by Glen “Alex” Alexander
Did I ever tell you about the night the Nancy J almost sank?
When I was young I did a little gillnetting. It’s a way to catch salmon that’s kind of interesting because it’s done at night. You have this huge net about a quarter of a mile long and 60 feet deep rolled up on a drum on the back of a small boat. You throw a buoy in the water attached to one end of the net then slowly motor forward as the net pays out the back. The cork line floats on the surface and the lead line pulls the net down like a curtain in the water. You wait for a few hours and if salmon swim into it, the mesh is just the right size to let their head through but they get caught by their gills. That’s why you do it at night, so they can’t see the net.
Thom McLaughlin owned the Nancy J, an old wooden hull with rust and pealing paint. It was originally a Bristol Bay monkey boat, used to tow sailboats to the fishing grounds in Bristol Bay in the years when it was illegal to use powerboats to fish in that area. In the cabin was this huge J Series 6 cylinder Cummins diesel engine that filled the space like an old dragon that had slept too long in its lair and could no longer fit through the door. When you went down the ladder into the cabin there were benches on the sides and an overwhelming smell of diesel. If you wanted to sit or lay down to rest on the benches, you could just barely squeeze past the cast iron bulk of the engine. You didn’t want to be down there if the engine was running; you couldn’t hear yourself think over the roar of the dragon.
Thom and I were fishing the fall season out of Point Roberts. The border between the U.S. and Canada runs west across the North American Continent and hits saltwater in Blaine, Washington. It runs out across Boundary Bay then cuts across the tip of Point Roberts before passing out into the middle of the Strait of Georgia. Then the border cuts back to the southeast to get around Vancouver Island making a sharp narrow point of U.S. territory in salmon rich waters called “The Point.” It also means that Point Roberts is an interesting piece of U.S. territory only accessible through Canada or by boat from the mainland. Thom kept his boat at Point Roberts and he and I fished The Point that fall.
One of the tricks of fishing in The Point was that if the tide carried you over the border while your net was in the water, you could be arrested for fishing in Canadian waters. The other trick was that the Tsawwassen Ferry, connecting Vancouver B.C. to Victoria, the provincial capital, passed right through the area so there were frequent big ships passing in the night. This could be a problem for a little boat with a quarter-mile of net attached to it.
On this particular night, we arrived at The Point and then waited as the sun went down to see where the ferries were passing, and stay out of their way. We saw a few other gillnetters scattered across the water. After a while we saw a ferry pass a ways to the north. We figured we were out of their way and so we set our net, not too close to the other boats. We shut off the engine and sat to wait. The sky and the water turned black as the night came on and each little gillnetter had a single light like a distant star bobbing on the waves.
Soon a ferry passed by just to the south of us. That’s when we realized we were right in the middle of the ferry lanes! We decided to let her sit and see what would happen. We didn’t want to pick up the net too soon.
After a while, Thom and I were curious about whether we were catching any fish. We decided to “shine the net.” We just let go of the net and left it adrift as Thom steered the Nancy J along the cork line and I shined a bright light down into the water. The light penetrated a few feet down on the net. We couldn’t see most of the it but in the top few feet we saw a few salmon. When we got to the other end of the net, we turned around and Thom asked if I wanted to pilot back to where we could reattach to the net and start to pick it up. As I was steering across the black Strait of Georgia, Thom ducked down into the cabin for something.
In a flash he popped back up and with wild eyes said, “We’re taking on water.”
“How bad is it?” I asked.
“She’s going down!”
I leaned over and looked through a porthole and sure enough, that big old dragon was chugging away surrounded by a stew of filthy water with all kinds of trash floating in it. Styrofoam, wood, paper and plastic were bobbing where the floorboards used to be.
Thom decided we’d better call mayday. The problem was, the radio was down in the cabin with the roaring dragon. We’d have to shut off the engine to use the radio. But with the engine shut off, the main bilge pump would stop. The dragon roared, “Don’t shut me down! I’m all we’ve got to keep us afloat.”
There was no way around it, we had to do it. I shut off the engine and in the quiet of the night I heard Thom’s voice below, “Mayday! Mayday! This is the Nancy J!” Immediately, I heard the response, “This is the Vancouver Coast Guard Hovercraft Station. What is your location?” Thom told them we were in The Point maybe three miles west of Point Roberts Marina. He told them we would stand by and turn on all our lights so they could tell us apart from the all other gillnetters. They said they were on their way.
Thom decided to abandon the net and motor over to the nearest gillnetter. When we got there we saw him picking up his net. We told him our situation but he said he couldn’t help. The tide was carrying him closer to the international border and he’d be liable if he drifted over the line. We headed for the next boat. It turned out to be one of Thom’s friends.
We grabbed everything of value and passed it over to the friend’s boat. We ripped the compass and all the electronic navigating equipment off the dash and passed it over. We pulled out the drawers and emptied all the cabinets. Thom told his friend that if he picked up our net he could have all the fish in it. Then he laid two survival suits out on the deck and told me that if we ended up in the water without those suits the cold would kill us in about twenty minutes. “Be ready to put one on.”
