Handlinin'
Many are the men today that can recall their boyhood on Bedford Basin, handlining or jigging from the Irving Oil wharf at Fairview Cove. If many of them could or would return today and see a three acre container pier , and a beautiful picnic park where they spent many happy hours, it would amaze them. Pollack and mackeral were often jigged three or four at a time. Halibut and eels were often caught. Us kids would melt lead at home and fashion our own treble hooks. In the years after WW II, and before the Fairview underpass became the Fairview overpass many a happy and productive hour was spent fishing from that wharf by boys and men from Africville, the North End, and Fairview. Not far from this wharf was the Halifax city dump, they dumped the city garbage,and bulldozed it into Bedford Basin in those days, also an abattoir, with it's alluring odours, and within viewing distance was an old whale oil plant at the narrows. On top of the hill was Rockhead city prison, a miniture Dorchester penitentary. While fishing you could often observe men going though recent truckloads of garbage, competing with the seagulls, and another entertainment was watching men fill brin bags from passing railroad coal cars, throwing them over and later retrieving them to take home. When an Irving oil ship was tied up pumping oil ashore to the storage tanks, sometimes the cooks would offer us kids hot cinnamon buns to eat from our fishy fingers.