Captain Phil Harris

by Josh Harris

  “You get that many fishermen in a room,” Colburn said, “and you can’t even agree on what kind of bait to put in a pot, let alone whether we should try to get another dime or fifteen cents or a quarter a pound for crab.

  “But one thing we knew for sure. Once we opened it up for questions, we would be treated to one of Phil Harris’s very colorful opinions, given to us in that crackly voice.”

  But nobody knew for sure which way that opinion would swing until Phil opened his mouth.

  “One day, he would be the biggest proponent of everybody staying in town,” said Colburn, “warning that if anybody tried to head out to sea, he would be shot. Three or four days later, Phil would be telling us why we were making a mistake tying our boats up.

  “But he had a good sense of timing about that sort of thing. More times than not, his opinion was correct, because he knew the business. One thing is certain. When he spoke, everybody listened.”

  • • •

  On one of Phil’s first trips aboard the Cornelia Marie, Cornelia Marie herself came along. As co-majority owner, she decided she couldn’t really understand the business that had become her life’s work if she continued to keep her head buried in an accounting book. So Cornelia decided it was time she inhaled the sea air and felt the roll of the waves.

  Phil wasn’t about to put her in harm’s way by taking her out into the middle of the Bering Sea in the dead of winter. But he did allow her on board for the calmer seas of the salmon summer season.

  At least calmer by a fisherman’s standards. When the Cornelia Marie hit the waves, Cornelia hit the floor, too seasick to get up. She was either there or hanging over the toilet. The crew learned to step over her but never ignored her. After all, she was one of the owners. They brought her water, ginger ale, and whatever else she could consume.

  After about a week, with Cornelia’s stomach beginning to settle, she assumed her duties. Phil had her working as the ship’s cook, but he also put her in the rotation on anchor watch so she had some understanding of the mental and physical stress endured by the crew.

  While Cornelia may have struggled in Phil’s world, the captain was much more comfortable in Cornelia’s workplace. He could sit down in her accounting office and accurately figure out the bottom line when it came to overhead and expenses, including the salaries of his crew, doing the math in his head without so much as looking at a calculator.

  But he knew the numbers were Cornelia’s department.

  “I never had to worry about what was going on with the boat, and Phil never had to worry about the books or how the money was coming in,” Cornelia said. “He’d call me and get the answers he needed, and I’d call him and get the answers I needed.”

  The Cornelia Marie fished for crab and halibut, but also for salmon and herring. January was the start of opilio crab season, April for herring tendering, July for salmon, and September for king crab.

  “Phil had a good reputation as a captain,” said Sig, a close friend but a chief rival in the days when both were leading men on Deadliest Catch. “He was really aggressive when it came to going after the crab.”

  But in the last few years leading up to Tony’s departure from the Cornelia Marie in 2000, some of Phil’s enthusiasm for crab fishing waned.

  “He still liked the gravy part of the job,” said Tony, “actually catching the crab, but not everything else before and after. The crew and I would get the gear ready, the bait would be loaded on board, we’d be ready to go fishing, and that’s when Phil would show up. And he’d fly out before the last crab was off the boat.”

  Tony was able to shrug and laugh about Phil’s last-one-in, first-one-out work habits, but one thing he didn’t take lightly was Phil’s drinking problem, an issue that grew larger and larger and eventually caused serious damage to their relationship.

  “Sometimes, before we left Dutch Harbor,” Tony said, “Phil would lock himself in his stateroom with bottles and bottles of vodka and just stay in there for days.”

  But the idea of manning the wheelhouse was a sobering thought to Phil. As the Cornelia Marie pulled away from the dock, he pulled himself away from his booze.

  “He never touched a drop at sea,” said Tony.

  On one occasion in 1998, the Cornelia Marie was tied up at Dutch Harbor for an extended period while a main engine was being rebuilt. Phil left the work crew, went on shore, checked into a hotel, and stayed there to drink by himself.

  Tony was concerned—enough to go to the liquor store where Phil was getting his vodka and plead with them not to sell to him any more. In response, Phil, determined to keep the vodka flowing, paid a local kid to pick up the liquor for him at the store.

