by Carl Safina
I join Mark as much for the company as for the fact that I can jump to the deck faster from the wheelhouse than from the galley. Because I can’t keep anything down, I resort to trying just a few sips of sugared water, getting increasingly elemental as I’m increasingly out of my element.
Actually, I’m surprised by how off center I feel. The sea is not all that rough. Mark says, “You have what we call ‘schooner shock’—immediate, chronic seasickness. It’s common here.”
Great. I wonder if the old schooner’s archaic masts are acting as levers, raising the boat’s center of gravity and giving the Masonic the woozy roll that seems to accentuate, rather than dampen, the motion of the sea. I hope that’s the explanation. I don’t want to think I’m simply a lightweight.
The crew continues baiting hooks. They tend to work quietly. They’ve long ago told most of their stories to each other. Bait and coil. Bait and coil. Bait and coil. Bait and coil. Do that twenty-seven hundred times, and—if your crewmates have each done the same—you’re ready for a day of fishing.
We continue along Kodiak Island. Kodiak has massive cliffs, slopes cloaked in deep green timber, a pronounced tree line (all visible), and the world’s largest Grizzly Bears (lurking unseen at the moment). The tundra slopes just above the tree line show a tinge of early spring green. The ridges above are sharp, their rocky peaks snow-laced. Several herring netters are working along the shore. We pass some clear-cuts—more scars from America’s war on forests, even here. No trees grow near Kodiak’s south end, not even stumps. It’s just too exposed there to the sea and the flying salt spray and the battering winds of winter.
Several Dall’s Porpoises come to play with the boat. Unlike most sleek dolphins, they look surprisingly fat and heavy—pudgy-looking, sausage-shaped, starkly black-and-white animals. They soon tire of us.
In the final light of a long, late day, skeins of Sooty Shearwaters fly silhouetted against the sky. Tilting sideways, they cut a lovely and picturesque profile of life.
We continue running while the world turns its curved back away from the sun. We are still running when the world whirls around to face daylight again. We run through a second sunset. And again we continue, well into the night. By the time the propeller has been spinning steadily for thirty-six hours, all shorelines, all peaks and pinnacles, lie far below the dark horizon. With my usual cycle of sleep, activity, and work disrupted by seasickness and inactivity, all normal sense of time and routine is already broken.
In my bunk Mark has placed a book of the poetry of Philip Levine. Levine writes of working-class people in factory towns, but it’s surprisingly easy to hear his voice out here. One disconcerting aspect of being at sea in a vessel under another person’s command is that for many days you have no control of where you are, and no visual sense of being anywhere in particular. As I suspend control of my life, knowing of unknowable dangers, entrusting Mark to take me somewhere, I read of workingmen and hear myself forewarned: “Where he is going or who he is, he doesn’t ask himself. He doesn’t know, and doesn’t know it matters.” It’s too late for warnings; I know it doesn’t matter now.
Surrounded always by the potentially life-taking water from which these men take their livings, my sleep on this boat has been afflicted by disquieting dreams. Mark says bad dreams are also common here. It’s unsettling to lie in a cramped bunk knowing that the whooshing you hear constantly—just a few inches away on the other side of the aged planks your pillow rests against—is the hiss of a hungry, frigid ocean that will inhale you for a snack if it gets the chance. Into my anxious, swirling sleep, I take a line or two from Levine’s poem “My Grave”:
… barefoot and quiet,
[you] leave my side and …
… return suddenly, your mouth tasting
of cold water.
In the deep of night we have crossed a place called Albatross Bank. In the days before sonar, birds alone must have marked the dramatic slope where the bottom falls away from thirty fathoms to well over six hundred. They surely find the place by smelling the plankton concentrated in water welling up from the deep to the shallow bank. Unseen below our hull—but well fixed by our navigation gear and profiled on electronic screens glowing in the dark wheelhouse—is a particular indentation where, over a mere two-mile running distance, the bottom has dropped from 240 fathoms to 400. Integrating knowledge in three dimensions, Mark says matter-of-factly, “This is a tide shadow; the fish just mill here because the current doesn’t run so hard.” That’s his learned sense of the area. My sense is merely water, water everywhere.
