In the heart of summer, before bureaucrats cast their nets of restriction, my world was once measured in tides and silver-bodied salmon. I was a fisherman’s daughter, raised on the deck of a 47-foot packing vessel, cradled by the Pacific and bound to the rhythms of the sea. My youth was spent chasing the salmon runs along the British Columbian coast, from Bella Bella to the Skeena River, and westward to the rain-drenched archipelago of Haida Gwaii.
When we weren’t on the water, home was a small Finnish settlement on Malcolm Island, which sits plumb in the middle of Johnstone Strait off the northeast coast of Vancouver Island. Translated as “Place of Harmony,” the village of Sointula echoes the dreams of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordic utopians who founded it in 1901. Sointula has evolved in the hundred-plus years since its inception, but still, to live there is to live a life bound by close-knit connections and shaped by the sea.
In my early childhood when the salmon fishery was booming, the town’s population bustled at just over one thousand inhabitants (double what it is today), and we celebrated the bounty of our ocean living with gatherings like the Salmon Days Parade. This mid-summer festival culminated in a community-wide seafood feast; provisions were shared freely and everyone was welcome. Throughout the day, adults gathered around fire pits and barbeques with home-brewed beverages in hand, pony clubbers raced around jump courses to the cheers of spectators, teenagers hurled softballs at the dunk tank in hopes of dousing their favourite (or least favourite) teachers, and the youngest spent hours playing on makeshift slip ‘n’ slides comprised of a couple of tarps and a whole lot of water, dish soap, and half-dissolved face paint.
As I approached my pre-teens, I was forced to bid these summer festivities farewell and join the ranks on my family’s fishing boat. To me, it felt like conscription. While other children my age tackled breezy summer chores like fence painting and lawn mowing, I was out at sea working relentless hours of hard labour – my parents running shotgun and offering no quarter to their only child who was expected to pull the weight of a full crew member on half the earnings.
Our job as salmon packers was to run stock for the fleet. We met gillnetters and trollers out on the fishing grounds and offloaded their hard-earned catch so they could stay on the bite and maximize their quotas before the end of each opening: a frenzied period lasting, on average, anywhere from twelve to seventy-two hours. The work was grueling—hand-bombing thousands of eight to fourteen-pound fish from ten to twenty-foot ice holds and then sorting each one by quality and species.
Fishermen, arriving in a steady stream, would tie up alongside us, their sleep-deprivation masked by adrenaline and dried salt. As we rocked in the swell and grappled with slick, scale-laden footing, we moved in a synchronized rhythm—tossing, grading, weighing, and tallying. Boat after boat, our hold would fill until our vessel sat heavy in the water, decks awash and the air thick with the metallic scent of salmon—“the smell of money,” the old-timers would say. Then came the race to the processing plant and the rush to offload, clean, re-ice, and head back out to the fleet, the cycle repeating. It was grueling work, and yet, even amidst my youthful protests, I suspected this life was rare, special, and perhaps, fleeting.
Between openings, while the fleet anxiously awaited the next whistle blow, we’d revel in our surroundings. I recall one night; we were on a run northward past Butedale in the Princess Royal Channel. The water was impossibly still, a sheet of obsidian reflecting only the green and red of our running lights. My mother woke me at 3:30 AM from a near-comatose state and pulled me up to the bow. “Watch!” she exclaimed over the rumble of the engine. Out of the darkness came a superpod of Pacific white-sided dolphins, racing alongside us, their sleek bodies igniting bioluminescence in wild arcs of icy blue-green glitter. They twisted and leapt, their forms refracted into constellations of light below the surface and synchronized shooting stars as they breached the air. For what felt like hours, they carried us through the darkness. Then as dawn pierced the sky above Great Bear Rainforest, they turned west past Gil Island and disappeared onward to the open Pacific. This experience, and countless others like it, remain irrevocably etched in my mind and soul.
