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The People

Voices of Salmon Nation

Scott Boley

Fisherman SCOTT BOLEY talks about his experiences up and down the coast, about running the Gold Beach fish market, and about celebrating and preserving the unique fishing culture of Salmon Nation. We mourn his passing in the spring of 2007.

When we first started fishing, the fleet was a lot bigger. You had young people like us who were just getting started. There were more boats, and there was a broader diversity. There were small boats and big boats of different kinds. It seemed like you had a good mix of people. You don't have many young people getting into the business now.

We haven't really done a good job of integrating our fishing into the rest of our communities. As the fishing fleets get smaller and smaller, we don't have any organized way to teach people coming into the business about things like sustainability, safety, and craftsmanship, and we also don't educate our communities very well. And as fewer and fewer people are tied to the industry and as the number of fishing boats has decreased, we've lost a lot of our support industries like boat-repair yards and fishing-tackle stores.

But people come to the coast just to look at boats and eat fish and be around the ocean — it's an ambiance that attracts people to the coast. What we need are more celebrations, we need events that help people appreciate what they have access to, and then they'll pay more for the product. We ought to be celebrating the guys who go out and don't take a bunch of risks. I've buried too many of my friends over the years.

On the one hand we have to understand that to attract young people to fishing they have to make enough money to survive. But on the other hand we have to have positive experiences for people that aren't monetary based. We have to place a value on things besides money. It's about recognizing and celebrating the diversity of life, and it's also about recognizing that fishermen are going to have to adapt — we have in the past and we're pretty darn good at it. If you adapt around a core of good principles that's fine, but when you adapt only around market pressures and short-term financial incentives, that's when you get into trouble.

My vision is to celebrate fishing and strengthen the value system around fishing by making it a more visible part of each community. It's about taking the stuff that we do all the time and making a little event out of it, like teaching people how to fix a crab pot, for example, or having an annual crab feed. It's about preserving this tremendously rich cultural heritage held by a lot of old-timers by collecting their stories and putting these things down on paper.

The people who move into these communities are hungry for those kinds of experiences just like they're hungry for the seafood. I want to see people coming together to tell these stories, generating publicity when the salmon season starts, and celebrating the fish we catch at a community event. I also want to see fisherman telling our own stories and sharing our own perspectives.

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I grew up in Klamath Falls and trout fished all the time, and I've always been fascinated by the ocean. I received a master's degree in ocean engineering from Oregon State and then stayed on as a research engineer. After a couple of years we moved to Gold Beach, actually because we liked it, where my wife got a job as a teacher, and I started my own consulting firm. I was doing research at OSU in the ocean engineering program for the US Army Corps of Engineers and I met this guy Howard a master seaman, licensed in all oceans. Well, Howard told me about a boat for sale, a good boat, and talked me into buying it.

He said salmon fishermen are making a lot of money so I went to the library and checked it out. It was true, fisherman were making a lot of money in the mid-70s. Thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars a year just working the summers, then you could ski all winter. That sounded good to me. I did my research and thought, well, I could do this. Then I went fishing and liked it, got hooked on it, so I'm still fishing, still enjoy it.

The thing that really appealed to me was that you got paid by how hard you worked and how good you were. It didn't matter how educated you were or how many degrees you had, it all came down to true work ethic. If you were smart enough to stay out there, remain alive, and find a fish, you got paid for it.

At the time, we were all fishing for Coho. There was a real big export market to France. I think we got $2.25 a pound in 1976. In 1976 dollars, that was a lot, comparable to the top prices paid today.

I bought the boat, the Frances, at Christmastime in 1975. It was $32,000 — a lot of money in 1976. I bought it from a fisherman in Gig Harbor, and Howard helped me bring the boat down the coast as far as the Columbia River. We went down the Straits of Juan de Fuca and came down the coast in March. I'd never run a slow-moving fishing boat before, and the weather was pretty stormy. Howard showed me navigation, and I learned about displacement boats. It was the same year they lost a 220-foot tuna clipper on the Columbia River bar. I was in Ilwaco at the time, and watched the salvage team try to pull the boat off the beach in 20-foot swells. It was something to see.