  “It got to the point,” said Tony, “where I thought he was going to drink himself to death.”

  Desperate to find help for his friend, Tony called Phil’s wife, Teresa, back in Seattle. She, in turn, called Cornelia, who jumped on Phil about his destructive ways.

  That began the erosion of his relationship with Tony, whom he thereafter regarded as a tattletale. It was the beginning of what became a constant battle. Tony wouldn’t back down, because his first priority was saving Phil from himself.

  In October of 1998, with the Cornelia Marie docked at Kodiak Island, Tony hired a deckhand named Freddy Maugatai. The night Freddy flew in, Tony drove to the airport to pick him up, leaving Phil alone on the boat.

  Phil had been by himself on the Cornelia Marie hundreds of times, but Tony wasn’t comfortable leaving him alone this time.

  “I just had this strange feeling,” said Tony, “that I needed to check on Phil.”

  By the time Tony got back, he learned that the deckhands on Beagle, a boat docked near the Cornelia Marie, had pulled a thrashing, ranting Phil from the water. Phil had left his boat, made his way to a nearby liquor store, bought some booze, consumed a large portion of it as he walked, then stumbled back to the dock. As he neared the Cornelia Marie, Phil had tried to focus mind and body to navigate the final few steps to the boat but had fallen short, tumbling into the cold, black water.

  “He was about done when they got him out,” said Tony.

  The incident only increased the tension between Phil and Tony, and, a little over a year later, Tony left the Cornelia Marie.

  “After I got off, Phil starting running the boat again,” said Tony. “That probably saved his life, at least for a while, because he stopped drinking in order to do the job.”

  Around the time Tony left, Ralph and Cornelia, after twenty-five years of marriage, divorced. The couple’s holdings were large and diverse, from their house and a thirteen-thousand-acre farm in Montana to two boats, including the Cornelia Marie, halibut shares, cars, and an airplane.

  Cornelia got her namesake, the Cornelia Marie, appraised at $2.2 to $2.3 million, as her share of the settlement.

  “I put my future in Phil’s hands,” she said.

  It was a wise choice for as long as it lasted. For the next ten years, Phil kept a firm hand on the wheel, steering the Cornelia Marie to fame and fortune.

  When Phil’s tenure at the helm ended a decade later with his death, Cornelia could take satisfaction from the fact that the fast-talking, nonstop-smoking, nervous captain she and Ralph took a chance on the day they met him had proved to be a reliable, efficient, profit-producing partner for twenty years.

  CHAPTER 9

  STEPMOMMY DEAREST

  She was an evil creature.

  —Josh

  To Phil, she was Teresa, the new love of his life. But to so many others in Phil’s inner circle of family and friends—a circle Teresa seemed determined to break up—she was Satan.

  It is believed that Phil’s longtime next-door neighbor and drinking buddy, Hugh Gerrard, first coined the name, but that is difficult to determine since it was used by so many so often. He was certainly one of the first to have a reason to use it, since he was one of the first casualties of Phil’s new relationship.

  When Phil and Mary broke up, it a
lso ended their merry foursome with Hugh and his wife, Laurie. Hugh took Phil’s side, insisting that, if Mary had swallowed her pride and pardoned Phil for his infidelities, they could have been reunited. Laurie wasn’t so forgiving, refusing to be part of a new quartet.

  Oh well, Hugh figured. He would just hang out with Phil on his own.

  Not so easy.

  Teresa constantly clung to Phil, so if Hugh wanted to spend some time with him, it was going to have to be a package deal.

  When Teresa began trying to distance Phil from his friends, Hugh was number one on the enemies list. He and Teresa were soon in each other’s faces. Hugh labeled her a gold-digger and a phony, expressing outrage that she claimed to be a practicing Jehovah’s Witness but drank and swore like a sailor. She preached that Hugh needed to find God and change his ways or he would be damned to hell. How, he asked, could she hold a Bible in one hand and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other?

