by Carl Safina
Mac says, “Go, Bailey, get him.”
Still grinning, Shaun waits for the next hook.
MEANWHILE CONTINUES THE CONSTANT BAITING, and the never-abating noise of birds—now several thousand fulmars—and the catching and the incessant toiling and coiling. The deck is such a mess of squid and herring chunks coming off the block that it’s surprising no one has slipped and fallen. The guys teach me a new word: gak. Gak is crud that involves slime. All the stepped-on squid and creamed herring on deck: gak. I say we call that shmutz. They like it; it catches on. When we get another ton and a half of fish in the boat the crew starts cleaning them by hand again, and birds that have been waiting patiently suddenly move in for another ravenous frenzy. Then the birds wait for more fish; some pass the time bathing and preening.
Every now and then a fishhook leader breaks in the rollers, sending a fish into the checker with a hook remaining in it. Those heads usually go overboard still bearing the hook. Albatrosses swallow some of the smaller heads whole. So the operation may not be 100 percent bird-safe. A Glaucous Gull has been circling the boat with a hook through its nostrils. The hook doesn’t seem to be causing that gull much immediate distress, but it looks a little heftier than a nose ring on a college student. I can only wonder what that metal hook will feel like when the weather turns cruelly cold in winter. My guess is that the bird is doomed. In the eastern Gulf of Alaska, Mark says, Sperm Whales are often drawn to the boat, eating fish heads alongside the seabirds. That doesn’t sound good.
What happens to an animal that swallows one of these hooks is unclear, because of the hook design. These are “circle hooks”; their points are bent back toward the shank, then down a little. Their shape is based on an ancient Pacific pattern designed to let the hook easily slide into a corner of the fish’s jaw and lodge there, so the fish can get hooked without putting much pressure on the point. They are much rounder than standard J-shaped hooks. It seems possible that a bird could regurgitate a hook of this style, or that these hooks could pass through a tube, such as a whale’s intestines, without snagging. But it’s certain that swallowing hooks can’t be good for animals. In some Wandering Albatross colonies in the Southern Hemisphere, as many as one in five chicks contains a hook received from its parent with its food; and hooks sometimes get stuck in adults, who occasionally die of internal injuries on their nests.
I mention this to Mark, and we agree that after the fishing season we’ll work together to add to the seabird-protection regulations a rule requiring that hooks be removed from any heads tossed overboard. Mark instructs the guys to take all hooks out before throwing heads. But I notice that, out of habit and in haste, they sometimes forget.
The working continues—hook after hook until the whole string is done. Then the big buoys and the flag with flasher atop come aboard, then the lengthy line and anchor.
Recounting of Shaun’s near-death experience on the wrong side of the element interface continues throughout the long day. By sundown Mark has already received an e-mail reply from Shaun’s stepfather, admonishing Shaun that when a man named Spence fell off the Republic, he at least got the fish he was after.
That chide notwithstanding, these guys—at least Masonic’s crew—are not the macho types I was expecting for such laborious and hazardous fishing. They are inured to hard work without being hardened by it. And they do less swaggering than some sport fishermen I know. Perhaps that’s because just being part of the crew proves plenty. Nobody has to fake anything. The work is difficult and dangerous enough to weed out the strutters. Mark’s comment: “There’s no room for prima donnas. This requires teamwork.”
Teamwork and camaraderie. In the cold rain and hard work, the men dream aloud about winter in the Caribbean and Belize. Sportfishing in Baja. Mark talks a lot about outings planned with his wife and daughters. Others will take sweethearts whale watching. After the deep sea there will be hikes in deep ancient forests of old-growth cedars (“What’s left of them,” as Tim says). Hot springs—and hot tubs.
CAL ANNOUNCES LUNCH: baked halibut. Although Mark had jokingly told me that fishermen’s four food groups are alcohol, cholesterol, caffeine, and nicotine, the food on board is hearty and nutritious. Cal pulls his weight on deck and still effortlessly puts together big, delicious meals. Mac wolfs several huge platefuls of rice, then asks Cal whether there’ll be any rice at supper. The meal seems altogether too rushed for so fine a feast. But Mark has a different perspective. He says, “During the derby days, instead of having twenty minutes to actually stop and sit down to a nice hot lunch like this, the cook would make three dozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and put them out on the hatch. People would just reach for sandwiches as they got hungry.”
