They never found the Sara Lee.
She was 5 days out working the trap lines, just like us when I heard the mayday call over the radio.
I was running the haul, I just stopped and grabbed for the microphone.
There was no answer to my repeated calls.
We dropped everything, I hit the throttles on the Nancy Lee and headed in that direction. Even at full throttle, we were 3 hours away, The Sara Lee was 40 miles South and West of us.
Running into the seas and wind, it took us 4 hours.
I checked the radar. I had been glancing at it every minute or so for hours.
Nothing.
There was a steady chatter on channel 16, we saw one chopper from the base up North swing over us and then head on.
I switched to a side channel and called Mark, the skipper of the Bitsy that was working farther out. They had beaten us to the area, running with the wind.
"Nothing, Dan. Not a goddamned thing!" His voice sounded broken over the speaker.
"All right, thanks, Matt."
"God. I am sorry, Dan."
The radio fell silent.
The seas were only 5 to 7 feet, the wind a steady 20 knots. Still, she rolled up angry and slapped us every few minutes. I had been calling out warnings to my deckhands when we were hauling to give them time to grab a line as the boat heeled over, seas washing the deck.
As calm as it ever got this time of year.
The Sara Lee was our sister ship, named after my Dad's two step-daughters by his first wife, Sara and Nancy. Dad was the Sara Lee's skipper, he had commissioned the two steel hulled 65 footers. The Nancy Lee was assigned to me.
Everyone called Dad "Cap", partly for the ever present wool cap he wore over his bald head, and partly because he was the oldest Captain in our little fleet.
The best Captain, too. Men fought for the right to crew with him, he always found the catch, he always came back with full holds.
He always came back with his men.
Now he was gone, just like that.
The hardest part is the not knowing, but that is the way of the sea.
The next day, we pulled the rest of the pots and ran for home, there was nothing else to do. The Coast Guard spent another day or so looking, but found nothing.
That was enough for me, I sold the boat and gear, opened a shop working on marine engines. I lost all interest in going to sea.
At least that is what I told myself. But I would stand on the docks and watch the fleet head out, that always caused a tug at my heart.
A man is completely free at sea, nothing but the water, wind and sky.
I would shake it off, and go back to my shop, my work.
I did fish the runs into the river, though. The Herring would come in riding the tides, tens of thousands of them. They came in waves, hours of waiting and then sudden mayhem. On moonlit nights we would hear the men yell, "Fire in the Water!" and we would run the nets out and around them with the skiffs.
Then we would hook up to one of the bigger boats and haul, thousands of them at a time flooded the decks.
On dark nights we often fished blind, only the rare flash in the water from the lights on the boat were there to warn us of our prey, so many times we pulled empty.
When we hit the school, it was always a frantic time, but often we would only get one or two good hauls on a night. Sure, we could net in the daytime but the fish went right around the nets, we would do well to recover our fuel costs.
We left the daytime river to the hand jiggers that sold their catch to the bait boats for a dime each.
That is how I met Tara. She was a jigger, one of the few women doing that. It took strong arms to tug the lines over and over all day long, sometimes pulling up a half dozen wiggling 8-10" long fish at a time.
She came into the shop carrying an old outboard. The thing was an antique 9.9 horse, it was so old I didn't know why she bothered. To start it the rope was wrapped around the top and pulled.
I normally wouldn't have bothered either, it should cost more to fix than it was worth.
But one look at Tara and I think I would have done anything she asked.
First, she didn't smell like slightly washed dead fish like the women I knew down at the waterfront bar. Women in our town worked as cutters gutting and cleaning the catch, or as packers in the canneries, shelling Crab. Most of them had fannies the size of a Walrus, several wore rubber boots right into the bars. I saw more than one woman out on the dance floor in those, carrying on to some tune out of the old jukebox.
Once in awhile I would end up with one of the better looking ones, they were all mostly willing. The only ones that were off limits were the wives of the men in the fleet.
None of us would dare touch any of them, it was just the way it was. And we all knew who they were.
Still, more than one of the wives had made it obvious that they would play while their man was off fishing, I just refused to.
I wasn't married, but I was one of those men, even though I didn't go to sea anymore. But there were other men around who would take advantage, we all knew the score and ignored that.
It was just something we would never speak of, not to any of the men who were often out to sea for days on end.
I am sure many of them knew, though.
I had never met Tara, odd for our small village. She never went to the bars or around town much.
