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

by Malcolm MacPherson

  Twenty years ago, I learned the hard way that the Internal Revenue Service means business. As a young crab fisherman, back then, I neither paid withholding nor saved to pay the IRS at the end of the year. I was a kid. I would tell myself, “I’ll pay the taxes the next trip,” and never did. By the time I sobered up, the money was gone. On the next trip I forgot about saving. But the IRS did not hesitate to get in touch. I wound up owing them $130,000, with interest of, like, 3,000 percent per month. I was paying taxes on the money I earned to pay taxes. I was moving in reverse. I wrote a check for $6,000 and the next month I owed $130,000 all over again. I do not understand how this worked but it worked—for them! I declared federal bankruptcy when I was twenty-five. The government took my cars, motorcycles, and a house. I paid them back over five years. And from then on, I shoved my assets, except for Time Bandit, which I own in partnership with three brothers, in the name of a woman from Homer I was living with. That may have sheltered the money from the IRS but it did not keep it from her. She left me with only my pickup truck. She was a woman scorned and not one iota more compassionate than the IRS. When we were dating, I put a tat of a wedding ring on my ring finger that says “Autumn,” which is her name. For several years, I have whittled away at the tattoo with a knife to make it disappear under scar tissue. The process has caused me pain. Sometimes I wake up at night to find myself trying to peel the tattoo off. It hurt going on, and it hurts coming off. You would be surprised how a tattoo can sink to the bone.

  Morosely, I return to the wheelhouse and tuck myself up on the shelf and get back to the events of last year.

  We said good-bye to Homer finally in mid-September. Waving to girlfriends and wives and other well-wishers, we steamed out of the harbor into the Kachemak Bay, heading toward the Aleutian Islands chain and the crab fishing base in Dutch Harbor on Unalaska. In those moments, everyone in the crew felt the thrill of another season. The summer was ending, tendering was behind Time Bandit, preparations had been thorough and complete, and now we were heading out to do what we love. Soon we would feel the pleasure of full pots, plugged fish holds, and the incomparable pride of knowing we had beaten the odds one more time. As Andy says with only a touch of melodrama, “We look over the abyss and we survive.” We moved out of the Kachemak Bay and pointed our bow toward the north side of Kodiak Island.

  The cold wind and spray hissing against the wheelhouse windows gave me an almost overwhelming joy of freedom. I had cast loose the immediate past, and out here on the sea, my “other” land-side life of girlfriends, debts, obligations, family and friends, worries, and children was behind me. Those I knew on land could not reach me where I was going. My mind was cleared. I was free as any man at any time anywhere on earth and I was about to do the thing I truly love: fish for crab on my own boat in an inhospitable sea. Other men work for the benefits or money or both. My idea of being rich is doing what I want. In life, I have a good deal. If I were to be gone tomorrow, I would have no complaints. I have lived the way I wanted to live. The exhilaration of crabbing in a new season, last year and every other year, was impossible to measure. It could only be felt deep within the heart.

  The run out the Aleutian chain 750 miles from Homer to Dutch, past islands with Aleut names of Unga, Sanak, Sutwik, Unimak, and Akutan, and Russian names like Popov, Korovin, and Ivanof (that allude to the history of this long peninsula), took the better part of an uneventful week. We were excited to see Dutch Harbor again. Some undefined mystique about Unalaska and Dutch Harbor confirms that we have severed our connections with normal life. Dutch is like what the border towns in Mexico were once like, and maybe still are—places of complete abandon, implied risk and even danger, of the exotic and unfamiliar, a nearly fabled place committed to hard work and hard play, a place devoid of beauty or softness, and a launching pad into the unknown. In winter, Dutch is like being on a hard ship at sea.

  We tied up in Dutch’s outer harbor in a crowd of other boats with names like Storm Petrel, Morning Star, Golden Alaska, Northeast Explorer, Chelsea K, and Aleutian Challenger. As quickly as we could secure the lines to the dock, we were off on a visit to the world headquarters for crabbers, Latitudes, a bar of longstanding notoriety. Once known as the Elbow Room, “the second most dangerous place on earth,” for the number and ferocity of the fights there, remnants of Latitudes’s earlier incarnations can be found today in the fading purple paint under the flaking blue paint of a recent remodeling. Nothing like a sign of welcome marks Latitudes, but the crabbing fleet knows where to slake its thirst for alcohol and its hunger for companionship.

