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

by Malcolm MacPherson

  I imagined an engine frying, the steering going bad, a man overboard. Any problem now could spell our doom. The thought recurred of standing in a Russian court naked. The crew came in the wheelhouse to watch. We were yelling and screaming. We were losing ground to the Russians. Eventually, they would catch us. I did not have an exact fix on the boundary, but I knew the Russians would turn before they reached it. And turn they did. We cut our engines and more or less floated and gloated. It was a feeling of triumph at least as satisfying as returning home with plugged tanks of crabs.

  I am aware, as is nearly every crab fisherman, that superstitions are created to give us the illusion of control over what we have no control over—the seas, the weather, the catch, the boat, and our mortality. Some of the beliefs seem stupid to me—like the one about bananas onboard a fishing vessel bringing bad luck. But my attitude changed one day about ten years ago out in the Bering Sea when a long-winged glaucous gull, sleek and white with a “blood” spot on its yellow bill, hovered over my boat’s stacks, I thought, like a harbinger of nothing good.

  By all reason, the gull should not have been there. Sea birds fly over us all the time looking and waiting for scraps of bait, but they ground themselves on the sea when the wind blows 70 knots, like it was that day. The gull’s appearance, when the other birds had settled on the sea, made me curious at first, and in the next moment gave me an uneasy feeling. Alone in the wheelhouse, and for no reason that I can think of, I recalled an ancient superstition that the soul of a drowned sailor departs his body only to be adopted by a hovering gull, like this one. The recollection gave me the shivers.

  Flying with the wind, the gull sped past, and it could barely keep up with the eight knots we were making when it circled around. The seas in the Bering, as I have said, can be brutish. This day, the swells were rising around forty-five feet with some rogues coming in at sixty. I had to push the throttles to keep the boat straight into the oncoming wave, then relax the screws for the sleigh ride down into the trough, where all that I could see ahead was the mountain of the next wave rising almost impossibly, higher and higher, above the boat—a sight to make my knees quake—and behind, another mountain of a wave above the transom. The “money shot” in the Perfect Storm movie, when the boat climbs up the 100-foot wave and falls back to its doom, draws an exaggerated but nevertheless accurate picture. Cut that image in half and that was my day.

  The Bering is a shallow sea, and the winds and currents churn the water up off a deep-water shelf along the sea bottom north and south of Little Diomedes, creating huge seas. Each cubic yard of water weighs 1,500 pounds, and a rogue, when it washes over our rails, dumps hundreds of cubic yards in one hammer-like blow against the deck. In a storm the sea swirls a boat in several unsettling directions at once, with the hull, stern, and bow each trying to accommodate the waves.

  The Bering is a dark, ugly sea. The sky presses down on the water, gray upon gray, creating a morbid feeling of being trapped in a coffin in a storm. The grays of the Bering after a while form a palette of shades—blue bruise grays, black grays, light grays, green grays—until no gray is a good gray. Gray to me means weather, and the darker the shade the worse I expect from the sea. That day, I was holding on for my own safety, with my legs spread wide and one hand clutching a shelf and the other hand hard on the throttles. If I lost my balance, I would possibly fly across the interior of the wheelhouse, ending in a bruising collision with the port side bulkhead about twenty-five feet away.

  The gull should have been sheltering either on the spindrift waves or on the desolate, treeless, and storm-blown Pribilof Islands about twenty-five miles to the west of us, and not that far from the Arctic ice pack and the Russian border. The bird had none of the usual reasons to follow us. I had called the crew in. One green-water wave over the bow and I quit. I got on the loud hailer and told them, “Okay, we’re done, guys. Get off the deck.” If I were ever responsible for a death in my crew, I would not be able to fish again. Even Maydays on the radios from other boats are almost too painful for me to stand. The decks were clean with no discarded gutted and bloodied cod or ground up herring discharge to attract gulls.

