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Indian Dock at Alert Bay, once had dozens and dozens of fishing vessels CREDIT Mack McColl |
It's not every day you get a story straight from the horse's mouth, but it happens, "It was a go-anywhere fishing fleet owned by four major companies at its peak," explained Porgie Joliffe, a First Nation fisherman from Alert Bay, B.C..
The business transformed when big fish conglomerates acquired license to the fishing grounds. Fiscal shenanigans whirled through the licensing regime, said Porgie, at a moment when technologies advanced and everybody had to keep pace because everybody had to deliver 'X' amount of fish to stay in the game.
Upgrades to equipment became expensive and money scales changed to the fishermen's disadvantage and boat owners soon owed their soul to the company store. Despite a shifty money supply the coastal communities of the Pacific North West thrived until the business was strangled by mismanagement and a lack of vision for the resource, he said; greed collapsed the fishery, he added.
"I bet there aren't 2,000 fishermen left on the west coast today and there are probably 3,000 fisheries workers." Joliffe shakes his head at the number of people paid to stare at a ghost. The Johnstone Strait in front of Alert Bay had been at the epicentre of fishing dynamism that spread to all inlets and passages chasing salmon (five species), halibut, and herring, among them Porgie's father.
Fred Joliffe, Sr., logged as well as fished. They also crabbed. He had a smoke house, "We ate like kings. My mother loved to bake. We had buns, cake, pie. My wife couldn't believe the way my family set a dinner table when she first married me."
He recalls from years ago that he took a census crew around and found 105 logging companies working in the area. At one time in the 1940s and '50s a tiny beer store on Mistrel Island sold more beer than any outlet in B.C., as loggers and fishermen are notoriously hard drinkers.
By the 1950s the big logging companies moved in and fisheries started to disappear. Logging had the worst possible outcome for the fish spawning territories of Pacific salmon. Logging was done the easy way by using riverbeds as sloushes that carried logs and dredged fish habitat all the way to the boom grounds at sea.
Then followed the after-effects of draconian logging policies; the habitat destruction was universal in massive clearcuts.
The treasured Nimpkish watershed was cut four times in a century and a half as a matter of fact, and the epochal composition of a home for millions of salmon of all species was desecrated almost beyond belief. "Then fish farms moved into the inlets around the Broughton Archipelago for the cold water."
The North West Pacific provides ideal conditions for the growth of Atlantic salmon in net-pens. For the past 20 years fish farms have occupied pristine waters on critical pathways for transiting juvenile salmon. The number of salmon sank dramatically in years since.
Regulations took fleets apart zone-by-zone, hour by hour, and fleet-reduction plans by fisheries turned a suffering fleet of a couple thousand boats to a mere handful. Porgie went a different direction during another regulatory bottleneck of license buy-ups. Today four working boats with commercial fishing licenses dock in Alert Bay.
Porgie started a charter company called, Kakasolas Fishing, "My wife's Indian name," he said. He runs fishing trips, wildlife watch tours, and takes people on visits to sites of antiquity. He runs the 'Naomi W' in familiar waters beside land where the family has ancient roots.
Porgie Joliffe doesn't have his 'status' as an Indian in Canada, and yet he has a great-great-grandfather who was a High Chief conferred in the old way, the Potlatch. This unique coastal status was conferred by heredity. Status Indian was expendible to this man who knew how to generate wealth and power.
Porgie inherited his father Fred Joliffe Sr.'s work ethic and sense of business and went into, among other things, fishing and logging. Today at the age of 70 he is a tour guide on a beautifully re-fitted Pacific Coast cruiser.
"I travel at seven or eight knots on 200 HP and have her at the lowest RPM possible. We are burning two gallons an hour, and these days fuel cost is the biggest expense." The tour for visitors comes with a knowledge stream. "I charge $500 per licensed fisherman per day, and they can bring their wives at no extra charge for 10 hours on the boat. I include lunch and snacks."
Porgie creates no illusions in his business. "I tell them right off that fishing is up in the air. There are no guarantees anymore. Heritage and history and scenic beauty, and some rock cod, and maybe some crabs are left in those once bountiful waters."
Touring takes people on satisfying journeys into a supernatural world of the region's people. "We visit Gilford Island and Village Island, old villages where nobody lives anymore, just a few bears, a few totem poles. I take people to Echo Bay."
This is within the Broughton Archipelago near the site of the work done in Orca research by Alexandra Morton, and he said there's another facility that contains a small regional museum.
His father owned the Barkley Sound, a seign boat. Today "He's 92. He's quite the guy. He closes the bar (the Bayside in Alert Bay) once a month. He fished all his life. He was a caring type but he was a hard worker. He'd do it daylight to dark. He had a nice seign boat. The town of Alert Bay had four fuel docks. All of Sointula's fishermen came over here to fill up." Today there are none.
Lately, he says, the fisheries people admit they failed to manage the fish. Porgie ascribes blame for the west coast fisheries collapse as follows: 50 percent belongs to logging and 25 percent belongs to the introduction of fish farms on critical wild salmon water courses.
His great-great-grandfather Joseph Harris was the last Hereditary Chief of Alert Bay's ancient Kwakwaka'wakw ville, and like all the rest he had his national rights and title usurped. He made the shift to the economy of an Industrial Revolution and a couple generations later Porgie was in the mix when it came to be his turn.
Other opportunities have beckoned his attention, for instance he spent many summers, nearly 20, guiding and hosting scientists who gathered from around the world to research the development of calcitonin, an important advance in human bone science.
He made life-long friends of scientists who came into the territory and invited him off to their places in the world. In his part of this old world, however, and there is much changing under his close observation.
"Grizzlies are wandering all over. There are no grizzlies on Vancouver Island. The island reported at least three last year. The fish farms have these large totes filled with 5,000 dead fish and the grizzly have been breaking into those, but it's just rotten fish."
The ecological impact of the disappearing supply of salmon will destroy the grizzly. "We are staring at a situation where grizzlies will start eating young grizzlies because they don't want the competition."
His business on the water is informative as to the condition of the Orca; he said the killer whales are perhaps dying young and pods are disappearing quickly when they pass through to feed elsewhere. The area once fed them so well they never left, said Porgie.
He knows the schools of herring have shrunk in both size and number. Bird populations are behaving erratically and sometimes they seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Then one day recently he saw 150-plus eagles circling on the southern end of Cormorant Island, which is an uncommon sight down there, he said.
