PART I: THE ACCIDENT
As the lines continued winding over the drum, Larry heard a short, sheet-white scream. He whirled around to see Dick’s feet going over the top of the net reel.
Part of the line lashed Dick ever more tightly in its mechanical turn as it rolled over him and rolled him over the reel. In that instant, Larry saw Dick’s terror-stricken face, pallid and frozen. His adrenalin surged and although he considered the longer, safer route around the net reel, he instinctively took the shortest route racing over the incoming line to shut off the hydraulic motor. Putting his hand on top of the core of the net reel, he boosted himself across the starboard cable line, something he’d done countless times before . . . although never while the lines were moving nor while wearing his heavy foul weather gear. The instant the line grabbed him like a vise in its whirl, Larry knew he’d gone from rescuer to victim. With its normal wear on even one haul, the line had developed indentations and small frays that snagged first his gloved right fingers and wrist, then took hold and whipped up his arm. It pulled him over the line and slammed him face down against the net reel, his arms flung out in prostration, in his perpetual reach to rescue Dick. Over the noise of the boat and its hydraulics and on his own first revolution, Larry heard Dick’s bones snap as the line wrapped and crushed him in its vise. The steel cable then cudgeled down Larry’s left arm, jolting and jerking him repeatedly. Fastened to the reel, Larry spun in continuous revolutions, feet over head, head over feet, again and again. The force flung his hat, boots and a sock God knows where.
The lines had now whipped and wrapped the two men against the reel like captured fish. Only the wind and Dick heard Larry’s cold realization:
“We’re dead.”
As soon as his feet left the deck, Larry knew, ‘this thing’s gonna grind us up.’ He saw himself and Dick as mush. Innards out in the air. Two men transformed. Two lives mulched into the beyond.
One cross of the line against his torso would break and crush his bones as easily as it had just done Dick’s. The wings and body of the net ground over the gunwale and across the deck toward the reel. Within a minute or two, its slow, steady, unstoppable pace would pull tons of fish on board. In moments, the weight and webbing of the net would bring to bear the final pressure needed to kill Larry and Dick.
If only the net’ll fall over the flange on that side of the winch. . . . If it’ll just fall over that flange, it’ll jam up that roller bearing. I’ve seen it happen. The motor won’t turn the reel. It’ll jam it 'cause it can’t break that cable inside the gear.
A skilled skipper maneuvers his boat to roll the cable lines and net evenly onto the reel. With Larry wrapped against the net reel, he could not steer. The line began to wind unevenly and drag toward the edge of the spool. It wedged over the drum’s flange and onto the chain and gear sprocket to catch in the bearing, jamming the hydraulic motor, preventing it from turning the drum. When the drum stopped, the trawl doors were still drawn against the sides of the boat, hanging unfastened from the gallows posts. Larry hung upside down suspended facing the reel, bowed against its underside, his back toward the deck, arms spread eagle, his feet not quite touching the deck. Motionless and trapped, he listened to the hydraulics, the prop wash of water against the stern, the drag of the net webbing.
He called out, “Dick. You OK?”
PART II: TRAWLING
Garibaldi is a small, quiet northwest Oregon town nestled between coastal mountains and Tillamook Bay. For centuries a Tillamook Native whaling village and a hundred years after the tribe had ceased to exist, in the 1970s and 1980s, it was one of 12 major fishing ports between San Francisco and the Canadian border. In 1982, Garibaldi was a community of 2,000 people whose livelihood depended on commercial fishing and lumber shipping. Dick Cooley had grown up in Garibaldi, going through the school with several of the Vandecoeverings, a commercial fishing family. Larry was a newcomer, having married one of the Vandecoevering girls 10 years earlier. As with any business, commercial fishing depended on the whims of nature. Some years were good, others spare.
