Time Bandit: Two Brothers, the Bering Sea, and One of the World's Deadliest Jobs

by Malcolm MacPherson

  Once I had to beat the shit out of two crewmen on another boat when I was working as its captain. One of the crew was probably doing drugs, and he was pissing on the floor in his stateroom. I told him to knock it off. I came back a while later, and he had pissed on the floor again. This time I did not tell him to knock it off. I knocked him out. His buddy jumped me. It was a brawl in small spaces.

  Over the years, I have seen the worst, from crewmen who are crystal-meth heads, thieves, dodgers who borrow money and do not pay it back, whiners who create bad morale among the crew, boozers and brawlers, shirkers and suicides-in-waiting. In crabbing, the order of the day can be the bottom of the barrel.

  But I have also seen the best, and last year, with one exception, we had a crew I was proud of. For king crabs, Neal and Andy counted as crew. Neal handled the hydraulics and engineered the boat; Andy worked the deck. I was in charge. My knees hurt and my arms ache too much to work the deck anymore. So in opilio season, when Andy takes the captain’s chair, we hire an additional deck crewman.

  Joining us three Hillstrands last year was Shea Long, a friendly and eminently capable 24-year-old who one day will be a successful commercial fishing boat captain if he chooses. He reminds me of myself in my younger days. He told me, “I’m pretty stocked up on ways to kill myself.” He skis with no regard for safety, snowboards, kayaks white water, and races motocross. The similarities end there. Shea does not drink or smoke and stays out of fights. He left Oregon State after a year of soaking up beer, girls, and parties. He went away to the sea until he decided what he wanted to do, and the sea hooked him. When he is working, Shea keeps his mouth shut, stays focused on work, and takes responsibility for more than himself. Last summer, while he was in charge of Time Bandit during the tendering season in Bristol Bay, he invited aboard a couple of wounded Army vets. They amazed and humbled him. They told him that what he did was crazy and dangerous. He told them, “Don’t be selling yourselves short. I do what I do. You are what you do. I’ve got my legs. Think of that. You think I’m crazy. But look at you! That’s crazy.”

  Then there was Richard Gregoire, who comes from an old Homer family. Richard was born the same day as Hitler. This is worth mentioning. He is sweet natured, but if a seabird lands on deck, Richard can be ruthless. He has brought guns onboard and shoots birds in the rigging like he has a thing against birds. I figure his character trait has something to do with his birthday. Andy and I know and trust Richard. He has seen the worst of the sea. A tall young man with a strong back and a quiet cheerfulness, he tells new deckhands like Shea, “Have fun until it’s serious, and when it’s serious, get serious fast.” He is a virtuoso at the Bering Sea Two-Step, the deck crewmen’s shuffling dance that keeps them balanced in rough seas on deck.

  Once, Richard burned down an island. We respect him for that. He and friends went camping on an island in a lake in Canada, north of Minnesota, and before turning in for the night, one of them went to take a shit in private. He was a conservationist. He lit a match to burn the toilet paper, which he covered over with dirt and detritus. Back at the campfire he quickly went to sleep. They were startled awake in the middle of the night by an inferno. Fires funneled over trees in great gouts of orange flame. They paddled their canoes off in haste and watched the whole island go up in smoke.

  One afternoon last year over a meal, Richard was enumerating the girls he has screwed. He mentioned one name.

  I said, “Oh, I had her, too.”

  Richard looked doubtful but hardly surprised. “You did?”

  “In fact, she was my first love. Now she has three kids. I owe her husband a drink chip or a beer.”

  “Oh,” Richard said, stumped for something to say.

