An education on the boat

Raincoast Chronicles 25 – m̓am̓aɫa Goes Fishing
by Alan Haig-Brown

Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025
$24.95  /  9781998526185

Reviewed by DC Reid

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Raincoast Chronicles 25 features Alan Haig-Brown – son of Roderick Haig-Brown, well-known author and Chief Magistrate of Campbell River – reliving his many years commercial fishing, largely with Indigenous people. The title, m̓am̓aɫa goes fishing, features an Indigenous first word, that we find out along the way, means ‘white guy’ – as in Indigenous humour.

Alan fished primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, some 13 years, with Herb Assu, an Indigenous man who was captain of the boat. His vast knowledge of the sea was submerged in his personality, but vital to keeping the boat afloat and everyone alive, in rough seas with changing tides and perilous winds in the Georgia and Johnstone Straits of BC. He became Haig-Brown’s father-in-law as the younger man married his daughter, Vicki. Herb and his family lived in the Indigenous town on Quadra Island at Cape Mudge, of the We Wai Kai people.

They fished primarily for herring roe and different species of salmon and went as far north as Alaska, though most fishing was in the inside straits of BC. They fished on the boat Departure Bay 3, known as DB3, in the fleet, built in 1928. The DB3, came with a very strong engine, a four-cylinder Caterpillar 77. So, these boats survived the rough treatment of wind, wave, and tide for a very long time.

The DB3 was financed, like most boats, by onshore companies, to which the Indigenous were tied – by those finances. The Indigenous were tied because of the large amounts of cash required to keep them floating annually which were paid for by the companies mostly during wintertime.

In summer they began work at 4:00AM and breakfast was served at 8:00AM by Mitzi Assu, Herb’s wife. She made stacks of pancakes, bacon, fried eggs, and fresh buns. Everyone stuffed themselves and then went back to work. She made three large meals per day, and everyone ate their fill, and remained fit, because the work was so draining. When the crew brought back berries from the local, steep lands beside the channels, she made huckleberry pies for everyone.

There were two main crops taken, and at different times of the year. Herring in late winter and early spring, and salmon in late summer and fall when the five species came back to inside waters.

The DB3 was originally a Japanese boat that was confiscated in the Second World War when the Pearl Harbour bombing happened, and sold to a local company, though many boats were owned by companies as far away as the Netherlands. Herb ended up owning the boat and fished it for the rest of his life.

The seine net was tied to a ‘peg’ on shore by skiff and then the main boat made a circle, thus trapping all the fish in the closed circle. The day’s catch had to be delivered to the processor at the end of the day to keep the fish fresh. And at first, for Alan, when it came to a net full of as many as five species of salmon, he had difficulty telling the different salmon apart. But he learned.

Companies loaned Herb, and all other captains, the money to do annual maintenance, thus gaining a financial hold on the boat, and, in some cases, where it fished. Fish were brailed on deck and in the hold. Alan, on one occasion, forgot his boots and his slickers filled with slime. He never forgot again.

Herb navigated the rough high seas and large opposing tides with ease, something Haig-Brown memorized for when it was his turn to steer. But he gave it back to Herb when it was too much for him because Herb had the seas in his bones and never made mistakes, something that other captains sometimes forgot. And when Herb hired some not-so-proficient greenhorns, he said nothing about their mistakes, but fired them as soon as the DB3 came back to the Campbell River dock.

Herb had been to Indian Residential School, the worst way of taking children and making them into small ‘white’ people. He ran away and never went back. He was educated by the British Columbia Coast Pilot and stored all its information in his head. Educated but not at a school.

Haig-Brown credits his captain with making him much more attentive to his life, and when he went to college, he paid far more attention to it, than when he had been in high school – before ocean fishing.

When cotton webbing for nets was changed into nylon, they became much more secure and a better set. And the floats, still called ‘corks’ replaced the earlier floats because they seldom broke in handling. And by those days’ standards they were pretty expensive: the new nets cost $6,500 – the same as Haig-Brown’s wages.

Herring fishing was much different from salmon fishing, with the herring tending to stay in one place and thus offer an easier fish to circle and catch. As well, the boats often fished at night rather than in the day. Also, the herring fishery attracted bigger boats, with a second floor, called ‘double-deckers’. The fishery began in January; very early compared with salmon.

Ingrained racism against Indigenous people continued with a ban on liquor sales until Alan’s father, Roderick, as magistrate, lobbied to eliminate this discriminatory practice. Previously, bottles were secretly bought, and some left on the boat and others in the fists of sleeping and hospitalized persons. Haig-Brown was given the name ‘Bootlegger Al’ whether he bought the booze or not, and it became all the more humorous with his deck mates and fleet as his father was the magistrate.

On one occasion the mates played a trick on Haig-Brown. They told him that Herb liked squid and he took one to him on the end of a fork. Herb wasn’t impressed, but the Indigenous staff had a good laugh at Haig-Brown’s expense. 

On one trip to Bella Coola, Alan learned that Indigenous tribes had their basketball teams travel by fish boat to their games in Klemtu and other places. To trade, they took seaweed, soapberries, and eulachon grease. These were the grease trails, and Haig-Brown came to see these as present day practices that went back centuries and were central to Indigenous tribal culture.

There was danger in the fleet as well. One day two girls in a rowboat fell overboard and Haig-Brown jumped in and the one that had sunk, he reached down and grabbed her hair and brought her to the boat. Another time, a fleet boat overturned. All men aboard tried to reach them. The crew were banging on the inside of the hull.  They could not bring the boat to rights and the men died.

The herring could bring big bucks for their roe. Starting at $8.80 per ton for herring for fertilizer, it grew to the huge price of $2,500 per ton, as it was made into Japanese kazunoko. The price increased the cost of boats, and their maintenance prices. Like the old days when Indigenous peoples owed their lives to the financing companies. In Herb’s case it was his knowledge of fishing that led him to being awarded a cost management arrangement.

Herb moved on to the Phyllis Cormack which was a boat of history. It was the boat Greenpeace used to protest nuclear testing in Alaska. Further fleet consolidation in the 1990s led to Jimmy Pattison buying the fleet boats and ‘owning’ the Indigenous peoples with the costs of their boat make-up.

Haig-Brown has said for many years that his 13 years in the fishing fleet educated him every bit as much as his going to university to prepare for being a writer in his life, in particularly for fishing magazines and books like m̓am̓aɫa goes fishing (with its oodles of pictures from his collection), along with his many years as a teacher.

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DC Reid is an author and a steadfast advocate for the Canadian literary community, having served as the president for the Federation of BC Writers, Victoria Book Prize Society, and League of Canadian Poets. He has won more than twenty awards for his work, including the 2023 Professional Outdoor Media Association of Canada gold medal for books for his memoir A Man and His River: a 25-year love affair with a wild island waterway. [Editor’s Note: DC Reid has reviewed books by Lorne Fitch and George Bumann for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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