We seek fish from a place of such crushing pressure and stunning cold and blinding blackness that no person could function even momentarily outside a submarine. Few submarines, in fact, can withstand such depths. No human has ever eyed this place where our hooks will lie in ambush. Other than its grossest physical features, we know almost nothing at all about this environment—or the lives of the creatures here, or what marvels of adaptation make so extreme a place their familiar home.
But the crew does know how to reach into that alien world. At two A.M. the engine changes pitch for the first time in a day and a half. Cal shoves a tray of food into the oven. The signal comes to set the long-lines. This is where we will do our hunting. The vessel slows. Here we will act as surrogate and agent for humanity’s appetite.
Albatross Bank and Environs
SOME FACTS ABOUT FISHING: These longlines are made of three-eighths-inch nylon line. They’re arranged into coiled sections called skates. Each coiled section is stored on a piece of canvas so it can be stacked, or slid—skated—across the deck. For Sablefishing, skates are one hundred fathoms (six hundred feet) long, with a hook on a short leader every thirty-nine inches, about 180 hooks per skate. Depending on conditions, about twenty-five skates in a row are attached to make each “string.” Usually Mark and the crew will set and retrieve three strings per day. Under good conditions, they bait about seventy-five skates by hand each day. That can mean hand-baiting about 13,500 hooks. Cutting bait, baiting hooks, setting, hauling, and care of the fish occupies eighteen of every twenty-four hours.
Mac says this fishery uses the same gear it did in the 1500s. “It’s archaic, super low-tech, but very effective.” That’s a romantic exaggeration. In the 1500s they didn’t have engines, electricity, line haulers, or synthetic lines and other modern equipment, not to mention things like radar, sonar, and GPS. But the basic fishing gear—a lengthy line with hooks on it, anchored to the bottom—is about the same as was used on Atlantic God hundreds of years ago.
THE CREWMEN APPEAR on the night-darkened deck wearing rubber boots, orange bib slicker trousers, and waterproof forearm sleeves called “wristers.” Inside their orange rubber gloves, their hands are coated with a product called Bag Balm, an antiseptic grease that helps keep hands warm and is actually manufactured for chafed dairy-cow udders.
Mark is in the wheelhouse, visible by the light of his instruments. He’s watching the sonar screen and scratching his sleepy face.
A full silver moon burns its cool firefly light through the flickering clouds above. Far, far below, Sablefish swim in frigid darkness. We send the killing gear to take them.
The crew ties the prebaited skates together in the baiting station at the back of the boat, their work harshly illuminated by eight encaged bare industrial light bulbs overhead. The paradox of artificial light outdoors is that it cuts your vision by blinding you to anything outside its radius. But in the short distance that we can see, a few birds are already moving in on us, settling down for a long visit. Mostly Northern Fulmars, it looks like. They’re fluttering in and out of the short halo of light we’re casting over the moving black ocean that’s bumping lumpily against our hull. Cal serves warm muffins and coffee, which the crew devours quickly between tasks.
Two of the fishermen set up the buoy lines, which have an anchor to pull one end of the gear down to the bottom, and enough line to let a big orange buoy with a pennant and radar refle
ctor remain on the surface for later retrieval. Each end of the baited longline string will have such a buoy line and anchor.
Tim hurls overboard the heavy anchor and its massive line coils and buoy. The boat is moving slowly forward. The first baited skate of line has been affixed to the sinking anchor. The baited hooks begin whizzing overboard, clicking through an open-topped metal chute. At the rate that the gear whips over the bait chute, it’s surprising that most of the bait staves on the hooks. The pretied skates are set to go overboard three in a row. As the last of these three is uncoiling itself and jumping into the chute and over the rail, one man leans in to tie the next set of three waiting skates to it. It looks very dangerous. There is no apparent chance for help if a person gets tangled or hooked, and serious injury would seem inevitable.
Sablefish live mostly on the sloping edge of the continental shelf, often at around 350 fathoms. That’s deep—2,100 feet. Sinking at a foot per second, it will take thirty to forty-five minutes for the gear to reach the bottom here. One by one, for over an hour as the Masonic continues crawling forward, thousands of whipping hooks continue clicking over the stern, sounding like sneakers in the dryer.