They’re almost always hungry. Watch these guys work for a few hours and the importance of food becomes obvious. Here on deck they drink lots of fruit juice and water and snack on candy bars and chocolate. They need all the hydration and calories they can get their jaws around. They work harder than anyone I’ve ever seen.
The effort promises big rewards and big hazards. Fishing in Alaska is one of the most dangerous professions anywhere. It’s a pain-for-gain, high-risk-for-high-return venture.
Jim comments that his most memorable fishing trip was his first time out for Sablefish. “We caught ninety thousand pounds in six days. And I was in extreme pain the whole time.”
Mark’s most memorable trip was his first to the Aleutians and the Bering Sea. It was the first week in April. “About five days into the trip,” he says, “we hit a horrendous storm. A wave broke over the entire boat. It blew out all the wheelhouse windows. Because I had no experience, it wasn’t all that frightening; I just kind of thought, ‘I guess this is what we do.’ I figured, ‘The captain knows what he’s doing.’” He grins. “It didn’t seem as terrifying then as it would now. I didn’t realize at the time what I know as an experienced skipper—that the captain was scared witless.”
Mark’s had other close calls and seen boats with decks swamped in gales. But, he says, “The most memorable trips are the good trips, when we absolutely kill ’em, like the time we loaded the boat in two days.”
Tim nods his assent. His most memorable trip was the first time he got a full crew share; the satisfaction.
Mac remembers a four-day halibut trip during derby days—over the entire four days he slept for two hours. “I got really close to hallucinating. At one point I was supposed to cut up a salmon for dinner and I had the meat cleaver in my hand and I realized I couldn’t see my hand and I thought, ‘This is dumb,’ so I put the cleaver down and I picked up a smaller knife and went at it much more carefully. But that was kind of the defining moment in my career, ’cause I realized that with the right attitude, you can do anything. Within reason. And I wouldn’t want to do it again.”
Mac’s most memorable trip was the time every other boat went in because the wind was blowing a steady sixty miles an hour, and for a week they fished in twenty-foot seas while the rest of the fleet was sheltering in port. “We were a pretty wild crew. These were my friends, and we all fit in each other’s energy. But I wouldn’t want to do it now. No way. It was hard, and it was dangerous, but at the time it was just one of those things—y’know?”
I wryly say it sounds character building.
He says, “We were all characters to begin with. Now I’m boring, boring, boring.”
Cal remembers his first trip on the Masonic as a very positive experience with guys that were competent and did their job well. Mark adds, “That was a cool trip, wasn’t it?” To me he fills in, “We fished right next to the ice pack.”
“And then in port that beautiful Coast Guard lady boarded us.”
Tim says, “Oh—wasn’t she nice! What was her name?”
Cal recounts, “We’re just returned from a week’s fishing, covered in slime, and she steps into the wheelhouse and takes her helmet off—all this blond hair just cascades out, and the smell of her shampoo just filled the place. And we’re
like, ‘Oh God!’”
Tim says, “Yeah, we were like, ‘Isn’t there something else we’re required to do, some other forms or paperwork we need to fill out?’”
We’re all laughing.