We didn't make a lot of money the first year, but we learned a lot. We figured before we started it would take three years to make money. There's a pretty steep learning curve, a lot of things you have to learn to get the fish to bite. It was a pretty nomadic existence. You lived on the boat and traveled up and down the coast. My wife was a schoolteacher, so we didn't have to make a living. Sure enough, we only made like $13,000 or $14,000, that first year, even though fishing was good and people who were skilled made lots of money.

By 1979, our fourth year of fishing, we had a good season, $40,000 to $50,000. (That's gross income, in basically four months of work.) It was always troll fishing using lures, or whole baits, hook-and-line fishing.

1988 was the last good year we had. From 1989 to 1995 there were not too many fish to catch, and there were fairly heavy restrictions. A lot of the fleet went away and people went broke.

The price of fish also went way down when aquaculture fish appeared on the market. In 1997, for instance, the price of fish off the boat got down to 85 cents a pound for Chinook salmon. Just horrible prices. So not only did you have reduced catches and increased expenses — because everything was getting more expensive — but we were getting a lot less for our fish.

The trouble was, from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, worldwide aquaculture boomed; production from places like Norway and Chile just increased astronomically. When people were substituting low-priced, farmed salmon, and didn't differentiate between our fish and those fish, we weren't getting much money. We didn't sell our fish year-round and people weren't valuing our fish any more than the others, they didn't realize they were special.

Public awareness about the benefits of wild over farmed turned that thing around. With Ecotrust and Salmon Nation, and with the bad name farmed fish started getting in about 2002, the price of wild fish jumped astronomically.

I served on the Pacific Fishery Management Council from 1990 to 1996 and I didn't want to serve another term. About that time, this fish market came up for sale in Gold Beach and I bought it with two other fishermen. The price of the business was pretty low, and as fishermen, we weren't getting what our catch was worth. Our main motivation in buying the market was to have a market for the fish we were catching, and be able to get a fair price. You cannot make any money at 85 cents a pound, no matter how good the fishing is. We figured we'd just cut out the middleman and go straight to the consumer.

We basically built it up from scratch. It had just a little funky walk-in cooler that wasn't well maintained and it smelled bad. We tore that out and bought nicer deli cases, new shelving, got a new walk-in freezer/cooler combination, and reorganized the place. We did a lot of the work ourselves, and over a period of years, we've improved it a lot.

Now we have four steady employees, and we usually add two or three more in the summertime. Some years it pays the partners a bit or profit. Some years it doesn't. Last year, for instance, it didn't pay us anything, though we did make a little more as fishermen for our catch than normal dock price.

The employees are good, and after several years of experience can pretty much run the store by themselves. That way we've got time to go fishing. The store has close to 2,000-square feet of floor space. There's about a 600-square-foot retail area, which has canned goods, frozen fish, fresh fish, shelves of pickles and jams and other local Oregon products. There's space for custom filleting (for sport fisherman), and also space for processing thousands of pounds of tuna or other fish. What makes us special is the salmon we sell is our own. And the Crab, Lingcod and rockfish we sell is locally caught. It's created a good market for all the other local fishermen, who sell us black rockfish and lingcod. Also, we know good fish, and are picky about what we buy from the major distributors. Quality always is most important, even if the cost is higher.

Even though the market took a lot of time away from fishing, I get a lot of satisfaction from providing high quality foodstuffs to people. This has helped me get a deeper appreciation for food and I've become familiar with groups like Slow Food who celebrate the diversity of different kinds of food and beverages and the way of life that produces those products. In the end I'm hoping that we can document and celebrate our own unique history here on the Pacific Coast. I'm hoping this will help us understand where we came from, why our stories and experiences matter, and maybe even where we're headed.

(Thanks to Dan Sadowsky for his interview with Scott Boley.)

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