Voyages: At Sea with Strangers

Nora D.S. Robins is Collections Co-ordinator (Internal) of the
University of Calgary Libraries.

Skogan is one of a very few foreign fisheries observers working on
Russian and Polish trawlers off Canada’s West Coast. For weeks and
months at a time, working on ships with such names as Provideniia,
Halniak, Delfin, and Antares, she monitors the hauling, weighing, and
processing of fish, and includes statistics in daily and weekly catch
reports, in accordance with the UN Law of the Sea. All biological and
other quantifiable data must be entered on computer forms with correct
codes. Each trip report requires descriptions of the ship’s procedures
for setting, towing, hauling, and transferring contents and trawls as
well as for dumping, processing, packing, and freezing fish; to this are
added size and capacity of machinery, and times, rates, and temperatures
as appropriate.

But more than this, the book is about the loneliness of life at sea.
Skogan spends a long time away from home with people whose culture,
language, and politics are foreign to her. She is a woman working in a
field dominated by men whose work she must continually monitor. She
writes about her relations—bitter and sweet—with crewmembers of the
Russian and Polish ships. It is a hard life for all concerned. The
collections of vignettes that make up this book effectively evoke the
monotony of her job and the lives of those with whom she works. Skogan
is a woman of controlled emotions. She writes in a form that is part
memoir and part documentary, almost beautiful and often sad.