“ Money!” said the ad in Pacific Fishing magazine. Dollar bills fluttered through the air as tunas in top hats danced on their tail fins. “Do you want to come home every night and make $1,400 per day?” The Pacific American Fish Company was looking for “a few good fishermen” in Astoria, Oregon, and Bellingham,
Washington. I called up Peter at Pacific American and asked, “What’s the catch?”
“Thirty cents a pound at the dock,” he said. It sounded like a fisherman’s dream. Ah, but the catch . . .
The catch, said Peter, was hagfish, a word to which one must always add, in a low, confidential tone, the explanatory phrase “slime eels,” or as fishermen in New England, where I live, like to say, “slime hags,” a term…
