Andy and I have hunted crabs for twenty years and we know their habits. We know where to look for them if we are not finding them. Male crabs congregate along the creases in sea bottom inclines like narrow gullies or arroyos. They snuggle against the ridges at around 400 feet where the feeding is good. These inclines, when viewed on a bottom sounder, form silhouettes that unmistakably remind us of different objects and people. Andy and I refer to them in terms like Sombrero, Butt Cheeks, Can Opener, Goose, and Magoo, for the one with the profile of the cartoon character Mr. Magoo. I knew from the evidence in our prospecting pots that the males were not yet separating from the females. They were congregating in potholes on the bottom. We had to go up to the undersea hills where the separation would begin, and I told the crew on deck over the loudhailer in a booming—I hoped ominous—voice, “Let’s go where no man has gone before.” I told Caveman to chain the stacks for safety’s sake, and we struck a heading to take us 220 miles north-northeast of Dutch and well above the other boats in the fleet.
Even in the worst of times, I prefer not to follow the herd. The younger captains will trail behind other boats in hopes of picking up pockets of crab left behind, but they are learning the grounds. Andy and I like to think we know where to find crabs based on long experience. First of all, we know what we saw last year. We have kept notes where we brought up the babies, which we call the recruits. We see what we see from the previous year and find the trends. If we cannot locate crabs quickly, they are probably not there, or so we tell ourselves. We wanted the mother lode—full pots until we plugged our holds with crab.
The weather as usual was miserable, with seas around thirty feet and the temperatures well below freezing. In that area of the Bering Sea, the weather seems never to know what it wants to do. In one thirty-minute period, snow blowing sideways can turn to sleet that forms sheets of ice on the deck and rigging. And then it will stop. It was one of those days to be indoors and snug.
Once we reached the new—and we hoped, unexplored—grounds we set a prospecting string, which we allowed to soak while Neal and I filled a thirty-gallon plastic trash bag with five pounds of flour, tied it off, and out on the deck near the block, attached the bag to the shot line and sent it down with a pot. We used to fill bags like that with shit so that anybody pulling our pots illegally would get shitbagged, but those times have changed. Nobody raids pots anymore.
Once we were picking up the pots, Caveman was working the block for Russell, whose elbow was still hurting, and Caveman was not keeping pace with the boat. He was expending too much energy; he had not yet learned to streamline his movements, and he was getting tired. We rubbed our hands together as he hooked a buoy and pulled in the shot line. He was standing next to the block as Neal, on the hydros, winched up the pot. When the trash bag hit the block, it exploded like a bomb, spraying flour over Caveman, who leaped backward. His face was white and everyone laughed at his surprise. We were still smiling a short time later when our humor turned to alarm.
We were retrieving the last of our pots, moving from one to the next in the string, when another boat, a 130-foot crab scow named Trail Blazer appeared on our starboard about half a mile out. We were moving in opposite directions roughly on parallel tracks. When we came abreast we were about 400 yards off. In the wheelhouse, I noticed that the barometer was dropping. We were in for a hard blow. I looked out the windows with my binoculars and fixed on a crewman on the Trail Blazer. He was clambering on the pots chaining the stack in anticipation of rougher weather. He was walking on the pot webbing and bars six widths of pots off the deck. It was dangerous to be on the stack in those seas, and the captain of the Trail Blazer unaccountably had allowed the boat to drift into the trough. A port-to-starboard wallow threw the boat heavily from side to side.
Andy came into the wheelhouse carrying his video camera. He had mentioned earlier that he wanted to experiment with the new camera. He said he was freezing on deck; he was wearing only rain pants, a sweatshirt and boots. I pointed to the Trail Blazer. With only a glance he sized up the danger. He said to me that the crewman had better watch out. The seas were rough; he could be swiped by a wave and disappear overboard and nobody would see what happened. We watched him with our naked eyes; he was now hanging over the side of a six-high stack trying to attach a chain. The captain of Trail Blazer was unaware of what his crewman was doing. The scow remained in the trough.
Andy went out the wheelhouse door behind the captain’s chair with the video camera. The Trail Blazer wallowed with each wave, which swung the crewman, who seemed unaware of the danger he was in, nearly into the freezing water. I looked over again, thinking, This is fucked.
