Fish, family, future
Salmon seiner continues family tradition out of Washington’s Gig Harbor
By Lael Henterly
Late in October, the 56-foot purse seiner Memories sails from Gig Harbor, Wash., at 5:30 a.m., heading to an area known as Point Robinson to wait for the 7 a.m. chum salmon opening. Birds swoop, a huge dark cloud pours rain over the nearby Point Defiance, and Vashon Island sleeps under a rolling blanket of fog. The Port of Tacoma twinkles in the distance.
“The most important thing is the dependability of the boat,” says skipper and co-owner Chuck Horjes. “That everything works.”
Most of the purse seiners that call Gig Harbor home head up to Alaska early in the summer, returning to fish the South Sound in the fall. Unfortunately for Horjes and co-owner Mitch Clark, by the time they acquired the Memories, it had a laundry list of repairs, and its coveted Alaska licenses had been sold.
Horjes’ uncle, George Ancich, acquired the Memories in 1960. When he retired, his son, Paul, took over as captain. Horjes and deckboss Clark bought the Memories in 2010 after Paul’s passing.
Without Alaska permits, the Memories was set on fishing an area known as the salmon traps near Washington’s San Juan Islands during the summer. The 2014 forecast was for millions of sockeye to pass in late August on their way home to the Fraser River in British Columbia.
Those predictions ended up being incorrect, with the fish avoiding U.S. waters as a result of what NOAA scientist Nick Bond describes as a blob of warm water, leaving the crew of the Memories with a scant 3,400 pounds of Fraser River sockeye. Midway through those long days of water haul after water haul, Horjes got a call from his sister: Uncle George had died, peacefully in his favorite armchair. Horjes and the crew left the Memories in Friday Harbor, flying home to the harbor for the service then back to set some more.
Horjes sailed back to Gig Harbor early in September plagued with a list of short-term upgrades, the loss of his uncle and the nagging need to lease an Alaska license and head north next summer. With 400,000 chum salmon allotted to each the South Sound and the Hood Canal this fall, Horjes hoped he could bring in enough to motor up the coast to Prince William Sound in 2015.
It’s a worry that echoes through Puget Sound fishing communities every few years: Will there be enough fish to sustain future generations? The area’s first inhabitants — storied native tribes like the Puyallup, Tulalip and Skykomish — were subsistence fishermen. Many of the later settlers who immigrated in the early 20th century from Croatia, Norway and Sweden also plied the waters up and down the coast as their livelihood.
In Gig Harbor, everyone is connected to fishing. They dine on fish for dinner, they talk fish in the evening at the Hy Iu Hee Hee or the Tides Tavern. They live, love and breathe fish. Fishing runs in families here. Most of those families came from Croatia generations ago, settling in this sparkling gem of a harbor where the sky is a different shade every sunset.
At 7:15 a.m. it’s still dark, but we can’t set yet for fear of poisonous, bulbous ratfish tangling up in our net. Horjes says how happy he is with his crew this year. There’s Darren Stutz, who’s run his skiff for 28 years.
“Not hard to find a skiff man. It’s hard to find one that’s good, though,” he says.
Then there’s Clark the deckboss, Clark’s son Kyle and the newest addition… » Read the full article in our MARCH issue.