The Nancy J was stripped clean but her nose was dragging pretty low in the water. We only had about a foot of freeboard before the sea would come flooding in over the gunnels. From across the Strait we could see a Coast Guard hovercraft coming right for us.
Finally we had some time to think.
Thom was wondering where the leak was. He explained that the Nancy J had a “beaver tail,” a piece of steel attached to the hull under the prop to keep the net from getting fouled. He thought maybe the struts holding the beaver tail had weakened the old wooden planks. He threw off the hatch in the stern and sure enough, that’s right where the water was pouring in. He also thought, “We got all the valuables off this old tub. And it’s insured.” Pretty soon I saw Thom back there stomping as hard as he could to bust out the old planks.
The dragon screamed and thrashed in the saltwater rising up its sides. The cabin was so full of water that the flywheel of the engine was throwing water all over the cabin and up onto the hot engine block. Steam filled the cabin and gushed out of all the open doors and hatches, illuminated by all the bright lights we had on to attract the Coast Guard.
A Coast Guard hovercraft goes about forty knots. With a huge aircraft engine, it flies about six feet over the water, suspended on a cushion of air. As it approached, it lowered down on the water and slowly drew up along side of us. Because it had no bow and the front sloped up at a sharp angle, it didn’t look like a boat. Then, with a whirring hum, it opened like the space ship on The Day the Earth Stood Still. Silent men in strange suits carrying unidentifiable equipment leaped out and took control.
They threw a hose down into the cabin of the Nancy J and set up a pump on the deck. But trying to start that pump was like trying to start an old chain saw on a cold day in Maine. They pulled and pulled, “BRUMP . . . BRUMP . . .BRUMP . . .” Finally it started with a roar. But it wouldn’t take a prime! They were pulling up buckets of seawater from over the side and spilling it all over that pump but it wouldn’t suck any water out of the Nancy J. By this time the waves were starting to splash up over the deck.
Suddenly the pump started sucking water from out of the hold and throwing it like a fire hose into the black night. In a flash the Nancy J was sucked out and bobbed up like cork. The Coast Guard guys started talking to Thom about how to plug the hole. They asked if Thom had a tarp or a blanket that they could drag down over the hull to cover the leak from the outside. Thom said he had an old sleeping bag. He warned them that the leak was right down by the prop. If they tried to pull anything over that leak, as soon as we started the engine it would foul up the prop and we’d be dead in the water.
Without paying any attention to Thom’s advice the Coast Guard started working on their idea. They tied four ropes onto the corners of the old sleeping bag and lowered it down over the bow. Then walking the ropes – two down each side of the Nancy J – they worked that sleeping bag under the boat along the keel and toward the stern. After a little struggle they got it over the hole. The water pressure held it tight and the water stopped pouring in. The Coast Guard started packing up their gear and told us to head for the Point Roberts Marina.
But Thom was right and as soon as we started her up, the prop fouled up on the sleeping bag. Now we had to be towed by the hovercraft. By regulation, a boat under tow by a Coast Guard vessel could only have one civilian on it, so I’d have ride in the hovercraft. Somebody gave me headphones and told me to take the copilot’s seat. While I rode in style, Thom got to hear about the events of night before, drinking, from a hungover twenty-year-old Canadian Coast Guard kid obviously suffering from the diesel fumes. One can only guess his thought of going from the hovercraft to the bowels of the Nancy J.
We started off slowly across the black water. I listened to the chatter of the crew in the headphones aboard the hover craft. I remember the navigator sat somewhere in the dark behind me. He wasn’t facing the front and didn’t even have a window. He was just watching the screens of his instruments. At one point I heard him say, “Better veer off a bit, there’s a big log up ahead. No, wait, it’s just some seagulls.”
After a while we pulled into the Point Roberts Marina and said goodbye to the Coast Guard. The Nancy J was lifted up out of the water. She looked like she was wearing a diaper. Thom and I got in his truck and headed for Bellingham for tools to make the repair.
The sun was starting to come up as we went through Canadian Customs, across the north end of Boundary Bay and back through U.S. Customs. We grabbed what we needed, then crossed the border twice more to get back to the marina. By the time we had the boat patched, the sun was setting and the other gillnet boats were heading out on the water to start fishing again. But we hadn’t slept for two days, so we went back into Canada and grabbed a pizza.
When everybody else was out fishing we laid down on the benches in the Nancy J on either side of the sleeping dragon. I could hear the water gently slapping against the other side of the planks next to my ear.
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About the Author
Glen “Alex” Alexander grew up on the shore of Lake Michigan and moved to Bellingham in 1972 for a job in a six-month internship in a private school. He stayed in that position for 6 years. Then he was a canoe guide in the Boundary Waters, carpenter, lab technician, student, performer and gillnetter before landing his dream job, EducationCoordinator at Padilla Bay Reserve, in Skagit County.
