Here's the complete chapter from 1951 stories
in "An Island
in Time II: Coming
of age in the 1950s". The book will be published in June or July and is
my second historical memoir of Fox Island (near Tacoma). Check out my Web site: www.anislandintime.com, Don Edgers.
Tales From the Deep / Dock
Fishing / In
Search of the Legendary "Rod" Cot Cole
Sharks! / Devilfish
Tales From the Deep
Gray whales in search of food (ghost shrimp and tubeworms) on their several
thousand mile migration from Baja, Mexico to Alaska were probably the
biggest creatures to be spotted in the water around Fox Island. These
monsters are anywhere from 25 to 45 feet and could weigh upwards of 60,000
pounds!
The
fishing line companies didn’t have much call for 60K-pound test
line, so if one wanted to angle for gray whales, steel cable might
be in order
along with the boat of the day being a medium-sized freighter.
Back in the 1950s, my dad, brother Bart[1] and I would spend a complete day trolling for salmon from the Sandspit on the west end of the Island to the Concrete Dock at the east end; a distance of about five miles on the north side of the Island in Hale Passage. Usually, we would use a large flasher in front of a lure with a hook. The lures most commonly used were a Pearl Warbler spoon, a salt water (large hook with polar bear hair) fly, a large plug, or a herring. On occasion, we’d catch something other than the salmon we were trying for, and one time I caught what was thought to be a sixgill[2] shark which looked to be close to seven feet long. I knew it was a monster as I spent quite a long time reeling it in with the salt water pole bending to the water when it would head for the bottom. I had the drag on the reel set so the 40-pound test line wouldn’t break, and there were times that I just couldn’t reel in any line at all. It was as if I’d snagged a car. When I finally was able to get my prey almost to the surface, my brother exclaimed, “Geez, there’s no way we can get that in the boat!" With that, he produced a jack knife, and cut the line. My only glimpse of what was the biggest fish I’d ever caught was the rear view of it swimming slowly toward Davy Jones’s Locker. At least I had witnesses to my near triumph, otherwise, it would have been just another fisherman’s story.
One other fruitless fishing expedition with my elders ended when we heard blackfish[3] coming in the distance. Blackfish, which are now called killer whales or orcas, totally ruined fishing of any kind, so we didn’t stand a chance of catching anything. If nothing else, it was a legitimate excuse to call it a day. So, we headed for shore to dig clams and rake crabs.
Fox Island and its fish have been tied together since Fox Island’s first white settler, “John Swan, and the local Indians packed salmon in barrels for export"[4] in the mid–19th century. One of the Island’s earliest enterprises was a dogfish[5] fishery housed on Carr Inlet of the south side, facing McNeil Island, in the early 1870s. The fishery processed an average of 3,000 fish a day, using about 20 workers.
“In the late 1940s, dogfish fishing was done off the beaches of Fox Island using set-lines. Set-lines are about 150 feet long with 4-barbed hooks on short leaders of steel wire attached to the line every three feet. One end of the line would be anchored out in the water about 20 feet deep, and the other end would be anchored to the shore. The hooks would be baited with chunks of fish, meat scraps or shell fish and set out each evening. In the morning, the lines would be pulled to shore and the fish removed from the hooks. Generally, almost every hook would have a dogfish on it (200-300 pounds of meat[6]). During the 1940s dogfish livers were a commodity, so the livers were extracted and some of the fish meat was used for bait the next night.[7]"
Dock Fishing
“Fishing off piers on Fox Island was a summer pastime for kids. If you
didn’t
bring your fishing gear with you, the Sylvan Store[8]
and the Ferry Landing Store kept a supply of fishing supplies. Fishing
poles weren’t used
because it was necessary to get your face as close as possible to the water
and next
to a piling. For 15 cents it was possible to buy a handline consisting
of about 50 feet of green cotton line wound on a six-inch square wooden
frame.
A small
lead sinker and small single-barbed hook were attached to the end of the
line. Bait was readily available on the pilings in the form of pile worms
which lived
under the barnacles. When barnacles were knocked off the pilings, worms
were available for the picking. If the tide was too high and the barnacles
were
underwater, your bait might be a piece of hot dog or bacon or kernel of
corn. Most of the fish caught on handlines was strictly for fun and was
thrown
back to be caught another day.[9]"
One time I caught the biggest fish anyone had ever caught from the dock out in front of the Sylvan Store during the summer of its last year of operation. One of my favorite fishing spots on the dock was through a four inch hole in the thick wooden planks. This hole was just perfect for poggie[10] catchin'. One eventful day when I was fishing through the hole, I caught a "whole slug" of poggies by noon, and decided to leave my line in the water while I went home. When I returned, I tried pulling up my line, but it wouldn't budge. I thought I'd snagged some junk, and tried again, and as I pulled with all my ten-year-old strength, I looked down to see a fish with a head bigger than mine! I wasn't able to get it totally out of the water, and even if I could've there was no way it'd fit through the hole. I tied off the line while I got the store’s proprietor to row under the dock and pull it into his rowboat. While he brought my quarry to shore, I ran home to get a wheelbarrow. By the time I got back, there was a crowd around my fish (back then two or three people were a crowd). The proprietor said, "Donnie, you've got a 40 pound lingcod!" After being displayed for a few hours, I wheeled my catch home where my dad buried it in his compost pile because he thought it had been sitting out too long to be any good for eating. I must've dug my catch up two or three time just to make sure it was real.
