Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Seaforth News, 1959-05-28, Page 7Great Waterway Half a century age the Panama Canal in -the -making was the wonder of the world—an engi- neering colossus that would dwarf all the ancient and mod- ern wonders—,"the most note- worthy contrbiution toward the material improvement of the world ever made by the Teutonic race," Tj,att•'wae before the skylines of MOand Manhattan were puil'°atset-With spectacular pin- naolesR OfeesEeel and concrete, be- foreslooyer Dam, Grand Coulee, ande. ,Bonneville walled back small inland seas, before TVA and the St. Lawrence Seaway, before the era of eight -lane throughways, skyways, and the Golden Gate Bridge, before the incredible construction miracles of World War Ih The importance of Panama has not diminished in those fifty years, but so many other man- made miracles have been crowd- ed onto the continents that the Canal has long since lost its pre- eminence as the earth's major tourist attraction. When the great ditch was empty of water and the concrete walls naked, the sight .was stupendous, the awe-inspiring grandeur too mag- nificent to comprehend. Now the real wonder of the Canal is submerged, concealed behind the unimposing control towers or inside thegiant walls where acres of intricate machin- ery have been functioning with scarcely an interrupation, since 1914. Transit through the locks is made So smoothly, so effort- lessly that a spectator unfamili- ar with the hidden workings sees ' little to marvel about, and the ride through the Cut where ter- rifying slides and upheavals kept engineers on edge for decades is no more exciting than a river- boat trip down the Hudson. To inured globe-trotters the slow, eight-hour passage across the Is- thmus can be rather tedious. From the Caribbean a ship noses past the twin cities of Col- on and Cristobal into tine channel leading to Gatun Locks. Great gates swing open and close; in three steps the -vessel is magical- ly lifted eighty-five feet to the level of a broad inland lake that bridges the American continent at its narrowest point. Skirting little exotic islands- and jungle peninsulas, the ship winds across. the lake for twenty miles, then at a dawdling pace moves maj- estically through the nine -mile Cut in -the Continental Divide, pauses at Pedro Miguel for the first Pacific lockage, at Mira- flores for two more steps down and in a few minutes is sweep- ing past Balboa toward the open Pacific. Altogether from deep Atlantic to deep Pacific the trip is only fifty miles, instead of ten thousand around the Horn. Seamen in their sixties and seventies still remember when they had to take that long way around, when the distance by water from New York to San Francisco was over 13,000 miles rather than some 5,000, when the passage to Ecuador was 7,000 miles longer than it is now Old men—the veteran diggers of the Panama campaign — remember when the terrain through which the waterway was to pass was a swampy morass, the bed of turbulent rivers, and impenetra- ble hillside jungle. But almost everyone else has forgotten. People back home, and the new generation, take the Canal for granted, as though it had always belonged to the geography of the Western Hempishere, — From "The Strength to Move a Moun- tain," by W. Storrs Lee. A man was undergoing a test of suitability for the police force and was asked: "What would you do in order to break up an angry crowd?" He thought for a moment, "Take up a collection;" he re- plied. TRABZON ERZURUM • TURKEY ►+ RAF BOMBS — The British Royal Air Force bombed 14,547 -foot - high Mt, Suphan in Turkey (cross on Newsmap), about 100 miles from the Soviet border. Purpose was to demolish secret socket equipment lost when a 4rc.op transport orashed. It was Considered too hazardous to get rhe equipment down and too dangerous to leave it where It might be found. MISSILE SHELTER — The world's largest airs-dpparted shelter, a huge lollipop shaped dome, Is field tested .at New Cumber.- ' land, Pa. Called the Pentadome, it'll be used for missile main- tenance. An outline of the continents is painted on. At left, workers erect a smaller version, CITY THAT LIVES ON FISH Prince Rupert almost lives on fish. Directly or indirectly, each of its 12,000 residents has. a vital stake in the fishing industry.• Fish processing and canning form the town's chief reason for being and its stalwart fisher- men sail great distances to bring back the produce that helps feed a hungry world. Chief harvest of the northern seas are salmon and halibut: The world's most valuable flatfish is halibut — that %mysterious fish that lives to be 40 years cid, and may, tip the scales at 470 pounds. Once fishermen pursued this late -mating species so ar- dently that only the 1923 inter.