Fifty years of fish

Mavis Thorne stepped off the Fulford ferry in the spring of 1974 with a typewriter, a trunk of books and a plan to start the island's second newspaper. She lasted a week. The island already had a paper, and a good one. What it did not have, Mavis wrote in her diary, was a decent piece of halibut.

So she bought a rowboat from a man in Vesuvius Bay, learned to jig for lingcod off Beaver Point, and sold what she caught from a folding table on the Ganges wharf. She painted THE HERRING over the table because she had already paid for the sign.

The table became a shack, the shack grew a counter, and the rowboat retired in favour of Dot, then Big Dot, then a third boat nobody could agree on a name for. Her daughter June took over the counter in 1998. Her grandson Kit runs the boats.

Mavis still comes in every morning to read the day's catch aloud, like headlines, to whoever is standing in line. We are still small. We still wrap fish in paper. We still fish by hook, line and trap, close to home, and we still sell out most Saturdays. If you have been meaning to come by, come early.