For weeks MacRae in the Blackbird and Vin Ferrara in her sister ship flitted here and there.  The purse seiners hunted the schooling salmon, the cohoes and humps.  The gill-netters hung on the seiner’s heels, because where the purse seine could get a haul so could they.  And the carriers and buyers sought the fishermen wherever they went, to buy and carry away their catch.

Folly Bay suffered bad luck from the beginning.  Gower had four purse-seine boats in commission.  Within a week one broke a crankshaft in half a gale off Sangster Island.  The wind put her ashore under the nose of the sandstone Elephant and the seas destroyed her.

Fire gutted a second not long after, so that for weeks she was laid up for repairs.  That left him but two efficient craft.  One operated on his concessions along the mainland shore.  The other worked three stream mouths on Vancouver Island, straight across from Folly Bay.

Still, Gower’s cannery was getting salmon.  In those three bays no other purse seiner could shoot his gear.  Folly Bay held them under exclusive license.  Gill nets could be drifted there, but the purse seiner was king.

A gill net goes out over a boat’s stern.  When it is strung it stands in the sea like a tennis net across a court, a web nine hundred feet long, twenty feet deep, its upper edge held afloat by corks, its lower sunk by lead weights spaced close together.  The outer end is buoyed to a float which carries a flag and a lantern; the inner is fast to the bitts of the launch.  Thus set, and set in the evening, since salmon can only be taken by the gills in the dark, fisherman, launch, and net drift with the changing tides till dawn.  Then he hauls.  He may have ten salmon, or a hundred, or treble that.  He may have none, and the web be torn by sharks and fouled heavy with worthless dogfish.

The purse seiner works in daylight, off a powerfully engined sixty-foot, thirty-ton craft.  He pays the seine out over a roller on a revolving platform aft.  His vessel moves slowly in a sweeping circle as the net goes out,—­a circle perhaps a thousand feet in diameter.  When the circle is complete the two ends of the net meet at the seiner’s stern.  A power winch hauls on ropes and the net closes.  Nothing escapes.  It draws together until it is a bag, a “purse” drawn up under the vessel’s counter, full of glistening fish.

The salmon is a surface fish, his average depth seldom below four fathoms.  He breaks water when he feeds, when he plays, when he runs in schools.  The purse seiner watches the signs.  When the salmon rise in numbers he makes a set.  To shoot the gear and purse the seine is a matter of minutes.  A thousand salmon at a haul is nothing.  Three thousand is common.  Five thousand is far below the record.  Purse seines have been burst by the dead weight of fish against the pull of the winch.