Small Craft Route: Rivers Inlet - E. of Mile 350

Moments in time: It is July, 1925, a Sunday afternoon at McTavish Cannery, one of 10 in the winding fjord that is Rivers Inlet. Steam tug's whistles echo up and down the channel. From all the canneries: Inrig, Beaver, McTavish, Brunswick, Good Hope, Goose Bay, Provincial, Wadhams, and Rivers Inlet, big steam tugs began towing long lines of 28 to 30 foot sailing gillnetters down the inlet. On each boat the one or two-man crew is stowingthe week's grub: hardtack, bacon, coffee, maybe heating up water on a stove made of a cut up coal oil can. The tug drops off boats as it travels, some sailors preferring the protected waters of places like Klaquaek Channel, others staying behind the tug until they got out into the wider waters of Fitz Hugh Sound.

Just at the stroke of six, a signal gun is fired from each cannery, and boats start paying out gillnets off their sterns, with cedar floats holding up the 50-foot deep nets like walls below the surface. At times the mists and the rain would descend and each boat would seem to be alone.

Then the fish would come as part of the powerful drama played up and down the coast each summer. The fishermen would watch their cedar corks bouncing as the incoming salmon drove into the nets below. Each day the fish-buying boat, or packer, would come to take the fish, and on Friday night, the tugs would corral the fleet for the tow back up the inlet to the cannery.

Today most of the canneries are abandoned, or the canning equipment has been removed, and they just serve to store nets and gear. Fishermen still work these waters, but big packers with tanks of refrigerated sea water take the fish to Prince Rupert.

Diorama, part of the salmon fisheries exhibit at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, but this could be a scene at any one of the dozens of salmon canneries scattered up and down the northwest coast.

Canned salmon label, circa 1930. Labels were almost and art form, and many canneries canned their fish under multiple labels.

Below: a cannery tug heads out from the cannery towing a line of sailing gillnetters, Rivers Inlet, 1915.