- nationa1 pact saved them from extinction. With revisions, that . treaty today enforces strict quo- tas for each of the four halibut Districts. Prince Rupert is 'headquarters for District 2, which runs north of Vancouver Island to Cane Spencer, north of Sitka, Alaska. But Canadian and American fishermen also set their long - lines in District 3A, the sweep- ing Gulf of Alaska, and in Dis- trict 3B, in the Bering Sea' be- yond the long thin line of the Aleutians. A halibut long -liner with a crew of seven men takes about a week to reach the distant fish- ing grounds over 2,000 mites from Rupert. They fish for e week. Race fish is taken on an individual line,hence the 'name The season's average runs from 80,000 to 100,000 pounds. But these huge fish, feedingon the ocean floor, can rack up inpree- sive tallies. Late in June of 1958 one boat brought back the rec- ord landing of all time for the Pacific Coast — 153,000 pounds, fo halibut. Not all the halibut taken in the North Pacific comes` into Prince Rupert, although the town usually receives the heavi- est landings of any port. To help take care of the big harvest Rupert has several cold storage plants — including the B.C. Packers', largest in the world for fish. Halibut is shipped fresh in ice, or frozen but never can- ned, smoked or salted. Processing begins as soop as fish are taken, for halibut. are gutted at sea. When the catch is winched out of the hold to • the dockside tables, • the fisher- men sort the halibut for size and behead them. The waste slides down a chute to be collected and sent on to a reduction plant for processing into valuable bs'- products, The fish are washed a scrub -brush gets them perfectly clean inside -- trimmed and shelved in the sharp -freezing compartments. Though it may be sweltering - outside, opera- tors inside the plant are bun- dled in woolen jackets, caps and mittens in the icy air, frozen the fish are loaded into a rack and dipped quickly int^ chilled water, then re-frozeie This. forms a complete glaze to pre- vent the meat from losing mois- ture, Then back they go , into cold storage at minus $0 Fahren- heit The stiff carcasses are stacked like cordwood, but gent- ly,. since the market demands perfect fish, Fresh halibut are packed in ice for shipping be refrigerated cast. Halibut ere Imam .fish, al- though they may often be,found near the surface. They're found over both smooth bottoms and rocky bottoms and can be taken. by trawl or line. For rocky bot- tom fishing, lines are preferred and in the Pacific Ocean, Hippo- glossus stenolepsis (as zoolo- , gists has dubbed him), is sought entirely with the aid • of the baited hook. Best • bait is octo- pus (it stays on the hook espec- ially well) but B.C. waters are short of octopi, so during the last two years much octopus for bait has been imported from Japan. Halibut are fond of herring so this fish is the more .usual: bait, although' cod may also be used. The halibut fishery Bevel- , oped largely because herring were also present in astronomi- cal numbers. Herring are taken in a .seine net — a large cotton er nylon web bag with draw- strings at the bottom. A net may cost as much as $20,000 or even more. And a school of her- ring can easily run away with the net, or plunge to the bottom. leaving "'the fishermen with empty hands. Fortunately, her- ring have never trained them- selves in the principles of mass evasive action, Whena school of herring is located, the seiner lowers ite.- seine skiff and sets the net be a great circle. Then a purse- line at the bottom of the net is quickly pulled shut by a powered winch. The cork-liue-- at the top is gathered in and if all has gone according to plan — the herring are trap- ped. A large brail net scoops the fish out of the seine into the hole of a entailer fish packer alongside. The record catch seems to be about 1,400 tons — enough to give a herring to every person in Canada — but the average is about 75 tons, still a lot of fish. The fish packer — which can carry 'from 40 to 125 tons — rushes the herring to the shore. Extra water is hosed into the hold and the herring are pump- ed out with a large centrifugal pump. Herring destined for bait are frozen in 20 -pound blocks. i But a large portion of this sil- very catch goes to reduction plants, where ealuable oils are extracted and the insolubles converted into fish meal. In summer, the herring catch is lighter, but still yields 20 to 40 gallons of oil to the ton. In win- ter, the catch is heavier, but the oil content is lower — perhaps 12 gallons to the ten ,on the av- erage, and