FISHING PIONEERS
By RICHARD MORGAN
IT'S a long way from Himanka, Finland, to the banks of the Fraser. A long way, but no farther in space than it is in time from an ex-sailboat powered with a $2 converted Model-T Ford engine to the high-powered gill-netters that scour the coast now in search of salmon.
Kaarlo Huovinen has made both journeys, as a young man immigrating to this country from his Finnish birthplace and as a fisherman whose career spans half a century and still is not over.
He actually did purchase a boat in 1928 for $125, and his brother George, who followed him from Finland, helped him to instal it.
Following his introduction to the salmon fishery in the Skeena River where he landed fish aboard a wind-powered gillnetter and sold them to B.C. Packers' Oceanic Cannery on Smith Island, he fished crabs with his own boat off Point Grey, managing to make "a few dollars" out of crabbing before he lost his 28 traps one day to an extra heavy tide.
His history in the industry from then on is a succession of boats, and upward mobility, though never so fast or so far that he forgot his early membership in the Finnish longshoremen's union, loading ships with pit props bound for British coal mines, nor that rising fortunes in the New World could not alter his role as a working man.
Today, 77 years of age, at home on Finn Road in Richmond, he is hardly more than a stone's throw from the Fraser and Finn Slough, pivot of his fishing career and home base for a whole generation of fishermen.
The vista southward through the rainswept window of his living room in the house he has occupied since 1947 with his wife, Inez, is of fields unsullied by deverlopers, then a line of trees, the dyke, the immense grey form of a deep sea freighter moving down toward the gulf. Behind the house, a spacious garden contains vacant chicken runs, 20-year-old apple trees, the weatherbeaten skeletons of this summer's corn plants.
Along this section of the river the Finns were the fishing pioneers. Most of the older generation is retired or dead now. Only a handful of them remain — settled, emotionally tied, like Kaarlo Huovinen, to the slough, fishing only during daylight hours, refusing to surrender to advancing years, clinging to their status of 'semi-retirement' deep into old age. *
Huovinen says he will fish again next year with the Cisco, the small gillnetter his wife affectionately calls "the tub."
"I have nothing else to do and I don't like sitting down," he says.
His and his wife's gillnetter Jeep — she has fished the river in
her own boat for the past 24 years — are still tied up at Finn Slough along with a dozen or so other boats, and Huovinen goes down there almost every day.
"It looks very sad at the slough," he says. "There's hardly any life there now but there was plenty of it in the old days. But I still like to go. I lived there. That was my life,"
The forties were the slough's heyday, Inez recalls. Forty boats would be tied up at a time. Some of the owners, like the Huovinens, resided at the water's edge in small cottages adjoining their net sheds. Others had homes on Finn Road or in the city, and after the week's fishing was over, nets seen to and boats washed down, they would trek into town "with a fish underneath their arms for their family."
The Huovinens summon with ease the names of the veterans, some still alive and in retirement: Frank Nomi, Henry Jacobson, his brother Jack, sons Andy and Walter, John Karen, Gus Tyback, Ole Kokko, Henry Koskela and his brother Hannes.
Though B.C. Packers, Nelson Bros, and Canadian Fishing Company invested money improving facilities after the war, the original floats were homemade and to this day the slough has a pleasantly makeshift appearance.
"It was good for about 10 to 15 years," Inez says, "but then the oldtimers started to retire, while others passed away, and it just gradually declined. Now there's just a handful of us left to carry on, and who knows how long that will be?"
A sign of the times was the transfer to the UFAWU's Steveston Fishermen's Local about 10 years ago of the Finn (Woodward) Slough Local members, union stalwarts for the most part and veterans of the Fishermen and Cannery Workers Industrial Union.
Kaarlo recalls that the local donated $500 to union headquarters on one occasion. Another time he and his brother loaned the union $50 out of their own pockets to help tide it over a difficult period.
He has particular memories of two Japanese cash buyers — Matsuo and Teraguchi — who operated out of the slough in the years leading up to 1941. Matsuo sold to Anglo-British Columbia Packing and Teraguchi to B.C. Packers. Both would willingly stand fishermen to a drink when the boats were tied up and the work was done.
