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

by Malcolm MacPherson

  It is not the mother thing between us. We are not worried that she loves us. Indeed, she might love us too much. She constantly reminds us of the dangers of what we do for a living, as if we did not know that after a lifetime of fishing for crabs. She prays for us when we are out on the Bering Sea. She asks us to please find safer work on land. Lately, she announced that she had given up that hope. She would no longer worry about us. Johnathan looked at me. He said, “That’s bad news.”

  What set our roles was our age difference of only one year. We grew up together. John was small until he was a late teenager and I watched out for him. The teenage world can be a nasty place and he was a combination of vulnerable and invulnerable. He has a tough and a soft side. I have to keep watch on his soft side. I do not want to see that part of him destroyed. Indeed, I do not want to see any part of him destroyed. And that desire has put me now in a state of worry that will not end until I hear his voice.

  In the stall again, I tell Rio good night, and I head through a gate across a lawn and through a garden, which Sabrina tends with devotion. The night scent of Mirabilis jalapa, Sabrina calls the golden flower, welcomes me along the path to the door. For the next couple of hours, I sit and stare at the telephone.

  We Started Throwing Fists

  Johnathan

  I am not lost at sea. I do not know where I am, but I just do not feel lost—yet anyhow. I curl up on the bunk in the wheelhouse. It is getting dark. The wind is blowing up. The sea is getting sloppy. I fire up a Winston and stare out the port windows. And I see nothing but an endless plane of water without a seam between sea and sky. I could be a farmer in the midst of a vast field of grain. I am a farmer, tilling the sea on a busted tractor.

  In Anchorage two days ago, I was talking about crabs. Fish in general can be a man’s excuse for talking, a conversational port that leads to oceans of possible humor, exaggeration, storytelling, personal insights, and folk truths. It is socially safe—in the sense of being noncommittal. And it helps a stranger to get to know someone else without grilling him. For a lot of men, conversing about fish with a commercial fisherman like myself is like a weekend softball player sitting down with Barry Bonds: informative, suspenseful, and floated on a wave of bullshit. I see even awe in some men I meet in bars. They will start a conversation about fishing to hear what fishing is like in the big leagues, and I do not kid myself. I know that to them crab fishing on the Bering Sea is like the outer edge of extreme sports, like climbing El Capitan without safety ropes or surfing a 100-foot wave off Palau. When strangers ask me to talk about crabbing on the Bering, I oblige. After fishing and women and my children, bullshit is the love of my life. I have told a few tales many times. Sometimes I hear myself telling them in my sleep. Not that repetition bothers me. With women, commercial crab fishing talk presents a view into a man’s world in which they can sit back and watch the fun. In Anchorage, an attractive woman at the table who had nothing to do with the sea, whom I had never met before, asked me how I was able to tell a male from a female crab, one being legal and the other being illegal to catch. The question was certainly valid, I thought, but I did not feel like giving her a serious answer. I told her, “You can tell the male crab from the female crab because the male crab is usually on top.” She looked at me cautiously not knowing how to react. Then she smiled, I thought seductively.

  Her ignorance, while understandable, illustrated a more interesting point—that we live today far removed from the origins, even from a passing knowledge, of what we eat from the land or the sea. Fishermen, like farmers, see the food up close from its origin to its delivery to market. We crabbers know from the ocean floor up that a crab is a weird being. Its ugly design brings to mind Jonathan Swift’s famous quip. “’Twas a brave man who first et an oyster.” Indeed, who first discovered that there was anything under a crab’s carapace to eat at all?

  True crabs have ten legs in five pairs, and look like spiders. The first pair of legs bears their claws or pincers, and the right claw, called the ”crusher,” is usually the largest on the adults. The next three pairs are their walking legs, and the fifth pair is small and normally tucked underneath the rear portion of their shell. Adult females use these specialized legs to clean their fertilized eggs; males use them to transfer sperm to the female during mating.

