Born and raised in Wawa, Ontario, W.N. (Nick) Marach trained as an architect, partly at UBC, but he kept his adventuresome heart beating by motorcycling in Europe and North Africa in the early Seventies. Returning to BC in 1972, he fell in love twice. He met his wife-to-be Veronica and just had to buy an old, thirty-two-foot gillnetter called the T.K. after seeing an ad in the Vancouver Sun. When he wasn't working as an architect, he lived aboard the T.K. and worked as a commercial salmon fisherman. Even when he had to move to Yellowknife with his family in 1982, he kept returning to the coast to fish during summer vacations until he sold his last gillnetter in 1990. From 2001 to 20ll he worked for the City of Surrey as their manager of the Building Division. Marach has now recaptured the magic of a bygone era with a maritime memoir of fishing for a living when all it took to call oneself a commercial "fisher" was a boat, a net, and a licence. Marach's memoir A Gillnet's Drift: Tales of Fish and Freedom on the B.C. Coast (Heritage House $17.95) recalls numerous colourful characters and the pleasures of an independent spirit removed from urban concerns.

BOOKS:

A Gillnet's Drift: Tales of Fish and Freedom on the B.C. Coast (Heritage House 2014) $17.95 9781927527719

[BCBW 2014]