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

by Malcolm MacPherson

  We were fucked. So was any other boat in the crab fishing fleet that was scheduled to deliver to Stellar Sea.

  The Coast Guard towed the crippled processor into St. Paul. Heavy damage required a tug to help Stellar Sea from St. Paul into Dutch for repairs. That left us with two weeks and nowhere to deliver our opies. If there was a silver lining, our holds were empty when the Stellar Sea fire broke out. Andy asked me what I thought. We did not have many options. We did not want to return to Dutch empty, and we could not fish for opies, which left us with baradai. We had a small quota. We had the time. And we could deliver these crabs to any processor we pleased. I told Andy, “It’s all good; it’s all fishing.”

  Andy both agreed and disagreed. Recently no one had fished baradai, which were fished nearly to extinction in the Bering twenty years ago until the state stepped in and protected them for a decade. They rebounded, but baradai are a difficult catch. When they were told, the crew grumbled. They had to reset the pots, which was not as difficult as they made it seem. And when Andy looked at his bottom plotter and found a likely prospecting area, the crew launched eighty pots over eighty miles, one every ten minutes.

  While the pots soaked Andy fretted over the weather, with a 960-millibar low closing in from the northwest. He predicted thirty-five-foot seas and seventy-knot gusts. He worried how many pots the deck crew could pull before the worst of the storm reached us. Meanwhile, he kept his eyes on the seas and the deck. Time Bandit was traveling in the ditch, jogging into the sea, taking the waves head-on. Every now and then a “viper” or “growler”—a whitewater curler on top of a wave that pops the bow with the speed of a striking snake—would hit the bow. To give the crew warning, Andy, who could see clearly over the bow into the oncoming seas, shouted over the loudhailer, “Move! Watch out! Watch out!” And the crew ducked and held on. Andy is particularly sensitive to vipers. He and Neal once were working on deck when a rogue wave with a viper washed over the bow and the starboard rail; six feet of green water poured onto the deck and only luck saved them from being washed overboard.

  Hurriedly, the crew pulled the pots to beat the weather. Their initial excitement turned to gloom when they realized, on closer inspection of the full pots, that out of every 400 crabs, only 15 were keepers. The throw-backs were too small, female, or “dirty”—crabs with shells darkened by barnacles. This kind of fishing was not worth the effort, but a crab fisherman does not expect to find a sweet spot the first time every time.

  The sea was starting to worry the crew. Their footing on the deck was getting slippery. Each pot that came out was rebaited and sent back down. Work that was fast and demanding pushed them to their limits. At one point, Richard, standing by the launcher, was poised to send the buoys overboard after a pot was launched. A wave slapped the bow and sped down the rail just as the buoy line skittered across the deck and around Richard’s ankle. All 750 pounds of the pot plummeted to the bottom. Richard, seeing the immediate danger, had only a couple of seconds to untangle the line; he jumped and danced to free his ankle. He bent over and slapped the buoy, which flew up and wrapped around his other ankle. He was a second or two away from going over and down when the line flew off his legs and slipped over the side with the buoy.

  Richard stood in one place, a look of shock on his face. He stared down at his ankles, half expecting to see himself jerked and dragged down. With a nervous laugh, he told Russell, “I got away with one on that.”

  From the bridge, Andy told the crew, “That got serious real fast. I hope you guys are carrying your knives.”

  He felt responsible for the poor showing. “This is the worst season so far for me ever,” he told me. “Somebody should go to jail for this.” He clapped his white cowboy hat on his head and stared out the forward windows. “This is just a huge clusterfuck with fuel money going down the drain.” He reached for the loudhailer and called the crew off the deck, deciding to let the remaining sixty pots soak until the storm blew through. Moments after the crew came inside, a thirty-to thirty-five-foot rogue hit the Time Bandit over the starboard rail. The boat shuddered. Green water poured over the deck. The powerful wave ripped the 200-pound Marco King coiler off its bolts and laid it on its side. Andy said, “I’ll fish through almost anything, but this weather worries me.”

