Time Bandit

by Andy Hillstrand

  We needed to meet our delivery date and time, or else the processor would send Time Bandit to the back of the line. And that meant the added worry that the opies in our tanks would not survive. That would count as a loss to the boat of more than $200,000.

  This seemed screwy. We were about to push into the ice pack to reach the Independence with the hope that we could deliver the crabs to the floating processor and get out again before the ice trapped us.

  But a 113-foot boat is a challenge to navigate in icy alleyways. With Andy gone—he had abruptly left the boat in Dutch to fly home to Indiana; Sabrina had asked him as a special favor to come home to attend the wedding of her nephew, and of course he agreed—I was alone in the wheelhouse, and there was never a time in our lives when I needed his calm and confidence more than I did now.

  During most of the fishing year, I take the Time Bandit for granted. She is seaworthy and trustworthy. She can go anywhere safely. I can operate and maneuver her with the certainty and finesse of twenty-seven years’ experience. Her quirks are second nature to me. Her sinking or foundering would never enter my mind, just as anyone else would never imagine his house burning to the ground. But now, the thought of trapping the boat more than entered my thinking. And if anything happened to her, I would be to blame. Her loss would be equivalent to losing our father. My brothers would understand the events that led up to her loss, but they would have doubts about me forever after, and I would lose part of myself. My confidence would shatter; it would not matter to me one bit that pack ice had wrecked her. I had wrecked her. And I would live with that guilt the rest of my life. I have visions of ice sheets around her hull, with nowhere to escape, and the engines straining to move her through ice thirty inches thick, with the bow creasing and the water pressing in. I had better get it together.

  We continued to pull pots; we were filling our holds with opie gold. Each pot that contained 1,000-plus opies rang up the cash register at $1,800. Shea looked at one brimming, squirming pot and said, “There’s a new pair of skis.” Russell wrestled Richard to the deck; they were behaving like happy puppies. “We are finally making big money,” Russell said. “This is what I live for.”

  I went down on deck to share in the fun. I told them, “This is a good way to end the season,” and the crew renewed its efforts, knowing that we were back on our original schedule. The day continued bright and the ocean’s calm made the work easier and faster on deck. Ice from 20-degree ambient temperatures coated the boom and the forepeak and the planking, but the crew was jubilant, knowing they could now return early to Dutch. Neal winched the last pot on the launcher and in another few minutes, Richard flicked his fingers signaling 650 opies. We were ready to deliver. We wanted to go home.

  With the crew tucked in bed for the night, I headed for St. Paul Island. About three miles off the island, the ice pack appeared out of the mist. I cut one main engine and crept with one prop at one knot through broken chunks of ice, praying that this would be the worst of the pack until we had offloaded the crabs and headed south. Over VHF I learned that the state had closed the St. Paul harbor, warning that even those protected waters might freeze over in the cold. I did not like the sound of that. According to what the State Wildlife Police reported, the temperature had dropped enough to freeze even the protected salt water in the harbor. I wanted the backup of a place to shelter Time Bandit. The harbor was the only safe haven for nearly 280 miles around.

  I waited to see what happened. For right now, I was trying to maneuver Time Bandit like a 113-foot skiff, around this sheet ice and down small opening leads. When the ice, with some sheets thirty inches thick and weighing 125,000 pounds, came in contact with the bow, Time Bandit boomed with a hollow sound like I had pressed my ear to an abyss. I felt for the boat. This was not Time Bandit’s role. Her hull was not made for this kind of sea, and her rudder and props were too fragile for contact with the thick ice blocks. She would go anywhere at sea that I asked her except here, against this solid water.

  Three miles of ice stood between the Independence and the Time Bandit. I could see her boom lights. But those separating miles might have been the circumnavigation of the globe. We had to get through the ice to that processor. Something weird was happening to me. I felt that if I could huddle Time Bandit close to the processor, which was anchored firmly on the bottom and enjoyed the protection of a double hull, Time Bandit would be safe from harm. Maybe the old safety-in-numbers bromide had taken over, but seeing the sodium lights on the processor’s booms comforted me. Our progress was a slow agony. We moved three miles in five hours; we could have walked the same distance across the ice in less than two hours.