In those days, the salmon industry felt as vast and eternal as the ocean itself. But nothing, as they say, lasts forever and by the late 1990s we saw the first signs of the impending closures. It started with a trickle of restrictions—small limitations on opening durations and quotas. Then the number of openings across the season was reduced, first sporadically and then in succession. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) declared it necessary. Stocks were collapsing, they said. We had taken too much and aggressive countermeasures were needed.
For the families of small fishing towns, the future abruptly turned bleak. Generations of men and women who had built their lives on these waters suddenly found themselves with nothing— many with no fallback plans, no education, no alternative career paths, no way to provide. I watched proud, capable people drift into despair. Alcohol, opioids, depression, suicide—crippling loss became the undercurrent of our coastal communities. Sointula families began to uproot, forced—like so many—to abandon their hometown in search of opportunities elsewhere.
On the political plane, tensions ran high. Indigenous communities, whose ancestral rights permitted them to continue fishing while commercial fishermen sat idly by, became the unwitting target of the sector’s fear and anger. Instead of turning to traditional methods of casting hand lines or small nets from cedar canoes (a misplaced expectation borne from a colonial mindset), most continued harvesting from the same type of commercial vessels as those owned by non-indigenous fishermen, whose boats remained grounded by the government.
It was a time of turmoil that divided towns, families, and cultures, pitting struggling fishermen against one another. And out of these stormy waters the fish farms rose—not new, but suddenly swelling in number, a rapidly expanding industry poised to replace what was becoming lost.
In my family’s final years on the water, I recall an endemic of farmed salmon escaping from their pens. Atlantic salmon—foreign to our Pacific West Coast waters—were being intercepted by the hundreds. Theirs was an unnatural conception. Hatched in tanks and deprived of a river origin, they had no anadromous instinct to guide them. They awkwardly intermingled with wild stocks, their systems almost instantly failing with the absence of their captive, processed food source. Fishermen would haul them in with their wild catch and they’d be riddled with sea lice, their flesh turning soft and their scales falling away. DFO began commissioning marine biologists as observers. Boarding our vessels, these observers would track escaped farm stock in an effort to gauge the environmental impact; an attempt to ascertain that which would not become fully evident for years.
The weight of this transformation—on the water, in the communities, and in the hearts of those of us rooted in this livelihood—was undeniable. In my youthful ignorance, I could not fully comprehend the wider devastation that was unfolding in real time. Still, as post-secondary pursuits called me away from the family business and from Sointula, I understood that I wasn’t just saying goodbye to my small town, but to a way of life that would never again be the same.
Today, the fishery moves in waves of moderate plenty and scarcity, bound to the relative success or failure of the salmons’ spawning cycles, which are marred by increasing environmental stressors. While the most optimistic of salmon fishermen will tell you the fishery is once again on the rise, retired generations still recall the bounty of decades past and view the current industry as a ghost of its former self.
Many of the men and women who once made their living on the water have long since left it, the savviest of them converting coastal homes and commercial vessels into Airbnbs and charter boats in response to a growing tourism trade. The fish farms remain, though not unchallenged. By 2029, they, too, will be banned if federal government policy stands and their open-net pens are ordered to close. And so, a new battle begins: conservationists celebrate a tentative win, fishermen doggedly hold out hope for a resurgence of their open water livelihood, and fish farmers—who themselves have built lives around an industry once promised as the future—fear what comes next.
I find myself torn. I mourn what we lost. I understand, now, as many do in hindsight, that we took too much, that early warnings were ignored, and that proactive conservation efforts may have come too late. I see the appeal of aquaculture—particularly under Indigenous stewardship—as a controlled and sustainable solution, but I also know that the industry is far from harmless. The farms may provide jobs and produce enough to meet a growing global demand, but they also have a history of breeding disease, devastating surrounding marine ecosystems, and threatening what wild stocks remain—there is still work to be done.
So where does that leave us? Between the past and the future; between one declining livelihood and its unsteady replacement? I think back to those dolphins, their phosphorescent ballet beneath the wooden-hulled hum of our boat. The ocean, in all its brilliance, endures. And yet, I wonder: when we take and take, when we twist nature into something to be commoditized, something profitable—what value is left behind?