Our Klamath Basin Water Crisis
Upholding rural Americans' rights to grow food,
own property, and caretake our wildlife and natural resources.
Our Klamath Basin
Water Crisis
Upholding rural Americans' rights to grow food,
own property, and caretake our wildlife and natural resources.
|
Oregon Troller view of the 2006 Season as
it begins A boatload of misery With the season cut by 80 percent, the fishing industry is struggling to stay above water By Winston Ross The Register-Guard, June 11, 2006 NEWPORT - Sunlight drapes the docks at South Beach, and a cool north wind blows the trawler (Troller) into port. The June II quietly glides sideways to its place at the base of the Carvalho Fisheries dock, across Yaquina Bay from Newport's Old Town. Jared Reeves climbs out of the wheelhouse and hops onto the deck. Both skipper and crewman, 23-year-old Reeves ties his boat off at midship and tosses a line up to the waiting dock worker. Finally, the first Chinook salmon fishing trip of the 2006 season is over. Soon his catch will be counted and weighed and Reeves will cash the first paycheck he's deposited in a month and a half, his boat's first earnings this year. It was a lousy trip. Reeves brought in a paltry 37 fish, less than half his allowable catch and not enough to make the four-day trip profitable. By the time he settles his fuel bill, writes a rent check, buys some groceries, repairs his broken-down Ford pickup and makes a payment on his maxed-out credit cards, the money will be gone. A rough start to a rough season. Because federal fishery managers lopped the number of days Reeves can fish by an unprecedented 80 percent and restricted the number of fish he's allowed to catch per trip to 75 - the first such limit ever imposed - Reeves will struggle all year. He will wonder if his father was wrong to persuade him to leave logging and invest tens of thousands of dollars in this boat and its required permits. He will put his life in danger each time he steers across the river bar because he can't afford to hire help. He fishes by himself, racing from the deck to the wheelhouse so that he can both man his lines and make sure the boat doesn't hit anything as it cruises on autopilot. Because there are only a few days available to him to fish, he'll amplify that danger by staying out in weather that would normally keep the June II tied to the docks. "You rock back and forth so hard your lines slack up and the fish pop off," Reeves says. "Everybody's pushing the issue on what their boat can handle." And because this year's salmon season is the most restricted it has ever been, Reeves says he will barely earn enough to survive. The risk, the toil, the hard days at sea in bitter winds and rollicking waves won't be worth it. Not this year, anyway. "With the stroke of a pen," he grumbles, "they pull it out from under us." But Jared Reeves says he has no other option. Fishing is what he knows and loves. Falling farther behind Just inside a small strip mall near Charleston's boat basin sits another casualty of the shortened salmon season: Pat Houck, in a faded, sleeveless T-shirt, grimy sweat pants and baseball cap, his eyes glued to a laptop on the desk behind the counter of his gift shop, Fat Patrick's. He's playing Solitaire. It's a way to pass the hours between sparse visits from occasional tourists. This time of year, Houck says he's lucky to greet 10 potential customers in the 12 hours the store is open. He's luckier still if any of them actually buy a T-shirt. What Houck should be doing right now is selling ice to fishermen. But the 51-year-old closed down the ice plant two weeks ago, after 22 years in business, knowing there's no way he could keep it afloat with the salmon season shut down along the entire South Coast. He's three months behind on lease payments to the Port of Charleston. He owes $25,000 for repairs to the plant after pipes burst four years ago, spraying ammonia all over his face and arms and landing him in the hospital for 10 days. Houck has no idea how he'll catch up. "Salmon is pretty much what I had left," Houck says. "Every winter I've been falling a little farther behind." He'd been losing money for the last few years, especially after the federal government bought half of the groundfish fleet's boats and permits because there weren't enough fish for the whole fleet. That took a third of Houck's business. Meanwhile, cheap shrimp imports from Canada put dozens of West Coast shrimpers out of business, making it even harder for him to keep the plant in the black. "I'm mad at the government," Houck says. "They're taking this out on the fishermen." Now he runs the gift shop, and watches television. He begins the day with the news, then "The Price Is Right," then Solitaire, because he doesn't like soap operas. "There's only so many times you can vacuum in a day," he says, picking up a piece of litter off the floor and straightening a pirate flag. Bad weather, bad luck Jared Reeves pulls on his rain gear and gloves, moves the hatch cover aside and hoists up the false floor of the June II's "slush tank," holding a mixture of ice and seawater, where his catch is stored. Reeves pulls out the first fish by the gills, a respectable but not great 18-pound Chinook, and