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

by Malcolm MacPherson

  We whine about price, but as long as Alaska supplies only a small percentage of the rapidly increasing volume in markets like Japan and the United States, Alaskan fishermen and processors will have little to say about the market supply and virtually nothing to say about the price of its king crab.

  The state is now encouraging us crabbers to join co-ops. Time Bandit is a member of one out of its own self-interest. If we catch more crabs than the limit our IFQs allow, instead of paying a fine, or worse, dumping the crabs back into the sea, other boats in our co-op that have not yet fished can account for our excess, which they can sell without catching. The state would like us to go even further with our co-ops by joining forces with the processors in true cooperation. We are not yet ready to take that step. It will never work; as we see it, cooperation would be like putting a fox in the henhouse.

  We are afraid of becoming hourly salaried workers with the adventure, traditions, and romance of crabbing buried under pages of quotas and rules and regulations. We do not want to be part of a bureaucracy. We do not sit well on committees and at meetings around boardroom tables. We are men who work with our hands. Debates are meant for bars. We work harder in short bursts than any other laborers in America. We have seen what industry and cooperatives did to farmers. Fishermen are independent, ornery, and wary of change. We sense that once we let go, we will lose ourselves. What worries us crabbers is how quickly our way of life might simply disappear.

  Have we reached the last frontier? Yes. The old ways are disappearing in a blur of speed. Yet fishermen hold on to what only God can change. As long as we fish for crabs, nothing can diminish the dangers inherent in our work. Nothing will change the winds and the sea. The Bering, then, is our last frontier. It is our Wild West, our Lonesome Dove, played out on waves.

  I Fear What Lives Under the Sea

  Johnathan

  The sea is rougher now, and Fishing Fever is in the troughs. I have no power to jog the boat into the sea. With a motor I could take the waves bow-on, but without power she is turned broadside in the troughs. The ride is rough; the boat is light and no match for the swells. The tide has turned against the wind. The seas are fifteen or sixteen feet, not yet of a height that threatens to capsize me, but they are nearly half as high as my boat’s length. I am a little worried.

  I strip down in order to layer warmer clothes. I must be ready for anything. I am standing on the floor in the wheelhouse in my underpants when suddenly I start to laugh. This is a funny, not a psychotic, laugh, although either would be appropriate. I have not thought about this in years, but once, not too long ago, I was staying on the thirtieth floor of a hotel on the opposite side of the casino on the Las Vegas Strip. I ordered lunch from room service. When I finished eating, I pulled back the covers and went back to bed. I must have slept for four or five hours. The clock said it was the late afternoon and downstairs the casino would be coming to life with suckers just like me. I like to gamble; it is a pleasure, not a need. I like the action and the life. The lunch leavings smelled, and I pushed the cart out the door into the hall. I was turning around when I heard the door click. I straightened up like I had heard a shot. I was standing on the carpeted hallway in my tightie-whities, nothing but pure WalMart BVDs. I was thinking, If I only wore boxers! I saw no alternative to taking an elevator to the ground floor. I walked through the casino, all across the casino to the other side. People did not know what to think. They were like, “What the fuck? Just look at that. They took everything from him but his underpants.”

  I kept my eyes straight ahead, my hands folded like I was going to communion. At the front desk the line stretched, it seemed at the time, from here to eternity. I got in the rear, and waited. I looked up at the ceiling. Remember when you were a kid and had nightmares about going to school in your underwear and you would wake up screaming? That was happening. We inched forward, and at last I was talking to an employee, who glanced over the counter and with admirable self-control did not give a single hint of anything out of the ordinary. I asked for a new card key. I explained the circumstance.

  She was a cold bitch. She asked me, “How do we know it’s you? Do you have an I.D., sir?”

  I said, “Come on, man.”

  Security on either elbow escorted me back to my room.