  Crabs live at depths of 400-feet plus in darkness and in water the temperature of liquid ice. They feed off rich nutrients that well up from the Aleutian Basin. They sense the presence of our bait through chemoreceptors; the crab has a hardiness that its shell alone does not do justice to. Their ballast system is amazing. Their blood is white, made of hemocyanin, and flows with powerful quick-acting coagulants that allow them to recover instantaneously from even the most grievous injuries and amputations. Their spiny shells protect them from natural predators like cod, and their beady black eyes, standing on short stalks just ahead of their brains, cover a field of vision adequate to detect enemies in time to react with their pincers.

  Crab legs, besides being delicious steamed in seawater and served with a brush of butter, fascinate crabbers. Last year in king crab season, the crew on a break was talking about king crabs’ pincers, particularly “the crusher,” which has the power to snap ballpoint pens in half. In something less than a scientific observation, Andy informed us that “Guys have had their dicks grabbed by the crusher.”

  Russell’s eyes brightened. “Is that a common method of catching a crab, Andy?”

  Opilio and king crabs can be easily sexed—to answer the woman in Anchorage in a more serious vein. The male abdomen, which curves under the crab’s throat, is narrow in males; in females it is considerably wider to assist in carrying the fertilized eggs. King crabs have “tails” or abdomens that are distinctively fan-shaped and tucked underneath the rear of their shell.

  Adult females produce thousands of embryos. When these fully develop they become swimming larvae and drift with the tides and currents. They feed on plant and animal plankton while their bodies undergo rapid changes. Red king crab larvae later settle to the bottom of particularly cold waters. In order to grow, they need to rehouse themselves in new shells every so often. Adult male king crabs keep one shell for as many as two years before molting and growing a new one. Red Alaskan king crabs, the largest of the crab species with the record female weighing twenty-four pounds and an average male weighing around ten and a half pounds, live for twenty to thirty years. The male’s leg can reach a span of six feet. We catch them all the time with spans of four feet plus.

  The adult crabs, like many other species, live in groups divided by sex when they are not molting or mating. The males can migrate up to 100 miles in a year, moving at times as fast as a mile per day in massed male-only configurations, like rolling balls on the sea floor. They eat worms, clams, mussels, snails, brittle stars, sea stars, sea urchins, sand dollars, barnacles, other crustaceans, fish parts, humans if they can find one, sponges, algae—and other king crabs. And they are eaten by cod, halibut, octopuses, sea otters, nemertean worms—and other king crabs.

  Alaskan natives have eaten these sea spiders since before recorded time, but who would have guessed that crabs would take off as an international delicacy? The commercial crab industry in Alaska started in 1950 when hundreds of U.S. fishermen entered a race every bit as frenzied as a gold rush. By the 1980s Alaska king crab boat captains regularly were earning well in excess of $150,000 in a season. The money was unprecedented, and crabbing was viewed as an endless road paved with gold. But in 1983, the industry simply collapsed. No one knows why. Whether the water temperature changed or a virus infected the crabs or whether overfishing tipped the species’ ability to regenerate itself, the crabs disappeared. We thought we had the crabs beat, too, with our large boats, big tanks, cranes and launchers, plotters and scanners. But we were wrong. In the end, the crabs reminded us of a simple lesson. While crabbing might call itself an industry, it is still fishing, and fishing is a part of nature, which man cannot tame, box, predict, or pr
od. It refuses to be controlled and is what it is and always will be. We live by its rules, not ours. We like to think that we are in control. As seafarers we must think that. Otherwise, we would not be able to summon the courage to face the storms. In our hearts we know that we have nothing to say about crabs, whether they will be there to catch or disappear. We have nothing to say about the crabs’ environment, the sea, except that either we will venture forth to fish or we won’t. I imagine this sounds simplistic to some people. I might agree with them. But I wonder about these issues.