Usually when a captain orders a crewman over the side like that, he will jog into the waves and cut his speed. I was about to warn their skipper on the radio of what was happening from our point of view. Andy came back inside the wheelhouse and said, “God, my hands are cold.” I told him I was going to call the Trail Blazer’s skipper, and I asked him, looking out the window again, “Where’d that guy go?”
Andy said, “I just saw him on the stack.” But the man I had seen turned out to be another crewman running to tell the skipper.
Seconds later, the captain was screaming on the radio, “Time Bandit, man overboard! Man overboard!”
I swung the binoculars. The man was now in the frozen sea two boat-lengths behind Trail Blazer. He was blowing air into a malfunctioning life vest. Just as before, when the F/V Troika’s captain died on Time Bandit to my everlasting shame, my legs started to shake with dread. I was not going to stand off this time and watch while another boat fumbled a rescue; the Trail Blazer was making a 180-degree turn but the man in the water would have succumbed by the time they reached him. I could angle Time Bandit directly without turning and reach the man in minutes. It was go time. I forwarded the throttles to maximum rpms. We could save this guy. I knew we could.
I thought of the water temperature—38 degrees—and the condition of the man, who was virtually defenseless in that sea. Seagulls hovered over his head probably imagining him as garbage. I watched the Trail Blazer turn, but her crew was not yet deploying a life sling from the crane and no crewman was on deck in a survival suit.
I flipped the switch to activate the general alarm. A siren screamed through the boat alerting the crew, who knew about the emergency without my telling them. Russell was dumping a survival suit out of a bag onto the wheelhouse floor. I do not think I ever saw him move faster. I steered the Time Bandit to bring our starboard alongside the man overboard. Down on the deck in the bow Neal was maneuvering the crane in position for a rescue. I thought of the brass key around my neck. For a year after the Troika tragedy, I wasn’t locking that door again. We were ready to save this man’s ass. My feelings were incredibly intense. Right or wrong, I felt that this man had only a few more seconds to live, and Time Bandit was all that stood between him and oblivion.
I was hard pressed to figure out his condition. He was not moving. He was not flailing his arms or swimming. Either he was trying to conserve his energy, and thus whatever heat remained in his body, or he had passed out and was close to dying in the water. It was a challenge for me to track him in the waves. He seemed impossibly small from where I sat. One second I would see his head; the next, he was gone. I felt such pity for him. He was a mere pinprick alone on a vast sea.
I brought the bow up beside him and reversed the engines. I swung Time Bandit like it was a skiff. Neal was standing on the starboard rail with a life ring in his hands. The man overboard was bobbing in the swells right off the block when Neal threw the ring. The ring landed beyond the man’s reach. I jogged the boat to keep him close to our starboard side. Neal threw the ring again.
The man was pleading, “Don’t let me die! Please don’t let me die!”
“You’re not going to die. We got you,” Andy told him.
I was yelling at nobody in particular, “We got him! We got you, Bud!”
Andy lifted him onboard. Altog
ether, once we reached him, getting him on the deck had taken fifteen seconds.
On the deck Caveman grabbed him in a full World Wrestling Federation neck lock. The man was crying and snuffling, “My mom thanks you; my grandma thanks you; my girlfriend thanks you. You saved my life.” Caveman was as keyed up as everyone else. We had saved him from drowning. That was true. But he was not yet saved from hypothermia.
Caveman dragged him across the deck and inside the deck door to the cabin. We put him on the floor where the captain had died, and Richard helped him strip off his wet clothes. He wrapped a blanket around him and asked him if he could stand up. Russell walked him to the galley, where he collapsed on the settee. Andy asked whether one of the crew should snuggle naked with him in a sleeping bag to warm him up. The crew looked at one another. Russell started laughing. “I guess he’s going to die,” he joked.
The man looked at me. “My God, was that scary.”
“You’re alive, man,” I told him.
“I just lost it. It was cold and I just…Icy. Caught the chain and…”
“You disappeared, man,” I told him. “You disappeared.” I hugged him, and he was crying with relief. I was too.
