Trolling

Trolling means you are fishing with a hook, bait or lure on a string being pulled behind the boat. According to the Rules of the Road (collision avoidance regulations) a vessel is considered to be “engaged in fishing” when they are using nets, lines or trawls that restricts the vessel from maneuvering as required by the Rules; but does not include a vessel fishing with trolling lines. So, according to the Rules, trolling is what you do when you are NOT fishing.

I spent my teenage years working on my father’s commercial salmon troller; a 42 foot wood boat built in the late 1940’s for crab fishing off the Oregon coast. My dad purchased the boat in 1965 for $12,500 with a federal fisheries loan and paid the loan off with fishing dollars in a few years. The name of the boat was the “Polaris”.

Salmon trolling on the Polaris was great fun for the two of us. I would get out of school a couple of weeks early and start school a couple of weeks late. We would begin fishing for king salmon out of Cresent City in late May. By the middle of June we would be fishing for silver salmon out of Brookings and by early July we would be in Coos Bay. From mid-July through late August we would fish tuna from Coos Bay north to Columbia River. Then it was back to salmon fishing as we fished our way south back to Coos Bay.

The fall of 1971, my senior year of high school, I didn’t start school until early October. In September we were fishing on a school of chinook salmon that were just outside the Coos River entrance. The fish were in 10 fathoms from the entrance south to Simpsons Reef. We were only catching about 25 fish a day, but they were averaging 40 pounds each and that fall the price was a dollar a pound for  large king salmon. We fished 20 days that month and made a quick $20,000. What a great cap for what had already been a good season.

Tuna fishing was always fun too. The Polaris would pack about five to six ton of tuna in the fish hold. We would generally fish tuna from mid-July through late August. In an average day we would catch around 250 tuna. When a fish was landed we would leave it on deck until it had finished kicking and had finished bleeding. Then I would throw them into the fish hold to cool before packing them in ice in one of the sections of the hold called “bins”. I remember one evening I went down into the fish hold to ice about fifty tuna. We had already had a good day and I could hear more fishing slapping the deck as my dad landed them. It took me about a half-hour to ice down the fish and when I climbed out of the hold the boat was in a circle, the deck was loaded with tuna and my dad was all grins as he was pulling fish as fast as he could. That was our best day tuna fishing ever; the total count exceeded 400 fish.

During the winter we would fish for crab out of Coos Bay. The season opened in December and continued through August, but we would only fish December and January. By February we would be hauling the gear in. Since most of the crab was caught in the first few weeks of December I missed a lot of school that month too. Come to think of it, I really didn’t go to school much. My dad figured it was more important that I learn the value of hard work. Just the same, I did make it to graduation; but as soon as the graduation ceremony was over I was on the boat with my dad heading for Crescent City. That summer was one of the best ever and in the fall I purchased a 60 foot fishing boat in Texas. My dad and I sailed it through the Panama Canal and I fished that boat, the “Rhoda Alice” off the Oregon and Washington coasts through 1979.

My fishing career was made trawl fishing, but it was founded trolling on the Polaris. For me trolling was fishing, even though it is not fishing under the Rules of the Road.