  Time Bandit jogged into the sea, and everyone held on.

  Inside in the galley, Richard, a self-confessed sugar junkie, braced his elbows on both sides of a two-gallon container of ice cream. He was staring into the middle distance. He said, “The hardest part of this job is just keeping my balance. That’s what takes it out of you. You have to keep your head about you and feel the movement of the waves. Sometimes you worry if another crewman is doing something stupid, like if by mistake he throws the line around your neck, and I’m overboard. Out there just now, I do not know how that happened. It was not a mistake on my part. I know, nobody ever admits to mistakes. But this was not one. It was a real accident that could have been a whole lot worse. Real accidents, not just stupid mistakes, really do happen.” And he plunged a spoon into the ice cream.

  Andy, in the wheelhouse, was deep in denial. “I find the crab and I fish the crab. It never happens that you just land on them,” unless, of course, you just land on them. He started talking about one year that stuck in his mind. “That year I could do no wrong. It was my peak. We never pulled bad pots. We brought in a total of 1.7 million pounds of crabs, in two months and a week, and my guys earned $72,000. I was invincible.”

  “What about now?” I asked.

  “I am vincible. But that year there was ice all over and every other boat in the fleet quit and went in. And that was when I landed on the mother lode.” Andy looked out over the deck. He said, “Maybe this weather will move the crabs onto the pots.”

  To sit out the storm, Andy decided to put into St. Paul Island for groceries, which is to say, for a night on the town. St. Paul Island is a bleak low-lying, barren island of wind and more wind that blows across the Bering Sea from Siberia. We tied up at the dock in front of an abandoned cannery at the bow of the Stimson, the Alaskan State Wildlife Police’s patrol boat. Small black wild foxes scurried over the snowdrifts hunting for rats at the cannery. The sun was setting. It was colder than cold. The crew, Andy, and I piled into the island’s grocery store looking for fresh bread; we spent more than $1,000. We paused for a drink at the island’s only bar, which was unheated. The floors were bare, but liquor bottles filled the shelves. We ordered drinks and settled into conversations with the native Alaskans who hang out there. One was telling jokes to his friends. “Knock, knock, who’s there? Dishes. Dishes Who? Dishes your girlfriend from Naknek.” We laughed to get along. The local natives keep separate from the fishermen. Some of the crew played pool. On the wall behind the table a sign warned, NO HITTING PEOPLE WITH POOL STICKS OR THROWING BALLS AT ANYONE. The St. Paul Island bar is that kind of place.

  We threw back a few more drinks to insulate us on the ride in the back of a pickup truck across the island to a small housing development where federal government employees live; they work for the National Weather Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We were going to dinner at the home of the Rex Morgan family, who had invited us over single sideband radio a day ago. Mrs. Morgan served baked chicken and corn on the cob, which was a break from Neal’s cooking, and the crew watched sports on a jumbo screen TV. Outside the wind howled and the black-furred foxes patiently waited in the snowdrifts in the back of the house for scraps. The lives of these dedicated civil servants like Rex are unimaginably hard. Without them, crabbers would be largely ignorant of the local weather patterns and the conditions of the sea.

  When we left St. Paul harbor the next morning, the weather stayed bad. Andy ordered the crew out to rig the pots for cod; at least if we were not catching crabs, we could bring up bait, and maybe new, fresh bait would make a difference in what we caught. The cod crowded the pots as the storm blew through. With the fresh bait, the crew set eighty prospec
ting pots that came up with disappointing numbers. The weather had not pushed the crabs toward us as Andy had hoped. We did not know where to find the baradai. Russell said, “We are catching snails.”

  We spent the next two and a half days prospecting for baradai. The morale of the crew sank. Nobody wanted to talk about fishing. The crew went to their rooms as soon as they had eaten. A funk settled on the boat under the weight of our collective failure. Responsibility rested with Andy, who was supposed to see crabs 400 feet under our hull, and his supersight was failing him. The crew was working the deck for nothing.

  Andy was disappointed in the whole IFQ system under rationalization.