  I was one of those fishermen who went east in response to the collapse of the Bering Sea crab fishery, which was recorded as the worst slump in U.S. fishing history. I was reading in a fisherman’s journal that New Bedford, Massachusetts, was the number one fishing port in the United States. I flew straight there. I bought the F/V Hannah Boden, the sister ship of the F/V Andrea Gail, of Perfect Storm fame. The contract was written on a napkin. We grossed $800,000 in four months. I worked my ass off. The owner refused to honor the napkin contract, and I bought F/V Canyon Explorer, an eighty-eight-foot lobster boat that we fished eighty miles off Cape Cod. We fished around the clock. For the most part, the local crews I hired were worthless. They liked to sleep. They stayed at the dock, and I had to hire replacements from the homeless shelter; I would take any able-bodied man I could find. Even with a wooden boat and with no cranes I still kicked ass.

  I thought of the East Coast fishermen; compared to us from Alaska, they can sometimes be stubborn, like the Maine lobster-men with five or six generations of fishermen behind them. Many of them, to this day, are good friends who sometimes tend to think of the Atlantic as their ocean. They did not like me fishing George’s Bank. I asked them, “Are you George?” A lot of them did not like me. It’s hard not to like me. They came around eventually. They are a proud breed, some of them, anyway…

  The worst fight I ever got in was in Providence, Rhode Island, on Christmas Eve. Two friends from Alaska and I were sitting at a nice, respectable piano bar, and one of them said he knew of a good club. I thought, no. I’ll just stay here, have a few drinks, and then go back to the hotel and go to bed. I ended up bleeding half to death a couple hours later. We went to a place called Club Hell. We checked our coats. One guy was wearing a $500 leather jacket that he was particularly pleased with. We were given coat checks.

  We had a nice time, dancing and joking and drinking, but when we were leaving, the employee who had checked our coats said he never gave us tags. He did not have our coats. They were gone. We showed him the tags and he said sorry. That was how the fight started. I said that we were not leaving without our fucking coats. The bouncers appeared. “Yes, you are leaving,” is what one of them said. We started throwing fists. This big fucker waded in. He was like Jaws in the James Bond movie, a freak of nature. He was the biggest sonofabitch I ever saw in my life. I drew him. I was about to learn why they called it Club Hell.

  Jaws picked me up by my crotch and by my neck, ran with me, and threw me against a Porsche parked out in front. I’m a 205-pound guy, but to him I was like a little bitch. There was nothing I could do. An alarm in the Porsche went off. The bouncer’s friends were kicking me. Jaws picked me up again and threw me into a brick wall. I was saying to myself, “Why did I go to Club Hell?” One of my buddies, Clark Sparks, who drowned a month later, tried to help me, but a bouncer knocked him out. I thought, “I’m going to die in Providence, Rhode Island, on Christmas Eve.” When the cops showed up, I hugged them. They gave me a ride to my hotel. I was bleeding in my hips and bled through the mattress. I got over it, but from that moment I made my plans to return to the serenity of Alaska.

  Last year, once we returned from Latitudes, we had plenty of work still left to do before the king crab season started. We loaded up our freezers in the forepeak with boxes of pinks and chum salmon for king crab bait. For opilios later in the season, we rely on cod and chopped herring for bait. But for king crab, we snap in two salmon per pot, and in opilio season we will load four cod per pot. The king season is open for thirty days but we plan to catch our quota in seven. We estimated that we would pull 120 pots a day, or 840 pots total. That meant we needed ten pounds of salmon for each pot, or 8,400 pounds of bait. We try to use all the bait in one season. Otherwise, we need to either throw it out the scuppers at a loss or save it in the freezers for next season.

  We still had the Coast Guard to contend with, and our own issues of safety. We see enough of the Coasties at the bars in Dutch to know them, and we consider them allies and, some of them, friends. We respect who they are and what they do. Our lives may depend on them.

  Last year, in a bar in Kodiak town, I ran into Matthew Thiessen, a rescue swimmer for the Coast Guard, based at Air Station Kodiak. For recreation, Matt surfs in freezing Alaskan waters, to give you an idea of his toughness. He hit the water last year to rescue four crewmen on the F/V Hunter, a fishing boat that sank in the Shelikof Strait in winter. His story is only one of probably hundreds the Coast Guard could tell about rescuing fishermen on the Bering Sea, but the Hunter tale illustrates for me what these guys go through for our safety.