Storm followed storm the fall and winter of 1981-1982 and brought little opportunity to cross the Garibaldi Bar between Tillamook Bay and the ocean. When the fishermen did go out, weather bound them to fish only one or two days at a time. Thursday, Feb. 4 dawned clear. Larry always spent his wife’s birthday, Feb. 6, in port, but this season it was critical to go fishing the first clear five-day stretch. That morning on his way down to the boat, Larry stopped by the hardware store for a couple of bolts for the stabilizers as well as some new hacksaw blades for the trip. Planning a night departure on the 11:00 high tide, Friday, Feb. 5, he was confident he and his deck hands, Dan Fisher and Dick Cooley, would have good fishing. Dan was a slight, soft-spoken fellow of average height. His mannerisms didn’t give away much of who he was, but every now and then he’d talk with his hands or nod a few times as he smiled. Early in the afternoon, Dan, his intended first mate, called to say he had cut his hand badly on a broken glass when doing the dishes. Having gone to the hospital to get stitches and not able to use that hand, he could not go. Larry regretted that since Dan was a hard worker with enough boat experience he knew what to do without being told. Dan had hired on as the Fargo deck hand a number of times before, and the previous fall had spent a month helping Larry convert the vessel from a double-rigged shrimper to a single-rigged trawler. Larry and Dan had removed the outriggers and installed the net reel, built deck grates to cover the entire back deck work area. They also installed improved deck lighting because they’d be working a lot at night. They mounted a high-volume water pump on board for washing the mud out of the fish tow. Then, except for five or six one-day trips when it wasn’t storming, they waited for the weather to clear. Larry knew he’d miss Dan’s experience on the trip.
That’s OK, not great but OK, thought Larry. Dick’s not trawled before, but he spent two months tuna fishing with David off southern California last summer. That brother-in-law of mine always has the best luck—walks away from car accidents, was a skipper before he could legally buy beer, has one of the biggest and nicest boats in the fleet.
Larry thought about the times, before he’d married David’s sister, the two of them had gone to bars together and Larry had watched him walk up to a girl, give his charmed smile and say, “Hi, my name is David. How do you like me so far?” Any young woman would melt to him as Larry stood shyly by watching his smooth and winning manner. On the ocean, the fish seem to swim into his nets. Ever since they worked on the Miss Lorraine together in 1973 and 1974, Larry always thought of David as a kid brother more than as a brother-in-law. He knew he had a grudging respect for David’s catching abilities.
David says Dick’s good. No spare minute for a long conversation or good read, but we’ll be OK.
As usual before a trip, Bev and Larry went upstairs for a long nap before Lincoln arrived home from school. She was upset he was not going to be home for her birthday.
“I’ll be here for the next one, Honey, I promise. It’ll be OK. This has been a really bad year. We don’t have any money! We can’t afford me not going out for this whole window of good weather.”
She was not persuaded.
“You’ll miss the race tomorrow with Tony. I know you can beat him from here to Rockaway. That’s $100.”
A couple of months earlier at a family gathering, Larry and his brother-in-law, Tony Vandecoevering, also a commercial fisherman, got into an argument even they considered silly: Who could run faster? They wagered $100, a pricey sum in a winter of poor fishing and little income, on a footrace across the five-mile sandy beach from Garibaldi to Rockaway, jetty to jetty. With much bravado, Larry offered, “I’ll even run the last quarter mile backward and still beat you!” Tony, 22, thought he could beat this 34-year-old man, but almost daily all that winter, Larry put on some large, heavy logging boots to run the hand-sand route. His plan was to run the distance, barefoot, light-footed. The two scheduled the race for Saturday, Feb. 6, Bev’s birthday. When Bev’s birthday came, Larry was out fishing and afterward never able to run. Grandiose challenge or not, Larry was in fine physical condition as he prepared to depart on this trip. To this day, he and Tony still josh about who would have won.
“Bev. I know I can beat him too, even running the last quarter mile backward. And barefoot. I’ve been running that stretch of beach a lot. I’m in great shape, much better shape than without that silly wager. But, I’ll make more than a hundred on this trip and I can still beat him when I get back. I’m going fishing. And now, I’m going to take my nap.”
As Larry was falling asleep, he ruminated on two-manning the trip. David said Dick was a solid fellow, would make a good deck hand. We’ll be OK, kept running through his mind as he lay with his arm curled around Bev. She, nursing her disappointment almost into anger, took longer to fall asleep.
After a leisurely dinner, Bev did the dishes, smiling while she listened to Larry and their 7-year-old son, Lincoln, wrestle on the living room floor. She dried her hands, then leaned against the doorjamb to watch. Larry tucked Lincoln under one arm and ran in circles around the living room, Lincoln yelping with delight. In a quick dash, Larry took the stairs two at a time and dropped his son onto the bed. Lincoln announced amidst his bounces of laughter, “When I grow up, I’m going fishing with you.”
