Commercial Fishing And The Weirdos That Love It

This will be a retrospective of my time commercial fishing starting with some of the stranger things that I saw at the pier.

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One morning as I was going down to the boat at 2am, I knew that something was up. Ed, the 300lb+ guy that I worked with at the time was acting a little funky. He was walking worse than his normal wobbling motion. I found out later that he had a fight with his wife and decided to take it out on some unsuspecting barstool, partially crushing it in the process.

We tried to get Ed on the boat without killing himself (especially since it was a 10 foot drop) so he could sleep it off on the ride out. Ed wasn't going to let that happen.

Have you ever tried to help someone over 300lbs walk anywhere while they fight you? It isn't easy.

After my captain and I got him safely onto the boat we thought that everything would be all set. Unfortunately, Ed had other ideas. He came charging out to (in his words) "earn his money" by untying the boat. Before we could stop him he had fallen over the side and into the river.

My captain (who shall remain nameless) started to panic. After calming him down, I threw Ed a line to (hopefully) get him back in the boat safely. It was the summer after all and we thought that all he would suffer would be some wet clothes, a bruised ego and a headache once we got to where we were going.

It didn't work out quite that easily.

With Ed being 9 billion pounds, we couldn't hoist him back into the boat all by ourselves. The hardest part was that he was too drunk to swim and/or help us out. He was just floundering around like a stranded manatee with paralysis and a heroin addiction.

Another problem we had to overcome was that the tide runs quite hard in our river. If I'm not mistaken, I believe that it is in the top 10 for tidal flow in the world. With all of that tide and the hippo-sized-object that we were trying to rescue, we couldn't muscle him out of the water.

We decided to then drag him over to one of the ladders that line the pier and hopefully get him out of the water that way. Shortly after telling him to grab ahold of one of the rungs, we saw that those would end up being too hard for him to climb. He couldn't get his arms to move correctly in concert with his feet. He would climb a rung or two, and then fall back into the water. About then, we were starting to get a little worried about him. We didn't want him to drown and none of us were strong enough to haul his ass up the ladder at low tide.

It was around that time that a captain for another boat happened to be walking down the pier and noticed what was going on. He watched bemusedly for a moment and then suggested something that quite possibly saved Ed's life....

"Winch him up at the takeout!" (the takeout is the area where we tie up to unload fish)

I laughed at first but quickly realized that it was so simple that it was brilliant!

With Ed gurgling "No!" we dragged him up the pier with ropes still attached to the takeout area. I then crawled down the ladder to make sure that he didn't drift away while we were hooking him up to the winch. After him throwing a few punches at me, I got him hooked up and yelled to my captain to start winding him up.

After he started getting winched up and cleared the surface of the water, he ended looking just like a drowned rat. He was just kind of hanging there with water pouring off of him for the whole ride up to the pier. The best part was that when he got to the top, two other guys had to pull him in and plop him down on the table that fish usually get sorted out on. Someone made a comment along the lines of "We won't get much money for him. He smells like shit."

You had to be there to appreciate it.



Unfortunately, Ed died a couple of years ago from a freak, and quick, illness. He was a good man who had his faults, as we all do.