Mugs Pettit, Chinook
Net Fishing
TOMV 2005

Later on, when fishing got so that we needed nets, this was pretty much...this was my grandmother's house for as long as I was a little boy I could remember I held the door shut. But this was made out of a pumice and it was chiseled out so that a rope would fit around there. And then when you either laid a net out, or you had a trap that you wanted to hold something there, you just dropped it down, your line went around here and it held it steady there.

Later on, when we started gill netting, and I started gill netting when I was fourteen years old because it was good for school money and I loved it. Same with my son who gill nets with me now, um...and both of them have fished with me, both of my sons have. This was a [quark] line, a quark for the quark line. This is a pretty modern looking piece of quark line. Usually you have a three strand, but this here is...this is the latest thing. This is what they used and it went through like this, the net was hung down from there, and this is the modern lead line in that when we first started building nets we had just a rope that we had a mold that we laid the rope in it and we poured lead over the top of this line. And then I could remember my grandfather had a ironing board set up and he would run the line across this ironing board and he would...he had his pot of melted lead and he would pour these in, and then he would move it ahead so far and he would pour again, and there would be a lead, however heavy he wanted the lead for his net to be a part. And then he would coil it all up, and then we would coil it all up and then we'd come back and take a file or his pocketknife and clean off the edges so that they web didn't hook on the lead, because when they lead's down here it's bouncing along and if the web would hook on that, well then it would foul it and pull it down and then the fish wouldn't come up and gill into the gill net. So those things were pretty standard. 

And then later on we came out with...this...this is the latest thing. This is a styrofoam quark. This is a knitting needle that my grandfather made. He carved them out of cedar. And what you did was you carry this with you on a boat, and if you had a tear in the net where you had to repair, you could just...we called em "koochied"..you just koochied it all up in a bundle, tied it all up, and it would finish the night out for ya because in those days we had heavy, heavy nets. We used a linen net. And in Bay Center I could remember you used to see those nets out on the racks. They had two poles and they stretched the lead line on one side and the quark line on the other and those nets would sit out and then about every other day or every two days you would pull your net off of that rack into a big tank full of what they call bluestone. And the bluestone was a copper product that it killed everything in there because you get so much a different bacteria and fungus coming on to the net that the linen would rot. And so if you dumped it into that bluestone and you kept it in that bluestone for one day or a day-and-a-half or whenever the season was closed, and then you took it out and you washed it out and then you went back fishing again. The linen net would last you about a year, and then you had to buy it. And then it wasn't very long when we got nylon nets.