One Friday morning in the spring of 1972, an ad in the Vancouver Sun caught Nick Marach’s eye: GILLNETTER FOR SALE. A young architect who had just returned to the west coast from a yearlong motorcycle trip abroad, Marach was not looking for a change of career—but he was looking for a boat to live on, and the price of the old gillnetter was cheap.

A Gillnet’s Drift takes the reader back to a time when the salmon runs on the BC coast were strong, and all it took to call oneself a commercial fisher was a boat, a net, and a licence. No experience was required. It was during this era that Nick Marach found himself, quite unexpectedly, with a new vocation and a new lease on life. For the next decade, he spent every salmon season navigating the waters off BC, following his bliss, and many times narrowly escaping with his life. Along the way he befriended a slew of colourful characters, met the love of his life, and somehow in the midst of it all still found the time to be an architect.

This book captures the allure of the gillnetter’s life in a bygone era, but it is also about the freedom of youth, the desire for self-expression, and the refusal to ever settle down completely, even when you have an office and a family waiting for you on dry land.

W.N. (Nick) Marach was born and raised in Wawa, Ontario, and studied architecture at the University of Manitoba and the University of British Columbia, graduating in 1968. After working for an architectural firm in Toronto, he travelled extensively by motorcycle in Europe and North Africa, before returning to Vancouver in 1972. That year he met his future wife, Veronica, and bought the T.K., an old, thirty-two-foot gillnetter. For the next decade, he fished each salmon season and worked as an architect at several Vancouver firms as time allowed. In 1982 Nick and his growing family moved to Yellowknife, where he took a job with the government of the Northwest Territories. He continued to fish during summer vacations spent in Vancouver. Nick sold his last gillnetter in 1990 and moved with his family back to the Lower Mainland in 1992. In 2001 he joined the City of Surrey as Manager of the Building Division and retired in 2011. Nick and Veronica have four grown children and one grandchild.

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