The sky was clearing and the sun was coming out nicely. It had been a dull trip but now the sky was blue and there was a nice glint of sun coming off the water below. I recognized where we were and knew we were only about fifteen minutes away. The drone of the single engine Otter float plane would put you to sleep. The pilot George Freeman was an old family friend of ours and flew charters into the secluded fishing lodges. One of many in the Queen Charlotte Islands and is owned by my family and that is where we were headed today.
My name is Jamie and I'm starting my summer break from the University of British Columbia where I am in second year of Marine Biology. During this summer I will again be working in one of our family owned lodges as a fishing guide. I have spent most of my life on the water and started fishing before I was even in my teens with my father who passed away a few years ago. Barry, who runs the lodge is actually my uncle and used to play professional football and is very close to me. He is not that much older then me due to the fact he was my father's much younger brother which leaves Barry as more of a big brother then an uncle and we get along great.
I have spent a lot of time in various sports. I pitched intermediate fastball and went to the nationals when I was nineteen which was only four years ago but have got away from that and now just spend my time fishing. I am just a bit over six feet tall and keep myself in good shape. I have brown hair and blue eyes and have never really had any trouble finding a girlfriend but at the present time I don't have one and I'm not really looking. I have too many things on my plate right now.
George tapped my arm and pointed, ahead of us and to our left I could see the Echo Bay Lodge where we were heading. George tipped the wing and throttled back and began his descent which didn't take long when you consider he only flies three hundred feet above the water anyway. He was coming in against a very light wind according to the wind sock at the lodge. George brought the Otter in and I barely felt it touch down and he advanced the throttles to steady the plane and then throttled it back and the pontoons lowered themselves in the water and we began our taxi towards the docks.
We drifted into the dock and Barry was there to meet us along with some of the workers from the lodge. George had about seven hundred pounds of supplies besides me on the plane. I got my stuff out and chatted with Barry. He said , "come on, I want to show you something" and we walked along the float. He took me out to one of the new docks and tied up at one was a brand new Bayliner Trophy Hardtop with twin two fifty horsepower Mercury Verado Outboards. My eyes must have been as big as saucers as that was a hundred thousand dollar boat. It had all the equipment and was rigged for offshore with radar and all the extras. With the five hundred horses this big boat was a sixty mile per hour plus outfit and completely loaded with all the little extras. I was impressed and who wouldn't be.
The lodge owned thirteen fishing boats and they varied in size from a couple of eighteen footers with hundred horse outboards that worked in close and a few bigger boats with larger outboards in the two hundred horsepower class. The twin engine outboards were used for the off shore travel. We would go off shore to a reef that was twenty miles out for halibut and many of the largest migratory salmon were caught off shore over five miles out. The motors would be singled out for trolling and each one ran independent of the other. Each engine was powerful enough to plane the boat on their own. If one of the engines ran into trouble you had the security of being able to get home on the other.
I looked the big Trophy over and Barry told me that he had sort of went a little overboard on this one and kind of bought it for himself and the family. He told me that it would be mine for the summer and that it was not in service right now. He told me to go ahead and take it out in the morning and get used to it and run it on a trip alone before he dispatched me with a charter. He also told me that I was going to have a young female partner this year and that she was the kid sister of Madge, the lady that did some of the accounting and was in charge of the lodge restaurant and some of the help.
What I remember most about Madge was that she was real pretty and very sexy. She was about five foot six, brunette and well under thirty years old. She had been married for a couple of years and was divorced. There was a rumour going around that she had a thing for Barry and I could understand that. He was single, in his mid thirties and in great shape. He had kept himself up from his football days and there was not much fat on him. I think he was a bit under two hundred and fifty pounds.
We went in the lodge and there I was introduced to my partner for the coming season and when I saw her I right away cornered Barry and asked him if he was serious. I had been introduced to a young girl that couldn't have hardly been seventeen years old with long black hair in pig tails. She was wearing cut off shorts and a tee shirt that said "ban fish farms." Her name was Cassie which was short for Cassandra and I found out later I was a bit out on her age as she was actually twenty.
Cassie was on summer holidays from her first year of training for social work. She was actually very cute and had a very friendly smile and was about five feet or a bit taller. When I walked behind her I noticed her shapely legs and the way she filled out the jean shorts. All of those attributes weren't however going to be of any help to me as far as fishing went. I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt and took her along with me and went for a walk along the dock and ended up at the new Trophy.
