“Rock and roll is a bit like fishing... many do it for the big bite.. The thrill’s just around the corner.”

Super Robertson.


And sometimes a bite comes, and you complain it’s the wrong kind of bite.

As a kid I did a fair amount of fishing at Gabriola Island, most of it with my dad. My dad has notoriously bad luck at fishing. My older brother, who is a passionate and efficient fisherman, often teases my dad about things, but even he finds my dad’s fishing ability too gravely inept to ridicule. The two of us spent many hours in a small cartop boat, trolling back and forth along the north end of the island, waiting in vain for the big bite.

Actually, there were a lot of big bites, just no big catches. There were also a lot of big snags and big tangles.

It’s not that there were no fish. Others seemed to catch fish. I could catch them myself off Gabriola’s famous Malaspina Point. Mostly rock cod, but also ling cod and the occasional perch. The seemingly hopeless kid next door got a sole one time. I seem to recall that even Larry ‘Have You Ever Thought of Fixing This Place Up?’ Wong caught something with his sponge. The guy had a dried sponge with fishing line wrapped around it. He stuck the hook into the sponge when he was finished. He brought it everywhere.

But my dad didn’t want cod. He wanted a salmon. Plentiful enough in British Columbia, but as elusive as a snow leapard as far as my dad was concerned.

He went to great lengths to fish. The beaches of Gabriola strech out magificently, especially off the north-west length of the island. Gabriola is the northernmost of the Southern Gulf Islands, and when the high pressure systems come in, they drive clockwise, in a south-westerly direction, kicking up winds and big waves that have been driving into the sandstone shore for thousands of years.

The result is a stretching, wave-etched beach of curving, rocky, mini-mountains, scattered boulders and little tidepool lakes. Very scenic, but an obstacle when it comes to getting a boat from the cabin to the water. My dad’s solution was to build a boat rickshaw. He was a plumber, and put it together out of pipe. It had two bicycle tires, which, because of their size and bounciness, enabled him to steer the thing over the rough beach terrain. It worked well. If he had fastened it to a bike he could have made a living hauling freight on the streets of Calcutta.

We would usually go out in the late afternoon, and stay out until dusk. This is when the tide was coming in, and the fish would come in with it.

We would start by trolling for our prey. After a few hours of nothingness, my dad would switch to the fishing equivalent of nuclear weapons; the downrigger. The downrigger is a small winch. It is fastened to the side of the boat, and has an expanse of heavy cable with a weight the size of a small cannonball at the end. You take your fishing line, and attach it to the weight. The weight takes the line right down to the bottom, or close to it.

My brother, when told of our downrigger use, would hiss contempt. The very use of the downrigger was an admission of defeat. 'You can’t catch a salmon, so you’re going for a rock cod,' which, of course, we could’ve gotten in about a fifth of the time just by standing on the end of Malaspina Point.

We did get one or two cod this way. My dad would serve them to me for breakfast, delusionally referring to the reeking dish as a ‘treat.’

“This is what they eat in Scotland,” he would say, providing an inadvertent explanation for over a century of Hebridean emigration.

The other thing we also managed to catch--in addition to the ever-accomodating rock cod--was dogfish. For some reason, the dogfish is the pariah of the sea. I often wondered why we couldn’t just eat one; could it be any worse than cod for breakfast?

Dogfish are little sharks. They’re as big as a good-sized salmon, so when one bites you really think you might have something. There were many times when a dogfish would start tugging the line, and the exhilaration of a real strike would flare in our little boat.

My dad would ferociously haul the line in, I would get the net ready, then the sleek, rubbery form of the dogfish would emerge in the waves.

My dad is a fairly bouyant person. When he gets frustrated, however, his voice takes on a theatrical mix of rage and agony, similar to Charlton Heston’s in the final scene of Planet of the Apes.

“Awwwwwww Christ,” he would say, using about five different inflections of tone for the word “awwwwwww.”

He would haul in the dogfish. The hook, a strangely blunt object when it came to fastening on to the mouths of salmon, was always well embedded in the dogfish. My dad would reach for an old machete that he would bring with him.

Whack. Whack. Whack.

WHACK.

WHACK.

WhackwhackwhackwhackwhackwhackwhACKWHACKWHACKWHACK...

WHACK....WHACK.................WHACK.

Having finally gotten the hook out, he would then humanely release the fish back into the sea.

“Go on, ya bugger, get outta here!” he would yell after it as it lamely swam off.

When I was eleven, my dad, mom and I went to visit my oldest sister in New Zealand. We were eating one time, having fish. It tasted, well, like fish, acceptable as fish goes.

“This is lemon fish,” said my brother in law.

“I’ve noticed it in the shops,” said my dad. “What is lemon fish, anyway?”

“Well,” said my brother in law, “it’s actually dogfish. They just call it ‘lemon fish’ here because they figure people will be more likely to eat it with a different name.”