  Most people may not know that these birds, especially the glaucous species, can be aggressive toward humans. Should a seaman fall overboard, gulls will immediately think he is discarded food and hover over him, darting and diving while trying to pluck the eyes from his head as if he were a salmon carcass. For a moment, the lonely bird landed on the deck and then rose to the height of the crane boom, as if it were impatient about something. It looked as miserable as an old man in a downpour, hunching its neck into its shoulders against the winds and the biting frozen spray.

  The crew was holding on, watching DVDs, reading magazines to pass the time, fixing themselves snacks, doing what they do, talking, dozing, trying to keep their breakfasts down. Some were failing to do just that in Time Bandit’s two heads. We had been prospecting for crabs, throwing off pots to find where opilio crabs were roaming along the sea floor. Other crab boats were continuing to fish in the area but were still out of sight even from the height of the wave crests.

  At that time, we had been out for a week without more than catnaps. By now, we were acting like zombies, and we looked like the living dead, with beards and clothes stained with fish blood and guts, doing what was necessary, taking the risks, in order to fill our holds. We smelled and we ached, and we thought about one thing: money, lots and lots of money.

  I was waiting for a weather report from the National Weather Service that would decide for me whether to make a run for shelter in the Pribilofs until the storm blew through. I feel comfortable near the islands as a safe haven, which also provides anchorage for the cannery processing boat that was scheduled to take our catch so that we would not waste precious fuel and time returning to Dutch. We were taking the waves bow-on, when the single sideband over my head in the wheelhouse crackled to life with piercing static. A voice screamed through the speaker, “Mayday! Taking on water. Mayday! This is F/V Troika….”

  My knees started to shake with anxiety. I glanced at the GPS; the Troika was near us, but out of sight. In these seas “taking on water” meant someone on that boat was going to die if we did not reach them in time. We were about twenty-five minutes out. I pulled the switch on the emergency horn, which blared through every nook and cranny on the boat, and I yelled down the stairs into the companionway, “We got a Mayday.”

  My crew knew what to do without being told. We trained for this. One of us climbed into a survival suit, and the rest of us ran to our stations. Neal headed for the crane controls near the forepeak; the crewman in his survival suit ran for the pot launcher near the crane hook and prepared to throw life rings into the water. Lookouts watched from the stern on both sides. I monitored the radio and took charge of managing the rescue. I did not notify the Coast Guard. By the time they would arrive on the scene the crew and captain of the F/V Troika might be dead.

  Ten boats converged on Troika and were visible as small dots on the plotter. I did not know the Troika’s captain, but I knew his boat. She was a crabber, an eighty-foot keelboat from Sand Point. The captain, I recalled from what I had heard, weighed 350 pounds, and stood 6’ tall. I learned later that Troika was taking on water in the rear lazarette. The stern was swamped. The engine room was flooding. When we finally were close enough to see her through binoculars, the boat listed at a sickening angle to port and was settling lower in the waves with every minute that passed. I threw the throttles against the firewall. Time Bandit’s two main diesels roared. In the Bering Sea, time is everything. That day, it was life.

  The killer is the sea. The water temperature was around 36 degrees Fahrenheit. Alaska Fish & Game issues a warning about Alaskan waters, describing what happens to a man who falls overboard.

  The initial cold shock from falling into cold water provokes an immediate gasp reflex, up to 2–3 quarts of air—or water, if your head is submerged. If you inhale water, it is highly unlik
ely you will come to the surface unless you are wearing a lifejacket. This means you have to have your lifejacket on when you enter the water! The cold shock stage is characterized by hyperventilation and rapid heart rate, which often produce a panic feeling. This stage lasts 3–5 minutes. The initial shock can also provoke a heart attack, which will make self-rescue extremely difficult. During this period, concentrate on staying afloat and keeping your head above water while you adjust to the shock so you can act more effectively.

  I have seen it happen, and Alaska Fish & Game has it partly right. The stages come quickly without a survival suit. The official description fails to describe the differences in human will. Some men give up; others hold on. Some men either rely on their training or lose their judgment completely. In that kind of water, what you think and how you control your emotions can mean the difference between life and death. In the Bering Sea, you have to want to live more than the sea wants you to die, and strange as it seems not everybody wants to live with the same intensity.

