 My name is Vic Amos. I've been fishing for 45 years, anywhere from Oregon to Queen Charlotte Islands, so in shore, offshore, prawn fishery. I've done a lot of different fisheries in my lifetime. Yeah, Terry Amos. I'm a fisherman for many years too. 30 years of war as an owner-operator. I grew up in it and traveled the whole coast, also the BC coast, some offshore into Oregon and Washington too. Okay, what's important to me in the fishery is that we maintain a family-based fishery where I deal with my kids and my grandkids, my granddaughters and my grandsons, my daughters, and it's not always about making money. It's also about having fun. You make it fun for them. When I grew up as a kid what I fell in love with was when the weather was bad, my father would go in and they would all barbecue a fish on the beach. And we'd stay there until the sun went down. So then we'd just sit around a fire having just hearing stories and stuff. So that's what's important to me is having that lifestyle. And it's not all about making money. It's about the ability to play together too. Okay. Yeah, lifestyle. It's been some good times fishing with the family. Yeah, I just hope to have enough openings or quarters to keep going, to keep us all active. And yeah, we like this type of a fishery and we want to teach our kids well. Yeah, for me it's the ability to survive. You pass on the skill of surviving, the ability to adapt quickly and change with the conditions. Whether it's fishing policies or weather or whatever the natural things like El Ninos or so, the ability to like fishing can get really complicated. You don't only have to be able to navigate and navigate without equipment. You have to know exactly where you are and where you're going without all of the modern day equipment. And modern day equipment is nice. So you want to teach them how to survive and become good at fishing. It isn't just going out and catching fish. There's a lot to it. You have to know how to maintain your boat. And a lot of people don't know how to do that. They don't know how to manage money. You have to know how to manage your money. Because if you don't manage your money, there's nothing to do any work on the boat with. So that's sort of what I want to leave with my kids is the ability to identify all of those skills from weather, navigating, maintaining gear, maintaining the boat, and knowing where and how to fish the tides, the moons. What's the best time to go out on a full moon? A few days after the full moon, the tides are the biggest. They're the largest tides. So you try to go out when the tides are a little smaller. Especially if you're not so bad in the shallow water, but you start getting into that deeper water, the tides are stronger in the deeper water. Undertoes are stronger. So you really have to know a lot about tides and weather. And what's nice now that I see is the modern technology, the cell phone, I can pull it up. And I don't have to rely on just Environment Canada. I can actually look, I don't know where this website comes from, but it's pretty accurate with the technology of today, satellites and what not. So yeah, there's a lot to teach kids. And patience, to teach them how to be patient, how to work together. Yeah, I mean, I could go on all day long about that. But yeah, that's sort of the basic. And I think that if they learn the family values plus the skills, I think that they're they could go to any job. And that's what's happened with all of my kids, my kids have all gone on to do well. Whether my oldest daughter is a teacher, my other daughter works in construction, she does really well at an age. She's got a brilliant mind for numbers. My son, Tom, is in the Navy and Halifax, and he's retired there. So and my son will runs a boat, my son, Jake, they all learned how to work. So whether they're fishing or they're not fishing, they take that same skill into whatever they're doing. That skill of learning how to fish is transferable into whatever field. My kids have all gone into different fields. So I think it's important to teach kids to know how to work, what it takes to be a good worker, because if you're a good worker, you'll always have work. You'll always have a job. Going back to my grandpa, we didn't have the updated weather programs we have now. So he would always be looking up at the skies and the horizons, and he'd be able to read them pretty well, actually, what was forthcoming. And yeah, that and spots, he would line up certain mountains and be like a gun site. I let him mark them. And he'd tell me of them, and I try to program them. I didn't get them all the time, but later it dawned on me. He's got a lot of skill there, finding these little details up on how they got to the spots. Yeah, peaks of mountains, peaks of mountains, and then you line up another mountain below, and it's got to or a point or some kind of a landmark. So yeah, that's how they all navigate it without equipment. Long before Peter's TPS. And my dad, going into the harbor, there used to be a whistle boy, navigation whistle boy. It could be green