  With tempers flaring and insults growing ever more vicious, their mutual animosity heated up to peak level, and Teresa kicked Hugh out of the house she shared with Phil. Phil just stood by and chuckled, telling Hugh as he marched out the door, “I guess this means you’re not coming for dinner next Saturday night, huh?”

  Phil had fallen under Teresa’s spell and, regardless of the friction his relationship with her generated with others around him, he was determined to make it work, everybody else be damned.

  Next on the list to go after Hugh was Dan Mittman, another of Phil’s Bothell buddies. The incident that precipitated Dan’s expulsion occurred while Phil was home recovering from a hernia operation.

  When Dan walked into Phil’s bedroom to check up on his fellow cycle lover, he also saw Paco, a massive pet parrot, the type of bird depicted on the shoulder of many of the legendary sea captains of centuries past.

  When Dan put his hand up in greeting, Paco responded by landing on one of his fingers. Smooth, thought Dan, a smile breaking out on his face.

  Having just finished lunch, he figured Paco was attracted to a few crumbs lingering on his hand, because the parrot kept pecking away gently at his fingers and knuckles.

  What Dan should have realized was that Paco was trying to position himself for a shot at the box of donuts Dan was holding, a treat for his bedridden friend. When Dan tossed the donuts to Phil, Paco lost it, attacking Dan so ferociously that he nearly bit the side of Dan’s finger clean off. Blood started gushing, enough to make him look like the victim in a slasher flick.

  “I grabbed the fucking bird and whacked him against the damn wall,” said Dan. “By that time, Teresa had come in and was watching the whole thing unfolding. She started screaming that I had killed her bird.”

  Phil tossed Dan a pillowcase to staunch the bleeding.

  It was a crazy scene: Phil in bed, Dan’s blood all over the place, and the dead parrot at Teresa’s feet as she screamed bloody murder.

  As she had with Hugh, Teresa ordered Dan to get the hell out of her house, screaming a string of expletives at the top of her lungs.

  As Dan stormed out of the house, Teresa followed, bellowing that she wanted her pillowcase back. Dan just stared at her like she was plumb loco, got in his car, slammed the door, and took off, officially excommunicated.

  And how did Phil react? Was he as upset as Teresa over the loss of their winged companion? Not even close. He just lay in bed howling with laughter, nearly busting his stitches.

  Phil’s pealing laughter was a sound that Josh and Jake would sorely miss after he departed. Josh and Jake were just seven and five respectively when their parents divorced. Phil would call the boys, but he didn’t come by to see them for nine months at one point because of the ongoing tension between him and Mary.

  Phil bought the condo Teresa was living in, and in 1993, two years after they met, Phil and Teresa, then thirty-five, were married.

  The first time Phil left to go fishing after they became husband and wife, he took her along on the Cornelia Marie. During the trip, the sewage tank was opened after it became plugged up.

  Unaware of the problem, Teresa went into the bathroom, set up her makeup kit, used the shower and then the toilet. But when she flushed it, a full load of waste came flying out, splattering Teresa, the wall, and her makeup.

  Furious, she went after Phil, who, in turn, went after Murray Gamrath, the boat’s engineer. While Phil put on a good show for Teresa’s benefit, cursing Murray for leaving the tank open, it was tough for Phil to keep a straight face and not laugh at the thought of Teresa painstakingly applying her makeup only to have it blasted away in the most disgusting manner imaginable.

  Teresa never again sailed on the Cornelia Marie.

  • • •

  Josh and Jake came to live with Phil and Teresa after Mary lost a vicious custody battle.

  “Teresa was great for the first couple of years,” Josh said, “but after that, I don’t know, maybe the pressure got to her, but she started beating the shit out of us.”

  There was no escape for the boys. Phil was in Alaska much of the year and their mother, claiming her visitation rights had been sabotaged by Teresa, didn’t see her sons for the next fifteen years.

  Mary said Teresa got in her face when they first met, telling Mary, “I know a good thing when I see it. Your loss is my gain. You have no idea who you’re dealing with. Why don’t you just kill yourself and save us all the trouble?”