  I had trained my binoculars on the Troika. By now, she was taking waves through the wheelhouse windows and door. I was standing off because the F/V Marchovi, another crabber in the fleet, beat us to the rescue. The waves pummeled the stricken boat, which was riding low in the sea. Its failing buoyancy succumbed to the pounding waves. Although the captain could not have known, his boat was done for. The best he could have done was to abandon ship and pray for rescue.

  About then, four deckhands jumped into the sea in survival suits. I watched them bob on the waves. I breathed a little easier because I could see they were acting smart. They conserved energy and whatever warmth was left in their bodies, and they used the suits’ tethers to stay in a group. I turned my binos from the crewmen to the Troika.

  She was taking on more water than her pumps could handle. The boat was as good as down. The captain was not going to find the hole where the water was coming in. Repair was out of the question. Time was running out. I watched him cut loose the life raft from the afterdeck. The raft popped open and deployed. I was relieved that he was finally acting to save himself.

  At that moment I had my own worries. The sea was rolling my boat. I could not head into the sea and still position myself to assist the Troika. Inside the wheelhouse, I was being thrown left and right in a violent motion. I glanced to where I had last seen the gull on the crane boom. It was gone.

  Another look through the binoculars told me that the captain of the Troika had found a survival suit, but he was not putting it on! I could see its bright red color, and I even started cheering him on. He did not get into the suit. He did not follow his crew into the sea. He disappeared into the engine room, probably diving into the murky water trying to plug up the hole. By now, half the boat was underwater. If he did not help himself soon, the captain was going to be trapped in the cabin. The next I saw of him, he was running through the galley into the wheelhouse. He came out the door with his survival suit still in his arms. Events were overtaking him, and he was not thinking clearly. He was acting like someone who thought the boat still had a chance.

  A rogue wave barreled toward him and its force just overwhelmed him. The survival suit flew out of his arms into a gust of wind and disappeared in the spindrift. He was in serious danger now. Too much was happening too quickly, and the consequence of the unfolding events seemed inevitable. I had to try to help him.

  The F/V Marchovi was the first boat to reach the crew in the water. By the time we had arrived, the Marchovi’s captain had positioned his boat with the men in the water along its port side. This approach was wrong. I did not understand why he would be doing this. The Marchovi, like us, was rolling hard in the trough. The crane boom was going up and down fifteen or twenty feet with each wave. A wave wall, made of steel and rising to a height of twelve or fifteen feet, higher than a man standing on deck, stretches along the port side at the rail and is designed to protect the crews working on the starboard deck from waves crashing over the boat’s port side. Now, with Marchovi’s port side to the men in the water, the crane operator and the deckhands ready with the life rings could not see the men in the water.

  A crewman threw the life rings over the wall. Another Marchovi crewman, dressed in a survival suit, jumped into the water to assist any crewman too weak to grasp the survival rings. While in the water, the crewman attached the picking hook on the crane to a metal ring sewn into the life ring. The hydraulic’s operator worked his controls, and in two or three seconds, the picking hook plucked each crewman out of the water and deposited him onto the deck. Another crewman was ready to grab each survivor under his arms and drag him across the deck through the door into the warmth of the cabin, where he undressed, dried himself, dressed in dry clothes, and slipped into a sleeping bag until he began to shiver, which was a first sign that he was no longer hypothermic and would live. The rescue of the crewmen did not take more than a couple of minutes. The survival suits—and the Marchovi’s brave crew—had saved four men from dying.

  Aboard Troika, the captain finally had given up on saving his boat and was fighting to save himself. He grabbed a buoy that was hanging off the side of the boat. He tried to tie a rope around his waist, but before he set a knot, another wave wrenched the buoy from his hands. Now, he was standing on the wheelhouse. The boat was straight up and down with the bow out of the water. He climbed on the gunwale but the bow slid farther under. He stepped over to the anchor winch. The boat sank right out from under him.