  A plug of Copenhagen soothes me now. On the shelf in the wheelhouse sits a bottle of Chantix that is supposed to help me stop smoking. The pills work. That is why I do not take them. With Chantix I do not feel like smoking or anything else that is bad for me, like eating greasy McDonald’s. You would be surprised how bad that little sonofabitch gallbladder can make you feel. You do not actually need one either. Chantix makes me feel like shit. I might as well take diet pills.

  In seas like these, I can get seasick. In the crab season, I almost always puke the first night out. I am feeling like doing that now. My stomach is queasy, and I am half prepared to run for the head, but Fishing Fever has no head; I have the whole wide sea to hurl in. I lie down on the bunk and roll with the waves. Normally this calms my stomach, but right now the motion of the waves is not what is giving me butterflies. A boat can be more relaxing than anything else when everything is going right. When it is like now, anxiety can churn my guts. There is nothing I can do, which makes the queasy feeling only worse.

  In the dark, I distract myself by thinking of what I am not afraid of. I do not fear heights; in fact, I love to freefall from airplanes. I do not fear the sea, though I have been afraid on the sea. One night last year in the king crab season, a 100-foot rogue wave with a 30-foot whitewater “viper” slammed into Time Bandit. That frightened me beyond the measure of I-thought-we-were-done-for. Andy was in the captain’s chair and I was in my stateroom when a wave hit us from behind. I did not know what was happening. Everything was falling. I could not reach the ladder to the engine room. Then that huge rogue, following behind that wave, punched us upright. Andy told me later that the impact tossed him up to the ceiling. It threw the microwave right through the galley door. It tore the refrigerator and stove off their bolts. We were sixty feet under the water. The whole boat was shuddering—dut dut dut dut. The engines sputtered. I thought it was over. I did not see how we could not go over. This was the kind of wave that takes out small villages. No one onboard said a word. We collected like crows up in the wheelhouse. Andy was clutching the wheel. I thought, We are going to see Davy Jones.

  More than anything, more than rogues, I fear what lives under the sea. I used to work, when I was not fishing, as a commercial diver, mostly pulling propellers. I would use regular scuba gear and wear a dry suit. I used wrenches and hammers and welding equipment, whatever was needed to do the job. I was happy with this work, but then I saw the movie Jaws, and the underwater world was never again the same for me.

  One time I was working to repair a shaft about twenty feet under the water when I noticed that a sea lion was swimming around me. I imagined that he wanted to see what was up. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as I worked. Suddenly, he swam straight at me, grabbed my shoulder with his teeth, and pulled me through the water. I knew exactly the feeling of being in a shark’s mouth. I kicked loose of him and came straight up to the surface. My eyeballs were big as saucers.

  I only dove twice more after that, but I watched my back in a big way. Now I am afraid of sea lions even when I am not under the water. They congregate in Kodiak harbor because people feed them off the dock. A man was sitting with his ass over the pier, and a sea lion grabbed him and took a big chunk out. He got his gun and shot the sea lion dead, and the police arrested him. Does that make sense to you? If a bear comes into town and starts eating your kids, you shoot him, don’t you? What’s so different about sea lions eating ass?

  Thanks to the movie Jaws, I am more scared of sharks than I am of drowning. I was long-lining off the East Coast once when a fifteen-foot blue shark swam up to the transom. At the time, I was drinking a cup of coffee. He looked up at the transom. He scared the shit out of me. I hit him o
n the head with the cup, which fell into the water, and he ate it. I wanted my cup back. No shark was going to take it without a fight. The shark followed the boat for three days looking, I supposed, either for more coffee cups or for a chance to eat me. I hooked up a big bait bag on a grapple, and the shark grabbed that grapple hook with all the power in its jaws. I fought him on a line for six hours. And then I got tired and I dragged him to death at eight knots. At the dock, I opened his gut with a knife. My coffee cup fell out with a broken handle. I glued the handle back on and called it even with the shark. I have every reason to believe that if he ate my coffee cup he would have eaten me if I had fallen overboard.