  Mary said the court allowed her to see her kids if the visits were supervised, but nevertheless, according to Mary, Teresa lied constantly to keep her from Josh and Jake.

  “Teresa would call me,” Mary said, “saying that the visitation date had been changed, then make it appear that I was a no-show. She would tell the boys, ‘I guess your mother just doesn’t care about you anymore.’ Teresa told Phil that I never even called the boys.”

  Mary said she did call, but that only resulted in the most painful moments of her separation from her sons.

  “Teresa would answer the phone,” Mary claimed, “and say the boys weren’t there. I would say, ‘I can hear them. Please, just let me talk to them.’ Instead, she’d lie, yelling at me over the phone, ‘What? You want to kill us and burn our house down?’ I’d say, ‘Teresa, what are you doing?’ ”

  Mary said Teresa would then call the police, telling them Mary was a danger to the family. As a result, a judge issued a restraining order against her, forcing her to stay away from her boys.

  “Even murderers get to see their kids,” Mary said. “I had never done anything wrong. I couldn’t believe Phil was letting this happen.”

  Asking Mary about Teresa is like asking a crab fisherman about the Bering Sea. There are many tales to be told. In Mary’s case, there is no way to verify some of them, since both Phil and Teresa are dead.

  Mary alleges that Teresa tricked Phil into marrying her by claiming she was about to receive $5 million in a divorce settlement. Teresa also said she was suffering from terminal cancer and, when she died, she would leave Phil the $5 million. The money, said Mary, never appeared and, after Phil and Teresa exchanged vows, the cancer disappeared.

  Mary also claims she heard Teresa had hired a hit man to kill her. Mary didn’t take the rumor seriously until a stranger approached her on the street and told her he had indeed been offered money to make her disappear permanently. He said he was promised five thousand dollars up front and five thousand more after eliminating her, but had told Teresa he wasn’t interested.

  That didn’t mean, he said, that someone else wouldn’t accept Teresa’s offer.

  “What am I supposed to do?” asked an alarmed Mary.

  “Watch your back,” said the stranger before going back into the shadows.

  Mary went to the Bothell Police Department but was told there was nothing they could do unless they had more details.

  “Well, if I wind up dead,” Mary replied, “at least you’ll know where to start looking for the killer.”

  • • •

  Josh and Jake have
their own horror stories about Teresa.

  Having endured Phil’s long absences at sea, she was desperate for attention when he returned home.

  “She wanted all his time,” Josh said.

  His sons, of course, wanted a share, even if just a small share, of their dad’s affection as well.

  “She’d get pissed that we were even around,” said Josh.

  So, before Phil arrived, she’d physically abuse the boys, warning them that they’d get more of the same if they tried to horn in on her reunion with their father.

  When he was alone with Phil, Josh tried to tell him about the horrors he and Jake had to endure while the captain was off catching crab.

  “She not only beats the fuck out of us,” said Josh, “but she gets out of control on drugs and spends all your money.”

  Phil was sympathetic, but he told Josh, “Don’t ruin this for me. I’ve got a great house and nice cars. I’ve worked my whole life for this. If I get divorced, she’s taking half of it.”

  Phil had done everything he could to make Teresa happy and his long trips more palatable. He had bought a home on Echo Lake, just east of Bothell, landscaped it, put in a pond, a large swimming pool, and a dock for lake access. He also turned one room into a beauty salon to make it easier for Teresa to do her work as a beautician.

  “You’ve just got to maintain yourself,” Phil told Josh.

  Teresa had her own story to tell Phil about his boys.

  “These kids are out of control,” she said. “I have to beat them and it doesn’t even faze them.”

  What did faze them was watching Teresa become a chemically induced monster.

  “She turned to drugs,” Josh said, “because she was lonely with my dad gone so much, and that only made it worse for Jake and me.”

  One time, Phil came home to find both his sons with black eyes and scratches on their necks. Teresa demanded that Phil mete out even more punishment because of their alleged misbehavior.