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Updated: June 9, 2025
The craft that came scurrying in just before nightfall were mackerel seiners from Gloucester. They were all of one graceful shape and one size; they came with all sail set, taking the waning light like sunshine on their flying-jibs, and trailing each two dories behind them, with their seines piled in black heaps between the thwarts.
We had our work cut out to hold this one while the wind was light and astern, but in the morning, when it hauled and came fresher, we went flying over the shoals. So far as the looks of it went the big coaster might as well have been anchored then. All that day we held on. And it was a lesson in sailing to see the way some of those seiners were handled.
"By the wind," I said the usual word when seiners are cruising for mackerel, and I went aloft to take his place at the mast-head. It was a lazy watch, as the mackerel generally were not showing at this time in the middle of the day. They seemed to prefer the early morning or the late afternoon, or above all a dark night.
MacRae nodded assent. "There's going to be a free-for-all," Stubby chuckled. "There'll be a lot of independent purse seiners. If the canneries don't pay good prices these independent fishermen, with their fast, powerful rigs, will seine the salmon under the packers' noses and run their catch down to the Puget Sound plants. This is no time for the British Columbia packers to get uppish.
He started off first with his "Oh, seiners all and trawlers all," but Alec McNeill and Patsie Oddie interrupted. "Oh, give us the other one, Tom the Newf'undland and Cape Shore Men." "Ha!" laughed O'Donnell, "it's the mention of your own you want you and Patsie there. Well, it's all one to me. Any man from any place, so long as he's a fair man and a brave man, and Lord knows ye're both that.
And then we put out to sea and again we were living the life of seiners, having it hard and easy in streaks. There were the times when we went along for a week and did not do a tap but eat, sleep, stand a trick at the wheel, a watch to the mast-head, and skylark around the deck, and read, or have a quiet game of draw or whist or seven-up below.
"Drive her drive her," he called to the crew. "More yet more yet," to the steering oar. "There's the porgy steamer's boat, too, after the same school. Drive her now, fellows!" The mackerel were wild as could be, great rafts of them, and travelling faster than the old seiners in the gang said they had ever seen them travel before, and what was worse, not staying up long.
But the salmon hunter, eagerly pursuing the nimble dollar, sometimes grows rapacious in the chase and breaks laws of his own devising, if a big haul promises and no Fisheries Inspector is by to restrain him. The cannery purse seiners are the most frequent offenders. They can make their haul quickly in forbidden waters and get away.
And then there were the seiners the mackerel catchers seventy or eighty sail of them making ready for the Southern cruise. All that meant that things would be humming for a while. So I took a walk along the docks to see it.
The seiner was carrying a fearful press of sail, but she stood up stiffly under it, all the red and green lights of the other seiners falling astern; it was evident that the skipper meant to keep them there. Before long, occasional flashes of light, being the phosphorescence churned up by the tails of a pod of mackerel, could be seen from the deck. "Into the boat!" cried the skipper.
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