Most of the things that I learned in the fishery I just picked up from watching other people do it. Grandmother Louise Cabot was a left-handed splitter and she taught me how to split fish. I was splitting very young - I can remember standing on a tub to be to the table. By 13, I was pretty good at it. I remember grandmother saying lots of times, "You're going to be a better splitter than I am." When the men came in at six in the morning with a load of fish from the trap, you had to get up and get on your clothes. In the mornings, a lot of times I can remember it would be all women and girls.

In the fall of the year, in the month of September, time come to make the fish. The older men kept on fishing. It seemed like they used to keep on the herring fishery after the caplin was gone off the bar - they'd keep trying to get a few hauls in the day off their trawls because it would be very good fishing then. Some days we'd have a couple of hundred quintals of fish out to pick up. You'd come out of school at 3:30 in the evening, grab your slice of molasses bread, change your clothes if it was good clothes you had, and go for the flakes. From that till 5:30 or 6:00 everybody was going full tilt bringing fish in and yaffling up fish. We had fish everywhere. When I was only about 13 my brother got a pony for me and he had a wagon with it. I used to do a lot of hauling the fish around. I was right in there headlong.

It wasn't salt bulk in those days, it was light salt fish; you didn't put so much salt on it. For dad and them, 350 or 400 quintals was a half decent summer - it was five and six of them in a crew. You'd pick up a fish by the tail and he stood out right straight, I mean that was like a shaving, there was no weight left into it. You had to pile up the handbarrow forever to break weight on it for 112 pounds of dry fish. You was packing it up till you got sick and tired of packing it up.

It was a lot of good memories of growing up there, the fish in the store and the store lofts and one thing and another. It was right from spring until fall - every day had its own chores and it was never a boring time.