“And right now, you’re going to sleep!” said Larry as he tugged the sheets up under Lincoln’s chin with a resolve that told the boy that talk was finished till he returned from the fishing trip. Bev arrived, her tender smile still present, and sat down to give Lincoln his goodnight kiss.
As she and Larry walked downstairs, she admonished him, “Oh, he’ll take forever to go to sleep, he’s so wound up.”
“Aw, he’ll go to sleep happy,” he slipped his arms around her, “and then I’ll wind you up!”
“Not before I finish packing your food,” she said, slipping away, once again upset he planned to leave the day before her birthday.
Bev returned to the kitchen and scanned the box: peanut butter and jam, cheese and crackers, bacon, onions, potatoes, and coffee. She topped it off with two loaves of bread she’d made that morning and two dozen eggs.
Oh, where did I hide those cookies I made, she wondered, casting a glance his direction to be sure he wasn’t looking. He wasn’t. She placed them under the small package of Oreo cookies he liked so much.
Larry packed a change of clothes into a duffel bag, then turned to the box on the counter by the door to add extra flashlight batteries, several pairs of gloves, and the two packages of new hacksaw blades. His old ones were pretty dull and he never knew when he’d need them. He thought of having run into his brother-in-law, David, that morning at the hardware store. David had said, “Dick’s really excited to be going out with you.”
Larry smiled as he and Bev loaded the boxes into the back of the pickup. All this was routine to her. Her father had started commercial fishing before she started school. Her brothers became fishermen when they were teenagers. The girls married fishermen, and the Vandecoevering commercial interests grew to become one of the largest family-owned fishing fleets on the Pacific Coast. Once established, Bev’s parents, Larry and Lorraine Vandecoevering, also went into the charter business, first purchasing the Solo, the last wooden boat the Coast Guard certified as a passenger boat. The family continued to add more charter boats and restaurant businesses.
Larry looked at the clock. 8:30 p.m. He’d told Dick to meet him at the Fargo at 9:45 p.m. Plenty of time. He followed Bev upstairs for an hour’s nap before his departure. As he got up, he ran his fingers through her hair and kissed her on the forehead, offering, “Happy birthday. Have a good tomorrow.”
“Lincoln and I’ll go to Mom and Dad’s.”
He took her hands in his, storing their feel and softness in his memory.
She felt his calluses, the roughness of the fisherman’s hands she knew so well, and smelled the sweet diesel and the organic odor of the ocean that had permeated her growing up and now resided throughout her home.
“Time to go.”
“Yes. Time.” She spoke flatly, burying her disappointment and worries before they fully surfaced. She stood and brushed her hair as she watched him dress, waited at the bedroom balcony door while he went to kiss a sleeping Lincoln. When he came back, he took her in his arms and after one last, long kiss, he walked out the side door onto the small deck and the stairs his youngest brother-in-law, George, had just built for them. Slick as everything was with frost, he felt the smoothness of the well-planed rails. He liked having that outdoor access from the bedroom, he thought as he descended the stairs and climbed into his pickup for the five-minute drive to the dock. To leave his bedroom for a fishing trip was his idea of perfection.
Bev waited for the sound, then closed her eyes almost reflexively as he shut the pickup door. She walked out on the deck and watched him pull out, turn down the hill of Seventh Street, cross Highway 101, and drive past her parents’ restaurant, The Troller. His headlights disappeared then reappeared before finally going behind Joe’s Charters. She stood in the chilly air, shivering, knowing he would be pulling his blue 1980 International Harvester pickup in front of her parents’ old red storage building.
How many trips has he captained the Fargo? At least 50, Bev mused in her usual and unconscious attempt to say he’d come back from this trip too. Although she usually didn’t hide her emotions, she buried the thought that this was his first captaining of the Fargo on a midwinter two-man trawling trip. Larry wasn’t concerned, though, for he had midwinter trawled under other captains, maybe 80 times, across three years and had certainly captained any number of shrimping or trawling trips on the Fargo.
Missing him already, she wiped the tears off her cheeks and dashed back inside, rubbing her arms rapidly. Crawling back into bed, she snuggled her face into his pillow, and with the ken of a fisherman’s daughter, sister, and wife, she mentally watched his actions at the dock and on the boat as she fell asleep.
