The Halibut Man

Read the first blog posting here, the second here and the third here.

GBR RAVE blog #4 - Sept. 8, 2010

“Feel the line,” said Wally, “I think we’ve got one.”  The line was taut and a bit jumpy.  But Wally Bolton kept telling us not to get excited.  Just the day before he’d been skunked – came home with nothing.  And it could be anything on the line.  We were hoping for halibut but he also catches red snapper, black cod (sablefish) and even octopus that are as long as he is tall.  All of it gets eaten.

Slow and steady he was pulling in the line that he’d set that morning.  We were bobbing around in a small skiff less than half a kilometre off shore, where the bottom of the ocean is over 1000 feet deep.  That’s where the halibut are, so that’s where Wally had placed his line.  Throughout the day the line sits on the bottom of the ocean, with bait hooks at regular intervals.   Hauling it up takes Wally almost 2 hours each afternoon; he pulls it in by hand, taking off the bait hooks and carefully coiling the rope in a big blue barrel.  I sat there in the rain, peering over the side watching the line coming up out of the deep and hoping for a big one.

Photo: Caitlyn Vernon

Wally talked while he pulled.  He doesn’t mince words when it comes to the possibility of tankers coming through these waters.  “I wouldn’t be doing this here should anything happen,” he said, “it would be a big disaster if ships hit shore.”  The halibut that Wally catch provide winter food for his family.  “If there is a big accident,” he asked, “where are we going to go, and where would we get food?”  “Would Enbridge relocate us somewhere else and feed us baloney?”  (He means baloney in the literal sense, the edible kind.)  “We would have to buy fish from the store,” he said, “but that would be farmed fish.”

It’s clear that Wally loves what he does.  I know this because he says so, with his arms stretched wide and a big smile on his face.  He fishes for halibut between April and September, when they come closer to shore.  It turns out that halibut follow the salmon, just like the bears and the wolves and the eagles and so much else at this edge between rainforest and ocean.  The halibut come to eat the dead salmon that drift down from the rivers after spawning.

Photo: Caitlyn Vernon

Finally there is something really heavy coming up on the line.  Watching over the side I can see it looks green, and so we know it’s a halibut.  Halibut have evolved to be bottom feeders; with a white underbelly, green back, and both eyes on the top side.  Wally gets a big smile on his face.  He says he doesn’t worry if there are days when he doesn’t catch any.  He knows they are out there and he’ll find them the next day.  But he wanted to catch one for us, and so he sits back with a big smile after hauling a 50 lb halibut over the side of the boat.

Just a couple days before he’d been out with one of the RAVE photographers, Thomas Peschak.  Thomas is the Chief Photographer of the Save our Seas Foundation and specializes in photos of underwater marine life.  He spent two hours in the water, taking pictures with his underwater camera equipment as Wally pulled in his line.  When Thomas saw a halibut coming up on the line, he went down deeper and snapped photos from below, looking up at the fish and at Wally peering over the edge of his boat.   “All you could hear was click click click,” said Wally with a laugh, about all the pictures being taken.  These photos will help tell a story – of the rich marine ecosystem, of the community that gets their food out of the ocean, of the art and skill and patience and strength required to catch halibut, of all that would be lost with an oil spill, and of how much Wally the halibut man loves doing what he does.

Read the fifth blog posting here.

Photo: Todd McGowan