Cassie seemed very nice and quite smart. I was feeling a bit better when I found out she had been there for a couple of weeks and had been working so she had a bit of an idea of what was going on and that she had grown up in a family with boats so she knew how to run a boat and had been working with fish. I was also happy to see she had an operators certificate which means she had taken the boating courses. I began to think we might be okay and we jumped on board the trophy and looked it over. The operation of the boat was not a problem to me as I worked part time for a Bayliner dealer while going to school and I had run all of these boats. I had not ran the new Verado engines but had heard lots about them with their full electronic controls and new fuelling system.
I told Cassie to get the ties and I clicked the ignition keys and checked that the boat was fuelled. I hit the key and fired the starboard engine and instantly it was running. I could hardly hear it so I hit the switch on the port and I had them both running. I told Cassie to get in and she pushed off and I kicked the starboard into reverse and we eased out of the slip and proceeded to back out of the marina. Cassie whispered to me that I had a cheering section. Barry warned me that there was a few of the old boys had their noses out of joint because I was going to be running the company toy as he called it. I guess they would have liked it. He said he told them this boat was his personal boat that it would be used in special charters by his nephew and that was it.
There was a few watching no doubt to see if I would screw up but I knew how to run this thing and when we cleared the last dock I left the starboard engine in reverse and hit the port engine into forward and the twin engines literally spun the Trophy almost end for end. I hit the starboard handle forward and it leaped ahead and we were on our way. Cassie smiled and all she said was "impressive, very impressive, you've done this before haven't you." I looked back and the boys on the dock were walking away.
I smiled as we headed out and got out into the main bay and it was calm so I checked the trim gauges and hit both levers and the nose of the Trophy rose in the air and settled down and the boat hit plane in about fifty feet. We had a rooster tail behind us and were running at over forty five miles per hour with a third of the throttles left. The big Verado engines were smooth and so quiet we could talk in the cabin and I asked Cassie if she wanted to drive and she slid over and took the wheel and I stood right beside her.
She seemed to be comfortable and I got her to do some manoeuvres. I got her to take the boat down to an idle and then got her to bring it up onto plane and showed her how to trim the engines by bringing then up until they threw water then down until the counter rotating props were biting the water and watched the speed go up as the tachometer needles went down. She was handling the powerful boat very well. I looked over and saw the speed sitting on a bit over fifty and I knew we would get along fine. In this short time together Cassie has really impressed me. She is obviously smart and seems to be a very sweet sexy girl and she seemed to be comfortable around me.
When we got back in we walked along the docks over to the cleaning tables as some of the charters had come in and most of them had done real good with salmon. Most of the boats limited out and some released quite a few. I was happy to see that "old Babe" was still around. Old Babe is the lodge's pet seal that hangs around the cleaning tables and gets the chucks of fish scraps that go directly into the water. She is an old girl that don't see very well and is probably a bit too old to hunt so she hangs around and lays on the docks and mainly gets in the road as people have to step over her. She is probably the most photographed seal around as there are hundreds of pictures taken of kids petting her and people sitting beside her. She never gets very excited.
I took my bags and went to my room put my stuff away and went down to the lounge and sat at the bar and got a beer. Madge was there and she came over and greeted me and hugged me. She sat down and we chatted and she asked "what do you think of Cassie?"
I said. "she seems to be very smart and picked up real fast on the boat."
"She is very excited about it and I got Barry to put her with you." She looked sort of down her nose at me, "I'm watching out for her too, that's my baby sister." She laughed. "I'm teasing you Jamie, Cassie will get along good with you and that's why I wanted her with you." Barry came in with some people and sat down and we all moved to a table and chatted as Madge moved off to the kitchen
In a fishing lodge the meals are served at certain hours and we moved into the dinning room and Cassie turned up and I took her with me and we sat in with the group. The dinner was great as we had roast beef, baked potatoes, lots of salad and the usual desserts. Madge had got them to butterfly and bake a couple of salmon and the guests that were there really enjoyed that and always cleaned it right up. They always serve some sea food and it depends on what the catch is. The lodge keeps a good selection of various wines. We get a lot of Halibut but the main catch is the big King or Chinook salmon as well as the Coho or Silvers depending on what you call them.