  We also hired Russell Newberry, who we can find when he goes missing on the boat in the forepeak sauna. Russell loves the steam. The crew calls him InSauna bin Russell. He is another Homerite about my age and a friend with an easy, engaging smile, an extended Fu Manchu, a quick mind, and almost as many opinions as me. He has a booming voice. Once I was watching a Seattle Mariners game on TV and amid all that pandemonium I heard Russell chanting “Ed…gar…Ed…gar,” for Edgar Martinez, the team’s great designated hitter. I sat up. I dialed his cell phone number. He was at the game. Russell has no ambition to be a crab boat captain. He does not want the stress. He is content, or as content as Russell can ever be, with working on deck in winters on the Bering Sea and taking charge of his own boat each July, gillnetting sockeye out of the Cook Inlet.

  For the January opilio season, we took on a last crewman whom we quickly named Caveman. “Even a caveman can do it.” For him, we had to keep the tasks simple. We did not know this when we signed him on. We hardly knew about him at all. We learned in a few hours that he liked to sleep. We had only seen him awake when he walked on the boat.

  When a crew works well together, work looks easy. Rhythm and smoothness within a team of men working toward the same end can be a beautiful thing. On a crab deck, a new and inexperienced crewman generally will make extra work for himself and for others. But by watching the more seasoned crewmen, he will soon find a system or a method that minimizes the steps, and he starts to make the time count. Some in the crew never quite get there. They are awkward. They will not take criticism in the spirit of cooperation, and they quit, or Axe Man fires them. These same fishermen for some odd reason are always demanding respect from other crewmen. Demand respect? On a Bering Sea fishing boat, respect is strictly earned.

  A crewman once came up to me and whined, “I put on my pants one leg at a time just like they do.”

  I told him, “Yeah, but they had their pants on one leg at a time four hours ago while you were still sleeping.”

  For many obvious reasons, crab fishing is like the military. The strongest guy in the world is of little use if he cannot do his job. You do not realize how far you can push your body until you fish for crab. It is worse than boot camp in the Marines. Some do it, and some don’t. A little skinny guy with heart will beat a big strong guy with none. Imagine yourself with jellyfish stinging your face in the cold and loud and wet, and every muscle in your body hurts, and one guy says, “My arms hurt.” You do not want to hear that shit. You never quit. And you will be amazed at what you can do. At sea the crew is a team. Two crewmen are physically unable to pull all the pots in a string. Andy and I have tried, and we worked until physical exhaustion took us off the deck. Yet Andy once showed himself to be a Superman. He personally pulled seven pots in an hour. I was in the wheelhouse at the time. I could see him down on the deck doing the work of five men—he ran the crane, pulled and stacked the pots, and sorted the crab. Andy has never been afraid of hard work, and neither have I. He will not tolerate a crewman who is not a team player but is an All That loudmouth. He hands them their asses tied with a bow. Andy, who is a better judge of people than I am, always says, “You have to assume that a new crewman is no good; otherwise, any form of trust might get you killed.”

  After working thirty-six hours straight, tempers can flare even among good crews. One time I was working on the deck with Andy when another crewman split Andy’s head open with a picking hook. Actually, he had thrown the hook at Andy’s face. He was screaming mad about something real or perceived; we never found out. The steel hook flew right past Andy’s face and swung out and back and hit him in the head. Another time a crewman wanted to stab another crewman with a knife over smoking cigarettes on the boat. They had been working on deck for a couple of days without sleep and were at their limit of exhaustion. He bloodied the other guy’s nose with his palm and told him, “Outside right now. I’m going to beat your ass.” He pulled a knife. Andy and I were going to let them go at it. Andy did not see the knife until they were on deck, and he told them, “Knock it off. Put the knife down.” They did as they were told, but they could not work out their differences. We threw one off the boat soon after that and replaced him with a crewman named Clark Sparks, who stayed with us for eight years.

  Clark an
d I fished off the East Coast together back in the 1980s. One day in summer, I was aboard my boat F/V Canyon Enterprise out of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Clark was in charge of another boat. We got our gear out; he hauled his trawl and I hauled mine. He was fishing out of sight of me about eighteen miles away. His crew called me on the single sideband. “Clark’s gone! Clark’s gone,” they said. I thought they were kidding me. There was no way he could be gone. The sea was flat calm. I cut my line and charged over there, two hours away. The accident must have happened while he was working near the trawl, which pulled him overboard and down. When the crew pulled up the trawl they probably pulled his body apart. He had to have been busted up too bad to swim. That same day we had our memorial for him. We cooked a big dinner. We threw his plate overboard, and we took swigs off a bottle and threw it over. We said good-bye in our own way.

