled out the ship’s log and filled it in. I went through the maintenance records and decided that one of our fuel tanks was low and needed to be topped up. In reality, it did not need to be filled, but I simply wanted a little more time to cool off before going home. The exchange of words from the charter was still with me.
While I was standing by the boat at the fuel dock, chatting to the young attendant, I heard someone call my name. I looked up and saw Cliff. He was a splash of colour in a Hawaiian shirt, yellow pants and white deck shoes. He was also wearing a porkpie hat and prescription sunglasses. I cannot tell you how pleased I was to see him. After we greeted each other, he said his usual stay with Alison was going to be cut short and he wanted to go out fishing before he left the following day. When I explained that the tides were all wrong and that I’d heard orcas were at Beechy Head and moving toward us, he said he didn’t care—he simply wanted to be out on the water. Despite my joy at seeing him, I was reluctant to take him. I was certain we would not have a single strike and the trip would be for nothing. There was also the question of cost—he would have to shoulder the entire cost himself instead of having it spread over a group of people.
“None of that matters,” he said.
I had run out of arguments, so off we went.
On the way out I contacted some of the local charter skippers by CB radio to find out how they were doing. The results were dismal—none of my reliable sources had seen a salmon in over two hours. With this information in hand and the orcas heading our way, I decided to fish directly in Race Passage off a rock we called RON Blasting. The rock was so named because a notice was written directly on it to warn boaters the peninsula was used by the Royal Canadian Navy to explode ordnance. The large letters were supposed to read RCN Blasting, but instead they appeared to read RON Blasting.
When we reached RON, I pulled out two medium-weight spinning rods with two saltwater spinning reels and attached forty-gram herring lures. I explained to Cliff that we would drift slowly past this rock, fishing at a depth of thirty pulls. A pull represents about two feet. With no other boats in the vicinity we had an unobstructed drift.
This is one of my favourite ways of fishing. The engine is turned off and each fisherman has his own rod and feels the moment a fish strikes. On this afternoon the sun was hot and the water inactive so our hundred-yard drifts lasted about twenty minutes before we pulled in our lines and returned to our starting point.
We talked of politics, grumbling about the poor quality of candidates. Religion floated into the conversation, and we both complained about the poor choice all gods had made when they moulded humans. We talked of family and nearly came to tears trying to express how much we loved our children. We talked of death and how final and pointless it seemed.
We were so deep in conversation I nearly choked on the dolmades I was eating when Cliff snapped his rod up and shouted, “Fish on!” His rod doubled over. “Maybe I’ve just got bottom.”
“If you have bottom, the bottom is moving.” I put down my rod to check the drag on Cliff’s reel. As I did the salmon took its first run, racing to the surface and heading toward Victoria. We looked at each other. I shook my head, saying, “If this is another thirty pounder, you’ll be on permanent staff.”
“I think you just hired me.”
Working a fifty-foot cruiser when you are alone can be a bit tricky. Sten and I were such a team we scarcely noticed how we covered for each other. But today I was on my own. I cranked in my line, started the engine and slipped us into a slow reverse.
“Watch out,” I yelled to Cliff. “I’ve put her in reverse, so don’t let your line go slack.”
Cliff was ahead of me, bringing in line as fast as he could.
“I’ll put us in neutral as soon as it stops running.”
“Better do it now,” he called up to me. “It’s sounding and coming back.”
I put the boat in neutral and pressed the kill button on the engine. In the silence all I could hear was Cliff mumbling under his breath as he reeled in the slack line. We were in deep water at the mouth of the bay with a light breeze pushing us toward Victoria. This was a fabulous spot to play the salmon.
“It’s a heavy fish, bigger than the others.” Cliff was short of breath as he spoke.
“How much bigger?”
“Much bigger.” He was puffing hard and his legs looked like vibrating cello strings.
I unfolded the director’s chair and eased Cliff backward into its seat.
“Thanks. That feels better,” he said, but he was still puffing.
The boat drifted in the slack current and the sounds of the barking sea lions could be heard in the distance.
“It’s so nice out here. Even better with a fish on.”
“Listen, Cliff, if you want me to give you a break, let me know. This might be a long haul.”
“Now, don’t you start with that. It’s not often everything is perfect.” There was a silence before he said, “Listen to those damn seals—you’d think they could learn something new to say. It always sounds as though they’re repeating the same thing.”
We played the fish for over forty minutes. At one stage I held my index finger under the rod tip to take the strain off Cliff’s arms and shoulders. He didn’t object so I knew it was giving him a break. For the last few minutes of the battle, Cliff stood up to direct the salmon into the net. He was clearly relieved the struggle was over.
Together we weighed the fish. When I told him it was a fraction over thirty pounds, he said, “I must be getting old. I could have sworn it would go forty.”
With the boat drifting gently, Cliff watched me as I cleaned his salmon and slid it into the fresh ice left over from the morning’s charter. He knew about the group we had taken out in the morning.
“How would you like me to take this fish around to those arseholes and stick it up their noses?”
I pitched over, laughing. It was the right thing to say at just the right time. Somehow it lightened my life. I shook his hand and thanked him. He didn’t release my hand but held it until I looked back into his eyes. “Thank you, my friend,” I said, “for an unforgettable day.”
“No. Thank you, Peter.”
We stood there, looking deep into each other. I realized he was saying goodbye. I let go of his hand and put an arm around him and gave him a squeeze.
When I told him to sit down while I took us back to RON he suggested we call it a day. “Let’s end it on a perfect note.”
So I packed up the tackle, cranked up the engine and headed for the dock. I called ahead on the VHF so Alison would be ready to collect Cliff and drive him home.
Fortunately there was no wind when we came in to moor, so it was an easy job to bring the Kalua alongside and tie it down with only me working the lines. Alison was waiting for us at our slip and made a huge fuss of the salmon. She insisted on taking pictures of Cliff and me holding it up. She even asked me to snap a few frames of her and Cliff standing by the boat. I could see she was worried about
