Herb Rice Artist, una historia de pesca en su niñez.

               (  note from eeclach pintorón blog: sorry Herb I took one of my blog photos to ilustrate
 your story but did not want to use the one you provided as I have no rights to put it.)

Herb Rice Artist·Lunes, 30 de marzo de 2020·

So this last 10 days of being home, Susan and I put together, Spaghetti Sauce (enough for 5 more meals), Roast Beef (enough for 4 more meals, Lentil Soup (up to 20 more lunchtime meals) all for the freezer. not much I know..... My parents used to do this all the time.

I remember very clearly going out Gillnet fishing with my dad at 11 yrs old. The trip took us from Ladysmith harbour to Rivers Inlet which was no easy task to start with, If you’ve ever been in a boat, especially travelling at a momentous speed of 6 knots…to cover up to 500 miles…or 434 knots which converts to approx 70 hrs of continuous travel time..or 3 days and nights..slow to say the least.

And of course this doesn’t take into consideration things to watch out for ie:

Dodd’s narrows tide, Johnson Strait tide (ripping fast), winds, ocean fog and maybe stopping from time to time for a rest and fuel. This could add at least 2 or 3 more days to your travel time..which would bring it up to at least 6 days.

At that time I never really thought about, The View…lol… Although nowadays I look back and only remember. Some of the pictures in my mind are clear and many are hazy but they are there.

So once we arrived at Rivers Inlet, Dad would make his first sets with his gillnet, running the net every few hours to see how many corks might be sunken with the weight of fresh caught salmon. Sometimes he would have to pick up the net and set it again in a different place. When the decks were filled for the first time, Dad would clean the fresh caught Sockeye Salmon, let them soak in water to drain any excess blood from them and cut them to size.

By this time I would have pulled out at least 15 cases of 12 each Mason Quart Jars that had been washed before we left home. These cases would be on deck where Dad would fill each of the 180 jars, putting 2 tablespoons of vinegar in each(to soften the bones he said), making sure the rim was left clean on each 32oz jar. Once these jars were filled, my job was to put on the lids; the first pot of water would be filled with quart jars and would be boiled for 4hrs. At that time, we had only 1 galvanized blue pot for boiling, it held probably 9 quarts at a time. Each time time the water boiled down below the top level of the quart jar, it had to be topped up. So consider that, the pot would have to be refilled 20 times to cook all the salmon in the 180 quarts.

That would be a total of 80 cooking hours to insure that we had salmon for those hard times during the winter.. It definitely got hot in the boat, and it definitely had the beautiful scent of cooking salmon for the next several days….We worked hard, well, Dad, worked even harder to insure we would be ok for the tough times.

This is only one of the stories of survival methods our parents taught us, they had many more, which over the next few weeks I will share.

Thank you for reading and yes please do share.