Bill and Elaine C*, Summer 2007 · 16 October 2007, 16:20 by Julie Loyd
(We chatted about the phone company and their pond chemistry, which may be high in phenols and cadmium. Then the talk turned to fish and I turned on the digital recorder.)
Elaine: ... they were in residence during that period of time. It seemed to me that they were noticeable pretty well before sunset. Anywhere from about 5 in the afternoon, through that latter part of the afternoon. This of course, was the longest days of the year so we could be looking at it at 9:00 at night. But it seemed to me it was sort of an evening feeding time phenomenon.
I was not down there in the morning, so I don’t know. Would be willing to go down there in the mornings and look, next May and early June. It might be interesting to see if you could see them then. It always seemed to be an evening thing, but that’s when we would wander down, you see?
But I thought that it was very noticeable and that they were, as I say, in residence. It didn’t seem like just a pass-through thing. Because it was pretty all-over action. There were places where there was a … not a school, but like a little herring ball or something in miniature. It was very charming, I thought, all those little guys just out there sort of fluffing through the water, it was very nice. I don’t know whey I wasn’t as aware of it this year. but I think maybe we just weren’t down there as much. We were doing other things. Because I didn’t have it as an assignment, it wasn’t part of my active conscious, which is very limited a lot of the time. (laughs) But I’d be willing to look carefully next spring. There’s nothing out there right now.
Bill: You know, Julie, when I was a kid, there were an awful lot more creatures out there. Not just salmon, but cod looking at your toes, skates. You look down now …
Elaine; I remember a lot more snapper. The red color was very noticeable. Yeah, even a lot more recently than his childhood, I remember a lot of snapper. Oh, in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. The color was very glamorous and so it was easy to see. And there was cod all over at West Beach.
Bill: I hear that the no catch zone around Bear Island is coming back pretty well.
Elaine: Who told you that?
Bill: Derek A*. Saw all kinds of stuff out there. Like the old days.
Julie: I was talking to Carol S* who said that your two points used to have kelp forests out, out from the points?
Bill: Boy. She goes back a long way.
Elaine. She goes back further than we do. Did you say kelp?
Julie: Yeah.
Elaine. Oh yes. I remember kelp from not too far out here. Because Colin went after kelp in Souvenir in about 1968 or so. And he didn’t have to go out very far at all. He overloaded the boat, I remember that, and he got scared and he screamed for John. John went out in another boat and helped pull it in, because he had overloaded the boat.
Julie: What did he want? Why did he want the kelp?
Bill: To grow corn.
Elaine: For his garden. He used to grow corn every summer, and he was very good at it, because he cared about it.
Julie: John?
Elaine: No, this was Colin, our younger son. He was born in 1963, and he would have been … no later than 1970.
Bill: Julie, are kelp beds dying off too?
Julie: People have been very interested in eelgrass, so they’ve noticed that. Just recently they realized that up here there’s certain fish that don’t like eelgrass, they like kelp.
Elaine: As in kelp cod.
Julie: Yeah, so now they’re noticing that some kelp beds, like yours out here, are gone. But nobody has officially looked at them yet. Friends of the San Juans are doing a survey, trying to say what there is now.
Bill: I guess there probably is less kelp.
Elaine: Oh, there is less kelp. I know that. Colin would remember that, because he used to row around out there.
We had a brief discussion about phenols and surfactants in pond water
Julie: One of the things that I’m doing is interviewing people about stuff like the fish that used to be out here. Would you guys be willing?
Elaine: Oh, I don’t remember like Bill does, but I can remember maybe more than other people. I’ve been coming to W***n since ’62. And he’s been coming to W***n since, what, 1940? I think, around in there.
Bill: Would you ask the question again? I didn’t hear you.
Julie: Would you be willing to be interviewed about the stuff that used to be here and the changes that you’ve seen?
Bill: I would. We’re not going to go into sexual histories.
Julie: Yeah. I’m talking about natural history.
Elaine: She means natural history, bless her heart. She’s not writing a …
Julie: Which can get pretty sexy.
Elaine: Well, I guess. It can get racy at least.