  The next eighty pots began to show a difference. After a couple more pots, we knew we were approaching a hot spot. Pots began averaging 200 crabs—huge for baradai. The mood of the crew lightened. The weather cooperated. We thought we could bring up our baradai quota in no time. But at sea, no one counts his crabs too early.

  Andy heard the sound of the engine change. He throttled back and on the loudhailer told Neal to come to the wheelhouse. Neal knew right away the meaning of the engine’s sound. A wave had pushed a pot line under Time Bandit’s hull and the starboard main prop had tangled around the three-quarter-inch line. The shaft seized up as the line tightened. Andy ordered the crew to cut the line from the pot. And a $1,000 plus pot plummeted to the bottom.

  “What’s going on?” Andy asked Neal.

  “We’re fucked,” he replied.

  To disentangle the prop, Andy would have to dive under the hull and check out the damage. And right now, a couple hundred miles from Dutch, he had to make certain that he did not further entangle line in the other prop. We had no choice but to limp back to Dutch on one engine with dicey steering.

  Times like these test a fisherman’s patience. But on that day they gave us an appreciation, which we do not always admit to, of the new rules of crab rationalization. Under the Derby, this prop snarl might have doomed our opie season, but probably not. Now, with new rules, no one could take our IFQs from us. There was no reason for dismay. Maybe rationalization took away our license to catch a bonanza of crabs, but it gave us a safety net. Right now, we felt disappointment but not despair.

  Back in Dutch, with Time Bandit tied up at the dock, Andy donned a dry suit, flippers, gloves and hood, a regulator, and a compressed air tank. He dove into the thirty-six-degree water off the dock: a pot line had indeed wrapped around the prop shaft. He cut through the nylon-and-hemp line with a serrated knife. The repair took an hour. A short time later, as we were preparing to cast off, a state police pickup drove on the dock and stopped beside Time Bandit. A trooper waved at Andy to come down from the wheelhouse. He wanted to talk.

  “What now?” Andy asked me.

  I could only shake my head.

  What now was Caveman.

  I have no idea how or why we hired him. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. Andy and I already knew that Caveman, wherever he was from, loved to sleep; he truly never seemed fully awake. For the other men in the crew, getting him out of bed was a regular chore. He never “got” it the same way the others did. And now, the police wanted him on an outstanding warrant for DUI in Alaska. The officer explained that Caveman’s name had triggered a hit when he was running crew licenses through a national police database.

  I told Andy, “I thought he told us he had postponed his court date.”

  “I guess he lied.”

  Caveman was one of Neal’s hires. Andy gave Neal an evil look. Caveman’s crime was not serious, as crimes go, but the officer cuffed him anyway. He was frisking him spread-eagle against his truck, when I offered him a parting thought. “Don’t worry, Caveman. For dinner they have sandwiches and cocks, and they are all out of sandwiches.”

  Richard said, “Why don’t we just leave him in jail?”

  We might have, too, if we were not a man short on deck and had to catch up after too much prospecting and too little to show in the holds. Added to that was the delay with the entangled prop. Luck was not giving us a break, and now we had no other choice but to bail Caveman out and bring him back on the boat. We had no time to trawl the bars for another crewman.

  That afternoon we paid out $500 with cash from our pockets and an ATM; the whole crew chipped in. The paperwork for Caveman’s release was ready when we arrived at the jail. He came through the security doors looking sleepy. What could we say? Nothing would change him. He looked as if the prison experience had exhausted him. The minute after we cast off Time Bandit, he was fast asleep.

  A Fork in the Road

  Russell swore he saw a flare. Its distinctive red light was so fleeting and tiny against the sky it could have been a trick of his eye, or something in his eye. But it was something, where for hours there had been nothing. He jumped on the radio to call Johnathan’s boat. There was no reply. He stared in the flare’s direction for fifteen minutes through the binos. If it was a flare, it came at a moment when he had nearly reached a fork in the road. The Kennedy Entrance lay to his left, the Barren Islands were off his port bow, and the entrance to the Shelikof Strait was off his starboard bow. He had to choose which direction to take. The flare, if that was what it was, came from the right, and without further hesitation he headed there.

