Fishing with Granny

By George Pitcher

I got to know Granny the best by spending parts of nine summers fishing with Granny and Grandad on the Julie Ann. I wasn’t always happy to be spending my teenage summers that way, but Granny sure made things a lot more tolerable out on the boat.

Granny never took a summer off. She was there every year I came. She had many roles on the boat, including: Cook, Legal Compliance Officer, and Protector of the Crew. I want to talk about a few of them.

Granny was the cook—and a good one. Things started with breakfast—she often gave you a choice that included biscuits, pancakes, sausage, French toast, and homemade hash browns. I had the chance to bring my family up and spend some time on the boat with Granny and Grandad a few years ago. Now every time I make French toast at home, my daughter Kate complains that it’s not as good as Granny’s.

There was no such thing as a cold lunch on the boat—it was always a big, hot meal, similar to dinner. Dinners included a lot of fish—baked king salmon, salmon patties, baked and fried halibut and ling cod, and smoked salmon dip. Other favorites on the boat included shake and bake chicken, turkey hindquarters, venison steaks, and lots of mashed potatoes. The only low point in Granny’s cooking came on the occasional rough day when she didn’t want to boil and make real mashed potatoes. Then she got out a boxed product called Potato Buds. The crew referred to them as “potato duds” because they just weren’t up to Granny’s normal cooking standards.

We didn’t use this title at the time, but Granny acted as the boat’s legal compliance officer. Granny wasn’t one to just follow the spirit of the law—she also followed the letter of the law. Granny was very concerned with making sure that all fish on the boat were legal in regard to both size limit and species. There were occasional times on the boat when a crew member might make a mistake a land a king salmon that wasn’t quite long enough. Most people on the boat thought mistakes should be eaten. But you could tell that Granny wasn’t comfortable with such mistakes lying around on the deck.

More than a few sea lions got to live out their normal life spans in the ocean due to Granny’s restraint of Grandad

Granny was also concerned about safety—you knew that Granny’s first priority was getting the crew home safely. From the EPIRB to the life raft to survival suits, Granny made sure the boat’s safety equipment was in order.

Granny took quality control very seriously. If you ever ate a salmon caught by the Julie Ann, you knew that it had been cleaned quickly and put in the slush tank shortly after it was caught. You can also be assured that it came out of the cleanest, best scrubbed slush tank in the trolling fleet. Of all the unpleasant jobs on the boat, getting inside of and scrubbing out the slush tank was at the bottom. And Granny was usually in there with you.

Granny’s role as protector of the crew was particularly important. Anyone who knows Grandad very well or ever fished with him knows that he’s a single-mindedly dedicated fisherman. His fishing philosophy was to spend as many hours as humanly possible dragging his trolling gear through the water trying to catch fish. He didn’t like to run around the ocean looking for fish—he knew they were right there outside of Pedro, and if you dragged your hooks through the water for 18 hours a day, all day every day, you would catch your share and make a living.

With that background, Granny was the only person on the boat who could:

1) tell Grandad it was time to stop fishing and go to harbor;

2) tell Grandad that the crew needed to sleep longer in the morning—which still seems to bother Grandad to this day; or

3) tell Grandad that it was too rough to fish and we needed to go to harbor or head for inside waters.

Granny was always the one to announce on a busy day that it was time to come in and eat breakfast, or it was time to come take a break. Then she would go out on deck herself and start pulling lines or cleaning fish while the crew had their breaks.

Finally, Granny was the faithful keeper and upholder, along with Grandad, of her beliefs and values. She expressed this more through actions than through words. The values I saw Granny demonstrate were:

1) Hard work—Granny was always up early to help Grandad put the gear out.

2) Service to others—Granny demonstrated this every day through things such as laundry, dishes, and scrubbing. She spent a lot of time in the laundry mat in Craig.

3) Fair play—Granny was intent on following the rules and not cutting in line in the trolling drags.

4) Mix of generosity and thrift—Granny didn’t like to waste things. You sensed that she had lived through leaner, harder times, and that she had an appreciation for the physical comforts and blessings in her life. But she wasn’t stingy—particularly when it came to things like paying the crew. She took a genuine enjoyment in paying her crew a wage that was more than fair.

5) Faithful—There was not a dinner eaten that didn’t start with a prayer, and every Sunday evening we would quit fishing early to have our little church service on the boat.

6) Taking good care of Grandad—Granny was always offering Grandad a cup of tea and making him take his afternoon nap.

There was a lot to be learned from spending summers with Granny. A woman who led by example through service to others.