"If you needed money, they gave it to you out of their own
pockets, and they didn't even want a receipt. They were wonderful men. They trusted the fishermen and the fishermen trusted them."
Inez Huovinen was born on a homestead near Wetaskiwin, Alta., in 1916, came to the coast when she was 20, worked a season on Canfisco's production line at Rivers Inlet before marrying in Vancouver, then settled at the slough at a time when its sense of community already was well established.
"They started early when the spring salmon were running," she recalls. "Everybody was in on it, and they fished till it was time for them to go up to Rivers Inlet. They used to start talking. 'Got to get up north, that's where the fish are.' It took them two or three months to get their boats ready and painted. Some worked hard at their boats, others less so.
"They'd leave around the beginning of June even though the fishing didn't start until the 24th or 25th. They didn't have the high-powered engines they have today, and they'd spend a couple of weeks travelling, maybe even longer.
"There was always a group that went together. If something should happen to someone there was always someone there to give a helping hand. And they always looked ahead for the bad weather. They were very cautious that way."
Inez Huovinen confined her efforts to the river where fishermen now are reduced to as little as 12 hours a week fishing and are, she declares "being kicked in the teeth and starved out all at once."
She started fishing with her son George, currently an employee of B.C. Hydro but in those days still a schoolboy.
"I said I had been thinking about going fishing. I didn't see why a woman couldn't do a job like a man. If you're on the water you've got to do something anyway."
While the men went north, she stayed to fish the river. Another "lady fisherman", Mrs. Aune Jacobson, kept her company.
Having been part of the growth of trade unionism in the fishing industry over several decades, the Huovinens view with dismay all attempts to erode the industrial unity achieved by the various fishermen's sections, shoreworkers   and tendermen.
"It's disturbing," says Inez. "Like walking on cracked ice, having bits and pieces working into something solid that we have already fundamentally established."
Arecent Tass dispatch reported that Soviet scientists were intrigued by "a fish which breathes through its nose, sees through its skin and can tie itself into a knot" found off the Kamchatka coast of Siberia.
The hagfish, Myxine Vlutinosa, the report continued, "can live without food for more than a year, has four hearts, each beating in a different rhythm, which control its head, its tail, its muscles and its liver, 'sees' through supersensitive cells covering its body, and has a spine so flexible that it can tie itself into a knot."
The report seemed to us a good opportunity to measure the worth of a book published last month by Knopf, The Fresh and Salt Water Fishes of the World, by Edward C. Migdalski and George S. Fichter.
We didn't find any mention of the particular species, Vlutinosa, but we did find a complete section on the hagfishes, Order Mixini-formes, which range in size from 2Vi inches to two feet or more in length, including the information
that three occur in the Pacific, the black hagfish, Eptatretus deani, the Pacific hagfish, Eptatretus stouti, and the less common whiteface hagfish, Mixine circi-frons.
Similarly, when Prof. Peter Hochachka, UBC biologist, returned from the Amazon recently with "mind blowing" reports of the piraruca and other lung breathing fish, we turned to the book for information. Again we found all that the interested layman could need, a section on the Australian lungfishes and another on the South American and African lungfishes, all of which come under the Order Dip-teriformes.
This verified our initial impression that The Fresh and Salt Water Fishes of the World, with more than 500 full color illustrations and 186 line drawings by Norman Weaver, is a book of more than ordinary interest to those fishermen who have a wider curiosity about marine life than those relatively few fish from which they derive their livelihood.
The Huovinens look back half a century
Richard Morgan photos
• Full of memories as he stands in his Finn Slough net shed, Kaarlo Huovinen (top) is one of the last gillnet veterans to whom the place is home. Wind and rain make this living museum of the industry a temporarily desolate place (bottom). Aboard her gillnetter Jeep is Inez Huovinen, who remembers the slough's heyday during the forties.
All you could want to know about fishes
• This is the jacket illustration from The Fresh and Salt Water Fishes of the World by Edward C. Migdalski and George S. Fichter, with more than 500 full color illustrations and 186 drawings by Norman Weaver. The book covers more than 1,000 species of fresh and salt water fishes, representing all the 43 orders and 212 commonly known families.
12/ THE FISHERMAN — DECEMBER 20, 1976