9:53 Bill: I don’t really know that I have noticed very much. I wouldn’t even have noticed that the kelp was gone until it came up.
Elaine: I’ve been aware of that one. My memory is just what you would see if you looked down out of a boat or something like that.
Bill: There used to be a lot more stuff. Everything …
Elaine: I will agree with that. More of everything.
Bill: Sand dabs. It would look like the bottom of the bay and all of a sudden it would move and you knew it was the back of tiny little sand dabs. But yes, I would be willing to do that.
Elaine: I don’t any faith in the fact that I was looking very carefully.
Bill: Isn’t it true that the white spot on Skipjack where the seagull dung is, is smaller than it used to be?
Elaine: I don’t remember that. You may be right.
Bill: I think there’s less seagulls out there and that’s why the spot is shrinking in size.
Elaine: I saw something this morning that I have seen very few times. And that was that most all the gulls were on the beach instead of on the water. Now that may seem like a strange thing to observe but that’s what I saw this morning, and I thought, “What on earth? They’re up on the beach.” They were up on the beach right near Carol’s place.
Bill: Oh, but you see that sometimes.
Elaine: Not often. I mean, there were dozens. It was like a herring ball only they were up on the sand instead of out on the water.
Bill: Lunch was on the sand instead of out on the water.
Elaine: I don’t know what they were eating, I don’t know.
(more pond talk)
Julie: One of the things that Carol said was that the blackfish used to come every August.
Elaine: Oh, she was right. And the last of the blackfish … I might be able to give a date for, that I have seen. Let me think … I think it was ’96.
12:56 Julie: That’s relatively recent.
Elaine: Um hmm, that’s my point.
Julie: Dan C* remembers blackfish as being different than Orcas because they wasn’t any white on them. Carol says, well, they did have white.
Elaline: Oh, I remember white.
Bill: They’ve all got white spots. All the Orcas have white spots on their bellies.
Elaine: I remember white. Sometimes they were pretty far away but they were very unmistakable. You could hear them, you could see them, you could see the water spouts. The whole thing was very apparent, you weren’t mistaken. They might be out as far out as say the other side of Skipjack from our beach. That’s quite a ways to see the white always. I can’t remember ever seeing them when they didn’t have the white.
Bill: I stood on Skipjack once when an Orca went by and you could see the white very clearly. There’s a huge increase in seals and otters. You never used to see any.
Elaine: Well, now that’s sort of true and sort of not true. It’s very true about the increase in seals. And the increase in otters has all come … It was up and then it went way down and then it’s gone up again, straight up. And that, I think, had to do with, there was a bounty on them when we were first here in the ‘60’s.
Bitte Baer M*, the great “conservationist,” lobbied to get the bounty removed. When the bounty was removed the population just immediately started to rise. You can get the date on that, I don’t know it specifically. I thought it was in the ‘70’s but I could be wrong.
Julie: And the bounty was there because they eat fish, or ?
Elaine: Yeah, they ate salmon.
Bill: It was also a way to make a little money.
Elaine: It was a way to make a little money, that’s very true. But the philosophical reason was that they ate salmon. That was how I think the bounty was legitimated. I don’t know what the bounty was, I don’t think it was a whole lot, but I people were glad to get the money. I don’t know how long the bounty had been on, I assume for quite a while. But I’m sure that that is something that is on the records: When did the bounty go on, what are the records about how the otter population went down?
Then when the ‘60s came along and people got very sentimental about preservation of species etc, and Bitte being the person she was, she was a very dynamic, forceful person, she just said, “Why this is ridiculous, we want these darling otters.” She very quickly got the thing … I assume it was quick. I heard all this. This is all hearsay. Who knows what really happened? It would have to be researched. The county ought to have some record of it, you’d think they would. But there was a very noticeable rise when the bounty went off. They were never a problem when we first came here in the ‘60’s. The boats stayed clean.
Bill: We never even saw an otter.
Elaine: We didn’t see otters.
Bill: Obviously the mom and dad were lurking around in some obscure place because the population came back.
Elaine: Yeah, but believe me, they were not apparent. Of course, they’re a nightmare now as far as we’re concerned, absolute nightmare.
