Photo courtesy of PANL VA92-66

You'd spread the fish in the mornings and you headed back inside for a bucket of berries. And you watched the sun then to see if it was going to rain and if you'd see a cloud coming you had to scramble for home because all the fish was out. There was always a chore to do. As a child we always had responsibilities. You had all the gardens to do as well, all the potato gardens and the cabbage gardens. 'Twas never a dull moment around; it was a job for everybody every day.

I wasn't very old when I got married in West Ste. Modeste in 1961. There was a lot of people getting married at 17. For the first eight or ten years I didn't do an awful lot around the fishery, only watch the boys come in.

I used to fish sometimes. After work in the evenings, Pat would go out probably and jig a quintal of fish and I might help him to put it away if I had someone up with the kids. I had five children and was quite busy around the house.

In 1974 I went to work for Port Union Fisheries in West Ste. Modeste. I bought fish, and myself and another woman split the works. We had a fair bit of fish there that summer. The next summer, 1975, I did a bit of work for them too. I got away from the fishery then for a few years. In 1979 I went back at it again as a supervisor after Northern Fisheries set up in L'Anse au Loup. This was fresh fish now he was getting into, first time ever in the Labrador Straits. I had around 65 people on my shift. When we started getting ready for this, a group come in from St. John's to put on those 2-week courses to train the trimmers and the cutters and all this stuff. And I was very good at filleting, and buddy said this day to the owner, "That's one of your top filleters."

In the summer of 1981 I worked for Nickersons buying fish on the wharf in West Ste. Modeste. There wasn't a day I went under 30,000 pounds of trawl fish, the biggest kind. The next year I went to work with Earles and I worked with them for six years.

From there on in the fishermen's committee and the community council started going after money and we got an ice maker installed and we got our canopy on the wharf done. Every year you kept adding a bit to it and trying to get what you could out of it. In 1987 I went after a large amount of money to diversify that plant. We could see what was happening with the salt fish market. It seemed to be diminishing - it was dying away because you weren't getting the price and the grade on the fish.