  At last we tied up alongside Independence’s dark and yet welcoming hull. The day was cold and bright, but the worst seemed behind us. The crew came out on deck and assisted with the offloading. Deck hatches had frozen shut in the night, and Neal and Shea snapped four stout lines trying to free one lid with the crane. But eventually the Independence’s crew was able to hoist down the brailers into the hold, and their workers stood on the crabs while pitching them into the canvas-sided containers; each was weighed and tallied as it was lifted out. The brailers signified money—a total that day of $216,551, which was not bad considering at one point only a few days ago I thought I would have to write off the opilio season completely. The crew had money to take back to Dutch; they could add opilio shares to their king money and live until the next season. I felt that I had done my job.

  With the last brailer emptied, I braced myself to cast off from Independence. But in reality, I had nowhere to go. I could have forced my way into St. Paul Island’s harbor, against the advice of the State Wildlife Police, but I did not; for once I chose to follow their advice. That left me with no choice but to run for clear water three or five miles south of Independence and hope for the best between here and there.

  The crew had no further work to do, and after a day of laboring with the offloading, I told them to take it easy; sleep. Caveman snapped to like a plebe at West Point. The sky was darkening. Night was falling. It was bitter cold. I did not dare to run the boat on two engines in the ice and so, as before, we headed out at an even slower pace—half a knot—than when we entered the pack.

  As darkness closed around the Time Bandit, the temperature fell. The ice moved south. The slow progress ground us down; each hollow sound of the hull hitting the ice slabs made me wince. Over the span of two hours we moved one mile away from the Independence. Mother nature was telling me that I was not going home tonight. In light of this, I laughed, but not a funny laugh; it was a psychotic sound that reflected the sheer insanity of this predicament. We ground to a complete halt in the ice, which was tightening its hold. The breaks simply froze together and disappeared. I could see neither polynyas nor leads in the reach of the sodium lights. I had nowhere to move.

  The hull boomed against the building ice as it broke leads of a boat length. But huge chunks of jagged ice erupted from the broken solid mass, and these threatened to rip into the hull. I craned my head out the window. The cold was unbelievable. The lights of the Independence shone brightly in the distance. I made the decision to leave the southerly track. We were not going to reach open water through ice that was rapidly thickening. The tension was tightening in my chest. I was smoking one cigarette off another. I had considered myself a veteran at handling pressures, but this now reached a new level of intensity.

  I made the decision to turn around and return to the Independence. Making a 180-degree turn with a 113-foot platform in the middle of slab ice had its challenges. By backing up and laying on the throttles I risked shearing off the rudder or bending a shaft or fracturing the prop. I could feel the resistance in my hands on the throttles. I thought about how I had laughed at Mike Myers as Austin Powers in the movie, turning around a golf cart in a corridor that was only inches wider than the cart was long. With a boat, a similar maneuver was no laughing matter. Forward, backward, forward, backward, slowly turning by degrees, until at la
st the Time Bandit’s bow was aimed toward the lights of Independence.

  We returned to her thrall through ice that had closed and thickened in our wake. Backtracking that single mile was measured in Winstons and coffee. The crew stood near me in the wheelhouse adding their eyes to mine. We were stationary in the water half a mile off the coast. Neal said the winds were shifting out of the south, which could signal that the ice pack would start moving again. The next few hours would tell. I advised the crew to get some sleep until I decided on a new course of action.

  Sitting in Fishing Fever’s wheelhouse, smoking, I was reminded of how fundamentally I am entwined with nature when I am at sea. At times like these, I really do think these things, these big thoughts that never ripple through my brain on land. Some people might think of this connection to nature as obvious, but not me. Usually I take for granted that nature is my master every minute I am on the sea. I can decide nothing independent of her immediate presence—the wind, weather, seas, temperatures, the fish and crabs. I am their slave. They dictate my fate. I am as a farmer, dependent on weather for his crops, on an unstable, rippling, ever-changing, and perilous land.