Julie: Because of the boat?
Elaine: The boats are filthy all the time. I would love to have the bounty go back on. I would love it. I have no love for them. I used to. They were cute, and all that, but to hell with them as far as I’m concerned. They’re smelly, they’re dirty, they’re filthy, they get into everything.
17:46 Bill: Everybody in Cowlitz Bay has got them. You go out there and there’s four or five fish heads.
Elaine: You have to clean the boats out and it makes you want to vomit, it’s just sickening. And then of course they come up on the land and they want to get in under your house. We’ve had to put wire around that little cabin down there, completely, so they wouldn’t … It’s a horrible little cabin with no basement of course, it’s filthy. The otters had lived in there when we first bought it.
Bill: They had their babies.
Elaine: They had their babies. They tried to get in up here, they tried to get in the woodshed. There was one in the barn, Bill panicked, he came in and he said, “There’s an otter, a mother otter in the barn,” He was scared to death she was going to “foal,” or whatever you call it (general laughter), up in the barn. So they really are not pleasant. I’d love to see them cut back. I don’t want to have the whole outfit killed off, but then there’s a line in there and it’s obviously very brittle.
Bill: I saw a mink at the Cut (the Ditch) once.
Elaine: That’s what you said. I’ve never seen mink around here, by the way.
Bill: I’ve never seen mink around here.
Elaine: We saw a lot of mink up off the coast of British Columbia. We went up to …
Bill: Barclay Sound.
Elaine: Barclay Sound one summer when our kids were young. We had a wonderful trip. But believe me, the mink were breeding like mink. They were all over and cute as could be. They had the funniest little high toned voice, it was just an amazing little sound. But boy, they took the place.
Bill: Julie, there used to be herring about that long.
Elaine: Oh yeah.
Julie: Like a foot?
Elaine: No, 8 inches.
Bill: Eight inches. It would have been a flood tide, we went out between Skipjack and little Skippy out there on flood. You could just fill up a washtub in no time.
Elaine: Give her the dates on that, because it was before my time.
20:24 Bill: I did it with my dad.
Elaine: Well, I know, so it was probably the 1940’s.
Bill: Something like that. Are these stories you’ve heard a thousand times? Are we boring the hell out of you?
20:39 Julie: They dovetail with the other stories but they’re new.
Bill: Who was the old guy who lived off of … jigged herring over there in Cowlitz Bay … was a water witcher and commiserated with me because I couldn’t make the stick work and said, “Bill, you’re the first man I’ve known who has no electricity?”
Elaine: Oh … His name was Wood.
Bill: Ralph Wood. He used to live off these same herring, jigging them in Cowlitz. I think he went out to, there’s a little rock out there. He would jig these things, I guess he smoked them and sold them.
21:30 Elaine: Well, Norman got them out here in the late 1950’s. Norman McDonald, and smoked them. After they were smoked, they’d shrink a little, so they were 7 to 8 inches, I’d say.
He had us to a lunch one day. He had gotten them out here, the place you’re talking about, I think. He’d smoked them up here. He built a pit down in under the ground, in a tunnel kind of, and then he smoked them, with the smoke coming out of that tunnel, on a screen. He served them to us for lunch.
That would have been … It was in 1958.
Julie: You’re good!
Bill: She’s real good on dates.
Elaine: I’m good on dates.
Bill: You’d have maybe eight or nine bright hooks.
Elaine: Right, I’ve seen those.
Bill: Jigs. And you’d put that thing down, you’d move it up and down a couple of times, and by god, there’d be six or eight fish on it.
Elaine: And your daddy used to polish those hooks with a felt treated thing that you were supposed to clean silver with. I watched him do it, shining the hooks. Glitter, that was the lure.
23:21 Bill: And then there used to be a run of white king. I keep talking about that run of white king.
Elaine: That was pretty late in the summer. White king, we got a huge one and smoked it in this little … what we now call the box house, which originally was a smoke house thing. We smoked that in … I can get the year on that one too …
Bill: Do you realize what you’re witnessing here?