  I also do not like killer whales, which swim in pods in Alaskan waters. I have seen what they do to creatures smaller than they are. They throw sea otters up in the air like eating popcorn. They would probably not intend to eat me, a man, but what would that matter if they mistook me for a sea otter? Tourists might shake their heads if they knew that an orca had eaten a human. But if they heard that an orca had eaten a sea otter, they would demand action. Nothing on or under the ocean is cuter than a sea otter. They are like puppies…. you could make slippers out of them. But they eat every clam and every crab from the shore to ten miles out to sea and then they move somewhere else and do the same thing there. Orcas and sea otters, I say, are a balance of nature. Orcas and me, not so much.

  And last of all, I am afraid of marriage. That is why I never came close or met the right woman. A relationship with a woman should grow and not be like a roller coaster ride. Getting married is not going to make it smoother. Like I say, when I drink, I drink. When I work, I work. When I am with a lady, I’m with that lady. I treat ladies real good. I treat boats good, too. I would have to work at a marriage, and crabbers like me are working too hard at fishing to have something worthwhile left for marriage. Besides, crabbers say, “You don’t lose your wife, you lose your turn.”

  Here is what happens: You come home from fishing after three months to find your wife in the bar, and that is not good. The fishing life is hard on them, too. I stayed with two women because we had babies together, and I put investments and stuff like houses I owned in their names, so it was like we were married. That ended our relationships as we had known them and would have ended our marriages. With the arrival of kids, there was no more sex on the kitchen table. All the romance went out the window. The babies slept in bed with us. I had to take their mother to a motel once a week for sex.

  The irony of my own children is that they have brought me untold happiness. My daughter gave birth to my second grandchild, Tiana, last October. My son’s wife had my first grandchild, Sawyer, last September. I became a double grandpa within a month, and am happy to say I am proud. I hope their parents do a better job of raising them than I did raising my children.

  My son Scott had a tough childhood partly due to me being a fisherman. He hardly saw me for nine months out of the year. He lived in Homer with my Grandma Jo and in Idaho with my mother and with my stepfather Bob. Scott’s mother was not around. When I was in town as he got older, he went with me on the boat, catching fish and tendering, and, more or less, he grew up on boats. He tells me how one of his first memories was tendering when he was five. At the time, his cousin Chelsey was on the boat, too. One morning, the crew and Andy and I were asleep when a boat came up to deliver salmon. Scott and Chelsey tried to wake us up, but Andy and I told them to go away. Without another word, they went up on deck and tied up the boat themselves.

  I gave Scott tough love. He was fifteen, failing at school and into drugs. He totaled my truck. I told him he had to pay me. At the end of the summer, he had made $14,000; I took out $2,000 for the IRS and $8,000 for my truck. I told him, “Welcome to the real world.”

  To get his life in order as a teenager, I gave him two options: Go out fishing with me or straighten out by yourself. He quit school and went to sea with me. At the end of that year, I wanted him to return to school. He asked me if I would go back if I was making $14,000 a year when I was only fifteen? He fished with me and bounced boats for the next seven years. Fishing became a celebration for him. He never thought of the dangers. He turned himself into a working machine as a deckhand. The sun went up and went down, up and down, while he did nothing else but work. And he liked it. He liked the sea. It was an escape. For Scott fishing meant living the life of a rock star. When he walked into the bar and rang the bell and was throwing down $100 bills, life was cool.

  Once at sea last year, we started out slow. The king crabs were not cooperating with Time Bandit’s timetable. We traveled east and north to a line approximating the area between Bristol Bay and the Bering Sea that had served us well the previous year. About two hours after leaving Dutch Harbor I started feeling seasick and gave the watch to Richard and went below. I lay down on my bunk, and before I could count to one hundred it was time for me to drive the porcelain bus. Once I puked, I felt fine. But I did not see the point of going back to the wheelhouse, and I went back to bed.

