When the cod fishery was open I had a job as a culler. A culler is a person the fish buyers would hire to go around to fishermen's stages and judge the quality of the fish and sort the fish into different sizes. I worked as a culler with Fishery Products of Fox Harbour for six years. They went out of business and Earle's Freighting Service moved in. I worked for them for five years.

I used to cull fish from Camp Islands to Ship Harbour. There were three full time cullers -myself, Ambrose Chubbs and Truman Poole. The company would also bring down five or six cullers from Newfoundland to help cull the fish. We would start culling the fish around the first week of September and stop about the last week of October. I would go to fishermen's stages and take my culling board and a set of weights with me. The culling board was just a board with all the different sizes of the fish marked off on it. Sometimes a fish inspector would go to a stage with me. He would check over the fish and inspect the fisherman's stage to make sure it was clean and that it didn't leak.

When you got to a stage you would give the skipper a piece of paper called a tallying card. I would also have my own tallying card. When we weighed off a quintal of fish, which was one hundred and twelve pounds, we would each make a stroke on the card. That way we would each have a record of the fish. When all the fish was culled, we would compare cards to make sure we both had the same tally. Most times it was right on target, but there was cases when the cards would be a little different. In those cases we each had to compromise a little.

There were three grades of fish. There was choice fish or number one as it was sometimes called. Fisherman got the most money for this kind. Choice fish was sorted into different sizes. There was extra small, small, medium, large and extra large. The bigger the fish, the better the price the fisherman got. Then there was standard fish - fish that had something wrong with it. This could be caused by poor splitting (fish with round or spilt tails), rust colored spotting caused by liver left on the fish, jigger holes or fin thorn. Standard fish did not sell for as good a price as choice did. The lowest grade of fish was called cullage, fish that was of poor quality. It was fish that was soft or the meat was hanging from the bones, usually gillnet fish that was left in the water for a couple of days. Fisherman got paid the least price for this type of fish.

Fisherman had to be careful when salting fish. They had to make sure that they used enough salt. If they didn't the fish would turn color, might get slimy or smell bad. Salt was not allowed to be reused year after year and was supposed to be thrown away. I remember one year a man down the shore reused old salt from the year before. The fish had turned a pinkish colour. He told me the fish was bay fish and that was why it was pinkish. I believed him and culled all of his fish. He had about one hundred quintals in all and it was all of the same color. When the fish was bought back to Fox Harbour my boss knew right away that old salt had been used to cure the fish. The fish had some kind of bacteria in it which made the fish uneatable. The entire batch of fish was dumped. However, that man still got paid for the fish because the fish had been receipted.