Shaun Bailey recounts the terror of a January storm when hundred-mile-an-hour winds built deadly, breaking waves forty feet tall. His stepfather, Carl Vedo, was behind the wheel of Masonic. Mark was not on that trip. “Carl had just woken everybody up to tie stuff down. He had been behind the wheel for ten hours, trying to get us behind some island, out of the wind. I offered to go down and make us some grub. There was water sloshing in the galley; the deck mats had got jammed in the scuppers and plugged them shut, preventing the deck from draining. But I brought up a sandwich anyway, and before he could even get a bite he says, ‘Hold on! Hold on!’ And he took the boat out of gear. We took a big wave. It rolled us way over. As we were still coming back up, another one smashes right on top of us—Bam! It put us all the way over, on our side. The pilothouse struck the sea surface and the windows blew out and water was streaming in and alarms started going off everywhere. That was the scaredest I’d ever been.” He shakes his head at the flashback and continues, “After what seemed like forever but was probably only a few seconds, the boat rolled slowly upright again. All you can do in conditions like that is to try to keep the bow pointed into the sea. So Carl kept holding the boat into it for hours, until the storm broke.” Shaun adds, “It was lucky there was no shoreline behind us; he’d been trying for twenty-four hours to keep us jogging forward, but the wind and waves had driven us backward seventeen miles. So yeah, it was pretty, pretty scary. Our radar had gotten blown out. So then we were coming in at Dutch Harbor without radar. That place is tricky at night. So Carl had us all up on the bow, being lookouts. Human radar.” He laughs. “Like the old days.”
Tim asks, “What year was that?”
Shaun replies, “That was the last derby year.” That last derby year, people drowned rather than miss a day of fishing. Those that lived made half the money they earn now.
AT 10:30 P.M. it’s not yet fully dark. But the crew quits anyway, because these aren’t the derby days. Cal says to me, “During the derby years there was a lot more hurry and less sleep. We called it ‘turn and burn.’ The operation is very casual now.”
Eighteen-hour days of manual labor that start before dawn isn’t most people’s idea of “casual,” but all is relative. We take off our slimy deck outerwear and crowd our scented selves into the galley. After several days I and my clothing are packing a suite of odors that can be masked only by a deckload of cut herring and squid and a putrid peer group. Fortunately, that is no problem. Mark says he’ll take a shower when he gets back to port, whether he needs one or not. Tim, in an insightful historical retrospective, informs him that the Roman Empire fell because of warm baths, adding that showers are for sissies.
As the days wear on, a growing collection of filthy, damp, smelly clothing hangs from lines strung among the bunks. Gloves hang on clothespins near the stove. The galley itself is frequently a comedy of gravity. Falling dishes, falling juice bottles—. Cal sweeps from the floor a bowl of fallen potatoes we’ve cut up, and washes them in the sink. Clambering around the crowded cabin and getting seated at the cramped table for dinner gets increasingly difficult.
But tonight it is so worth the extra effort, because Cal has utterly outdone himself with an extraordinary supper of lamb and Sablefish—complete with mint jelly and gourmet bottled sparkling springwater. Just in time to really enjoy it, my digestive system is functioning again. When you finally stop throwing up, there are some pretty luxurious moments out here in the heaving Gulf of Alaska. Cal usually cooks to perfection on the rocking diesel stove, but this Sablefish is something to go lyrical about. No wonder the Japanese buy every single one this fleet catches; these are the most buttery-fleshed fish I’ve ever tasted. Most Americans have no idea Sablefish even exist. The fish are bought at princely sums for export as soon as they hit the dock—sometimes sooner.
Mark explains, “In Japan it’s one of those presentation fishes. It’s made to look beautiful, and people pay for it.”
After dinner, because these are not the derby days, we have leisure entertainment: a National Geographic video—Search for the Giant Squid.
As the squid video starts, Jim remarks, “They’re good eating.”
The narrator begins dramatically: “They’ve been called aliens from inner space. They have been dreaded and feared for centuries. No Giant Squid has ever been seen alive.”
Jim says, “I’ve seen one alive. Sometimes they come up hanging on to a cod.”
Tim says, “I’ve seen two, also.”
When an archival scene from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea shows a Giant Squid attacking the boat, Mac calls to Captain Nemo, “Smoke the reduction gear!”
Jim says, “Nemo’s just trying to hack off an arm for dinner.”
Mac says, “For bait!”
Footage of California Squid in their mating aggregations prompts Cal to say, “That’s quite an orgy.”
“Just like landing in Dutch Harbor.”
The narrator warns, “Humboldt Squid have been known to kill people that fall into the water.” When the scientist boldly dives into the sea among the hazardous Humboldt Squid, Jim says, “I hope he’s wearing Kevlar wristers.” Everybody laughs.