Tara had on a sweater that did nothing to hide her full bust, and a pair of stained blue jeans. She wore shoes that were heavy like a man's, functional. Her hair was tied back tightly, black as coal but clean looking.
Not a fancy woman like one might see in a nightclub in the city a hundred miles inland.
Beautiful, no doubt about that. She looked to be 30 or so, and she stood six inches under my 6' height.
For some reason looking at her made my breath catch in my throat.
I checked out her old outboard, I quickly realized it would need a couple of hundred in parts, if I could find them at all. I saw the pained expression on her face when I told her.
"Let me work on what I can figure out." I told her. That $200 could be a week's work for a day jigger.
Then I reached and handed her an old Evinrude I had sitting in the corner. It ran like a top, it would do until I could find parts for hers.
You would have thought I just handed her a Diamond necklace. She took the 80 pound engine and walked out carrying it like it was nothing.
It was about a week later I was over at Sam's scrap yard, looking for some pipe to make a winch frame from. I spotted one of those old outboards laying in the pile, and several pieces of another one.
Sam let me have them, someone had dropped them off for scrap metal. The best one had a hole in the top gas tank, but I didn't need that, I needed a piston and rod. The shafts were all there on both of them, too.
I had Tara's old outboard ticking away like a sewing machine in just one day.
So I went looking for her. It wasn't because I needed to, it was because I wanted to.
George down at the docks loaned me a skiff.
"Goin' fishin'?" He asked me.
"No, I was going to see if I could find Tara."
He grinned at me with a knowing expression.
"That be quite a catch, that one." He smiled.
"I just wanted to tell her her outboard is ready."
"Yup, she be quite a catch!" he repeated, making me blush.
George rented out boats to tourists, and he was a fixture on the docks. He knew everyone and everything. Plus he looked like he had stepped right off a sailing ship from 100 years before with his long white hair and sailor's outfit, which was quite a delight to the families with kids that showed up for a boat ride.
He was missing most of the fingers of his right hand, the result of a line catching them years before at sea while setting crab pots. George always made a point of showing that off to the wide eyed youngsters as he readied the boats for them.
"She starts a little hard." He told me, a bit of an understatement. I finally got the old engine running, headed off upriver, figuring she would be working one of the areas where the scattered fish recollected.
I found her, sitting in a 16' wooden hull, her hands busy with the lines.
"Hi!" I called out as I slid up alongside and shut the engine down.
She looked up at me, surprised at first, then she smiled as she realized who I was.
"Hi, Dan!"
I tied us off, noting the buckets she had onboard were pretty full.
"Good catch, huh?"
"Yes, I have nearly 300 now." she answered, just then lifting two fat Herring on board.
"I got your outboard fixed." I told her, as I pulled a jig line out from under one of the seats and flipped it over the side.
I began to jig, in short order I had one, I tossed it into her bucket and dropped the line down again.
"What did it cost?" she asked, never stopping the constant effort to attract another fish.
"Nothing. I found a spare engine at Sam's and he gave it to me." I hooked a double this time, and flipped those into her boat, too. I missed the bucket with one and it flopped across the floorboards. She reached down and deftly grabbed it, her other arm never stopping the constant motion with the hand line.
"It has to cost something." She said.
"What about your time?"
"Aw, I had nothing else to do." I lied.
She just nodded, we sat quietly and fished for a good hour, each of us landing several more.
Her buckets were full, she had perhaps $40-45 for her day's work. We both knew the bite would stop when the tide changed.
"How about I cook you a nice dinner?" she asked, as she rolled up and stowed her gear.
I wasn't about to turn that down, my own ability with a frying pan leaves a lot to be desired.
"Sure! When?" I asked.
"Tonight. About 7 or so?"
I nodded, happy at the prospect.
She pulled on the rope starter and was off, I pulled on my loaner a dozen times before it finally sputtered to life.
I made a mental note to drop by and see George, and tune this thing up as it labored back down the river to the docks.
I was pretty sure why George had given me this one in the first place, he knew I wouldn't be happy until it ran right.
I scrubbed myself until my skin turned pink, trimmed my hair and beard. I put on my best shirt and pants. I checked my watch every few minutes, rebrushed my teeth a dozen times.
I was acting like a damn schoolkid.
Arriving a half hour ahead of time, I walked around for awhile, finally knocking on her door 10 minutes early.
She answered the door with a big smile, the fine smell of homemade bread baking in the air around her. Her hair was hanging loose over her shoulders, not tied back tightly like I had seen each time before. She wore a soft flowered blouse and a skirt instead of the ever present blue jeans.