  Latitudes is about the size of a doublewide trailer with cheap linoleum floors, a long scarred bar, and a stage, now a storage area, where Jimmy Buffet played a gig in his younger, less renowned years. Music now comes at ear-melting levels from a jukebox. The one false note in the décor, such as it is, is a large painting on a remote wall that depicts sailors drowning. It seems too unlikely to be true, but there it hangs. To protect the art from destruction from the likes of me—I hate this kind of reminder—the painting hangs behind a Plexiglas shield in a shadowed corner. Over by the bar, a ship’s brass bell, with a clangor tied to a braided rope, signals drinks all around paid for by the one who rings the bell, who may have struck the mother lode of king crabs or may be drunk and generous.

  People who do not know us wonder why crabbers in particular, and fishermen in general, drink as much as we do. I answer them honestly. If we did not get drunk when we came in from the Bering Sea we would not forget what we had just gone through and we would probably never go out again. We do not want to be sober in port, coming or going. We are about to leave for the sea on a boat with no women and indeed, no life to speak of. We will work. That is all we will do. And so we fortify ourselves against that imminent reality. And we meet friends in the bar and drink because that is what happens in bars. Drinking is a social activity, and if we sometimes get too social and get drunk, there is no excusing it. And all the explanations in the world never really hold up to reason.

  The young women tending bar at Latitudes do not serve so much as push drinks in the nicest ways, with smiles and chatter; they listen to our tales sometimes as if they are even interested. They laugh, and they are women, which is often enough of an encouragement to keep us ordering drinks. Like the crabbers, the bartenders too must make money to last them a year in only weeks. A breed of adventurers every bit as dauntless as the crabbers, these young women handle the male bar clients with humor, cleavage, and sisterly affection. Lisa, the bartender at the Grand Aleutian, told me last year that she wondered whether her life’s role “wasn’t to take care of crabbers. These guys are the life—the soul, really—of this sea-based business and the link between the past and the present.” She makes certain that a full shot glass appears before the last one is finished. Someone else pays, I pay, the bar pays—the economics mysteriously work out. The women bartenders love us partly because we throw money around like confetti. We believe that generosity and good cheer count as much as breathing. Here today and gone tomorrow, and the barmaids cheer that attitude. They see it nowhere else in this high a dosage.

  Alaskans in general have a drinking problem. I handle my part of it. Growing up, locals called Homer a “quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.” The same could be easily said of Dutch and a thousand other Alaskan villages. Maybe the dark winters, or the cold, contribute to this thirst for booze. Could it be explained at Latitudes that heat does not come from a furnace? Warmth pours from bottles of Crown Royal, cans of Budweiser, and from human bodies crammed together. While the once-famous, never-ending line that snaked across the potholed parking lot waiting to enter the Elbow Room is shorter now outside Latitudes, the bar has retained its soul, when the crabbers come to town.

  Dutch, and its home island of Unalaska, has tried to change its well-earned Wild West image; prior to the 1960s the island had no image to boast of at all. It had history, which was hardly triumphant. The only land in North America, bes
ides Pearl Harbor, that Japanese Zeros bombed during World War II, to this day U.S. Army bunkers, Quonset huts, and barracks dot Unalaska’s green hills in summer. But the results of the conscious effort to upgrade Unalaska’s image to date are decidedly mixed.

  Twenty years ago, bankruptcy threatened the local government when Unalaska defaulted on loans to build an airport, which was eventually completed and counts now as an essential transportation hub, albeit one with the single most terrifying landing strip in the United States if not the world, with gale-force winds, ice, blowing snow, and a jagged rocky ledge yards away from wing tips. Airplanes approach from the sea or the harbor only yards off the end of the strip. An official airport pickup truck drives to the end of the landing field and blocks auto traffic before each airplane takes off on the chance that it will crash into cars and trucks driving to the docks. Flights not infrequently abort approaches because of rapidly changing weather and divert forty minutes away to Cold Bay’s runway, which NASA maintains in pristine shape as an emergency strip for the space shuttle. There are always surprises flying into Dutch. Not long ago a woman sitting beside me, looking out the window, exclaimed, “My, what a big fish.” I looked. “Lady, that’s a humpback whale.”