can be much less. Crabs, Salmon On the dock of Nelson Bros. Fisheries Ltd at Port Edward, just outside Prince Rupert, are stacked circular wire crab -traps,' These traps are baited and set in about 20 fathoms of water. Led on by an odor tantalizing to their species, the hungry crab climbs a small ramp so con- structed near the bottom of the trap that escape is impossible. Since the bait is enclosed in a plastic box, a sniff is all the crab ever gets. A small circular escape hatch has recently been added to the device so that undersized Drabs can go back 10 the sea and grow some more. Crabs are canned at this. factory, while butter clams are canned at a plant in Prince Rupert. The Prince Rupert Fishermen's Co- operative Association also kip- pers a Mall quantity of herring and smokes a considerable am - mount of cod and salmon. In Prince Rupert, salmon is everybody's business, It was Izaak Walton who first called the salmon "the king of fish" and the ancient Chinese had. legends about "the fish with golden flesh", West Coact In- dians have long prized the sil- verfish; it was their chief source of food -and part of their way of life. British Columbia's second salmon cannery opened on the Skeena River in 1875. (First plant was built on the Fraser in 1870.) It was at this time that U.S, transcontinental railways linked the west coast with the east, thus expanding the mar- ket, ar-k t,, Skeena River salmon ha('e had a fine reputation ever since. There are five species of Pa- cific salmon and the quantities of each caught vary from year to year, Biggest physically is the Spring, also known as the Icing or Shinook, but the catch of Springs is usually very small and is largely sold as fresh fish. The fish that in most years ac- counts for the largest and most profitable harvest is the Sock- eye, or Red Salmon, with the smaller Pink a close second. The Coho (also known as the Blue - hack, or Medium Red, or Silver Salmon) is more important fresh than canned. The fifth of the speciesis the Chum (or Ke- ta) which is canned in good quantity writes Lyn Harrington in Imperial Oilways. Strictconservation laws gov- ern the catch of every species, in each district. For salmon fish- ing ists=ing' in Canadian waters, the gill - net is the most common gear. This is a float -supported twine fence which hangs vertically in the water — but it must be not longer than 1,200 feet and, varies from 14 to 20 feet deep. Some 2,000gillnet boats operate in District 2, out of Prince Rupert. The nets are floated across in- lets and •river'. mouths, usually by one man operating alone 'm the wide, wide sea. Tis daily catch varies; it might be 50 or 60 fish, or much more. A purse - seiner — a big, beamy craft up 10 90 feet long, witth a crew el 'threeto eight men — may bring, in ten times as many. Another method of catching . salmon — mostly used further out to sea, but also employed en inside waters — is trolling. Every spring, some 200 trollers sail out of Rupert, seeking Springs and Cohos chiefly, al- though occasionally Pinks will go for a baited hook. The troller usually carries four poles — two mounted on each side about amidships. Each pole carries three lines, generally. Lend weights sink the lines and the Iures are hook -equipped spoons that spin and twinkle in the water. The salmon snaps at the lure, is hooked and hauled in. You can trawl with a couple of hand lines from a rowboat, of course, but serious trolling is done from boats designed or converted for the job. They may be up to fifty !feet long, diesel - powered and expensive. Trol- lers brave the stormy waters of Hecate Strait, fishing out toward the Queen Charlotte Islands, and beyond. During the April to September season the boat's in- come is likely to run between $4,000 and 6,000 and every cunt of it is earned. Fresh, Frozen, Canned .. Cohos and Springs are the sal- mon which are largely sold to the "fresh fish" market. They May be boxed in .chipped iee and, shipped in refrigeration across the continent. • Sometimes. they ,are quick-frozen for the benefit of customers who prefer to cut their own salmon steaks, or cure them with salt or stroke. While a large amount of salmon is cured in Canada, a substantial quantity goes to Europe for fur- ther treatment, to return to gour- mets in this country by way of the delicatessen, The Co-opera- tive Association mild -cures some salmon sides in a brine for sev- eral days. It's a skilled opera- tion to slash down one side of the backbone, and as neatly take off the other side, Sockeyes, Pinks and Chums are the chief canning fish. The Oceanside Cannery of the Can- adian Fishing Company Ltd; may 'be regarded as typical of this complicated