Larry gathered a load from the pickup bed and crossed the street to the narrow way that led to the dock and the Fargo. He felt that usual elation—life is replete—as he walked between Joe’s Charters and Smith’s Pacific Shrimp Co. Smith’s owners, the Schreibers, also owned the Fargo and Larry always tied up alongside the company dock. Good-looking boat, he thought as he recollected his first sight of her 13 years earlier when she had just been launched and was running down Newport’s Yaquina Bay for her sea trials. He was on the deck of the Ruby, deck handing for the boat owner, his childhood friend, John Rice. That image of her held in his mind. Brand spanking new, he found her impressive as hell. A big boat for that time was 55 to 65 feet and the Fargo was 52 feet. Her distinctive flying bridge and attitude in the water had impressed Larry as he viewed her from the deck of the 32-foot wooden troller, Ruby.
Eagerly anticipating his first trawling trip, Dick had arrived 15 minutes early. He stood on the dock studying, admiring the Fargo until he saw Larry’s headlights go past The Troller. He walked back to where he knew Larry parked, ready to help carry gear. On the long tuna trip as a deck hand for David Vandecoevering, the sea bug had bitten him and he was eager for any job on a boat. An unobtrusive yet likeable 29-year-old, he was a quiet, open-faced fellow with a sincere mien and, Larry noted, honest eyes. He stood about 5’ 9” and slender, had a scruffy beard, wore a gray sweatshirt, rain pants, and rubber boots. He seemed just one of the ordinary fellows hanging around the background of a dock looking for work. Different from many, however, Dick was unpretentious, the kind of guy a skipper wants for a deck hand. He didn’t brag about dragging up everything from sperm whales to Dover sole on his way to the Aleutians, only to grow clueless when told to tie or release a bowline. Although he didn’t know him well, Larry could tell as they loaded, he would like having Dick on board.
“No hair hanging out, Dick. It could get caught in the machinery,” Larry stated, also noticing Dick had already cut his sweatshirt sleeves off at the elbows, another of Larry’s safety rules around unforgiving machinery.
Dick tucked his shoulder-length hair into the standard blue knit cap. Larry had already told him about his firm rule of no alcohol allowed while at sea on any vessel he skippered. Once, to cut the pain caused by breaking his wrist the day before a trip, he took four shots of apricot brandy while towing. He towed into a current running perpendicular to his course. He felt too calm and behaved too slowly. Before he could react, he had crossed his gear tangling both nets and all four doors. The trip ended immediately because he had to go in to repair his gear. He vowed he’d never drink on board again, nor would he allow it. Trawling with its heavy machinery and complex maneuvers doesn’t mix well with alcohol.
Dick helped Larry carry and arrange the food and gear, both of them cautious on the thin-iced street, dock, and deck. Dick followed his directions to the letter. Larry put the survival suits in the unused head below with a stash of tools, including his hacksaw and blades.
He checked the pressure-release life raft atop the wheelhouse. Secure. The logbook, in which every 15 minutes he’d record his loran readings, location, and heading, and his navigational chart lay handy for quick access next to the compass on the counter behind his captain’s chair. Down in the engine room, he rechecked his fuel levels. His saddle tanks had 200 gallons each plus he had two tanks full—1,500 gallons of diesel each—more than enough for this four- to five-day trip. The 50-gallon lube oil tank was full. The two banks of batteries, one on either side of the engine room, were fully charged. He went up to the wheelhouse and started the Wood Freeman autopilot. Anyone who spends time at the dock knows the sound of each sea boat: FV Fargo was getting ready to go out. Larry readied himself for a short-handed trip during which he and Dick would work 24 hours a day with brief snatches for sleep and food. He scanned the instruments—radar, three radios, chromascope, and depth finder, Loran-C—all on and working. After working on the Ike the winter before, and becoming accustomed to a chromascope, he had to have one. He smiled at it. Not everyone had one of these great colored depth finders that showed with such fantastic clarity the details of the ocean floor with its hills, valleys, sunken ships, and schools of fish. His CB would keep him in touch with his buddies. Codes the Garibaldi fishermen had set up gave them a way to share information about where to fish without broadcasting it to everyone with a VHF radio. The VHF was every fisherman’s lifeline for making money and in case of emergency. His single sideband he rarely used, but sometimes he listened even as faraway as Alaska.
The Fargo, now fully loaded, including five to eight tons of ice for fish preservation, and with gear stowed, was ready. Larry walked up to the flying bridge. It was cold but at least it wasn’t going to rain on him. Dick unhitched the lines and Larry reversed the engines to back the Fargo out the two hundred feet to the neck of the channel. Turning port, he backed north till he had enough clearance to turn toward the bay before he headed to the bar and ocean beyond.
