The Big Run: Life Aboard a Salmon Seiner

The mighty salmon runs that worked their way through Puget Sound each season on their way to British Columbia’s Fraser River provided a way of life for fishermen in the Pacific Northwest for more than a century.

 Commercial gillnetters and purse seiners pursued millions of Sockeye salmon each season hoping to harvest a portion of the massive schools of fish that migrated through the region each season. It was demanding, and often dangerous work,  but the knowledgeable captain and crew could hit it big by being in the right place at the right time to capitalize on this natural bonanza.

In 1958 when captain Nick “Foreigner” Barhanovich hired greenhorn Ray Fadich to work as a skiffman on Barhanovich’s purse seiner,  The Emancipator, Fadich had little clue of what that fishing season would hold for him. As the newest member of the Emancipator’s crew Fadich had to deal with a steep learning curve, days of backbreaking physical labor, and the practical jokes and daily initiation into the brotherhood of the commercial fisherman that came with the territory.

In this memoir of the 1958 sockeye fishing season aboard The Emancipator Ray Fadich describes in detail the disappointment and joy he and his crewmates experienced as they vied with weather, competing boats, and time as they tried to strike it rich during The Big Run