It's not easy to make a living in the fisheries these days. But some folks refuse to give up. Steveston, BC is one place where the traditional commercial fishery continues to survive. It's a cute little town in south Richmond, an odd hybrid of traditional, contemporary and fake (there are movie crews shooting just a few blocks from the old commercial wharf).

There are no big, destructive factory trawlers here. These are conventional inshore fishing vessels, 10 to 15 metres long, and rarely with more than half a dozen crew.

Sockeye salmon was by far the most popular fish on the day of our visit, but it wasn't too hard to find chinook, halibut and the oddly-named lingcod (which is related to neither ling nor cod).

The crews hang boxes of ice over the transom of each boat to showcase the best of the day's catch. This particular boat was an oddity, being staffed by two white men at market time. Far more common, around here, is for an Asian-Canadian girl to pop her head out of a hatch, then leap on deck with a salmon in each hand. "Fresh fish, I have fresh sockeye for you! The five-pounder [lifts a fish up for us to see], he's twenty dollars. The ten-pounder here, for thirty. Good party fish! [Opens the gutted fish to reveal thick, dark fillets] Look, clean and fresh, just caught!" So-called 'traditional' gender roles appear to be the norm on many of these boats; the men-folk spend the morning working the nets and lines, while the women take over the cleaning and the selling when the boats get back to port.

The boats themselves are an interesting lot. Sturdy net drums and fairleads, mostly hydraulic powered, are the standard fitout. But each is different; the vessel in the previous photo was fitted with many spools of high-test line instead of a net.

Weird rudder configurations are common. Perhaps these odd, set-back rudders help with handling when there's a large net in play, or perhaps some quota rule influence is showing. I honestly don't know.

Most of these boats have an aft steering station of some kind; they are too short on crew for the captain to be tucked away out of reach during tight manoeuvres. A second helm need not be fancy- a couple of control levers plus a steering wheel is sufficient, and saves the expense of constantly replacing "watertight" electronics whenever they get drenched.

Many of these boats have dramatically flared bows, both to cut back on spray and to enlarge what would otherwise be an uncomfortably cramped foredeck. The ground tackle is roughly "cruiser's typical" (i.e. a size or three up from the anchor manufacturers' usual advice), with chain or wire rope on spool windlasses being more or less the norm. Almost everything around here has a hefty exhaust stack for a cabin heater, in addition to the usual engine exhaust (predominantly dry-stack among this fleet).

And in case you want something that you can eat without an hour of prep work, it's hard to beat the delicious, affordable paninis at the Pierside Deli.