By Ken Robinson

Managing Editor

I could say it was the day my reputation in the family as a fisherman was established. I was fourteen.

It was  August I think. In that summer, days blended. 

We met Dad’s friend, Jim C. In the grocery store parking lot. His passenger, also fourteen, was a kind of lumpy kid. He looked like he didn’t want to be there.

Dad followed Jim’s Ford station wagon south to cross the Narrows Bridge in Tacoma. The drive was a blur of green trees and some patches of water. It seemed like it was never going to end.

On a map, the route looks like a fish hook, with the point in Seattle, the bend at the Narrows and the shank tracing Highway 101 along the Olympic Peninsula.

The trip took about four hours. The peanut butter sandwich meant for breakfast and lunch was consumed by the time we rolled into the narrow street in Neah Bay. 

The buildings looked like they were made from found materials.

There were no tall structures along the main street where everything seemed temporary.

Dad, or may Jim C, had rented a cabin. We put our stuff inside, grabbed our rain gear and fishing rods and headed for the water.

I had never heard the word ‘kicker’ boat and still don’t know why it is called that. The boat was open, about 16-feet long and with an outboard motor. 

The lumpy kid did not want to go along. It was Jim C on the motor and Dad and I pushing out into the ocean in a boat that seemed large  in the harbor and smaller as we sailed out into the big water.

We hugged the coastline, a long boulder-strewn strip of beach, staying closer to the shore. The pitch and swell of the ocean danced our boat happily. The day was warm. The water had a dazzling brightness. 

We fished over kelp beds. Sometimes what seemed like a fish biting was the grab of a kelp ball and we had to check our lines to be sure we still had bait. 

Then I got a real bite and something big pulled line from my reel in a jerking urgency. The mood in the boat changed from a soothing refrain to high alert. 

When my catch came closer to the boat, we could see it was a red snapper, about three pounds. Dad grabbed the big net and was poised to slip it under the fish when another, much larger fish loomed underneath and bit into the snapper. Dad netted both fish and swung them into the boat.

Jim C never changed his posture. He killed the motor . He had a white cream-filled cookie in his mouth, eating it no-hands style. He didn’t speak but seemed content and oblivious to the incident. He ate cookies without using his hands so the taint of herring we used as bait would not contaminate his food. That and gasoline traces that perfumed the air.

He was a milkman, the kind that delivers to your house. I don’t know how Dad met him. He wasn’t our milkman. 

The bigger fish that grabbed hold of the snapper had a scary set of sharp teeth. Jim C said it was a lingcod. It had a kind of greenish tint. It was three times the size of the snapper, about as big as a man’s arm.

I was pretty happy with this unusual catch. 

We eventually cruised out toward Cape Flattery, a short distance from the harbor. Once out there, you are in the open ocean and the immensity of it enfolds you. It is also where Tatoosh Island and its offspring hold forth, rocky sentinels that signal departure from calmer waters.

It was on the route to Tatoosh that I hooked something much larger than the two-for-one catch earlier.

It was a fat salmon, weighing in at 38  pounds when we returned to the dock. Other anglers came over to gape at the fish. 

An earnest man with a white mustache came down to the dock. He  seemed disturbed. He told us that a boy had driven a station wagon down the one-lane road in front of our cabin and struck a pedestrian. And drove off.

The  driver was  Jim C’s adolescent son. The pedestrian was a doctor, in town for fishing, now in bed in a small clinic operated by the Makah Indians. 

The doctor was not badly injured, the man with the mustache said, but had talked about suing the father of the under-age driver.

There was nothing for Dad and I to contribute to the issue. We at e a sandwich and decided to follow a small stream that came out of the high ground around Near Bay. It was a short walk from the cabin through a field where cows roamed. We had fishing rods meant for trout fishing. A narrow stream, lined with small trees,  separated the field.

Dad wore waders. I wore my standard foot gear of black Converse ‘tennis’ shoes.

To cross the stream so I would not get my feet wet, Dad told me to hop on his back for the crossing. We get about half way across and did not notice the hot wire place there to keep the cows from crossing. 

An electric shock convulsed our bodies as we struck the wire. Dad dumped me into the stream and we both scrambled out in the direction we came from. 

We went back to the cabin where Jim C and his sullen son hunkered in the corner. The right front fender of the Ford had a dent the size of a dinner plate, about the size of a doctor’s hip.

The trip home the next day seemed much faster. Anticipation of showing my catch to my brothers fueled the journey.