At four A.M. Cal serves a big tray of chicken and rice with salad. I’m not sure if it is dinner or breakfast, but since it’s dawn it must be breakfast. It disappears in a hurry. I sample a few tentative mouthfuls. Mac conspicuously engulfs several huge platefuls of rice.
The first pale daylight illuminates the crew’s work of setting the next string. Now, just as the fishermen are drawn by their hungers into these deadly waters, the birds are ready to take their chances with our baited hooks. Roughly a hundred fulmars and a dozen albatrosses—mainly Laysans, with two Black-footeds—are already following, crisscrossing our wake. The crow-sized fulmars, relatives of albatrosses, are mostly gray; atop their yellowish bill lie their conspicuously fused little tube-nosed nostrils. Lacking the ease of albatrosses, fulmars pump hard, as though flying is work for them. They seem to have a dour, businesslike approach to life. If Charles Dickens had written about seabirds, fulmars would have populated the uncouth lower classes of his novels. The albatrosses maintain a graceful equanimity, beautiful as ever, pacing effortlessly even when waiting to scavenge a piece of bait or some fish guts.
A hook without bait, or with a drowned bird on it, is a hook that will not catch a fish. So it’s fair to say that while the fishermen can be a problem for the birds, the birds can be a problem for the fishermen. Therein lies further incentive for fishers to keep birds off the hooks. This situation has potential for a win-win.
From the mast arm over the bait station, Mark and Tim deploy the “bird lines,” two long streamers with vertical lines coming down to the water. The vertical rubber lines dangling from the streamers form a kind of snaking bead curtain of obstruction to flying birds. The streamers stretch about fifty yards astern. At that distance, the baited longline is already too deep for the birds to reach. That’s the whole point. Two big buoys on lines tied to the moving boat are also sent astern. They create commotion. The scare lines snake and slither, as though the ocean imparts its own swimming motion to things. The buoys continually splash and startle.
The birds clearly dislike all this folderol. The splashing seems to frighten them, and they appear to fear colliding with the streamer lines. Birds continue following, sometimes landing on the roiled water of the wake, looking longingly at the sinking baited hooks. Few fulmars are coming inside the streamers. Those that do don’t stay very long and virtually never attempt a grab at any of the bait. The albatrosses continue following the boat but at a safe distance, staying well clear of the gear. In fact, this year the Masonic will achieve zero bird mortality: for the duration of the season neither a fulmar nor an albatross and nary a gull will be drowned on a Masonic-set hook.
Mark’s system is not unique, but what’s unusual is his desire to make it work—for the whole fleet. And as the saying goes: Attitude makes the difference. Similar systems are mandated elsewhere, such as in New Zealand waters. But as one official of New Zealand’s Department of Conservation says of the country’s regulations that make streamer lines mandatory, “On most boats, the rules are not followed—at all. Regulations alone are a waste of paper. You need education, enforcement, and willing fishermen.” The fishermen in Mark’s fleet are motivated partly by a fear of being shut down by Short-tailed Albatross kills, partly by the negative publicity they’ve received, and partly by a genuine desire to fish cleanly and avoid killing birds. The main thing is: they are motivated.
Tim explains that five years ago the fleet did not religiously use bird-avoidance gear.
Mark says, “The regulations did it, and that required heat.”
“Like anything else,” Tim comments.
Mark, who’d gotten major heartburn from environmental groups, says graciously, “And we need watch-dog groups, certainly.”
Tim adds, “Because extinct is for a long time.”
So effective is the Masonic’s simple system that there is no real reason why albatrosses should be threatened by longline fishing. Few problems of such seriousness have so easy a solution so readily available.
It seems, therefore, all the more heartbreaking, and ultimately unacceptable, that in much of the rest of the world, long-liners don’t bother, while birds drown and albatross populations decline.