  Now, there was no boat. He had nothing left to float on, or in. He was a man in frozen water without a lifejacket or a survival suit. The seas were huge, and the wind was blowing the crests of waves into sheets of stinging spray. The sea and the sky were dark. My anxiety grew with each moment he was out there alone. I was watching from 150 yards away tormenting myself with the thought that I should just barge in to the rescue. It’s my personality, my style, to go where I’m not invited. But what if my actions only made the situation worse? I was standing by, useless, when a man’s life might depend on me. I saw no good choice.

  The Marchovi deck crew threw the captain a rope, which he managed to tie around his waist. But the boat rolled at that moment and ripped the rope down his waist and pulled him out of the water by his leg. The picking hook on the crane was snapping up and down with each roll. The rope ripped the captain’s boot off. He flew in the air like one of those sea lions being attacked by a killer whale. He just flipped, a big man like that. I thought, What the fuck! I’d never seen anything like it. The Marchovi took another roll. The Troika’s captain tried in vain to grab the tire on the boom. He was desperate and grasping for anything at all to hang on. The boat rolled. He shot up in the air and fell back. That was when he breathed in water.

  I yelled out, “Heave ho, I’m coming in.”

  I could not do worse than the Marchovi. I brought up Time Bandit’s starboard side to the captain. I knew I could snatch him in a matter of seconds. The crew was waiting. Neal jumped over the side with a survival suit on. We had the sling, the suit, and the picking boom. Neal grabbed the captain and held on. He hooked him on the picking hook, and Andy pulled the two men from the sea. The rescue happened in less than thirty seconds.

  The captain was in a bad way. He was hypothermic. It was that single breath of water that was killing him. His core temperature had plummeted. We dragged him into the warmth of the cabin and laid him on the floor of the stateroom nearest the deck door. We laid him on his back on the carpet in the stateroom to the left of the deck hatch. I did not see how he could survive. He had been submerged in the water on the Troika up to his chest and then in the water through the wheelhouse. He had been diving into the water in his engine room. When he breathed in the water, his core had chilled beyond his body’s ability to recover. There was little we could do for him now. He was unconscious, but he breathed twice. I was bending over him, praying that he would live. Neal was giving him CPR. We could not get him to breathe.

  He went, “Pfffff,” with a soft
deflating sound.

  We gave him CPR for two and a half hours. I ran down from the wheelhouse every five minutes. I had called the Coast Guard for guidance. They said to keep him warm and monitor his core temperature with a thermometer. “He isn’t dead if he is cold and dead,” a Coast Guard flight surgeon told me. “He’s only dead when he’s warm and dead.” I stopped taking his temperature.

  Finally, the crew leaned back on their haunches. Their faces expressed the truth, and we cried.

  I could feel the man’s soul drift past me.

  Imagine! He did not know he was going to die that day. Then suddenly, he faced death and had two chances to save himself. If the Marchovi had grabbed him on the first try, he would be alive. But he was the one who made the critical choice to save the boat instead of himself. To be fair, maybe he did not think he was in trouble and if we had come up to him right away, we would have saved him. I knew that. I felt guilty for that. I blamed myself.

  We brought his body to the Pribilofs. The EMTs who met us at the dock pronounced him dead. The crew and I used the crane to take off his body. We were standing around in the snow, smoking. We did not talk or look into each other’s eyes. A nice lady came up to us. She asked who we were. I had not seen her before on St. Paul. She was crying softly. She said, “I know the family of this man. Thank you for what you did. At least they have a body to bury. He has six young boys.” I turned away from her to hide my tears.

  We stayed off Time Bandit that night. It did not seem right to go back, out of misguided respect. I looked at the sky the following morning. Dark and brooding, it suddenly came alive with bright white gulls. I took off my cap as if I were inside a church. In that moment I believed. A sailor had lost his soul to the sea, and a gull had scooped it up and would follow boats like mine until the end of time.