  Civilization of sorts came to Unalaska a few years ago when the world’s largest cannery, Unisea, built the Grand Aleutian Hotel with the Chart Room, its superb restaurant. After king crab season last year, the crew of the Cornelia Marie was in the restaurant at an adjoining table with the crew of Time Bandit, and through the meal we exchanged toasts, barbs, wisecracks, loud conversation, and stale jokes, like, “You know you’re a crab fisherman when your wife changes her name to Sharon Peters.” The chef in the Chart Room presided over an eight-foot table of desserts that he was rightfully proud of. Without much warning, a crewman from the Cornelia Marie started a food fight. Soon the air was thick with profiteroles, tiramisu, mousse au chocolat, and globs of homemade ice cream. The hotel security guards and the Unalaska constabulary arrived with their pistols and Tasers holstered. Restoring order, they seemed embarrassed for us, with our faces and hair covered with sticky sweets. The chef kicked out anyone in the room with frosting in his hair. That was most of us. The party continued in the downstairs bar, which was where we were going anyway.

  That kind of official vigilance keeps the island less rowdy but it robs some of its soul. Such is progress. Latitudes is closing, which is yet another sign of the times. Last year, the Dutch police stopped me for driving one mile an hour over the speed limit of twenty-five in bright daylight. The deputy must have been new. I told her, “Ma’am, you have to be kidding.” She told me to stay in the car. She said, “Sir, I am saving your life.” I drove away with a ticket and a sinking feeling for the island.

  As further evidence of changing times, the bars close at one a.m. And services on Sundays at the historical Holy Ascension Russian Orthodox church, with its beautiful blue onion domes and sturdy concrete walls to fend off icy blasts of wind, help to give the island a family feeling that is at once new and, among the crabbers, not altogether welcome. Most of the island’s thirty miles of roads are paved, but then each year the hard winters reduce the surfaces to rock and rubble. I have the suspicion that rubble would be the fate of the long campaign to civilize Dutch if the crabbing fleet had not been forced to cope three years ago with epic changes, which had been a long time coming.

  Until the 1970s, Russian and Japanese industrial fleets dominated the Alaskan crab fishery. When I was younger, out fishing with my dad, I remember seeing giant Russian ships scoop “red bags” of twenty to thirty tons of fish and crabs from our coastal waters. My dad and his generation could do nothing but stand by, watch, and lobby their congressmen. They were forced to fish for crab closer inshore. In 1973, for example, Russian ships took 2.2 billion pounds of fish and Japanese took 4.6 billion pounds from Alaskan waters, within the 200-mile limit, while Alaskan fishermen took only 1.4 billion pounds from the same waters. My father’s generation stayed out of the Russians’ way and remained all but strangers to the grounds in the Bering Sea. I listened to my dad complain that the Russians were depleting our stocks of fish and if they continued, fishing in Alaska would die. He felt personally about it. He bitched to anyone who would listen, and it was usually me. I grew to hate the Russians, and I dreamed of reprisals. It was the Cold War. They were twice my enemy, and I vowed to get even.

  In the early 1990s, I finally had my chance. The Cold War was ending, but the Russian navy patrolled their side of the international border. Their boats were not raiding our waters anymore, but one day I fished their grounds, with what I decided would be a symbolic Cold War payback—Time Bandit vs. the Russian navy.