  The next morning, we launched prospecting pots, and the deck routine went as usual. I rank the jobs on the deck according to risk and skill levels. Last year, Neal operated the crane with economy, precision, and speed; he always does. Neal on the hydros eases the minds of the deck crew. He works in a smooth rhythm. Nothing ever surprises him at the controls. The hydros may look easy to operate but they come with a cost of pain. Neal must stand at his station in the freezing cold and wet. He cannot move. His hands and feet freeze. He has had arthritis in his knuckles for years. In spite of the agony of the cold and discomfort of the wet, he has never laid a pot on a crewman’s head or pinned one against a rail. He has reason to be proud of his skills. He never gets sloppy. One “oops” from him, and a crewmate can end up injured. Neal says little. He is a pro who stays out of the way. As a captain in the wheelhouse looking down on the deck, sometimes I wonder if he is even there. That is how good he is.

  He is a jack of all trades. He knows woodworking, welding, and engine mechanics. He says often longingly that he would like to have been a fireman or an explosives man, like the ones who implode entire buildings. He might have made careers of them but he could never stand the nine to five. One time he sold furniture in a store. He quit soon after he started. He told me, “I don’t like bosses.”

  He is also Time Bandit’s cook, and nobody gets in his way when he is working in the galley, which has less space perhaps than a kitchen in a small apartment, although with a grand view of the sea out a single porthole over the sink. Neal clearly enjoys cooking. Though he is not a great chef, his staples—eggs, pancakes, bacon, hash, spaghetti with meat sauce, etc.—are as good as they can get on a boat. He cooks roasts and other high-protein dishes that he can prepare in advance and puts in potatoes and vegetables at the last moment. His specialty is crab plucked from the sea and immersed in a large pot of seawater. He serves the delicacy with a brush of butter. When crab is on Neal’s menu, which is not often, the crew never complains. He plans the timing of the meals, as best he can, around the schedule of the captain, for example, asking me when I estimate the crew will get a break between launching and lifting the pots.

  The crew eats like starved beasts. No matter what or how much, the food vanishes in minutes of silent gulping. The crew hardly comes up for air. A gallon of milk will disappear as quickly as the spout will pour. An enormous eighteen-pound roast beef, fresh from the oven, was reduced to bones last year at three in the morning. The men eat dessert from two-gallon containers of ice cream. Whatever is placed on the table is never enough, and though he knows that food for the crew is nothing but fuel, Neal still takes a measure of pride from cooking for them.

  I take nothing for granted about what Neal achieves in the galley. The miracle is that he can cook anything on the Bering. The seas are rough all the time. If we can let go of a stationary, steadying object like a wall, counter, bed, or sink, for five seconds without falling off balance, we think of the sea as calm. It happens rarely. To coo
k in that shifting, topsy-turvy world requires Neal to rig the stove top with adjustable braces for pots and pans, and boiling water sloshes on the counter or floor anyway. One time a boiling pot went straight up in the air nearly to the ceiling. He has cooked bacon in twenty-footers. Scrambled eggs seemed easy; he would not attempt to cook an egg over-easy.

  Last year, Neal brought onboard a month-old Jack Russell terrier puppy that he named Bandit, with a semicircle of brown around his left eye. Bandit was learning to coordinate his legs, and he moved around the boat less to the places he might have wanted to visit than according to the motion of the boat. He slept with Neal and played on the deck with live crabs. Richard and Shea trailed after him with newspapers when Neal notified them that it might be time for Bandit to “go poopoo.”

  Dogs at sea are an old tradition. Mine was named Jake, a mutt, part boxer, part lab, with evil white eyes. Jake weighed about 100 pounds. I took him fishing each year to Togiak in Bristol Bay. He would not go to the bathroom on the boat. I would go, “Come on, boy, you can do it,” but he never did. He never sniffed crotch and was no ass sniffer either. He knew he was a dog. He was my buddy.