Elaine: Wait a minute … I can tell you by how old the kids were, is what I’m going on. That would have been in … pretty close to ’64. That was a white king run.
24:17 Bill: It was August or September.
Elaine: It was August I’d say, because we had people in school. We would have had to be back in town by Labor Day. It was August.
Bill: It had to be August. It was an unusual time for a king run, it was a very definite phenomenon.
Elaine: It was the best salmon I’ve ever tasted, the white kings.
Bill: Very fat.
Elaine: You’ve probably had them. You still get them. I mean, the fish buyers can get them. I don’t know about Mr. von R* but I imagine he gets them sometimes.
24: 55 Bill: Well, I don’t know. That run has disappeared.
Elaine: Well, that’s what they say.
Bill: It’s not out there anymore. I don’t know what river it went up. The Fraser River?
Elaine: May have been, or the Nooksack, I don’t know that either. That would be interesting to find out, if the Nooksack had had anything like that.
Bill: We ran into a guy in Bellingham, who said that he was running a hatchery and he had white king.
Elaine: He was trying to get them going again.
25:29 Bill: I don’t think there’s any fewer eagles now than there were, I think there are more.
Elaine: They’re more, a lot more.
Bill: I don’t know why more eagles.
Elaine: I think that has to do with the eggs being protected from chemicals, among other things. I don’t know what Julie thinks about it. You probably know more than I do about that.
25:50 Julie: No, I think you’re right.
Elaine. I think that was it. We could see it happen. After they took that off the market …
Bill: What was it, DN whatever it was …
Julie: DDT.
Elaine: Yeah.
Bill: ... it was supposed to thin the shells of birds, DND, or whatever it was? Didn’t there used to be more of those little birds that have red feet?
Elaine: Oh, the Puffins. Tufted Puffins. Absolutely. Loads more.
Julie: I’ve never seen one here.
Elaine: Well, they were gorgeous. Not gorgeous, they were just stunning, charming. They had the most wonderful way of moving across the water. Not on it, and not in it. They literally could skim. They were wonderfully colored, and they had the remarkably noticeable beaks. They were really handsome little creatures, and there were a lot of them. They were abundant in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. And then, I think the changes there came pretty early. They were fewer, and then I think you could see a few, maybe into the early ‘80’s, but I’m not sure that it was very many. It might have been the ‘70’s when they really began to wane. But they were still very abundant in the ‘60’s when we first brought the children up here. The most were in the ‘50’s, because I’d never seen them in my life before, until we used to fish over at Orcas, when we were still staying with your folks in the summertime. They were charmers.
27:57 Bill: If anything we’ve got more owls than we used to.
Elaine: I don’t know. We have an awful lot of Barred Owls, which we didn’t even have five years ago, over here. You may notice those at your place. They’re very abundant. I’m surprised at how they’ve multiplied, but I guess that’s a move from the East Coast all the way across the continent, from what I’ve read. Can you imagine? What a trip, what a trip!
Julie: I haven’t done that trip, it’s too far.
Elaine: What a trip! Too good! I love to think about it! They’re moving out! As Jean V* told me about three years ago, that they had barred owls in their backyards where they live in Maryland. So they’re all the way across the continent now, and I think pretty well spread.
Bill: I imagine too, that there’s nowhere near as many dogfish as there used to be.
Elaine: Did you ever tell Julie about your great war effort?
29:05 Bill: About to. You may know that the dogfish liver … At the time of World War II, there was no oil that would hold up in the North. Airplanes needed oil in very cold temperatures. They used dogfish livers to make that oil. Probably this was a little window of time, and I imagine that shortly after that they came up with another way of making this oil. Anyway, for a while during the war you could catch dogfish and sell them. You ended up making about 35 cents a dogfish or something. Ralph Wood had one up in Cowlitz Bay, and I had one over … there were a lot of them … I had one on the West side of Orcas. You put down a hundred hooks and you would get about 90 dogfish. I mean, just every hook was taken. Then I used to see schools of dogfish when we were just messing around with the boats. I haven’t seen one in years and years and years.
