Terri Stone (Ophir) is a natural storyteller. She retired in the late 2010s after over 40 years of commercial fishing though she may get back to it in a small way. Stone has an endless supply of anecdotes about her skippers, other crew members, boats, and fishing itself.
Bio
Terri Stone (Ophir) is a natural storyteller. She retired in the late 2010s after over 40 years of commercial fishing. She has an endless supply of anecdotes about her skippers, other crew members, boats, and fishing itself. She learned much from one of her first captains, Mark Stone, and his father, Terry Stone, both of whom she described as gentlemen (as opposed to less complimentary terms for others who were not such considerate or knowledgeable captains). On a good day, they’d catch up to 100 silvers (coho salmon), which brought in good money back in the 1970s. What was important, she recalls, was making sure the product "was always in really good shape, and I always respected that aspect to the trawlers. You know, you get that beautiful salmon and . . . you take the best care you can, and you get the best price you can. . . . It's very sad to see what's become of all that. . . . the salmon fleet itself and all the beautiful wooden boats. You know, there's still people hanging on." Stone has lived in Ophir on Oregon's south coast since 1980; before that, she enjoyed bunking with other fishermen in a snug cottage in Newport, right on the harbor. Terri Stone first came to Oregon in 1970, spent the summer in Eugene, and then traveled up to Newport, where she got her start in commercial fishing by "pounding the docks." Though she's spent most of that time in Oregon, she did live in Alaska for a time. She fished every month of the year for 15 years in Kodiak, where the crew worked from sun-up to sundown; in the winter, that's 10 p.m. – 2 a.m. Her first fishing experience was on the F/V (fishing vessel) John Thomas, a dory (a small boat with high sides, a narrow, flat bottom, and a sharp bow) with hand cranks instead of those powered by hydraulics. On the John Thomas, Stone learned to throw and set anchors on nights spent off the coast of Newport; she describes being "enthralled" by the sight of her first gray whale though not so much by the stink when the whale spouted. Over the years, Terri Stone has fished on trawlers (commercial fishing vessels that drag a trawl or net behind the boat) as well as seiners (boats that drop a net that hangs vertically in the water with weights along its bottom edge) and jig boats (jigs are lines that use lures instead of bait to attract fish). She’s fished for halibut, shrimp, and even scallops over the years. Fishing happens when the fish are running and the fishery is open; you don’t wait. As she put it, "if you can see, you can fish. So sleep is always a premium because there's not a lot of that." Some of Stone's favorite fishing experiences were on Mary Jacobs's boat, The Renaissance, where the crew of all women fished for herring in the Bering Straits or for humpies (pink salmon) and everything in between. It was hard work, but the women made a good time of it by mixing long days with jokes, the occasional feast of sourdough biscuits, and games of scrabble. Stone, like many fishermen, has had her near disasters, too—getting her clothing caught in a cable and barely escaping serious injury, making it through pea soup fogs, or getting the trawler net caught around a shark. Her stories about those times are riveting and bring her experiences to life for the listener. In the spring of 2021, she and her partner purchased a new old dory, a heavy, fiberglass boat called the F/V Junket. Stone explains, "And so we are going to launch this thing and continue to try to make some kind of money and some kind of fishing out of Gold Beach." They plan to fish for salmon, lingcod, and halibut and sell the fish to offset the cost of running a boat. And to celebrate their new venture, Stone wrote the beginnings of an "Ode to the Junket."