or white or red, but anyway, it didn't matter where he was going. What they have is they have a whistle. They all have a whistle, so they go, you hear the whistle, right? And so what he would do, when he was fishing in a fog, I mean, you don't know where you're going. You really don't. You're really going in by the, you know, just by running into the shoreline somewhere. Once he ran into the shoreline, he recognized the shoreline, so then he would just go along, and then when he got closer, he would shut the engine off, and he would listen. He would listen for the whistle, right? And the whistle was an indicator that the entrance was real close. So he'd hear the whistle, and then he would get, realize what direction it was. It's really important to know that direction. So he went in that direction, and then when he got close again, he shut it off in here. He's getting closer. He's going the right way. So then once he got by the whistle, he was probably half a mile from the beach. From there, he would just, he knew roughly the angle. And again, it was, you had to watch because you had to be so aware as you're going in because the, you know, some of these entrances are narrow, right? And that's why they have these whistle boys outside so that you have the opportunity to hear it and see it. And they all have numbers. Everyone, no matter what color it is, those whistle boys, whether it's white, red, or green or black, they all have numbers on them. And you can take those numbers and you can put it on the chart and see what number is that one. You can find it. So it all correlates with what's in real life and what's on the chart. So that way you know that's the right boy. What I would like to say is that for me, a lot of times people hear I'm a fisherman, and they'll say good luck to you. And I always want to respond by saying it's not about luck. Once you've been doing it this long, you go to the same spot, buy, rough it within the same time of the year, and you're going to have them there. Are you know that their run is coming by there, right? So are you know that when it comes to halving, you know that that's ideal halve grounds, right? What is ideal halve grounds? The most ideal halve grounds is a clay bank because then you can leave your gear out 24 hours a day without worrying about your bait being eaten up. Now if you lay it over gravel, which they like sand and gravel, they you know you will get lights coming through and eat up your bait and you've got to get your fish out every day. So I mean it's important to know those, you know, because we've had bad days. You know I've had days of one, two, you know, but I've had days where I absolutely load it, right? And they come, right? But it's a matter of, it isn't a matter of lucky. It's a matter of knowing where to go, you know. You will have those days where everything just lines up and it falls into place, and then there's days where you don't. But in the long run, you, you know, you know so much about where to go that it really isn't about luck as much as the skill to do it. So, okay. For me, I think starting out in the morning we'll get our gear out and everything will be quiet and then you're watching and listening. Your crew is out in the back watching. This is on trolling and it's, you're just kind of waiting there because if you don't stop, it's going to happen. They're going to bite sooner or later and then all of a sudden your belt starts ringing. Boom, boom, boom. Another one starts to hit and then it just spikes your excitement, your adrenaline and kick starts to hit the day and it's just a really exciting feeling. And you know what I also like is that because things are more, we've got more technology, with more technology, technology you have more electrical. And if you have any electrical leaks, even in the minor little electrical leak, it affects your readings. Like for years, Terry would beat us a few fish every day and they're going, well, we've got the same gear, we've got everything's the same, right? We're running over the same grounds. But I think that what we did last year was we, we did some rewiring for the boat was 38 years old now. So we took some of the older wire and replaced it. And I think that made a difference this year was, was just, you know, it could, I mean, a lot of these older wire, they would crack. And I mean, they're not completely exposed, but the electricity gets out, right? And it can affect your boat to, and how it fishes it. So it's really important to pay attention because you're trying to assimilate your boat as a school of heron or school of bait, no matter whatever that is. And that school of bait is like a room here with people. It emanates electrical charge, a positive charge, right? So, so you have to really pay attention to the condition of your electrical, right? That's what I'm saying. It isn't so much luck. It's about paying attention to the details, right? And because you could have one leak on electrical pump with a bilge pump in the hatch where it's always wet. And if that's leaking in there, it doesn't always