  Does this make me different from people who live with buffers between their daily existence and the rawness of nature? Absolutely, yes, it does. It makes me a daily survivalist who is innately wary and in fear of change. I am filled with abandon when I return to land, where I have nothing like the sea to fear. What is to fear on land that can compare to a boat on the Bering Sea? Do I fear that I will be thrown off my Harley or beaten in a bar fight? Is this why I am like I am? Is this the reason Andy wants to spend more of his life working with the quintessential land animal? Is this why, his conscious desire notwithstanding, he goes back to the sea year after year, as if sirens were calling him toward jagged rocks on the shore?

  I pondered my predicament in that ice pack. I knew what I did wrong. I ignored my cardinal rule. I had wanted, more than even the safety of my boat, to deliver my catch on time to the Independence, and thus cash in on $216,000 of crabs in our holds. I had fallen prey to the logic of the new system. If I missed my delivery date, I would go to the back of the line, and my crabs would all die. I had defied my basic instincts as a captain by sending Time Bandit through the pack ice. In most of our lives, we get away with our mistakes. Nothing touches us with absolute inflexibility. But that is not nature’s way. She demands her payment for any small transgression. And now I was paying dearly for mine.

  The ice pack changed again. This seemed like the devil at work. The wind must have shifted in the dark. Through those night hours, the temperature dropped further and the wind swung around from the north. More pack ice joined that which was already pushing around the island. Bay rollers under the ice undulated the flat shiny plane around our hull. I felt these rollers grinding the ice against our hull. The force of the wind on the ice was pushing us toward the shore. The engine sawed when the prop struck broken ice blocks and the sound pierced to my soul. The engine quit twice, and the engine alarms sounded below. I was not going to let nature wreck Time Bandit on the land, no matter how few choices remained to me. She would go down, if that was her fate, but she would never die like the Alaskan Monarch.

  I had to make a desperate run for open water; I had to get away from the shore. I wanted the crew to be ready for any contingency. They had not slept in two and a half days, except for this three-hour nap. I flipped the switch to activate the boat alarm. I shouted over the sirens to the crew deck for them to get up. I needed to share with them our troubles.

  Shea, Russell, and Neal were out of bed at once, dressed and ready; Richard followed soon after. They stood by me in the wheelhouse looking out through the sodium lights at the ice floes, offering advice and consolation. I needed Neal and Russell especially to help me decide what to do, how far to go, and what stress to put on the engines. Would the screw take the beating? Or would the ice jam the rudder shaft into the lazarette, flooding the boat? These were immediate possibilities. Should we simply shut down the engines and let the wind and ice determine our fate?

  Too long later, Caveman came up the stairs, dressed only in sweatpants and rubbing his eyes. He had heard the alarm, woken up, and then had gone back to sleep.

  “What’s going on?” he asked at the top of the stairs.

  This question made me irrationally angry; I was on edge. I needed sleep. I felt shockingly alone.

  “Just shut up or I’ll kick your ass,” I told him. “We are in trouble.”

  Caveman stood with his arms folded across his bare chest.

  I told him, “We might have to get in survival suits. Wake up, get some clothes on, and get some coffee. We are trying to get out of this ice.” I looked at him. I was truly angry with him. I said to Shea, “I don’t know what kind of guy goes back to bed when the alarm goes off. But I am looking at one now.”

  Caveman stood at the top of the stairs, I thought almost defiantly.

  “You! Caveman! Get dressed!” I turned to Shea and said, “Thank God there are people onboard who actually care.”

  I tried to advance the throttle but Time Bandit was having none of that now. The boat did not budge. The ice rumbled and boomed against the hull.

  “This isn’t a pretty sight,” I told Richard.

  The ice was forming in forty-and fifty-foot jagged chunks.

  I sent Neal to the forepeak hatches to check on the bow for leaks.