Elaine: I can remember in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s, going fishing for salmon, and caching nothing but what you called “doggies,” all the time you were out. You were incessantly having to pull them up, get them off the hook, throw them back, and get rid of them, because you really wanted a salmon for supper. So they were very abundant, and I have no idea what’s happened to them. Do you hear about it? Does David run into it?
Julie: No, no one’s talked about it.
Elaine: See? That’s just a huge difference.
Bill: I’m wondering if there aren’t more Dungeness Crab out there than there used to be.
30:55 Elaine: I do too.
Julie: Carol said that they never ate crab. They just weren’t interested.
Bill: I know it. Did she think they were there?
Julie: I didn’t ask.
Bill: Apparently there’s all kinds of them out there, as David knows.
Elaine: I would even think that David has noticed a difference since he has been working these waters. Because from my observation, they’ve greatly increased in the last five to ten years, and he’s been there all that time.
Bill: You’d think that if there had been a crab fishery, as there is now, we would have seen it. I mean, now, we see crab pots out there …
Elaine: I think that Carol S* is on to something. It was simply not a de rigeur food as much back when she was young, ‘cause she’s even older than I am, poor darling. My memory is not of hearing a lot about it, people eating crab. Now, they ate crab in San Francisco and Charleston and Baltimore and so on.
Bill: Maybe you’re right.
Elaine: But I don’t think our native people were very interested in eating crab. I could be wrong about that. Carol’s grandmother was really an Indian woman, wasn’t she? Do you remember her at all? I don’t. Margaret’s mother, Mrs. L*, isn’t it?
32:38 Bill: She was dead before I …
Elaine: Yeah. So, there’s a true Indian precedent for food ideas, perhaps. Although Margaret, gosh, she was just a good cook. She made the best maple bars you ever put in your mouth.
Bill: I think Margaret’s second husband …
Elaine: No, you’re not talking about her second husband, she only had one. Mrs. L*’s second whatever.
Bill: The guy who fed the quarry from halibut caught out here …
Elaine: Well, that was Margaret’s father. His name was … he was Finnish, what was his name?
Bill: K*.
Elaine: K*, that would be Carol’s grandfather. Did Carol go into any of this?
Julie: It was a very short interview.
Bill: Well, Margaret’s father would take halibut down to the quarrymen. There was a hole out here, quite a ways out, somewhere West of Skipjack.
Elaine: Well, Lynn D* knew about that hole, and I’m sure that Bill C* did too. But Lynn D* knew about that hole because I remember him talking about it. A halibut hole. I never remember that going on when Lynn and Mary were still living in Danni’s house. It was their house, not Danni’s, but anyhow, it was their house then. But he talked about it as a younger person, getting halibut there quite readily.
Bill: It sounded to me as though Margaret’s father ..
Elaine; I think he had access to a lot of halibut. Absolutely. That’s what they said.
Bill: It seems to me that nobody one even tried here lately. I don’t even know where the hole is.
Elaine: You were trying to get Lynne to describe it to you years ago.
Bill: And I didn’t get very far.
Elaine: You didn’t get very far. We felt that there was some private material. The people, the old folks didn’t want to spread the word to all the young interlopers. We were interlopers at that point.
Bill: You could find it with a depth finder now.
Elaine: Um hm. It’s possible that some of the C* boys would know from their dad.
I think that the fish situation has really changed tremendously, just since I’ve been coming, which was from ’62 on.
35:44 Julie: I think those were the really bad years for wildlife.
Elaine: Oh, they were. It was terrible, sure.
Bill: Julie, you act as though things were better since then.
Julie: I think some things have improved and the things that have gone extinct are gone. There’s more eagles and more otters, there’s herring in Cowlitz.
Bill: You have herring in Cowlitz? Little ones or big ones? (Julie gestures 5”) You got them that big? I think they are a different species from the …
Elaine: I didn’t know that. That’s interesting.
Julie: Yeah, we did a net pull, four days ago, something like that. We got maybe 1,000 fish. There were about 400 or 500 herring, and 40 pinks …
Bill: Forty pink salmon?
Julie: Little ones, and a number of chinook, but I didn’t stay long enough to get the count on the chinook. And then the other, maybe 400 fish got away. The net was just full of them.
