It is said that George Moskovita bought,
repaired, traded, and sank more boats than most fishermen would work on in a
lifetime. Moskovita spent his adult life out on the Pacific Ocean. When he
first started fishing at the age of 16, he thought to himself, “Boy, this is
not for me!” but he couldn’t have been more wrong. “But of course it was for
me!” he later said. There is nothing like being out on the open ocean,
surrendering yourself to the dangers of the waves and witnessing the beauty
around you.
Captivated by Moskovita’s stories and unique
perspective on maritime life, Carmel Finley, a historian of science and
researcher of fisheries and fisheries science at OSU, approached us about
publishing Moskovita’s memoir. She wrote the introduction to Living Off the Pacific Ocean Floor, and
today she joins us to share her enthusiasm for Moskovita’s extraordinary
stories.
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I fell in love with George Moskovita on p.
37. I had been attracted earlier, on the first page, by the horrendous story of
the sinking of the Treo on the
Peacock Spit during a dark December storm in 1940. I loved that his family had
loved this man so much they had collected his stories and photographs,
publishing his memoir in 2000. But I really fell for George on p. 37, as he
wrote about getting $14.40 a pound for his shark livers. “I almost fell off my
chair. I couldn’t believe it. I said I would be right down. I couldn’t get
there fast enough.”
I was laughing out loud. It was so easy to
imagine I was hearing George himself tell the story. And that’s when I knew
that Oregon State University Press should republish George’s stories.
Most of the literature about the development
of fishing emerges out of the Atlantic, where fishing developed over centuries.
There were highly developed native fisheries for centuries, but when
industrialization arrived, fisheries developed very rapidly, especially after
1930. New technologies, such as refrigeration and nets designed to avoid
catching small fish, spread quickly throughout the fishing world. George’s
stories detail just how that technology spread and how fishermen used new gear
to catch new species of fish.
Trawling—pulling nets in the water to catch
fish—was slow to come to the Pacific Northwest. There were attempts going back
to the 1880s, but either the boats sank or the companies went bankrupt—and the
fish had to be transported to San Francisco for processing.1
That changed in 1940, when four Puget Sound
boats moved to Astoria and started the trawl fishery. At 26, George Moskovita
already had a decade of experience fishing in Puget Sound and Alaska. He
arrived with a camera and a cranky old purse seiner called the Treo, and started landing dogfish that
he sold to a fish plant owned by a mink rancher. The Treo promptly sank off Peacock Spit, almost costing George and his
crewmen their lives.
George Moskovita lived in the dynamic and
volatile world of commercial fishing between the 1930s to the 1970s. He bought, sold, sank, and traded
boats, and he made deals on all kinds of other things. He was quick to see an
opportunity where he could make money. Over his lifetime, he caught salmon and
sardines, sharks during World War II and pink shrimp in the 1950s. When he
retired from ocean fishing, he and his wife, June, fished a gillnet boat out of
Bellingham, where he had been born.
“He called me the best engineer,” George wrote. “I told him I was just a curious person. I like to see how things
work.” George combined that curiosity with resourcefulness, great personal
bravery, a willing to trust his intuition—and to trust his boats (sometimes a
little too much). Along with his sense of humor, it all made for wonderful
stories.
It is easy to romanticize the world of
fishing; especially stories are accompanied by pictures of beautiful boats. The
story George tells has little romance; fishing is hard, dangerous work. Other
fishermen are jealous of their fishing secrets. Crewmen sometimes wind up a
trip with less than they started. It was hard to make enough money to cover
basic expenses, let alone pay the bills. If the boat wasn’t fishing, it wasn’t
making any money.
I’m delighted that OSU Press has decided to
share George’s story by re-publishing his memoir. And I’m sure I will not be
the only reader to chuckle at George’s wry, funny, account of making a living
off the ocean floor.
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1 George Yost Harry Jr., “Analysis and History of the Oregon Otter Trawl Fishery,
1884–1961,” Doctoral dissertation, University of Washington School of Fisheries,
1956. http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/xmlui/handle/1957/16899,
downloaded March 1, 2013.