  The computer plotter, in which I had input Dutch as our destination, indicated an Estimated Time of Arrival: “NEVER.”

  Caveman appeared in the wheelhouse. At least now he was dressed.

  “I don’t yell for no reason,” I told him.

  If the boat went down, Caveman would not have been prepared to save himself with no clothes on. A boat can go down in four minutes flat. We were not in immediate danger. But Caveman was not using his head. He was behaving like a caveman. If I had told him, “Go drop that anchor now,” he would have not had his shirt on. And what if our collective safety required the anchor to be dropped now, not when he was ready? I had a right to be mad. I hate captains who scream at their crews. Screaming accomplishes nothing. This once I felt justified.

  But I was also mad at something else about Caveman that was under my skin. He was always late.

  Caveman remarked, “I know I’m not getting in this cold water,” as if he would have a choice.

  Neal came back to the wheelhouse to report that ice was bending the steel in the bows. At the moment, the dents were not an immediate threat to the boat. The paint had chipped off the inside of the hull, which the ice had not yet breached. Neal said that he had never heard such sounds before, “like something from another world,” he said.

  Caveman must have thought over what I told him. He came up to the wheelhouse angry about how I had singled him out. I was not prepared to argue. I had said what I felt. I would not apologize. He punched me once in the nose and once in the ear. I said, “That was pretty good. You better get out of the wheelhouse.” He punched me a third time, in the throat. I said, “That hurt.” I was going to split his nose. Instead, I hit him on the top of the head, once, and knocked him out. I dragged him out of the wheelhouse. When he came to I said, “You can either finish this fight or you can finish this season.”

  For the next four and a half hours, nerves held us together as captain and crew. If a boat weighing 298 tons can move gingerly, Time Bandit did. I maneuvered her like a skiff with the throttles, on and off, steering left and right with the leads in a heading south. The sea swell broke the ice and created a path that was no more than a boat’s length. We moved boat length by boat length. The sun came up. I could see clear water ahead. We reached the pack’s fringe. In another half hour, we went clear. We had made it through my worst night.

  “Dude,” I told Richard, “that took a year off my life.”

  I should ask a lawyer to legally change my initials from J.H. to T.U. I am Tango Uniform like never before. The minute the light intensifies in the
east I can see where I am in this universe. The rain lowers the sky down to the sea. A mist is changing to fog. This world is a dull gray. No one will know I am gone. The look of the cliffs in this weather is like the Land Before Time. The sight off my starboard side chills me. Jagged rocks heap along a mountain wall that rises four or five hundred feet to a short plateau of snow and ice that beats down on my face like sharp slivers. I refuse to put on my life jacket. That is not who I am. I know I can get ashore and cling to the rocks. I tie the ropes of my bumpers in knots. I shoot my last signal flare away from the cliffs.

  The thrall of a current and tide takes hold of Fishing Fever. Inexorably, the water draws the boat toward the line of surf on the rock reef just under the cliffs. That is where I am heading. I can hear the surf collide with the rocks. I can smell the land, as if the violence of the sea against the rocks has produced its own stench. The air, filled with the sea, smells of heavy brine. I estimate forty minutes before I will be in the surf against the rocks. There can be no recovery there, no sandy beaches, no gradual bottom, indeed, no beaches, just rocks sticking out of the waves like blades, and beyond, a wall of rock against which the water explodes.

  I must slow my boat’s drift. It is too deep here for an anchor to grip and hold on the bottom. I tie lines around two buckets, which I throw out as impromptu sea anchors. Their drag is imperceptible in these swells, which are getting higher with every ten feet I drift toward the rock wall. As I watch the buckets drag behind Fishing Fever, I look back in the direction where I came from. It is at that instant that I see a flare. But I do not see a boat under the flare. I am as certain as ever that I saw a flare. And if that is true, then that boat must have seen mine. The worst case, of course, would be if the boat in the distance that fired the flare was in trouble and in no position to come to my aid. That does not seem likely. But a flare is never to be fired only as an indicator; it should be ignited only if the boat firing the flare is in an emergency.