operation. It's highly mechanized and fast -- for large quantities of salmon must be handled in a short season, and speed is essential to maintain the freshness of the product, Heart of the canning process is a remarkable device famil- iarly known as the "Iron Chink" This machine can inhale whole fish at about 75 per minute and exhale the fish minus head, fins, tail, scales and entrails; at the same time it washes away the blood along the backbone. After being thoroughly scrub- bed in fresh running water, the fish is sliced into can -size por- tions by spinning c i r c u l a r knives and the portions are slip- ped into the cans, and salted, at about 250 cans per minute, (The small, quarter -pound, cans are Billed manually,) Filled, the cans pass to an automatic scale, which rejects any that are lightweight. Women "patchers" add more salmon, or re -arrange any can that is not attractive in appearance. Ap- proved cans pass to a closing machine that affixes the lid, ev- acuates the air and applies a coded reference that tells the variety of salmon, area where caught, place and date of pack- ing and even the shift and pro- duction line involved. Steady research has led to new products and new markets. Neck -points or gill -tips, trim- med from salmon, • are now a separate pack at Nelson Bros. They've found that these bits — more pieces than allowed in the regular pack — sell especial- ly well in the Orient. At the Co- operative, neck -points are quick- 'irozenior kippering during the winter. Quick-frozen fillets have be- come a most valued product to fish packers. Fillets occupy less space and have less weight than fish in the round, and thus freight costs are lower. Fillet- ing also means better "portion control", the packers' term for quality. Filleting is a speedy opera- tion in which the workers, most- ly women, deftly slice the meat from the bones, peel off the skin, "candle" the flesh (except hall - but, which is too dense) over a frosted light to make sure it has no imperfections. Other women swiftly tuck the slices into waxed containers, which go through over -wrapping mach- ines, and then to the freezer. A by-products industry has been built up on the waste. Re- duction plants of Nelson Bros. and of the Co-operative collect the waste from all Prince Ru- pert fish houses. Liver and cod, 41al1btit and ether fish are pro- cessed to recover the high vita, min -content oils. The best ctaalr ity of herring 011 is in demand 'by the pharmaceutical trade, Other grades go into many pro - duets from cosmetics to cand'les,. paints to soaps, By no means least is the meal obtained from the non -soluble fish and fish waste. Dried and ground into a fine meal, this makes a high -protein food' for poultry and livestock, While rather expensive to use on it large scale as a fertilizer, many a Prince Rupert rose or prize dahlia thrives on an oceassional feed of fish meal., Lipstick Clue Did you know that lip -prints are as individual as finger- prints? Los Angeles police, seek- ing a hit-and-run driver who had killed a girl, were told at a gar- age of a car with a dented fen- der which had just come in for a quick repair. In the dent was a 'perfect' im- print of a woman's lip which revealed, microscopically, four- teen crease -marks matching those on the victim's lip. They justified a manslaughter conviction, and the officer on the case said: "It was the first time we had ever tried to , get a lip impression from a body, But each set of lips has its own characteristics, which are as Identifiable as finger- prints." Another unusual story in Jack (Dragnet) Webb's "The Badge" a graphic account of the Los. Angeles Police Department, con- cerns four young teenage boys found sleeping in a car which contained a machine-gun, .45 automatic, two shotguns, two rifles, two sticks of dynamite, a bayonet and t h r e e hunting knives. The fifteen - year - old ring- leader explained that things go- ing on in the world had bother- ed hies, so they'd planned to steal a boat and escape to San Miguel island, sixty miles off, and create a new nation where boys could be happy farming, fishing, hunt- ing and relaxing! INTERESTED — Ingemar Johans- son, who meets world heavy- weight champ Floyd Patterson on June 25, -got a ringside view of the pasting received by Brian London in his ill-fated try for the crown at Indianapolis. GET-TOGETHER — One of the first things Sir W inston Churchill did after arriving in Wash- ington was call upon Former Secretary of Slate JoI*i Foster Dulles (right), at Walter Reed Hospital with President Eisenhower (left). The painting of Churchill on the wall was done by the Chief Executive and presented to the hospital.