Mark has proved that where people put a little effort into it, saving albatrosses from death by hook-drowning is possible. It works. Mark explains, “It is pretty simple, but it’s not just the streamers, it’s also how the line is weighted. If you put one big weight on the end of the line it pulls the rest of the gear so taut as you’re moving forward that it’s strung out along the surface like a buffet lunch before it gets far enough back to begin sinking. But if you put a lot of smaller weights on, it sinks rapidly as it’s coming off the boat. The challenge is how to do that and have workable gear at the same time. We’ve now got quarter-pound weights every sixty feet, and it seems to be working for us.” Mark says that the scare lines used to deter the birds would work less well for Swordfishing because those longlines are set shallow—sixty feet from the surface instead of on the bottom hundreds or thousands of feet down—with little weight to get them down quickly. It’s less a problem for tuna long-lining because they usually set deeper.
But there’s a glitch even here in Alaska: though paired streamers and line weights—just like Mark uses—reduce seabird mortality by over 90 percent, only one out of five captains uses them. Alaska’s regulations require fishers to use one of the following measures to avoid birds: bird-scaring streamers, a buoy or piece of wood towed on a rope, underwater setting (requiring an expensive and sophisticated machine system), or setting only at night. The easiest thing is to throw a buoy over on a rope, and you’re in compliance. So that’s what the other 80 percent of skippers simply do. Result: Mark’s kill rate has dropped to zero, but the overall rate and number of birds killed hasn’t dipped (it’s actually increased slightly since the regulations took effect). In Australian waters, where boats have been required to use streamer lines since the mid-1990s, albatross kills have taken a 99 percent drop. Why are people in Alaska allowed to do what doesn’t work, and not required to do what does work, when what works is so simple and there are champions for success inside the fleet? Good question. The answer is that the National Marine Fisheries Service hasn’t heard from enough people like you and me, and they’re not paying enough attention to people like Mark. (Happily, that situation will change. Because of increasing concern from both the public and industry, Mark’s method will eventually become law throughout Alaska, and will also spread to Canada’s British Columbia.)
BY THE TIME WE’VE SET the third string, the first line has been deadly in the deep dark for about five hours. We go to pick it up, homing in on the radar reflector and bright orange buoy. Tim places the line into a power-hauler amidships, and for many minutes its wheel turns and turns, dumping the line on deck for the crew to
begin coiling and coiling and coiling. At great length, the first hooks begin appearing—empty.
The boat proceeds forward very slowly, with the line coming over the side of the boat as we crawl along its length like a spider running up its own web, summoning our line from the bottom. The boat is a bird magnet. Increasing numbers of winged scavengers are continually arriving. We’ve already collected a couple of hundred Northern Fulmars. And a couple of Glaucous Gulls, and Glaucous-winged Gulls. They press close to the hull, waiting eagerly. Beyond them, as though proud and aloof, are perhaps fifty Laysan and four Black-footed Albatrosses. Mark says if you go east you see more Black-footeds, until by the time you reach British Columbia there are hardly any Laysans.
I stand shivering, trying to duck the fine bow spray, newly impressed by how comfortable the birds look on this cold sea. Their dense feathers deliver the finest kind of insulation. Their webbed feet, paddling the frigid water, would cost them a lot of heat, but a countercurrent heat-exchanging capillary system takes the warmth from blood leaving the body on its way to the feet and uses it to warm blood coming back into the body from those chilly toes. Cold feet, warm heart. Many of the fulmars are actually sleeping cozily, head tucked under wing. The boat is their chow wagon for a few days, and many of these birds will likely remain with us. The albatrosses, so far from the Hawaiian swelter-skelter, look equally at home. Some are on the water, but many albatrosses are just sweeping around and around the boat as though for the fun of it. It doesn’t seem to make much difference to them whether they’re sitting or sleeping or in the air, since they expend so little energy while flying. When they do decide to land, they come in with their big feet splayed, stretching the webbing between their toes and skiing onto the heaving surface before settling their great bodies. Bobbing on the swells, two of the Laysans are actually engaged in courtship, with bills clacking, heads shaking side to side and bowing. Don’t they ever get enough? I wonder if they have traveled together. Their enthusiasm for each other spreads to two adjacent pairs. On land and at sea, albatrosses—let it be recorded—just love to dance.
