P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class=MsoNormal>More than a history of the Vancouver fishing industry, this collection of adventures set on the Pacific Ocean also serves as a compelling memoir. With dozens of salty tales of hardworking and hard-living fishermen and fish-industry workers, this is the story of West Coast fishing from the Strait of Georgia, down to Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, and even a look into New York’s old-time, mob-controlled fish markets. With wisdom and insight, the tales also serve as an ecological warning, recalling the lost bounty of Canada’s natural resources of a century ago and their possible extinction today at the hands of government mismanagement and overfishing.

Norman Safarik's profile page

Allan Safarik was born in Vancouver and raised in a commercial fishing family on Vancouver Heights in North Burnaby where he spent much of his childhood exploring the waterfront when he wasn't playing soccer in East End parks. He is the author of fourteen books of poetry, is an editor and was a co-founder of Blackfish Press in British Columbia. In 1986, he edited the award winning anthology Vancouver Poetry. Safarik, a long time resident of White Rock, BC, currently resides in Dundurn, Saskatchewan and teaches Imaginative Writing at St. Peter's College in Muenster. Safarik won the 2003 John V. Hicks Manuscript Award for Literary Non-Fiction and the Saskatchewan Book Award for Poetry (in the name of Anne Szumigalski) for When Light Falls from the Sun Hagios Press. He has a B.A. in English from Simon Fraser University. His recent books include Yellowgrass (Hagios, 2008) and The Day is a Cold Grey Stone (Hagios 2010).

Allan Safarik's profile page

"There are plenty of published memoirs of British Columbia's fishing industry, but none quite like this. Most are told by the fishers, and generally focus on the salmon fishery. Safarik, however, brings a unique insight into the diverse fisheries that British Columbia's coastal waters once sustained and the people who caught, processed, and bought them." —www.BCStudies.com