  The Coast Guard searched for his body for two days and found nothing in the Gulf Stream. The water was 81 degrees. I looked for twelve hours after everybody else gave up. I would not accept that he was gone. If that happened to me, I would not want my friends to stop looking. I would want them to give me every benefit of the doubt. I found cardboard from his bait boxes floating on the sea. I knew he was near there. I felt his spirit when I reached a spot 200 miles out of Gloucester off George’s Bank. Dolphins were swimming there. I felt him. I could not believe he was gone. He was like losing a brother. He had become family. I miss Clark.

  When we are crab fishing, either for king or opilio, we are rarely out for more than two weeks at a time, and that is plenty for the crew. After grinding hard, they start to deflate in that time. Their bodies weaken and they need more sleep. They start to get weird. Their behavior alters for the worse. They get argumentative and flinty. Even the best of them change. It happens on every boat on every trip. I imagine that it happened with Christopher Columbus. As captain, I have to understand basic psychology; it’s not that the weather is too bad or the temperature on deck is too cold. It’s that psychologically the crew gets beaten down. And that is when mistakes are made and accidents happen.

  As time goes along, crewmen can choose either to work as deckhands as a career or advance themselves to boat captains. Or they can fade away. Time does not work in their favor. After a few years, they think they know better than the captain. They want to make decisions. But they are not the captains. Andy tells them, before they get too big for their britches, “The only job where you can start on top is a ditch digger. You’re the head honcho from the start. Everything else, you have to work your way up, and if you have no desire for improvement, you will stay where you are, with your mouth shut.” Some deckhands remain simple tools who will never get anywhere. Andy and I tell a joke about them: “What is long and hard on a crab fisherman? The second year of third grade.” And we tell another one about the crewman who entered a bar with a ship’s propeller sticking out of his ass. The bartender points this out to him. The crewman says, “Aye. How do you think I got here? It be driving me nuts.”

  These days, I believe we are lucky to find anybody to work on the deck, much less good hands like Shea and Richard and Russell. Look what we ask of them: Work steadily without sleep for seventy-two hours in freezing temperatures with saltwater spray keeping you constantly wet. We expect them to perform tasks that would call for accuracy and economy of movement on land, and out on a heaving deck, they are balancing their bodies when all that another person could do is hold on for dear life. The demands are heavy. An ocean of death lies over the rails. The weather on the Bering Sea needs to be experienced to be believed. Time has no meaning. In day, the sun gives light; in night, sodium lamps, which we call “the Norwegian sun,” light their violent universe. Work and more work means bodies strained by overuse, sore muscles, and shattered spirits. During breaks, the food can taste lousy and must be eaten quickly. The living conditions are basic. What is there to like about crab fishing, except the money?

  And for this misery, Time Bandit’s five crewmen are paid 30 percent of what the boat earns, less a share for diesel oil, bait, and food. In the opilio season last year, our crewmen grossed $32,000 apiece for the work of a couple weeks. Few jobs pay as much in that short a time, but the men know that after they have suffered through what the Bering Sea throws at them, nothing is free.

  The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday

  By the time Russell Newberry had chugged (at eight knots) back to Kasilof cannery dock after a day of sockeye fishing, unloaded his salmon, cleaned the boat and walked through the gloaming to the junkyard fishing camp, he was prepared for a night’s revelry—booze, maybe somebody would bring a woman, jokes, some hot food, and laughter. He was getting into it, warming his hands over the oil-drum fire, lubricating himself with a Bud, with Dino Sutherland and some others like phantoms in the flickering light, when during a lull in conversation he thought to ask, “Has anyone seen Johnathan?”

