The River Killers by Bruce Burrows Page B

was a problem for Super Bette, girl computer whiz.
    There was a rap on the door. “The conference starts in five minutes.”
    â€œOkay, be right there.”
    I shut everything down, disconnected the monitor, and took it back to the bridge. Alex handed me up a coffee and I took a sip as I looked around. The usual suspects were gathered and all five radios were crackling away. I turned all of them off except for the VHF tuned to channel 78A, and picked up the mike.
    â€œAttention, the roe herring fleet. This is the James Sinclair . Stand by for an announcement.” I released the mike key and looked at Pete and George.
    Pete shrugged. “Go ahead and put them on forty-eight hours’ standby. Then we’ll get down to the details.”
    George raised a finger. “Forty-eight hours takes us to Monday night, which is a bad time to open a fishery. Make it thirty-six hours and they’ll be ready to go Monday morning if necessary.”
    I nodded and keyed the mike button again. “Attention, the roe herring fleet. We are giving notice that the fleet is now on thirty-six hours’ notice with the earliest possible fishery on Monday morning at eight, but with an anticipated fishery on Wednesday at 0800 hours. Here are the results of today’s test fishery.”
    I then read off two pages of numbers: tonnages, percentages, male/female ratios, number of slinks, amount of spot spawn, and all the other arcane data that, taken together with a healthy amount of pure intuition, would allow us to pinpoint the optimum time for the fishery. I finished with, “Please come back to the James Sinclair with any questions.”
    â€œ James Sinclair, Dawn Dancer .”
    One of my favorite boat names. “Go ahead, Dawn Dancer .”
    â€œYeah, well, so how come if you’re thinking about opening on Wednesday, you’re putting us on standby for Monday?”
    George rolled his eyes. “Jesus, who’s running that boat this year? Must be a goddamn rookie.”
    I made sure George was finished expostulating before I transmitted a reply. In a carefully neutral voice, “Skipper, all our information points to a probable Wednesday fishery, but the fish have fooled us before. We don’t want to see a panic on Monday morning if a major spawn does start then.”
    There were more questions but everyone seemed fairly comfortable with the idea. Fortunately, weather was not a major part of the equation for this particular fishery. Spiller Channel was a fairly sheltered area and these were the seine boats, the big boys. Thank God I wasn’t running a gillnet fishery somewhere off the west coast. That could be a real high-wire act. One slipup and you’d lose more than the Flying Wallendas.
    When the last query had been queried, and the last reply replied, I bade goodnight to my fellow inmates and returned to my stateroom. I hadn’t learned much from Alistair’s computer but thought I might be able to glean a clue from his logbook. Many fishermen keep a ship’s log and a separate fishing log. Alistair combined the two. A typical entry would look like this:
April 3
    0500: left base
    0630: set one string, Blarney Rock
    0715: set one string, Mulcher’s reef
    0820: set two strings, 80 fm hole.
    1230: picked 1st string—63 lbs large
    1345: picked 2nd string—52 lbs large, 15 jumbo
    1430: picked strings 3 & 4—115 lbs large, 42 jumbo, bycatch—two China rockfish
    1435: left for Shearwater
    1730: arrived Shearwater, delivered
    1900: fueled up—84 gal.
    1930: tied up
    The log covered the last four years. A quick skim-through showed that almost all entries followed the same format. Sometimes entries referred to a simple cruise without all the set data, but other than that, there was nothing even remotely unusual. For lack of anything intelligent to do, I took the logbook to the copier and spent fifteen minutes copying every page. Then I placed the book in the