Gamblers who play slot machines and hit
the jackpot don’t put money in
the winning machine after collecting their winnings. So it was with me
fishing off the dock. When the store closed at the end of that summer,
my Popsicle
supply dried up, plus if I happened to catch another whopper there wouldn’t
be anybody to show it to. The 40 pound lingcod had given me my 15 minutes
of fame on the Island.
In Search
of the Legendary “Rot" Cod Hole
My family had a classic "Point Defiance" 14-foot boat with four oarlocks.
This vessel was definitely a two-man, or three-boy boat which wasn't
used very often except on special occasions like when we might spend the day
out in the
middle of the bay (Hale Pass) off of Ketner's Point trying to find the
elusive rock cod hole (we called them "rot" cods.)
One particularly memorable fishing trip was made with two boys from across the cove whose folks rented a cabin for about a month every summer for a couple of years. We got in the mood to go "rot" cod fishin', so got our lunches together, a gunny sack to put the fish in, a club for whackin' big fish, a gaff hook, four mismatched oars, three bailing cans, a gallon jug of drinking water, a couple comic books each, life preservers (actually boat cushions we sat on), three kinds of bait (clams, mussels, and pile worms), and our deep-water hand lines (three or four regular hand lines tied together and wound on a big stick or a 1 X 3). Since two of us rowed, the other one bailed now and then while we pulled in semi-unison toward our vague destination. When we thought we were in the right spot, we dropped our lines over the side with each kid using a different bait to see which one was the fish's favorite.
About 10 minutes into our mission, we'd finished eating our lunches, drank half of the water and were just getting down to some serious comic book reading when we got our first bite. We hauled in a true cod just about to the surface of the water when a dogfish came right behind it and bit it in half. A second or two after this the other two lines had pulled tight in our hands and we quickly pulled up a couple more dogfish. The water seemed to be filled with sharks and, in fact, we caught one with the gaff hook. We decided to keep these fish for my dad's compost pile, but still wanted to catch some cod, so we rowed about half way between the ferry dock and Ketner's Point and dropped our lines again. Within five minutes we had three more dogfish, so we decided to make a day of dogfish fishin'.
Two or three hours later we'd drifted down to the Tacoma Narrows off of Point Fosdick on the mainland and didn't have room for any more fish. The current was running so strong that by the time we got the boat into a back eddy we were almost under the remnants of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. About two hours after that we got home with our half-swamped boat (we couldn't bail for all the fish). Unloading our catch, we counted 60 dogfish and half of a true cod, which measured from one to four feet long (not counting the half-cod).
All
the fish were hauled up to my dad's compost pile, and because the livers
of the dogfish are so rich in oil, they had to be removed
before
being
buried. My dad made the initial cut and then we cut out the livers
and put them in
a five-gallon lard can. Supposedly, we could sell the livers
for their oil to a fisherman named "Gilly" who lived across
the bay near the entrance to Wollochet Bay. The can of livers was
left on the beach in hopes he would
stop by, since there weren’t any phones on the Island. Well,
Gilly didn't show, so when the tide came in, the can of livers
tipped over and got tangled
in the row boat's shore line. When the tide went out and the sun
beat down on all those livers they smelled to high heavens! The
smell was so bad we didn't
go boat fishin' for the rest of the summer. The “rot" cod
hole stayed elusive for one more year.
Sharks!
As I was doing research for this
book I discovered Puget Sound has 11 species of sharks! I’ve mentioned
only two species so far, i.e. the spiny dogfish shark, and the sixgill. But,
the Sound also has: sevengill, thresher, basking,
salmon (or mackerel), brown cat, soupfin, blue, Pacific sleeper and
white. The fearsome great white sharks have never been officially recorded;
however,
a retired Tacoma Point Defiance aquarium worker with 40 years of experience[11]
while salmon fishing just north of the Narrows Bridge claims he caught
a 20-foot great white shark in December of 2002. Since he only had
a 16-foot boat, it
was fortunate the monster “spit the flasher out, surfaced a couple
of times, and swam away." Since the shark wasn’t brought
in or didn’t
have its picture taken it doesn’t qualify as an official sighting.
There are several reasons for so many shark species being in the waters around Fox Island: There’s lots of food available in deep water or just off shore, like herring, salmon, seals, and dogfish.