  “Johnathan? No,” several of the fishing campers replied in unison.

  Russell understood the men’s apparent lack of concern. Johnathan was erratic. Unpredictable behavior was his only consistent feature, if anyone were to ask, though hardly anyone in camp would say so to his face. It was a shared characteristic; hardly anyone could ever predict what the captain of another boat might do. Things happened. The weather changed. An engine blew. Tides gripped a stalled boat, either shoving it toward home or out to sea. A collision with a log easily creased a hull and crippled a boat. As for a captain not responding to radio calls, it happened all the time. Captains who are not catching fish the way other boats were reporting simply did not want to hear about their good fortune and snapped off the radio. Besides, who was to say Johnathan was even planning to return to Kasilof? Russell expected him, but so what? He was a professional fisherman capable of watching his own back.

  But Johnathan was usually the first into Kasilof. And now that Russell had mentioned it, the men looked at one another like boys whose mother had caught them in a lie. Music was blasting from CD players in two parked pickup trucks with open doors. On a fold-out banquet table over by a derelict house trailer someone had laid out in foil pans a dinner of soggy macaroni and cheese and a salad that looked toxic. The food was cold and the booze bottles were a quarter empty.

  “Has anyone heard from him at all today?” Russell asked.

  “Not since last night,” Dino said.

  Russell speed dialed Johnathan’s cell phone number, then switched off his phone, remembering how Johnathan had fried his Razr last night on the fire.

  “Maybe he went to Homer,” Dino said. Along with Russell, Dino was Johnathan’s oldest friend. “You know John….”

  Russell did know him. He knew that he would be the last person to miss another rowdy night in the Kasilof camp. “What was he going to do with his fish in Homer?”

  “Russ, I didn’t think of that.”

  “Did you talk to him today?”

  “I just said not since last night,” Dino said.

  “Me, neither.”

  “You know Johnathan.” Dino waited a minute. “I thought he hit El Dorado and didn’t want us to know. I tried to reach him.”

  “He went out alone, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  Russell knew Johnathan especially well and for the longest time “because of the salmon thing.” They both owned salmon boats, were original members of the Kasilof fishing camp, and loved sockeye for the immediacy of the catch. They deployed the gill net and minutes later knew what they had caught. No waiting. No boredom. Russell and Johnathan shared a common view of the fishing life: Everybody has a good time; easy come easy go; no matter what happens, there will always be another day of fishing. Russell often summed up his view of life by saying, “It would just kill me to leave this planet with a full tank of gas in the truck. You can just as easily get killed making a left hand turn in town as you can drown out on the Bering Sea; you must live today like it’s your last; and the only easy day was yesterday.”

  As a teenager
, he hung out with the Hillstrand brothers and was in and out of trouble because of them; the Hillstrand boys were always doing something that was on the edge, and their reputation in Homer in the summers was legendary. Russell was drawn to the sea because of his father, who had served in the Coast Guard in Kodiak, but Russell had to fight to find jobs as a teenager, while the Hillstrand brothers automatically went fishing with their father. The opportunity to work on Time Bandit had arisen a couple of times, but Russell chose other options on bigger and different boats each Bering Sea crab season, until recently, when he hired on with Johnathan and Andy as a crewmate.

  The Kasilof camp brought them together with more leisure time than on the Bering Sea. The camp was all about camaraderie. They never knew when the salmon were going to come in to spawn. The men in the camp were set up to go when the fish arrived offshore. But until that moment, they waited only yards from the shore. And around an oil-drum fire, they talked about how much money they were going to make, about gear, women, and fishing in seasons past. Then suddenly, the fish were running. The men dashed for their boats. They went out and fished, and when they came back at the end of the day, as it was growing dark, they talked about where they had fished and what they had caught. Russell wanted to catch every single fish in the sea. That was his dream. He was so competitive. If he played tiddledywinks, he wanted to win each game.