The Bait Coolah

The bait cooler is a place in the working harbor with which every sternman is well-acquainted. Sternmen are responsible for the bait and most likely pay a visit to the cooler once daily. Let's just say that it doesn't exactly smell like flowers.

When most people walk within 20 ft of the bait cooler door, they hold their nose and grimace. This is a natural reaction, because by holding your nose, you are forcing yourself to breathe through your mouth. Once you've spent some time in the bait cooler, however, you eventually lose the holding-your-nose-and-grimacing part and just automatically breathe through your mouth. In fact I breathe through my mouth all day, since I am leaning over smelly herring while I work. It's really a blessing that humans can't smell with their mouth.

While I don't particularly enjoy the smell of rotten herring, I must confess that it is a familiar smell. It is among other comforting smells, such as engine oil and Gojo, that I associate with my dad from my early childhood. It has been kind of a background odor throughout my life really and it continues to be. I find the smell of bait so "comforting" that now I bring it home with/on me every day!

The summer after I graduated from college I fled to the central Cascades of Oregon to do a forestry internship. I missed the ocean so much during those 3 months in the old growth forests, that I treated myself to a roadtrip down the coast for my birthday. I ended up on the docks of Crescent City, California where all the crab-fishing boats were tied up. It smelled of bait. The lapping of the water rocked the floats gently. One of the boats even bore my name. I felt at home.

I became especially familiar with the cooler this winter when we spent many hours in it preparing shrimp bait. The bait cooler provided shelter from the bitter northerly wind in January and February. We pulped and stuffed bags in the bait cooler throughout shrimping season. We had the cooler all to ourselves, since no other fishermen who work off of that dock were shrimp trapping.

One day I was stuffing bags merrily (ok, maybe this is an exaggeration) when I spotted a black flash out of the corner of my eye. By the time I looked it had vanished, but I did notice that there was a hole in the corner of the cooler where it had disappeared. The plywood wall and foam insulation had been gnawed through and bits of fish were scattered about. Turned out there is a full-time resident in the bait cooler! Mr. Rat! Every day after that I noticed that the fish on top of our barrels full of herring were nibbled at. The bait cooler wasn't only a place to store herring, but it was a food pantry for the Rat family! I found this comical. We managed to cohabitate the cooler in peaceful harmony and share the bait.

Now the bait cooler provides a refreshing escape from the scalding June sun. I was actually eager to get a barrel of bait this morning so that I could feel the cold air on my sunburned back. The cool condensation poured out of the cooler like a think fog bank when I opened the heavy door. I dug my hands into the cold fish throughout the morning sometimes leaving them there for a minute before stuffing a bait bag, so that it would cool me down a bit. Thank God for the bait cooler!