Poor Mans Rock | Page 8

her back before Jack MacRae was born. It was a sunken menace at any
stage of water, heartily cursed by the fishermen. In the years between,
the rock had acquired a name not written on the Admiralty charts. The
hydrographers would look puzzled and shake their heads if one asked
where in the Gulf waters lay Poor Man's Rock.
But Poor Man's Rock it is. Greek and Japanese, Spaniard and Italian,
American and Canadian--and there are many of each--who follow the
silver-sided salmon when they run in the Gulf of Georgia, these know
that Poor Man's Rock lies half a cable south southwest of Point Old on
Squitty Island. Most of them know, too, why it is called Poor Man's
Rock.
Under certain conditions of sea and sky the Rock is as lonely and
forbidding a spot as ever a ship's timbers were broken upon. Point Old
thrusts out like the stubby thumb on a clenched first. The Rock and the
outer nib of the Point are haunted by quarreling flocks of gulls and
coots and the black Siwash duck with his stumpy wings and brilliant
yellow bill. The southeaster sends endless battalions of waves rolling
up there when it blows. These rear white heads over the Rock and burst
on the Point with shuddering impact and showers of spray. When the
sky is dull and gray, and the wind whips the stunted trees on the
Point--trees that lean inland with branches all twisted to the landward
side from pressure of many gales in their growing years--and the surf is
booming out its basso harmonies, the Rock is no place for a fisherman.
Even the gulls desert it then.
But in good weather, in the season, the blueback and spring salmon
swim in vast schools across the end of Squitty. They feed upon small

fish, baby herring, tiny darting atoms of finny life that swarm in
countless numbers. What these inch-long fishes feed upon no man
knows, but they begin to show in the Gulf early in spring. The water is
alive with them,--minute, darting streaks of silver. The salmon follow
these schools, pursuing, swallowing, eating to live. Seal and dogfish
follow the salmon. Shark and the giant blackfish follow dogfish and
seal. And man follows them all, pursuing and killing that he himself
may live.
Around Poor Man's Rock the tide sets strongly at certain stages of ebb
and flood. The cliffs north of Point Old and the area immediately
surrounding the Rock are thick strewn with kelp. In these brown
patches of seaweed the tiny fish, the schools of baby herring, take
refuge from their restless enemy, the swift and voracious salmon.
For years Pacific Coast salmon have been taken by net and trap, to the
profit of the salmon packers and the satisfaction of those who cannot
get fish save out of tin cans. The salmon swarmed in millions on their
way to spawn in fresh-water streams. They were plentiful and cheap.
But even before the war came to send the price of linen-mesh net
beyond most fishermen's pocketbooks, men had discovered that salmon
could be taken commercially by trolling lines. The lordly spring, which
attains to seventy pounds, the small, swift blueback, and the fighting
coho could all be lured to a hook on a wobbling bit of silver or brass at
the end of a long line weighted with lead to keep it at a certain depth
behind a moving boat. From a single line over the stern it was but a
logical step to two, four, even six lines spaced on slender poles boomed
out on each side of a power launch,--once the fisherman learned that
with this gear he could take salmon in open water. So trolling was
launched. Odd trollers grew to trolling fleets. A new method became
established in the salmon industry.
But there are places where the salmon run and a gasboat trolling her
battery of lines cannot go without loss of gear. The power boats cannot
troll in shallows. They cannot operate in kelp without fouling. So they
hold to deep open water and leave the kelp and shoals to the rowboats.
And that is how Poor Man's Rock got its name. In the kelp that

surrounded it and the greater beds that fringed Point Old, the small feed
sought refuge from the salmon and the salmon pursued them there
among the weedy granite and the boulders, even into shallows where
their back fins cleft the surface as they dashed after the little herring.
The foul ground and the tidal currents that swept by the Rock held no
danger to the gear of a rowboat troller. He fished a single short line
with a pound or so of lead. He could stop dead in a boat length if his
line fouled.