I told him, “My legs are shaking. Take your time….”
“Unbelievable,” Russell said.
“I wasn’t going to let you go,” said Andy.
I was puffing hard with adrenaline. “Last time that happened we pulled a dead guy out of the water.”
Andy said, “Not this time, huh, John?”
“No, this time we got him.”
We waited for his body to react to the warmth. His name was Josh White. He had four minutes to shiver, we estimated, or the indication would be that his core temperature had fallen too low and he would die. He was weeping. I had to get away from him, and I was bawling as I left the room. I do not know if it was for Josh White, or the captain off the Troika, or maybe for myself, because the curse was off the boat.
I went up to the wheelhouse. Andy was there. “We redeemed ourselves, brother.”
I told the skipper of Trail Blazer the news. His attitude struck me as…well, different. He wanted Josh White to swim back to Trail Blazer.
“What was that?” I asked him.
“Put him in a survival suit and tell him to swim back.”
I did not get it. Josh White was telling us that today was his thirty-first birthday. What a gift: fall overboard, get rescued, and swim back? I did not think so, and I told his captain my thoughts.
“Well, tell him to take the rest of the day off and celebrate,” he said.
Andy and I gave each other looks of incomprehension. What was this guy thinking?
We kept Josh onboard Time Bandit and dropped him off the next day in St. Paul in the Pribilof Islands from which he could catch a flight to Anchorage. And feeling huge rushes of endorphin, we set out to return to where we had put down our prospecting pots. And almost like night and day, the pots started to show us money. They came up bulging with king crabs, first with sixty-nine in a pot, then seventy-one. I was doing the “crab jig” in the wheelhouse when Russell indicated with his fingers from the deck that the next pot contained 100, and the one after, 106! The crabs had moved north. We had landed on top of their main mass.
I told Andy, “Nobody will believe us. I’m the Comeback Kid.”
The next pot showed 151. We were averaging more than 100 per pot. This was historic.
We dropped another set. Andy put on his cowboy hat for luck. I told him, “I’d rather be lucky than good any day. I found the mother lode.”
The string produced numbers I had not seen before: 106, 134—that was when Andy put on his hat—126, 132, 118. It was like dredging up a treasure chest every ten minutes. Red gold!
And, finally, with no place to put more crabs, we headed back to Dutch.
We pulled $320,000 of crabs in thirty-six hours, for a total of 133,000 pounds. The red crabs for the season grossed the boat $500,000. Two-thirds went to the captains and the boat, and a third went to the crew, which meant six percent or $32,000 for each deckhand, less his share, again six percent, of the food and fuel. Not bad for a couple weeks’ work.
We met up at Latitudes, where I took possession of the $900 prize for the most crabs per pot. All that cash felt good in my hands; I rang the bell for drinks all around and donated most of what remained to the Fishermen Memorial Fund. Even though it was early in the day to be drinking, Russell shouted over the raised voices, “It’s 7:30 in Japan. Let’s get drunk.”
I will always wonder if our good luck had anything to do with getting the bad luck off the boat. Could the size of our king crab catch really have had anything to do with saving the life of Josh White?
Do Flowers Hurt When You Pick ’Em?
Andy
Still nothing from Russell. I carry my cell phone in my shirt pocket, even now and then needlessly checking on the volume control, distrusting the instrument because it does not ring. I’m sitting on Rio’s back, and Rio is up to his belly in water in the middle of the pond, where the biting horse flies only reluctantly will go. To anyone passing by, we would look strange, a man and a horse in a pond, hardly moving except for Rio's swishing tail. I am finding myself stuck where I am, not knowing about Johnathan.
He has the softest heart of any of us Hillstrand boys. People who do not know him might doubt this; he comes across bold and brash, I suppose as a defensive measure, a sign of fundamental shyness, perhaps? Our mother thought he would grow up to be a veterinarian; he carried insects and small animals in his pockets. He held bees in his hand. He raised and sold teddy bear hampsters to the pet store. When our cat was giving birth to a litter of kittens, she came for Johnathan. He left her to tell us about the babies, and she came back to get him. When we were little kids on the Spit, visitors would leave starfish and other sea creatures on the beach, and John put them back in the water. One time, he asked Mom, “Do flowers hurt when you pick ’em?”