From the flying bridge, Larry thought again, almost without realizing it, how he would two-man this trip. Although he didn’t want thoughts of Bev to interfere at this moment, he couldn’t help it. It had not been a great evening at home with him about to miss her birthday. He really did need to spend more time with his family. Picking out the buoys with his spotlight, that stupid big marine light never had worked well, he headed the Fargo down the bay at five knots. Looking back, he scanned the deck—all secure—and watched his new deck hand, Dick Cooley, out for his first trawling trip. Dick was checking the net reel, winch, and lines, all the while smelling fish and diesel, the smells Larry no longer thought about but just accepted as a comfort of his world.
Moving out feels good, thought Larry as the 5-knot breeze blew against him. The Fargo had just passed the rock abutments, along the north shore when, turning back to steer, he inadvertently tangled the cord around his ankle and pulled the spotlight off the bridge’s binnacle board. The sealed beam lens shattered as it landed on the steel deck of the bridge.
“Aw, damn!” he muttered to himself.“Broke my spotlight.”
Leaving on a Friday and Dan having cut his hand, the broken light portended Larry’s third omen. Superstition be damned, he didn’t believe in it anyway, especially in this lean year. Any one of these events might have caused another not to go out or to turn back. Some fishermen took all the spiritual and superstitious behaviors they could muster. . . anything to help, God forbid they should need it. . . to survive and avoid the abyssal depth.
To go out on the vast sea, even if the next boat is a quarter mile away, a fisherman needs extra protection. He has his practical things—radio, life raft, survival suits. But he needs to take more—his omens and religion. David, Larry’s brother-in-law, admits he is superstitious, won’t go out on a Friday, and now, won’t go out in Februarys. Such omens vary from seaport to seaport, family to family. No whistling on the boat. Don’t take a woman on board. Never leave port on a Friday. Don’t say “banana” or “rabbit” while on board, but touch lead if you do. How do these men, so brawny, courageous, tough, and practical, come to believe such omens? Much can go wrong at sea and sometimes no amount of strength or grit makes a spit of difference. Storms roll in; rogue waves swamp the deck; ice builds up, sinks the ship without a trace; windows in the wheelhouse break; men wash overboard never to be seen again. In a vain attempt to control the uncontrollable and not be a victim, fishermen assign imaginary connections between events, and give false causation to their safety.
A woman on board may distract the crew, although it is known that captains as recently as the 1800s occasionally took their families with them. Not going out on Fridays started with respect for the crucifixion and spread throughout Christian societies. Harvard psychologist Skinner saw when he rewarded pigeons according to a fixed time schedule, whatever the pigeon did just before the reward, such as turning in circles or bobbing, it repeated before the next reward. He had taught the pigeon to be superstitious, to learn erroneously that if it turned or bobbed, it got a reward. Go out fishing but never on a Friday, the boat has no problems, the catch is good, and the fisherman comes home safely—that is his reward. The superstition about Fridays becomes a charm and its 2,000-year history strengthens.
No, Larry wasn’t superstitious. Nor did he think the Higher Power would save him if he got in trouble. That was his responsibility. He would be cautious and careful. Common sense and safety were his watchwords on a fishing trip.
Larry continued toward the bar, and the solitude of ocean, time, and planet. Crossing at flood tide tonight—and no reason was ever good enough to make Larry cross the Garibaldi Bar on its dangerous ebb—the half-mile wide bar was one of its calmer masses of whirls and swells. He responded to the familiar small pitches without thought as he steered. Carefully, now with only the mast light and the light of the clear night, he continued to move between the markers till he viewed the seas as they changed from bay to open ocean. A few moments later, savoring the solitude he relished, he turned to face the cold, east wind for a last view of the comfort of home and harbor. He saw the smallness of himself on the grand scale of the ocean that lay before him.
Glad it’s no colder than it is. . . . Rime ice on everything. But not quite cold enough to ice up. Jeez, it’s flat as a lake out here. Still. Calm. This is as close to perfect as it’s gonna get for winter fishing. The boat held so steady on the sea, no engine parts or trawl gear clanked. He felt only the hum of the engine in his feet.
As he continued south to the grounds he often fished, Bev’s disappointment and his guilt at leaving before her birthday nipped again like a mosquito at the edges of his thoughts. He poured himself a cup of coffee from the thermos and continued his heading toward Cape Meares. In the middle of the night, coffee was his main staple until its edge drove him to the galley after a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He let Dick steer for a few minutes.