  In time he passed Augustine Island. Ahead looming in the dark was the protrusion of Cape Douglas at the northeastern end of the Strait, which poses a constant danger to boats traveling between Anchorage and Cold Bay, out the Aleutian chain and beyond. There are no lights and radar reflectors to mark the cape, but Johnathan might not have been in a position to benefit from those aids anyway if he had discharged the signal flare.

  Russell could only estimate the distance and time to Cape Douglas. He was less than trusting of Dino’s Livers End. Since he did not know its traits, its strengths and weaknesses, he wanted to take her easy. The engine sounded strong and steady. The generators worked fine. The boat was lit up like a lighthouse. He was making progress, he hoped in a direction that would end with Fishing Fever in his sights by full morning light.

  I Had Better Get It Together

  Johnathan

  The tiniest hint of the pre-glow dawn shows in the east behind the peaks of towering mountains along the coast. Darkness is all around Fishing Fever, but the promise of light lifts my mood. I shake out one of two remaining Winstons, fire it up, and suck down its delicious, calming smoke. I restrict myself to two inhales and pinch off the ember with my thumb and forefinger. I slide the butt into my pocket for later.

  Fishing Fever tells me what she is feeling. She reacts to the water sloshing at her hull; she sends me indications of changes in rips and currents and tides. She seems in the grip of competing forces. There is the height of the sea, which has not increased through the night but remains around fifteen to sixteen feet. This causes me discomfort. The boat rocks in the troughs. The wave frequency has changed; the boat sways like a toy in a washing machine on wash cycle. The currents are strong here and move against the tide. This body of water is fighting itself and anyone riding on it.

  I remember the time I was captaining the Debra D, out of Mount Vernon, Washington, during opie season in mid-January on the Bering Sea. The boat was carrying 24,000 pounds of frozen bait cod in boxes on the forward deck. We were jogging into heavy seas when we took a huge wave over the bow rail that knocked the entire boat sideways, and the bait broke loose of its chains and slid across the deck to the launcher. In less than ten seconds, we were in those seas with a 40-degree list to starboard; we were going over. The crane controls were underwater. I started jerking out our survival suits, and we waited and watched; the crew ran down to the deck. By some miracle, the boat stabilized itself long enough to allow the crew to shift the eight tons of bait back into the center of the boat. That was as close as I ever have come to sinking aboard anything but smaller boats and skiffs when I was a kid.

  I am hungry now but have no intention of eating another raw salmon. In the last hour, my hand touched
the bottle of Crown Royal, which remains sealed. There will be time to quench that thirst when I am out of this stupid mess, one of those incredible incidents that happens to other people. My stomach growls, probably from the Winston, and in the wheelhouse I twist open a bottle of water, which soothes my stomach and makes me feel like smoking the remainder of the butt.

  We launched again from Dutch last year with a clear prop and a court date for Caveman. We pointed our bow in the direction of the Pribilofs. With our quotas intact and a different processor ship on station, we approached St. Paul Island in fair but extremely cold weather and began to pick up the pots we had left on the seafloor when the prop snared the line.

  The soak proved helpful. We went from snails when we last pulled pots in this string to 500 a pot now. The storm had moved the crabs onto our gear. Finally, we were finding good fishing. The crew was feeling good enough to joke with Caveman. He clearly resented what he perceived as their lack of respect. It seemed obvious to me that he had not earned points when he told me that he had cleared up the matter of his court date. He was getting on my nerves.

  After the storm, the sea calmed. But the calm I detected around St. Paul was different, by which I mean unique. These seas were small with high winds and extreme cold. That signaled that the Arctic ice pack was moving south.

  Two types of ice haunt the Bering Sea. One is called fast, which is another term for ice that holds fast to a point of land. Fast ice can spread a few yards to hundreds of miles depending on the depth of the water, the air and water temperatures, and the winds. Usually, fast ice does not threaten mariners. It gives a home to polar bears, walrus, and seals.