❖ FISHING OFF THE GUT SCOW ❖

Friday Harbor Packing Co.
Original photo from the archives
of the Saltwater People Historical Society©

"In 1894, three men from Astoria, Oregon, Johnny Devlin, Fred Keen, and Phillip Cook, came to San Juan Island looking for a good place to start a fish cannery. They built the Friday Harbor Packing Co where the Cannery Condominiums are now, near the ferry landing. I started to work in the Friday Harbor fish cannery in the summer of 1942 when I was fifteen years old. By then its name had been changed to the Friday Harbor Canning Co.
      In those days you had to have a permit to work if you were under sixteen, and I got my permit from Howard Carter. My brother, Albert, started working at the cannery that same summer. He was only twelve at the time. Leith Wade, the superintendent of the cannery, told us that we were doing a man's work so he was going to pay us a man's wage. My mom also worked in the cannery that summer, in fact, my mom worked in canneries for 48 years.
      

A bounty of salmon
Friday Harbor Packing Company,
San Juan Island, WA.
original photo from the
Saltwater People Historical Society©

In the years when there were big fish runs, many people worked 15-18 hour days. Some even longer. Sometimes in the 1940s, there would be 100,000 fish on the floor when we came to work. The canneries, fish buyers, and purse seine boats in the northwest would all be swamped. We worked such long hours that some of the guys would not even bother to go home. They would just sleep for a couple of hours in the boiler room or on the salt sacks. When it was busy like that, people would come down to the cannery to work and help us out after their businesses closed for the day. I remember Blair King and Alfie Middleton doing that.
      In the 1930s, 40s, and the early 50s, the fishermen worked 6 days a week. They would come into the docks on Friday afternoon and would be gone by Saturday afternoon. There would be a fishermen dances at the Moose Hall every Friday night. The old Moose Hall is now the Front Street Cafe and Boardwalk Bookstore.
      In the late 1930s and early 40s, a lot of us kids would go fishing off of the gut scow. 

Young boys fishing off
the Gut Scow.
Friday Harbor, San Juan Island, WA.
original photo from
the Saltwater People Historical Society©

The gut scow was where the heads and insides of the cannery fish went. We caught a lot of herring, as there were hundreds feeding off the little pieces of fish and blood that ran off of the scow into the water. When the scow was full, the tug CHALLENGER towed it to Anacortes where the remains were ground up.
      In the 1950s we used to have freezer ships come to our cannery with frozen fish from Alaska. They would unload just so many fish into the cannery from the freezer ship so they could thaw overnight. The cannery had a water sprinkler system to thaw the fish, and then they would be canned along with what fresh fish were caught the day before in our local waters. We had to skin and bone the fish by hand, and then hand pack and can them in 1/2-pound glass jars and the jars sold for fifty cents. In 1953 Bud Murray and I started working on the Iron Chink, which is a machine that cuts the head off the fish, then cuts off the tails and fins, then slits the belly and brushes out the insides. At high speed, the Iron Chink would do 72 fish a minute."

Written by Tony Surina, Friday Harbor, San Juan Island. Courtesy of Terry Jackson, John Wade, and Wally Botsford, The Fishermen and the Fisheries of the San Juan Islands. Unknown date of publishing.

❖ POINT ROBERTS COUNTRY ❖ with June Burn 1930

METSKER'S MAP OF PUGET SOUND COUNTRY©
Copyright of Thos. C. Metsker
"Metsker the Map Man."
This map is for convenience not for navigation.
Click image to enlarge for viewing Pt. Roberts.

"The village of Point Roberts is called West Point Roberts. It stands down in the lower lefthand corner of the peninsula. Here are two or three stores, gas stations, a big fish cannery. Behind one of the new stores, there stands a thirty or forty-year-old building with "Bureau Salon" in big letters across its false front. There are several houses, of course, one little hotel called the Green Lantern, another restaurant, a schoolhouse and nameless relics of houses whose uses I do not know.
 

      Jutting out into Georgia Strait from the beach is the long dock. The daily boat, TULIP, from Bellingham, stands off here to discharge mail and freight. Beyond the beach a mile or so, fishtraps look like centipedes floating on the water. The high derrick affair up northward is one of the boundary monuments set there to let fishermen know when they are on their side of the fence.
      It stands over a mile from shore, I believe; 5,500-ft to be exact. I suppose there is a light atop as there is on the one ashore. The international boundary makes a sharp bend two or three miles out from Pt. Roberts and turns southeasterly down Georgia to Haro Strait when it bends again through Haro to Juan de Fuca and so on out to sea. It really is too bad that it doesn't turn southwesterly from Boundary Bay and so avoid this bit of peninsula altogether. It must be a great bother keeping up customs and boundary patrol for six square miles or less of country. Though it does add interest to our map to see Pt. Roberts away up there at our northwesternmost corner separated from us by both land and sea. It is more than an island, surrounded as it is on three sides by water, and on the fourth by an alien country.
 

      Summer people, week-ending visitors, are already trickling down to all the long, sandy beaches of the Point. They look very carefree, walking like Pippa on her one holiday of the year. Very jaunty and satisfied they look, as if they had achieved some private victory of their own.
      At the village, I found Mr. Culp just ready to go home. He brought me back to the cottage in the woods, and this evening after supper all of us crowded into the coupe.
      Down to Boundary Bay, we went past Baker's new charming log cabin, past the Russell place, along the narrow graveled road with shrubs pressing in from both sides, past the Ellis Johnson place. Honeysuckle in bloom in the woods. Mrs. Culp told of the effort that their local Grange made to stop the vandalism of wildflowers and shrubs in the summertime. They wrote Olympia about it, learned that tree stealing could be prosecuted, but apparently not other forms of the ruthless gathering of wildflowers.

      Leghorn Heights on our left, and the Solomon ranch. Crystal Waters beach. Is it not a lovely name? Thorstenson Ranch and the Goodman place deep in the woods. Down to White Lily Point, which is a high bluff overlooking the bay. Here, in March, the little white six-petaled Easter lily droops her sweet head under every salal shrub, every frond of Oregon
grape. In bloom now are vetch, wild roses, Indian Paintbrush, honeysuckle, fritillaria or rice-root, and many little things whose names I do not know.
 

Eight photographs from the archives of the
Saltwater People Historical Society©

      Across Boundary Bay the lights of Blaine, below the bluff fifteen fishtraps with long curved leads. Far down across the Strait, Lummi Island, and Orcas. The big P.A.F. fish cannery at the foot of the high bluff has not run for years. Mr. Arni Myrdal is in charge of fishing operations down there. Wise in Icelandic lore he is, they say. But I did not meet him on this trip. See you tomorrow. June."
Above text by June Burn. Puget Soundings. May 1930.