The National Fisherman, oceanographic and other fishing magazines upright in the rack at the end of the table caught his eye. Different from most fishing vessels, the Fargo had no girlie magazines on board. The first time Larry brought one home, it was the last one he bought. Bev had said, “My father doesn’t have them on his boats or in his house. You’re not going to either.” Larry respected his wife and had none at home or on board. It was not much of an issue for him because he loved to read the science of the ocean when he took a break.
Not many breaks on this shorthanded trip, he thought.
He found the homemade cookies in the box Bev had packed and felt even guiltier about having left on Friday. It was after midnight now. Her birthday!
Aw jeez, Bev, happy birthday! he said to the blue denim wallpaper she had put in the galley early in the fall to cover the food, grease, and coffee stains on the paneling. It really was a pretty posh fishing vessel with the denim here and Gibson girl wallpaper in his stateroom. He smiled at his reverie.
One September day after the owners of the Fargo asked Larry to captain the boat, Bev informed Larry she was going to do a bit more than muck it out—she was going to paper the galley and stateroom. OK, thought Larry, this boat is really filthy, even for a fisherman. As for Larry’s stateroom, an inch short of the 6’ 4” he needed merely for his height, it was covered in an almost black paneling.
Bev had started hanging paper before she started school. Her mother and aunts all had papered their houses and Bev tagged along to various homes helping and learning. By 1980, she opened her own business in Tillamook County, Beverly Hills Wallpapering. She silently poohooed her brother David’s laughing at her desire to paper the Fargo. Everyone in the family knew that Bev was a nut for any series of projects. She’d already done a room in every family member’s home and at least 24 other places in Tillamook Co, often doing entire houses. They just shook their heads at her latest turn. Give her a surface and she’d come up with a way to cover it.
On the one hand, this job looked easy—she wasn’t papering Victorian homes with 12- and 14-foot ceilings. On the other hand, she had to consider that the boat had one angle when level, but plugged to capacity after good hauls, it would tilt. She had to hang the paper so it wouldn’t be at a tilt when level or listed.
She selected vinyl light blue herringbone denim for the galley. When she showed Larry the Gibson Girl paper she’d selected for the stateroom, he glanced at it and nodded a quick assent. It was the closest she was going to let him get to pinups in this independent marriage between two strong personalities. He easily gave on this one; she’d give on something else when a situation arose that might lean toward him. A week later, she went to the docks and climbed aboard the Fargo, wallpaper, paste, bucket, brush in hand, Bullet their basset hound following her.
Taking on the “she” of the boat, she spent a half-day scrubbing the galley wall behind the stove and small sink free of its years of grease on grease layers. Disgusting, she thought, about to put up the denim paper. It will look much better when I’m done and give these fellows a couple moments of pleasure as they pour a cup of coffee, scramble up a scootin’-along-the-shore, or make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She spent three days scrubbing, priming, and hanging the wall coverings.
As she worked, she thought about the day she first met Larry in 1970, about 100 feet from where the Fargo was now tied up. Sitting on the gunwale of the Teddy Jo talking to a short, dark-haired fellow, Larry wore a lavender shirt, a blue bandana tied around his neck, and his cap set on his head at a jaunty angle. She looked at his gorgeous red beard, beautiful blue eyes and forgot why she came down to the dock. He smiled at her and she smiled back.
“You still burning the toast?”
“What? I never burned any customer’s toast.”
“You burned mine yesterday when you served me breakfast.”
“No, I did not,” and love and a lifetime relationship began.
Nine years later, like the amulet a medieval lady tied to her knight’s arm, the she of this wife was going to do everything she could to protect the she of her husband’s boat. She stepped back to admire her work, the unbeknownst talisman to the vessel’s safety. Meanwhile, Larry was on the back deck rigging for shrimping or in the engine room cleaning, checking, or repairing something.
She examined the walls in his stateroom. Six-foot strips made this an easy job. She’d grown up in Garibaldi with parents in the fishing business, had gone to school with most of the local fishermen, waited on them at her parents’ restaurant, The Troller, and was well known in town for her perky personality. One and all fishermen came by to kid her over wallpapering the Fargo. When she finished at the end of the third day, she stepped back to check her work. Laugh away, Fishermen! This looks really nice, she thought.
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