As the World Turns: A fish story*

By Ed Rogers

A couple of weeks ago, our colleague Paul Clark (aka motomynd) brought to my attention a news story out of British Columbia about a fisherman being sentenced to a lifetime fishing ban and prohibited from ever being aboard a fishing vessel again (story by David Strege, MSN). Paul asked whether Vancouver Harbour isn’t on the fringe of my old Northwest haunts.
    Indeed it is. The city of Vancouver is right across the border from Washington. My friend Edda’s brother and sister lived there. Fishing and crabbing are highly controlled in both Canada and Washington. A lot of people up there live off the water, and generations of people know no other way of life. New laws come along telling them not to do things that their family has always done, and that leads to problems like the guy in the news story had.
    The Canada fisherman’s case reminded me of Federal Judge George Boldt's 1974 ruling affirming Native American treaty fishing rights, which allocated 50 percent of the annual catch to treaty tribes (under federal treaties signed in 1854 and 1855).
    Judge Boldt issued the ruling, but he didn’t tell the State of Washington how to accomplish the goal of 50% of the catch going to the Native Americans. At best, the State could only guess at the annual catch between the Indians and others.

U.S. District Court Judge
George H. Boldt (1903-1984)

So, someone came up with the idea of removing 50% of the commercial licenses from the fishing fleet, believing that would satisfy the intent of the ruling. Boldt agreed that it would. Subsequently no new licenses had been issued. If you wanted to go fishing, you had to buy one of the old licenses. But there was a problem: a license wasn’t issued to a fisherman but to a boat. Therefore, you had to buy the boat to get the license. This meant further that the State of Washington had to buy fifty percent of the fishing boats in order to get the licenses back.
    But it wasn’t that simple. After all, who would volunteer to give up their livelihood? Though the State offered to buy the boats at almost double their worth, there were no takers. The “answer” was a forced sale. The State drew names and the resulting fifty percent were required to sell their boats to the State or have the State take them by force. The taxpayers weren’t all that happy about their tax money being spent to buy these boats, so the State promised to auction the boats off after the licenses were removed.

The boat involved
in the Dec. 21 Canada ruling

The fishermen whose names had been drawn were not happy either, so they came up with a plan too. They sold their boats to the State all right, but not until they had stripped them of every piece of equipment they could take off. Consequently, some of the boats had no engines, and none of them had navigational or radar equipment. 

    When the boats came up for auction, the only buyers to whom the boats were worth anything were the original owners, who could put the equipment back on them at little cost. In fact, the original owners were the only ones to show up at the auction. They got their boats back at 25 cents on the dollar.
    You may ask, why would they want to buy back boats without a fishing license? That was what I and many other people wondered when we heard what had happened. It took several months before the full story came to light: The fishermen put their boats back together and sailed them to Alaska, where they relicensed them and recommenced fishing.
    In the end, I guess, both the Indians and the fishermen made out okay. How well the salmon made out is another matter.

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* An extravagant or incredible story [Merriam-Webster Dictionary]

Copyright © 2022 by Ed Rogers