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62 First Drifts with Margaret AFTER SEVERAL DAYS EXPLORING the fjords across Kachemak Bay, we knew we couldn’t make a living hunting seals. We had to get back to the cannery and get ready for the fishing season. There was a lot to do and a lot to learn, and we needed to buy more provisions on our tab at the company store. We left the harbor at low water and rode the flood to just above Ninilchik before the tide turned and reduced our speed to almost nothing. But it was sunny and flat calm for the whole trip back to Kenai, as though we were on a different body of water. We took hours to gain ground on the Clam Gulch Tower and the Sisters, and even more to round Humpy Point and finally make it into the Kenai. Over the next few days we tried to seal the leaks in the cabin and built a new gas tank from an old fifty-five-gallon oil drum. Then we focused our energy on figuring out the net and imagining how it would work from the boat. The gear that came with Margaret was stored in the web loft above one of the cannery buildings. The loft was a long, dimly lit rectangular space beneath the rafters, lined along each low side with cubicles or lockers that were framed in with two by fours and enclosed by chicken wire. All the boats had gear lockers here and ours contained seven bundles of gear, each tied up in burlap and holding one shackle, a piece of net fifty fathoms long. By tying three shackles together we’d have a legal-sized net measuring a hundred fifty fathoms, or nine hundred feet. We picked what seemed to be the three newest shackles, hoisted them down onto a wooden cart, and hauled them along a boardwalk to a series of net racks at the edge of a grassy tide flat. Even that early in the afternoon, mosquitoes rose from the grass to swarm around the few fishermen who stood working with their nets. At least the mosquitoes were big and slow enough to make easy targets. And they weren’t bad enough to keep us from glancing across the flats to take in the view of Mt. Redoubt on the other side of the Inlet. First Drifts with Margaret 63 Only when we draped the cork line over one rack and the lead line over the other, with the web hanging in between, could we begin to see how it all worked. The cork line was strung with evenly spaced floats, and the lead line had little pieces of lead clamped to it. The web would hang from the cork line and be pulled down into a long wall of net eighteen feet deep. It was a network of countless diamond-shaped meshes each measuring five and an eighth inches when stretched tight, just the right size to slip behind a sockeye’s gills when it tried to swim through. A couple of our old nets were made of linen and the floats were football-shaped pieces of cedar, about six inches long, with a one-half-inch hole drilled through them for the cork line, and they had been dipped in paraffin. The newer gear was made of nylon and the orange-colored floats were made of spongy plastic. It helped to see the gear stretched over the net racks, but how in hell were you supposed to work with it from the boat? We checked out some of the other conversions that had already loaded their gear, and the nets sat piled in the stern compartments like little stacks of hay. How could they keep a net from being just a tangled mess? For now, though, the main problem was to repair all the tears and holes we could see. Other fishermen worked at lightning speed, using wooden needles to mend their gear, and we knew at once that we’d never learn to do that in just a few weeks. We talked with Tut, the cannery’s web boss, and arranged for a cannery worker to mend our net and bill it to our account at the company store. Tut, whose real name was Trygve Ellingsen, was in his early seventies, and we were fortunate that he liked us well enough to take us under his wing. He loved kidding us about being school teachers, and showing us...

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