I've just read a very satisfying memoir about fishing out of Noyo Harbor in the 1960's and 70's. Local readers of long standing will enjoy this book because it's about everyday people and extraordinary events they remember.

The rest of us will enjoy this book because it's thrilling, and skillfully reveals a dangerous workaday world mostly hidden from landlubbers.

Trolling On the Edge, The Story of a Noyo Fisherman was written by Jeanne Duncan, based on about 20 years of conversations with her brother, Patrick Robbins. Jeanne is an excellent writer with an impressive resume. Patrick, now working well away from the ocean in the high desert of northern California, for many years lived an ocean-going life of risk and adventure.

Like most books I read and enjoy, this one is patched all over with green post-it notes marking passages. Here are a few quotes:

"At a time (in the 1960's) when you can buy the best house in Fort Bragg for $50,000, a Makela brothers (wooden) boat sells for $160,000. But then, to a fisherman, a house is nothing but a poorly built boat." From the chapter Longlining, Western Style: "If one hook gets out of place, or the tub is coiled wrong, one comes out somewhere and takes a whole tangle with it. ...You don't know where the next hook is coming from. I always felt like I'd really accomplished something if I lived until noon."

From the chapter Storm: "I've never seen 40-foot swells before, and they are awesome... There isn't anything in your life that prepares you for 40-foot swells -- not even 30-foot swells."

Trolling On the Edge begins with Patrick's childhood spent around the men and boats in Noyo Harbor. As a young man Patrick learned pretty much every kind of West Coast fishing there is. He worked through the last successful decades of family fishing in smaller wooden boats. He got out of the profession about the time everyone was forced to convert to steel boats, bigger crews, and a more technical style of fishing.

"To most Noyo fishermen," Patrick says, "wooden boats feel more like home, and they like the pride and skill of capturing fish fairly and knowing that enough of them always escape to assure the continued health of the fishery... What is worse for them than rendering their boats and methods obsolete is the fact that the changes make their unique skills worthless... these changes are taking a lot of the joy out of fishing."

Some listeners may remember a novel The Fisherman's Son by Elk author Michael Koepf. Koepf fished the West Coast in the same era, and his book gives a no less true account of the joys and anguish of the fisherman's life.

Patrick Duncan ends his memoir like this: "Several runs of Pacfic Coast salmon are on the endangered species list. The fishermen on small wooden boats are too, but I wouldn't give up on them. They will be around as long as there's an ocean, because there will always be fishermen the world over who know what I know. We're too independent to have any cult or secret handshake, but if we did we would have a maxim, and keep it carefully guarded from the prying and curious. It would be something like this one that William Henry Davies wrote about a private passion:

I'll make my Joy a secret thing,
My face shall wear a mask of care;
and those who hunt a Joy to death,
Shall never know what sport is there!

Both Trolling on the Edge and The Fisherman's Son are in paperback, and both are well worth your time.

Aired Friday August 31, 2001 at 8:35 am and Sunday September 2, 2001 at 6:55 pm