lays it gently into the aluminum bucket dock workers have hoisted on the deck. A damaged fish could drop the price per pound he negotiated at sea from $5.75 to $2. Now is no time to be slamming salmon around. Reeves is light on fish because bad weather at sea drove him back to port, ending an ill-fated week. A few days before the start of the season, the axle on his pickup broke as he was driving into Charleston, nearly sending the vehicle into a row of houses and ripping out the entire back end of the truck. Because Reeves has no money to repair it, the pickup is sitting at a garage. Not long after he got on the water to head to Newport a week ago Saturday, the pump that cools the engine on his boat malfunctioned and overheated, forcing him to shut down and work on repairs. He wound up making a mortifying call to the U.S. Coast Guard, asking for a tow into Florence. In port, Coast Guard crewmen boarded Reeves' boat and cited him for having old flares. There's no ice plant and no marine store in Florence anymore, so Reeves was lucky to find a few working flares at a local sporting goods shop. He persuaded a buddy to drive in from Eugene and scuba dive in the bottom of the boat to unclog some debris, because he couldn't find or afford to hire someone local. He returned to sea with three hours of sleep and two-day-old ice. When Reeves finally got to the fishing grounds, he found them crowded with other trawlers, increasing the risk that he'd crash into one of them and diminishing his chances of catching the 75-fish limit. "Pretty much everybody that's participating is right here on this one spot where I'm at," he says via cell phone from the sea. "Everybody's going through the same groove." Puzzles and puttering Back on shore, 74-year-old Kurt Russell enjoys one of the most sublime views in the Charleston Marina. With a mostly idled salmon fleet, the owner of the boat basin's fuel dock has plenty of time to do just that these days. Like Houck, Russell lost a good piece of his business after the groundfish buyback. It's afternoon already and he's only had one customer so far, a boat that bought 120 gallons of diesel fuel. On a good day, he sells 3,000 gallons. In a grimy "United We Stand" sweat shirt and jeans and black loafers, Russell spends most of his time where he is right now: in a chair, gazing out the window or at the History Channel on TV. Sometimes he flips through a Guinness Book of World Records, or helps his daughter work on puzzles. There are 40 different varieties of puzzles in the back room, and the pair have put them all together at least once. Every now and then he'll get up and putter around the fuel dock, keeping up with repairs or transferring oil from one place to another. Fishermen buy fuel from Russell on credit. He is owed $200,000, which forces him to do two things he hates: delay payments to his supplier and cut off trollers that get too far behind on their debts. If they can't buy fuel on credit, their boats will stay tied to the docks. "When we first bought the dock in 1999, we were paying $5,000 for a load of fuel," Russell says. "Now it's $25,000 for the same truckload." The hard part is deciding whose credit to yank and for how long. He knows he could shut down most of the fleet if he didn't keep the accounts open, which ultimately would put so many boats out of business that it would come back to bite him. "I know most of these guys pretty good," he says. "You don't want to shut them off." So Russell looks out the window and waits, hoping things get better. "The wolf at the door" The dock hands have checked all of Jared Reeves' fish and there's only one potential "No. 2," which could mean a lower price because it has some old scars from the teeth of a sea lion. But the wounds have healed and the fish can still sell whole, so Reeves will get the full bartering price for his catch. He's lucky to get $5.75. With the majority of the fleet coming to port at the same time, a once-starved market for wild Oregon Chinook salmon has suddenly been flooded. The week before, trollers were getting $7 and $8 a pound. In a few days, the price could drop to $4 or even $3. Blame the short season for that glut, too. With only four days at a time to fish and only a few trips to make this year, the fleet will be crowding the waters every chance they get, with all the boats leaving and coming back to port at once. You can feel the devastation in the air in Charleston these days, says the port's manager, Don Yost. "Sadness. Fear and sadness. These guys are some of them afraid of the wolf at the door," he says. "It is a quiet disaster. It affects a hundred boat owners here. It's a major hit for us." As for Reeves, he wants to know when he can collect his check from this first trip out. "These guys told me I'd get a check next week," he says to Leonard Van Curler, who runs the Carvalho Fisheries dock and is brokering the sale between Reeves and the skippers of nine other boats, and a bigger buyer. But Van Curler has welcome news: The check should arrive via Fed-Ex by Friday, in time for him to get it in the bank and pay some bills by today, the start of his next trip. Maybe this time he'll turn a profit. |
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