The June 1982 Pacific Fishing article about Mark Coulthurst was, at key junctures, a biography. At every point along the way, it was clear that his story — his life — had an arc. If the “arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice,” as Martin Luther King Jr. once noted, then Mark Coulthurst’s arc bent toward success.
Would that very success lead to Alaska’s worst unsolved mass murder?
Mark Coulthurst: Doing the Bellingham Scramble (excerpts), by Doug McNair.
PART II
Mark’s fishing career really began in a motorcycle shop in Bellingham. At 16, his boss invited him along on gill-net junkets. “He towed the little net out from shore with a skiff, then went back to his shack to sleep ’til morning. Sometimes the net would go dry at night and we’d go out and pick, maybe, a couple of fish. It was the same deal, time after time. You couldn’t really call it fishing.”
Even so, the prospects of pulling salmon out of a net seemed a good deal more exciting to the teenager than pulling chain sprockets off a parts shelf. “So I found an old, beat-up skiff and my dad hawked his house trailer” to help pay for it. And there he was, a 17-year-old entrant in an overcrowded, downhill fishery.
Gillnetter Skiff (example)
“I started on spring chinook in Bellingham Bay and did real well. When I started going out into the gulf [the Georgia Strait] I realized what a small boat I had.”
Still, the lad was, in his own words, “smashing ’em,” and after two seasons and a brief lease on a Bryant bow picker, “I saw this great big, beautiful, fiberglass gill-netter — one of those Mel Martin boats, and I just had to have one of those Cadillacs.”
Mel Martin fiberglass gillnetter (example)
Out of high school now, Mark built the boat from the hull up and started putting in good salmon seasons, fishing everything he could from springs to chums, making a foray into Alaska. But the real extra leverage that got him into the new gill-netter St. Mark, and, two years later, the seiner Kit, came as a result of “diversifying and maximizing.”
“At the time, we were always looking for something else to do, something else to fish for. I can remember going to the gill-net association meetings and listening to the guys cackling about herring fishing. You couldn’t make any money at it, they said.”
“It’s been a gold mine for us.”
With one of only a few Puget Sound gill-net permits, Mark went after herring with the skiff, hauling as everyone did, by hand, until the catches just got too large and he built the first herring gill-net drum in the sound. In a few years, the cycle was set: after fall salmon it was south to the new San Francisco Bay herring fishery, then Puget Sound herring, Southeast herring and back to Bellingham for springers.
Later, when the Togiak, AK., herring fishery started up, Coulthurst was poised. “That was such an exciting thing, to see all those boats and tenders coming from everywhere to the middle of nowhere for the first big season. The anticipation and excitement were tremendous… Boy, did we fall flat on our faces that first year!”
Togiak herring fishery (Alaska Fish Radio, 2018)
Source: Alaska Department of Fish & Game (Commercial Fishing Division)
Copyright Leland E. Hale (2018). All rights reserved.
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