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Catching more than just fish

Richmond author publishes book on commercial fishing

The fishy smell youll get after reading Fishing the Coast wont just come from Don Peppers highly descriptive details of catching a herring and the subsequent gutting of it.

It will also come from reading about the negative changes and turns the fishing industry has endured over the Richmond fishermans 50 years on the open sea.

We have not been good stewards of the resource, said Pepper, who holds a PhD in fisheries economics. The technology has changed, the industry has changed, and theres no fish. We no longer have a coastal fishing industry.

Pepper has spent the last two years writing the first book about commercial fishing on the West Coast by a fisherman.

He celebrates the book launch with a slideshow, seminar and signing tomorrow (May 9) at the Vancouver Maritime Museum from 5:30 to 8 p.m.

He claims one of the main mistakes made in the fishing industry was shifting control from the owner/operator to the armchair fisherman, the sharecropper. Such a change makes it difficult for any fisherman to make a living.

Now the quotas and permits are determined by these armchair fishermen, said Pepper. If a fish costs $6 per pound, he gets $4 and you only get two bucks. Thats no way to make a living. Its almost impossible. We get fewer and fewer fishermen every year.

Sports fishermen literally fishing certain species to extinction and the decline in salmon also contributes to the flailing industry.

Besides looking at the larger picture, Pepper also zooms into the individual life of a fisherman, giving a reader a taste for the industry almost as potent as the fish on the table.

Very few have written on exactly how we did it, and gone into that sort of detail.

Starting out at the age of 16, Pepper tells tales of a fishing life now past from catching Adams River sockeye in Johnstone Strait to being thrown overboard during a storm in Deep Water Bay; from getting his first $1,500 pay cheque to making as much as $40,000 in one year.

He writes about how it can both be a world of camaraderie, but also loneliness, as the less fishermen make, the more they have to be out, away from home.

Its not always a fun way of life, he said. Boats sink, you get thrown overboard, youre away from home. But when youre out on the central coast on a sunny day, watching that fog pull away from the great, blue Pacific, its just heaven.

Most fishermen cant articulate the joy of fishing, its just beautiful.