pump out electricity. But once the water comes up and it pumps it out, it might pump it out for a minute. When the water comes up, the level comes up and the automatic pumps kick on. Then you have this, all of a sudden you got this charge going out, right? And if you have a negative field, right? It also chases fish away. If you got too much of a charge, it's no good either. So you really have to get that balance of electrical and usually around half a volt to seven tenths of a volt, right? Not quite a full volt, maybe half of a volt. On your hull, you're just emanating that as you've gone through the water. It's locked to it. I think for me, it's important for my kids, if any of them are going to do it, for them to always have options. Like if you have one fishery and that fishery collapses for whatever reason, whether it's El Mino or poor runs or bad weather, that you really need to have options. And I think that's what I said the other day. I was saying the reason I survived was because I had options. And some of those options meant work. You work really hard. For years, I did a half a million pounds of dog fish. Well, nobody wanted to do it because you only get paid 25 to 30 cents a pound for it. But when you put in a half a million pounds, you at least pay your bills. So options so that when the salmon were poor, we could maybe go to the fishing offshore, right? And in years, I've done prawns. I've done link cod, gangtroll link cod. I've done gill netting. I've done the halbit fishery, all of the troll fisheries for all of the species, whether it was pinks or sockeye or coal or Chinookkeye. So you have to have options in your basket of opportunities. If you're going to make it, you can't rely on just one fishery. And that's sort of what we're getting down to right now. We're going to have to start planning now so that if we're going to stay in the industry, we have to survive. And how are we going to do that? Because we can't rely on the political process to save us. It's going to be, what are we going to do that is going to preserve our ability to stay in the industry? Just getting back to those options, that's really important because you never know when we're going to get cut back on one fishery or the other. Like right now, we're doing halibut and salmon, which we've did for a number of years and it's been working out, but now we get a cut back on one fishery and we'll have to think this over before the season. Now it's getting there and decide on what our next step is. Yeah, maybe it won't be called fishery. We're going to have to do something to make up for the shortfall in one fishery that's been put on us this year. Yeah, you have to maintain your boat and equipment really well so that when opportunities come, your boat is going to work. One of the problems that I see is that a lot of boats are undercapitalized for maintenance and so they get all excited about an opening and they'll go up to the opening and there might be 30 boats starting out in a fishery, but because they don't have enough money for maintenance and they didn't maintain their boats, that within a dare to, you're down to maybe 15 boats. You're down to 10 boats, you know what I mean? So it's really important to be on top of your maintenance when you're down. You have an opportunity to to work on your boat. You work on your boat. It's like doing homework. What ways to pass on my knowledge of the fishery is by taking my kids out when they're really young, like three, four or five years old to come out. We always joke that you start out as a cabin boy or a cabin girl doing dishes and cleaning and keeping the cabin clean and eventually they work their way out to the deck and start to pull gear and make gear and you know and eventually they, you know they eventually take things over and in my case with my son Will, he came with me when he was 14 and he was able to run the boat on his own by the time he was 18 and he ran on a solar trip without me when he was 18. So he's been at it now for probably 14 years. So that's how I pass it on and I'm with him as a mentor all the way through from beginning to end. Fishing can get complicated because there's an accounting and bookkeeping side of it which I've never handed over to any of my kids yet but eventually they'll have to take all of that over. So I think that just being a mentor, being there day in and day out and encouraging them to get started now because we know the time frames, we know what needs to be done. So yeah I think it's more important to be a mentor which means you're there all the time, you're never just there to teach them, you're there to work them through all of that and you just slowly teach them, slowly teach them to the point where eventually they just take over. I'm pretty fortunate I got trained by, to me, two of the top fishermen in my eyes which is my dad and my uncle. So I got a lot of knowledge and my son wants to step into the industry. I'll pass on whatever I can to him. So far he's young and he's not quite sure what he's going to do yet so we'll see how that unfolds.