The River Killers by Bruce Burrows

in the air. I was glad my cool DFO fleecy was warm. I considered the report card of my “date.” Danny tries hard but there is much room for improvement. Still?

Six
    The James Sinclair pulled the hook at seven the next morning, right after I’d pulled up the crab trap, removed six large males, and thrown the females back. I’d lost track of the number of times we’d pulled anchor and steamed off trailing a crab trap behind. When a crab trap gets wound into the propeller, it’s generally considered to be a bad thing.
    We cruised through the narrow gap that leads into Seaforth Channel, and turned the sounders and sonar on. The brilliant stars faded as the sky lightened. The ocean was still a blanket of black, flecked with the white of small waves. A freshening breeze was kicking up a bit of chop but the three hundred tons of James Sinclair pushed imperviously through the water. Our heading was west, and by the time it was fully light we were turning north up Spiller Channel.
    We zigzagged up the middle, all eyes on the sounder. Every blob of red indicated a school of herring, and we estimated the size and noted it. The two test boats were performing the same exercise along both shorelines. By noon, we’d formed a rough estimate of the amount of herring in the area. The central coast seine quota that year was thirty-five hundred tons. Between us and the test boats, we’d identified six to eight thousand tons.
    We’d sent the plane up and the spotter had seen thin streaks of white in the green water along the Spiller Channel shore. Light spawning had started.
    The other key factor in the equation, the roe content, had risen to twelve percent in the northern part of the channel, although it remained at about ten percent in the south. This probably meant there were still fish moving into the spawning area from the open ocean. But D-day was getting closer. There would probably be a run on Rolaids and Tums at the Bella Bella store.
    About four o’clock, we headed back to Shearwater for the evening conference. George was somehow handling the boat without my assistance, so with nothing better to do, I plugged my computer into the sat-phone network and went to the DFO website. I’d meant to check some of the stats from the Gulf opening but was waylaid by an icon for the Strategic Policy Working Group. Guided by some masochistic impulse, I clicked on the icon and it opened the report of the Special Policy for Licensing Abalone Group ( SPLAG ). After reading for a couple of minutes, I burst out laughing. “Listen to this. The policy guys have come up with a solution to the abalone problem. They’re going to introduce area licensing.”
    Area licensing was a method by which DFO attempted to correct their screwups. It could be they’d issued too many licenses for a fishery, or mismanaged a fishery to the point where there weren’t enough fish to support the same number of boats that had once made a good living. What they did was divide the coast up into little boxes and tell everyone that, whereas before they could fish the whole coast, now they could fish only in one little box. And if someone wanted to break out of the box, he could do so only by buying another license from a fellow fisherman. Result: one less fisherman and more expense for those remaining.
    But this was ludicrous. Abalone was a dead fishery and the licenses were worthless. Pete and George rolled their eyes. They’d spotted the obvious flaw. Why would an abalone fisherman with a worthless license want to buy another one? “Stay tuned,” I said. “It’s a work in progress. I just know they’ll come up with a brilliant solution. These are, after all, Policy Guys.”
    Silence. Sort of like when your dim-witted uncle acts up at the town picnic and embarrasses the whole family. Maybe this should be number two on my list of “Reasons Our Bureaucracy Keeps Screwing Things Up.” The