  At the time, I was cruising eight nautical miles inside Russian waters, near the Siberian coast, dropping crab pots in thick fog, when out of the gray a battleship came straight at me. I honestly shit my pants. I am more foolhardy than I am brave, and this confrontation now required me to be brave on steroids. The Russians were paranoid. They probably thought Time Bandit was a spy ship but exactly what it was spying on would have been hard for even them to say. A couple years before, they had seized an American crabber in these same waters. The sad thing about that episode was that the American boat was not poaching Russian crabs like I was trying to. The crew had stopped for souvenir T-shirts on Little Diomedes Island three miles over the Russian line. The Russians locked up the crew, brought them to their mainland, tried them naked in court, convicted them, and only after months of diplomacy, released them. The Russians impounded their boat, which remains in Russia to this day. I knew the risks I was taking. But I was not worried, until I saw the battleship Potemkin headed my way.

  In those years, the Global Positioning System (GPS) was a new technology that the U.S. Air Force did not make available to the public until 1993. Until it arrived on the scene I rarely bothered taking longitude and latitude fixes while out fishing in the Bering Sea. I knew our locations out of habit, and Time Bandit’s compass guided me. I knew where to find the best opilio crab grounds. I cared about nothing else.

  On the radio the Russians asked me to identify myself. They spoke in broken English, and I mumbled a reply in the hope they would not understand. I called the U.S. Coast Guard on single sideband. The Coasties sounded panicked when I told them. I wanted them to send Air Force jets to my rescue. But that would not be the Coast Guard. Their orders to me were very specific: “DO NOT STOP! DO NOT LET THEM BOARD YOU. KEEP COMING.”

  Apparently, my call stirred up an immediate commotion that reached back to Washington. Those waters were sensitive, I guessed later, mainly because the Air Force and U.S. Navy had a submarine and missile base on one of the farthest islands in the Aleutian chain, Adak, not that far from where I was dropping pots.

  I told the Russians I would stop my engines as they had demanded, and of course I would wait for them to board us. And then, hanging up, I gunned it.

  I do not know how fast Time Bandit was going, but that battleship was going faster. Those things move like speedboats. I calculated how much time I needed to cover the eight miles—about an hour, the longest sixty minutes of my life. Time Bandit crossed the line into American waters with the Russian warship about a quarter mile behind, and we aboard Time Bandit were high-fiving each other and shouting and jumping around on the deck like we had won the Cold War. The battleship slammed on its brakes, turned around, and headed back toward Little Diomedes. We waited until dark. As the hours went by, our radar showed five more warships, then nine, waiting for us to come back to retrieve the four crab pots we had left behind to soak.

  Their boats moved north and south, up and down their side of the border, while we stood off several miles on our side. I think they figured out we would not leave our remaining pots behind. And if we came for them they would not let us get away again. I debated whether we should call it quits, but I decided no. I had to uphold the honor of the American flag, represented by those four American pots!

  The crew voted
for the raid. I had expected them to. But I did not influence their decision. In fact, they were excited, because part of the cost of those pots, if they were left behind, would come out of their pay. And that money could be better spent at Latitudes in Dutch. We made our plan.

  We had dropped the pots a quarter mile apart. The deck crew can bring up a pot in three minutes. We needed forty-five minutes to reach the first pot, at least another fifteen minutes to pull them in, and a further forty-five minutes to get back over the line. The warships by now were nowhere on my radar. We were emboldened by the first escape, and besides, if the Russians saw us pulling pots they might change their minds about us being a spy boat. This, of course, was wishful thinking.

  We ran up to the international border. We cruised parallel to the imaginary line by a couple hundred yards, until I reached a point that gave Time Bandit a direct shot to the first pot in the string. I turned ninety degrees to port and chugged across the international boundary, expecting to see the Russian armada on radar at any minute. We reached the first pot. The crew was ready at the block and the crane. They worked fast to haul it in. I brought Time Bandit up on the second pot, then the third. By now, I wondered if the Russians had given up. I was beginning to feel…well, almost relaxed. We approached our last pot, and the crew was about to throw the hook, when what looked like the entire Russian navy came up on the horizon. I pushed the throttles. On the loud hailer I told the crew to forget the last pot and come inside. Seeing the Russian navy, and assuming that they were watching us through binoculars, we gathered outside on the stern deck of Time Bandit and shot the Russians the bird and pulled down our pants and mooned them. I turned the boat east. The race was on. This time, the Russians did not try to radio us. They were coming to seize Time Bandit.