37:14 Bill: This is a beach seine. It’s only legal for scientific purposes. You can’t do it to eat.
Julie: No. There were lots of fish. Some people said that was new.
Bill: That’s good. Yeah, I would say that’s new, but not that we’ve really tried.
Elaine: I was going to say, we used to fish, and we don’t fish any more. Unless you’re out there pretty often fishing, you don’t get a picture.
Bill: We quit fishing when … they say that there were two layers of salmon. There were the salmon that you could catch when you put on, say, up to 6 or 8 ounces of lead so that your line might be … oh, at most 15 feet below the surface. And then below that, there was another …. all the time that we were up here fishing, there were these deeper salmon, which then people had to go after with these great big balls of lead that would bounce along the bottom and got caught on rocks all the time. So I never really got into that deep strata, and it wasn’t really necessary until we began to run out of the shallower stuff.
38:45 Elaine: ’84.
Bill: That about it?
Elaine: Right on. I know that. Because that was the last summer we got a lot of good fish. That was the summer that David B* stayed with us.
Bill: Yeah. You know, as I’ve said many, many times, if you had a lot of salmon in these waters, it would be a wonderful, wonderful thing. They were a terrific boon, and they were also a big economic factor. There were people running resorts, and it was marvelous. A lot of fun!
Now, the C*’s, we here talk about beach seining. They just used to leave a net out. It may have been legal then. At night, and then in the morning the tide went out and there’d be a salmon or two in the net. You didn’t even have to get in the boat.
39:59 Elaine: I would like to have seen that. I never saw that. I heard people talk about it, but I’ve never seen it.
Bill: I wonder if there’s any pheasants left on Orcas Island? We used to go pheasant hunting.
Elaine: Pheasants? I haven’t heard of them. I wouldn’t know, you could ask.
Julie: Is that something they stocked there, or were they natural?
Bill: These were wild, they were wild pheasants, They were in Crow Valley then.
Elaine: You don’t think they got away from a domestic …
Bill: They might have.
Elaine: How many would there have been? Do you want to come up with a wild guess?
Bill: Oh, I would have no way of putting a number on it. But every old countryman would take his shotgun and go out and get … Wonderful meat. And a nice thing to do on a September day.
Just thinking about the various dimensions of wildlife. We used to see more Orcas. We would see an occasional true whale. I don’t know that the porpoise population is different.
Elaine: I don’t think it’s very different, but I don’t know. Just going between here and the Cut, which a lot of people call The Ditch, Brant’s landing, that’s where David takes us and picks us up when we come and go with our big loads. I can’t tell any difference in that. It’s pretty steady, pretty steady. And I don’t know why that would be steady whereas the bigger guys keep failing. Whether it’s food … must be just food. Who knows? I’m sure people have ideas about it.
Bill: Then along South of West Beach, there along those rocks on the way to …
Elaine: Deer Harbor
Bill Well, I was trying to think of the name of that point, that first point down there.
Elaine: Soderburg.
Bill: Soderburg Point, yeah. There used to be ling cod that long (just under three feet). I gather those things are 40 years old, some of them. Those are very very old fish.
Elaine: Well, Walter H* used to pull those ling cod up the beach. He’d get them and then he’d get them out of his boat somehow and pull them up the beach. I’ve seen him pulling them like that.
Bill: Just huge things. And then he’d can them, and if you can think of anything worse than cod canned by …
Elaine: Well, I can’t think of anything worse than canned cod, but anyhow. (general laughter) But there was a lot of meat. And when anybody would bring in a ling cod down at the resort down there, well, that was usually cut up and shared, people staying in the cabins.
Bill: It was too much for one person.
Elaine: Unless they were going to can them, it was an inedible amount of fish.
Bill: I think it weighed forty or fifty pounds, a lot of them.
Elaine: Yeah, there were a lot of ling cod.
Bill: Now, they’re rare, because they do get so old. You’re using up fifty years of living if you catch ling cod that big.
Elaine; So that was just overfishing, is what you’re saying. They fished those things out.
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