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Vin Ferrara's dark eyes gleamed, for agua blanco means "white water" in the Spanish tongue. The Terminal Fish Company's new coolers were yawning for fish when the first blueback run of commercial size showed off Gray Rock and the Ballenas. All the Squitty boats went out as soon as the salmon came.
The fish schooled in great shoals off Nanaimo, around Gray Rock, the Ballenas, passed on to Sangster and Squitty. And the fleet followed a hundred strong, each day increasing, Indians, Greeks, Japanese, white men, raking the salmon grounds with glittering spoon hooks, gathering in the fish. In early June MacRae was delivering eighteen thousand salmon a week to the Terminal Fish Company.
Many a small coaster has crept thankfully into that lee out of the whitecapped turmoil on either side, to lie there through a night that was wild outside, watching the Ballenas light twenty miles away on a pile of bare rocks winking and blinking its warning to less fortunate craft.
T. Gill in 1865 described a large shark known in the Gulf of California by the name of "Tiburon ballenas" or whale-shark, as a distinct genus Micristodus punctatus which, in my opinion, is the same fish. And finally, Prof. W. Nation examined in 1878 a specimen captured at Callao. Of this specimen we possess in the British Museum a portion of the dental plate.
By the time Jack MacRae was writing August on his sales slips he was conscious of an important fact; namely, that nearly a hundred gas-boat fishermen, trolling Squitty Island, the Ballenas, Gray Rock, even farther afield to Yellow Rock Light and Lambert Channel, were compactly behind him. They were still close to a period when they had been remorselessly exploited. They were all for MacRae.
And in another week they will be breaking water like trout in a still pool around the rocky base of the Ballenas Light and the kelp beds and reefs of Squitty Island.
The blueback pushed on the Gray Rock to the Ballenas, as if the blackfish and seal and shark that hung always about the schools to prey were herding them to some given point. Very shortly after they could be taken in the shadow of the Ballenas light the schools swarmed about the Cove end of Squitty Island, between the Elephant on Sangster and Poor Man's Rock.
But he kept it up. He had a sense of some approaching crisis. By the third week in July MacRae was taking three fourths of the bluebacks caught between the Ballenas and Folly Bay. He would lie sometimes within a stone's throw of Gower's cannery, loading salmon. He was swinging at anchor there one day when a rowboat from the cannery put out to the Blanco.
The oily swells came up that moon-path in undulating folds to break in silver fragments along the shore. The great island beyond the piercing shaft of the Ballenas light and the mainland far to his left lifted rugged mountains sharp against the sky. From the southeast little fluffs of cloud, little cottony flecks white as virgin snow, sailed before the wind that mothered the swells.
Away to starboard the Ballenas light winked and blinked its flaming eye to seafaring men as it had done in his father's time. Miles to port the Sand Heads lightship swung to its great hawsers off the Fraser River shoals. MacRae smiled contentedly. There was a long run ahead. But he felt that he had beaten Gower in this first definite brush.
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