Fog

After 2 weeks of searching, the offshore trawlers located the herring schools and we have been busy offloading and salting down 150,000 pounds of fish. Makes for long and busy days. The early morning hours are spent tending boats and getting set up for the operation; fueling the fork trucks, setting out pallets, organizing tools and gear, assigning work details. Once the pumping of the fish begins off the boats and the big 2000 pound exactas are being filled off the boat, the sea gulls join the party in great numbers.

They are so thick and aggressive that it looks, all the world, like the Alfred Hitchcock movie "The Birds". They swoop and fight, squawk loudly, swallowing the spilled herring whole, attacking each other trying to make the other disgorge their prize. They fly around the bait shop, big Black Backed Gulls swooping clockwise and Herring Gulls counter clockwise, dodging and weaving, an aerial dog fight (bird fight?). For kicks, the crew throws fish, sometimes with cans attached with string to watch them swinging from the beaks of the flying birds. Ray caught one and it tried to take off my gloved fingers. Quick little buggers.

The conversation on the dock at break was about jail. I learned that if you are ever in jail and someone offers to give you the candy "Skittles" don't accept. There are prisoners that lick the skittles and use the colored coating for make-up...

Later, one of the guys sat looking at the sea and said to nobody in particular, "I hate whales." OK, I'll take the bait so to speak. "Why would you hate whales", I asked. "I don't like their attitude" he said. "They think they are better than everyone else." I laughed and asked "So I know they call you Swanson, but what's your real name". "Marty" he said "but I prefer my prison nickname."

"What's that", I asked.

He said "Skittles..."