  Matt never saw the boat. Hunter sank quickly. An EPIRB in the water alerted the Coast Guard’s Alaska headquarters in Juneau, which diverted a CG C-130 Hercules already in flight to take a look around for survivors from about 2,000 feet. They spied a life raft in the water, and Matt and his helicopter crew were called out. From their ready room in Kodiak they ran across a concrete apron to an H-60 Jayhawk military helicopter parked in a hangar. Matt sat in the back of the chopper, running the radios. He was wearing a dry suit with fleece long johns, boots, and a flight helmet. When the helo reached the raft and hovered, ice warning lights lit up in the Jayhawk’s cockpit. Ice was forming on the rotor blades in temperatures of 10 degrees below zero. The Hunter’s crew had been in the raft for more than an hour. Matt took off his flight helmet and put on his flippers and neoprene headgear for warmth. He snapped the hoist cable to a rock-climbing harness he wears, and with a Triton harness carrying his gear, like flares and a radio and such, he headed down. The shock of cold water hit him. The raft was clipping away from him at around four knots in the wind. He swam like hell and got a hand on it. Four crewmen looked at him from under the raft’s awning. They were wearing survival suits, but he said that just by looking at their faces, he knew that two of them were in bad shape. They were in shock, and water had leaked into their survival suits. The Hunter’s captain had stripped down his suit until he was naked to his waist, in serious shock and in denial; hypothermia can make men believe that they are hot, and this illusion can kill them.

  Matt grabbed the first crewman and took him into tow. A man-sized metal basket was lowered from the helicopter. Matt worked to get him into the basket in seas that continually flipped the man out. He was not helping his own cause. He was rigid and his right arm was stiff, and Matt had to bend him to get him into the basket. The first crewman was finally hoisted up. By the time Matt turned around to reach for the next crewman, the wind had blown the raft away, and without explanation, the helicopter left—just disappeared. Matt treaded water alone for the next fifteen minutes, wondering what was going on. He told me he thought in back of his head, “I got three more guys to rescue and I’m pretty winded. I have no helicopter and I don’t know what to do.”

  The Jayhawk finally did return and hovered. Matt used a strop to hoist the second man, then rode the cable up to the Jayhawk to warm up. That helped. And he went back down into the sea for the last two. The third crewman was hard to reach. The raft continued to move with the wind. The Jayhawk hoist operator and cockpit crew had put Matt down broadside to the raft. He had to sprint for two minutes in the water to reach the raft only a few feet away. It would have stayed beyond his reach if a swell had not surfed him to it. Water had leaked into the captain’s survival suit. He was heavy to start with. Matt was afraid that the additional weight of the water in the survival suit would tug the captain out of the sling. H
e told him to relax and let the hoist operator do the work. Matt said the man had a look in his eyes that said, “I’m not going to make it.” The hoist line took the load. He was winched to safety. The last survivor, by comparison, was easier.

  The four rescued men off the Hunter were hypothermic, two seriously so. They were out of the water and in danger of drowning but not yet out of danger. It was Matt who told me the horror of serious triage performed in huge waves of icy 36-degree water. If he is faced with several bodies in the water, and his resources to save all of them are few, he has to make hard choices. He said the specter of this happening keeps him awake at night. In only seconds he must evaluate and prioritize consciousness, breathing, and circulation. He has to ask himself who is the most salvageable. I could never do that, and neither could most people I know. It would be playing God.

  Matt has dealt with some hard cases. One time he was lowered to the deck of a boat to rescue a fisherman whose body was caught on a steel winch drum. The initial report indicated that the man was already dead. Matt was going to pick up the body. But when his feet touched the boat’s deck, the man looked at him with knowing eyes. He was still alert and trying to tell him something but noise of the helicopter drowned out his words. The man gave him a look that said, “I’m not done yet.” He was lashed to the drum by tight strands of two-inch braided nylon rope, which was connected to a supply boat they had been towing. The rope had broken both the man’s lower legs and femur bones and his pelvis, and part of his scalp was peeled off. Miraculously, he survived.