The narrator concludes by quoting John Steinbeck: “An ocean without its sea monsters would be like sleep without dreams.”
Tim nods thoughtfully and emphatically at this sentiment.
Showtime over. Time for sleep with dreams of sea monsters.
MORNING COMES BRIGHT and—finally!—sunny.
The crew say sunny weather means bad weather is coming.
Well, of course. Bad weather means bad weather is already here, and sunny weather means bad weather will come. In the Gulf of Alaska, nothing means good weather is coming.
Winds are scheduled to increase with a cold front. Ominously, the Coast Guard is on the radio trying to raise a boat whose EPIRB signal they are receiving. EPIRB stands for Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. It’s a unit that slides into a holder, usually on the wheelhouse. If it starts floating, it begins transmitting a satellite signal to the Coast Guard, with its position. Usually the only way an EPIRB starts floating is if the boat is no longer floating.
As the wind increases, seas build and the air cools, the crew maintain their pace, their attitude, and their banter. As the day ages, the weather maintains its threatening posture. All day the surface of the sea has been whipped into a tight white-capped chop by a steady twenty-five-mile-per-hour wind. A grim and grizzled sea, ragged and disheveled as an unmade bed.
By midafternoon the weather fax arrives showing a strong air-pressure gradient. A stiff blow is on its way. Mark pensively weighs his options: stay and try to fish through it; or suspend fishing during the blow and try to endure it; or run ahead of it and wait it out in port. The forecast predicts a gale. Options one and two carry the risk of getting trapped; if the storms gets out of hand it may be impossible to run to shelter. We are only eight hours from the nearest port. “Even if we can fish through it, people get battered and worn out. More things sliding across the decks. More strain on the fishing gear. Risk of accident increases. You tend to lose a day,” he says, “for every day of fishing like that.” He decides that unless the four P.M. forecast changes, we’ll fish hard today, then haul aboard all the gear that is out and run for port at about two in the morning.
By late afternoon the fishing improves markedly. To be more accurate, the catching improves markedly. The fishing itself is getting harder, with building winds and waves. But we’re getting more and larger fish, and a much cleaner catch of Sablefish, with fewer dead grenadiers to discard. After working twelve hours, everyone wants to stay on the grounds and keep fishing.
We’ve been resetting after each haul. Right now, the seas are white-capped and building but not huge. All the gear is in the wa
ter, fishing, when Mark goes to the wheelhouse to get the updated forecast.
Mark receives word over the radio that the EPIRB whose distress signal the Coast Guard was receiving had gone off by accident. But such a false alarm keeps everyone on edge. Mark listens with concern to the updated forecast. A mechanically generated voice of the government sends its matter-of-fact prognostications: “ … Gale warnings. Southwest winds, increasing to fifty knots. Seas building, to twenty feet …”
Mark shakes his head and says he hates heavy weather. “You never get used to it, and the older you get the more you hate it. The mountains of water, the murderous wind, the driving streaks of foam—”
Cal, who has come in to deliver a sandwich to Mark, adds, “It becomes another world.” He lists the only two advantages of heavy weather, and they are: you get to wear all your rain gear, and if the boat sinks you don’t have to clean it. He adds, “Fishing has been likened to a prison sentence with the possibility of drowning.”
Of course, many things carry risk. Driving a car is risky. But compare: cars crash in a blink; boats in storms sink after hours of desperate effort and terror like a wild animal in the cage of your ribs.
Mark, looking a bit weary, clicks off the radio and says with finality, “We’re going in.” He sticks his head out of the wheelhouse and announces that we’ll run for port after hauling all the gear. Then he sends an e-mail to a fish buyer on Kodiak, saying we should be at their dock in the early afternoon tomorrow.
Now we will pick up everything. This means that the workday that began at four A.M. will stretch to two A.M. tonight. No one grumbles. It’s just direction, and everyone takes it matter-of-factly. Faced with a twenty-two-hour workday in worsening conditions, Tim’s only comment is, “Hell, we’ve done it many times before. It’s no big deal.”
