PAT NEAL: A wilderness crime spree

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, February 18, 2026

ADMITTING YOU HAVE a fishing problem is the first step in dealing with it. Sometimes, it’s only when you hit rock bottom and realize the devastating effects that fishing can have on your life that you are able to discover the true cost of fishing.

For example, once upon a time, I took pride in having a vegetable garden I could harvest something out of almost 12 months of the year. But I had to fish. The only way I could fish as much as I had to was to be a billionaire or a fishing guide. I am a fishing guide. Everything else was put on the back burner.

For example, recently I became a victim of a wilderness crime spree.

I was gone fishing. In my absence, a pack of vandals invaded the homestead and trashed my garden.

Many folks complain about deer raiding their gardens, but that’s nothing compared to a herd of elk using your garden for a wallow. Once they get done with it, there’s nothing left but mashed potatoes. This was a tragedy because potatoes and fish are the two basic food groups that get this column written.

I know what you’re thinking. I should have dug my spuds last fall like everyone else. Don’t judge.

Go back and read the part about my fishing problem. I was too busy fishing salmon last fall, and by the time winter came around, I was fishing steelhead, leaving me little time for anything else until it was time for supper, when I would slip out to the garden to dig a fresh tater. They keep best in the ground all winter, where a little frost seems to make them sweeter.

These weren’t just any old spuds.

These were the famed Ozette potatoes grown on the Olympic Peninsula since 1791, when the Spanish Captain Salvador Fidalgo anchored his ship Princessa in Neah Bay, which he named Bahai de Nunez Gaona.

The Princessa carried some Peruvian Indians, who we can assume brought the potatoes since they had been growing them since 2,000 years before Christ.

Captain Fidalgo had instructions to mount a battery of cannons, construct a palisade and an oven to supply bread to the crews of visiting Spanish vessels.

The Makah resented the Spanish presence. They understood the act of possession where Europeans claimed land by planting a cross and a bottle.

The Spaniards started growing potatoes, considered an aphrodisiac at the time, so there’s no wonder there was trouble with the women.

Nunez Gaona only lasted a few months. That’s all it took for the Spanish to realize the Sea Otters were doomed and there was no gold in these hills.

Within a few years, potato cultivation spread east to the S’Klallam, where the Wilkes expedition reported them being grown at Port Discovery in 1841.

The potato moved south to the Ozette and Quileute, where James Swan observed them being grown on James Island in 1861.

Potatoes were the most important crop to the pioneer settlers on the Olympic Peninsula. Potatoes could be sold or used to fatten hogs.

In 1861, Captain Abernathy and his neighbor Elliot Cline were able to trade potatoes for dairy cows from Victoria, B.C., which started the Olympic Peninsula dairy industry.

The first potato crop on virgin soil could be a bumper with 200 to 400 bushels per acre without the benefit of irrigation or fertilizer.

Subsequent crops grew fewer and smaller spuds, as the soil was played out.

Planting potatoes is part of the history of the Olympic Peninsula. I miss mine now that they’re victims of a wilderness crime spree.

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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.

He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.