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Updated: May 13, 2025
Through the narrow entrance the gasboats were chugging in to anchorage, one close upon the heels of another. MacRae considered the power trollers. He shook his head. "Too slow," he muttered. "Too small. No place to lay him only a doghouse cabin and a fish hold." He strode away along the cliffs. It was dark now.
So for the next trip or two he contented himself with meeting Gower's price and taking what fish came to him. The Folly Bay mustard pots three of them great and small scurried here and there among the trollers, dividing the catch with the Bluebird and the Blanco. There was always a mustard-pot collector in sight. The weather was getting hot. Salmon would not keep in a troller's hold.
Tugs, fishing boats, salmon trollers, beach-combing launches, all that mosquito fleet which gets its bread upon the waters and learns bar, shoal, reef, and anchorage thoroughly in the getting, these knew that besides the half-moon bight called Cradle Bay, upon which fronted Horace Gower's summer home, there opened also a secure, bottle-necked cove less than a mile northward from Point Old.
The trollers had promised to hold their fish. The first man alongside to deliver reminded him of this. "Southeaster held you up, eh?" said he. "We fished in the lee off the top end. But we might as well have laid in. Held 'em too long for you." "They spoiled before you could slough them on the cannery, eh?" MacRae observed. "Most of mine did. They took some." "How many of your fish went bad?"
The bulk of the fleet had followed them. Only a few stuck to the Cove and Poor Man's Rock. To these and the rowboat trollers MacRae said: "Sell your fish to Folly Bay. I'm through." Then he lay down in his bunk in the airy pilot house of the Blanco and slept the clock around, the first decent rest he had taken in two months. He had not realized till then how tired he was.
A good many trollers sold him their fish before they learned that MacRae was paying the same. And the mustard pot evidently had his orders, for he tilted the price to sixty, which forced MacRae to do the same.
The trollers would hold their salmon, even when some sporting independent offered to shade the current price. They would shake their heads if they knew either of the Bird boats would be there to take the fish. For when MacRae said he would be there, he was always there. In the old days they had been compelled to play one buyer against another. They did not have to do that with MacRae.
He had eighteen thousand dollars in cash and the Bluebird. The Folly Bay pack was twelve thousand cases short. How much that shortage meant in lost profit MacRae could only guess, but it was a pretty sum. Another season like that, he smiled grimly. The next season would be better, for him. The trollers were all for him. They went out of their way to tell him that.
That meant a full load every trip, since he could follow the trollers till he got a load, if it took a week, and his salmon would still be fresh. He wondered why this had not been done before. Stubby enlightened him. "Partly because it's a costly rig to install.
Only a poor man trolled in a rowboat, tugging at the oars hour after hour without cabin shelter from wind and sun and rain, unable to face even such weather as a thirty by eight-foot gasboat could easily fish in, unable to follow the salmon run when it shifted from one point to another on the Gulf. The rowboat trollers must pick a camp ashore by a likely ground and stay there.
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