But, notwithstanding any of that, sometimes he can piss me off like nobody else on earth. Before king crab season, he swans into Dutch on a PennAir flight from Anchorage, instead of riding out the rough seas on the Time Bandit from Homer; and he arrives like Hollywood with local girlfriends and his buddies all waiting to greet him at the airport. He is the Time Bandit’s captain in the king crab season. He knows I will cover for him. That’s what I do. But that makes me angrier still. He is a force of nature that I cannot change. And by now, I would not even try.
I do not know where the fishing and our ages and the ownership of the Time Bandit will lead us brothers. We could sell out our IFQs and the Time Bandit and walk away with a million dollars each. Our boat is a partnership, and if I can build up the horse business in Indiana, I will never have partners again. Selling the boat would get me out of this endless cycle. I wonder how we have stuck with the repetition of seasons this long: From January 15 to March 31 we fish opilio and sometimes baradai like we are now. Then we run Time Bandit home, take the crab gear off, and put gear on for herring tendering. We go to Sitka and deliver to Prince Rupert Sound, Canada, through April. We then go back to Homer and prepare for the herring fishery for two weeks, and once that is complete, the boat goes home again. Now, salmon tendering lasts from June 15 in Bristol Bay for forty days, until the end of August, then in Kodiak until late September. And before king crab begins on October 15 we have to tear down the boat, paint the hull, and attend to the gear. The boat never stops—and that is the real meaning of Time Bandit.
Are we going to continue as we are now? I just do not know. Johnathan will want to go on, and Neal will go along with him. I may have to keep fishing, but with my head instead of my heart. But what about the long-term future?
Fishing the Bering Sea was a family affair starting with our dad, but I do not see that in the Hillstrand family’s future. My daughters are not interested; Chelsey loves the sea but a career as a fishing boat captain is not going to happen. Neal’s two teenaged boys are not going to fish
either. Johnathan’s son, Scott, may continue but he faces a dilemma of how to live off fishing if he does not own a boat. He will be relegated to life as a deckhand. Earning six percent of the catch might work while he is young, but after a certain age, the work gets harder. His wife Ashley faces a dilemma, as well, as a mother, wife, and woman. Her husband will be off the boat or on the boat. There can be no middle ground. He is either a seafarer or a family man. He has to marry the boat. It is the same choice I made as a younger man. Scott is our last family hope on the sea and it is not looking good.
Fishing as a lifestyle does not get passed down anymore. I do not need to wonder why.
It used to be all or nothing. It was a gold rush. The risks were exhilarating. If we did not pull it off, we lost the boat. Our backs were constantly against a wall. We lived for pressure, the rush, and the adrenaline. But what young person wants that? My brothers and I have fished from the age of twelve. It was ingrained early on in our character. We had the ethic for stress-related work. We were mentally tough. Our dad, mean as he was, gave us this character. We worked hard. He yelled at us, “Pull on the goddamned line, you stupid sonofabitch!” I was pulling 250 fathoms of purse line and every muscle in my body was popping. If I let up for a second, he would yell at me again. That does not happen anymore. Those times are gone.
My brothers and I grew up with nothing. We knew what hunger was like. Today, parents give their kids everything. Parents know that they are not building their children’s character but are helpless to do anything else. Few young people know hunger and real want. They have not experienced what it is like to have nothing. And just something small like a hard life at sea with little to show for the work will not satisfy them. This is America as it is today. And America today is no training ground for Bering Sea fishermen.
The Bering Sea crab industry is moving in a direction that eliminates even the romance of the sea. With rationalization, the industry is consolidating and shrinking. Some 300 boats in the king crab fleet not long ago crowded Dutch Harbor during Derby Days; now 80 boats are registered and about 65 boats actually cast off and go fishing. The canneries are taking over the business from ocean floor to retail shop floor. The deck crews of the future will be hourly workers. The captains will earn salaries. We are dinosaurs.
Time Bandit: Two Brothers, the Bering Sea, and One of the World's Deadliest Jobs Page 17
