Fish, Gold, Rum, Drug

04/2016 Vol. April 2016

Guy LaPorte had seen a little weather on the Inside Passage.  In eighteen years of commercial fishing, hadn’t he warned dozens of weekend yachters, moored on Nettle Island, not to let the innocent name fool them?  He’d seen the Queen Charlotte Strait, the Hecate Strait, and the Strait of Georgia - all dismal bodies of water - turn lethal in a crossing. So, when his fishing vessel, the Susie Q, encountered a sudden storm just south of Desolation Sound, he wasn’t surprised. He also knew it would be the last time he’d see rough waters because he was going to anchor and dock this life as soon as he got back to the island.

At forty-two, Guy was about to change careers and become a grandfather. That his teenage son, North, barely admitted being the father of the baby his girlfriend was carrying mattered little to Guy. He saw becoming a grandfather as a new start in life, a place to right wrongs. Though he couldn’t think of too many wrongs. He’d been a decent father, raising North, mostly on his own, living on the Susie Q when his ex-wife, Minnie, had thrown them both out because her Goddess told her to.