Fox Island’s south side faces Carr Inlet and the north side of McNeil Island. Located on McNeil’s north side is a good-sized harbor known as Still Harbor which has a small island named Gertrude. Gertrude Island is actually a large seal rookery that is very noisy during the seals’ mating season, plus killer whales and other predator-type sharks look at this area of the Sound as a veritable smorgasbord.
Predatory sharks also like to dine on, what seems to be Fox Island’s most prevalent resident fish, spiny dogfish sharks. Evidently, all varieties of shark prefer the deep water between McNeil Island and Fox Island as evidenced by the close encounters and actual catching of sharks bigger than the vessels stalking them. “One summer day, Buster McHugh, Les Ramsdell and Ward Hunt (teenagers at the time) spotted a large dorsal fin in the waters of Carr Inlet. It was serenely cruising 300 feet offshore. They decided to go on a whale hunting adventure. They quickly gathered equipment they thought necessary to catch their prey, like a large spear attached to a rope and a 30.06 rifle. A six-horse-power outboard was put on a 16-foot rowboat and Buster’s brother Dave joined the expedition. While all this activity was going on, the large dorsal fin would periodically disappear and then reappear as the monster cruised back and forth parallel to the beach. A short time after launching the boat the four teens reached a spot directly in front of the cruising shark and cut their motor. As the creature continued on a collision course with the 16 foot craft it dove under them and revealed a 30 foot long body of enormous weight! The four boys immediately agreed that it would be foolhardy to spear and shoot something so large. They quickly started the outboard motor and put it on maximum speed to get back to shore as fast as possible. The fish was thought to be a basking shark and probably weighed three tons."[12]
Back in the early 1950s, Roseanne
Hunt entered her husband, Ward, and herself in a fishing derby
that awarded prizes of an outboard
motor
and a boat
for the two biggest fish caught. Ward was an old pro at shark
fishing, so set
out a shark line (cable) with very large baited hooks which
were attached to an
anchor and buoy. After a few hours, the line was checked and
the “drowned" quarry
was slowly hauled near to the surface for a gander. On the line
was a shark so big that it had to be dragged to shore with an
outboard motor boat. It turned
out that they actually had two monsters on the line which had
to be hauled over to the Day Island Marina on the Tacoma side
of the Narrows and pulled
out with a boat winch, then loaded into a pickup truck and weighed
at some truck scales. The boat prize was won with a 1,000 pound
shark, and the motor
prize was won by an 800- pounder. It was all in a day’s
fishing off the south side of Fox Island!
Devilfish
Supposedly, the world’s largest octopi a.k.a. “devilfish" live
in the waters of Puget Sound. Granted, they wouldn’t hold a candle to
the octopus in the 2006 movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead man’s chest,
but by non-movie standards, they are quite large. My father would sometimes
go with his fisherman friend, Gilly, to catch them in the cold and swiftly
moving waters near the shores of Tacoma in the Tacoma Narrows. We had frozen
parts from one of these octopus fishing expeditions in our freezer in Seattle
for many years. On a slow day in my neighborhood I’d invite
playmates to take a gander at the individually frozen tentacles.
"Fox Island’s shark hunter, Ward Hunt, was also a master of catching octopi in the waters of Hale Pass. There are many large rocks and boulders to the east and west of the ferry landing which are the favorite hiding places for Island devilfish. This type of fishing is a two-man operation consisting of a rower and a fisherman with a long pike pole. While the oarsman slowly rows the boat parallel to the shore in about 10 to 12 feet of water, the pole man peers into the water looking about the rocks and seaweed for the telltale sign of a red octopus. Upon spotting the prey, the pike pole would be thrust into the water and engage the creature with a spinning motion like one would use winding spaghetti onto a fork. On one octopus fishing expedition, Ward and Dave McHugh pulled a 15-footer into their boat! Their prize completely filled a washtub and was nearly impossible to keep subdued.[13]"
There was a radio show during this time called
the Shadow. The announcer in a sinister sounding voice would say, “Who knows what evil lurks in the
heart of man? — the Shadow knows!" I would end this story with
a parody: Who knows what giant creatures dwell in the depths of Fox Island
waters? — Its fishermen know!
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[1] My brother Bob was either in the Air Force in Washington, D.C or in Eugene,
OR.
[2] Most Puget Sound sharks have five gills, except the relatively rare (and
prehistoric) sevengill shark.
[3] Actually, a large type of dolphin
[4] Miller, George L., Fox Island, A History, Fox Island Historical Society,
1993, p. 77
[5] Spiny dogfish shark – “the most abundant
shark on the planet"
[6] Dogfish meat is quite edible. In fact it’s the
fish of choice in England for fish and chips. Not so on Fox Island.
[7] Dave McHugh, July 17, 2006
[8] Until 1950
[9] Dave McHugh, July 17, 2006
[10] a small, perch-like bait fish
[11] Bob Salatino
[12] Dave McHugh, 2006
[13] Ibid.