Captain Phil Harris (17 page)

Teresa’s life ended in 2011 when she died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three, the same age Phil had been when he passed away a year earlier.

“I didn’t even feel bad when Teresa died,” Josh said. “She was a mean-hearted lady, one of the meanest people I ever met.”

Crab fishing is not a job, it’s a mentality. You can get past the physical pain. What we endure, you could train a monkey to do. It’s when you deal with your own demons, dwelling on them because you have all that time to think at sea, that’s when you crack up.

When I get panic attacks, and I’ve had my share, I try to think about home. But if I focus too much on stuff back on land, I might make a mistake and kill somebody. Or kill myself.

It can be really fucked-up out there. So why do I keep getting back on that boat? Because it’s the only thing I know how to do. You get addicted to the lifestyle. You earn fast money and then you come home, party your ass off, forget what you had to do to earn the money, then go back and do it all over again because you ran out of cash. You’ve got bills to pay and there’s no other way you can make money like that except perhaps dealing drugs.

For every full pot of crab we pull up, there are fifteen blank ones. On the show, fans see us bring in all that crab, but they don’t see how long it really takes to get it. People think we are out there for a couple of weeks. No, it’s more like nine months.

You work thirty-six hours and get four off. It’s not real good for your health, screws with your emotions, and you become coldhearted and arrogant. There’s no pain in the world like the pain you feel up there in the Bering Sea.

You never know what’s coming. You can go from calm conditions
with a little overcast to, thirty-five minutes later, ninety-mile-an-hour winds and thirty-five-foot swells. You get slapped in the face by Mother Nature, your face freezes, and layers of your skin just start falling off.

People meet me and say I look a lot bigger on TV. It’s not my size they see on the screen. It’s the size of my job.

—Josh

In 1983, Phil was scheduled to leave on the
Golden Viking
in search of blue crab. While the boat was being loaded at the dock, Mary, on hand for her husband’s departure, experienced a weird vision unlike anything she had ever seen. The
Golden Viking
suddenly appeared to her as a black silhouette, no longer three-dimensional.

“It looked like a death ship,” Mary later recalled, still shuddering at the image.

She told Phil of her vision and begged him not to go.

“Why don’t you just say you want to spend another night with me,” he said, “instead of lying about it.”

He was grinning, but his wife had ignited an old fear. Phil was a product of a fishing culture that had adhered to superstitions for centuries. Considering the ever-present threats fishermen face, it’s not surprising that their desperate desire for a safe voyage causes them to latch on to anything that can give them hope, false though it might be. Historically, some sailors didn’t believe in leaving port on the first Monday in April because that was thought to be the day Cain slew Abel. Friday departures were also verboten, as was the presence of bananas, priests, or flowers on board. Some seamen thought it was bad luck to encounter a redhead while heading for the boat or to allow their left foot to touch the deck first when they board the vessel.

After Mary spooked him, superstition kicked in, and Phil agreed to stay ashore.

The
Golden Viking
shoved off without him. And on the first day of September 1983, as it was fishing off the coast of St. Matthew Island in the middle of the Bering Sea, 220 miles west of the Alaskan shoreline, the
Golden Viking
capsized and sank nine miles south of the island. Rescuers aboard the fishing vessel
Tiffany
found four of the six crew members alive on a raft, suffering from hypothermia.

The missing two crew members, Michael McKee and Nick Moe, had drowned. Both were close to Phil. It was a tragic blow, and a tough reminder to the entire crab fleet of the treacherous aspect of their trade. Yet it wasn’t something the crabbers could allow themselves to dwell on. Not while fishing in the same waters. Not while there was still crab to be caught. As Phil later told his sons, “You can’t take it personally or it will drive you insane.”

Yet as Jake found himself asking after his first encounter with disaster at sea, how can you not take it personally when you see the bodies of dead fishermen floating right past you?

It was 2005, and Jake, just nineteen at the time, was on board the
Cornelia Marie
for his first opilio season. The grind of the arduous work was slowly searing into his worn muscles, but he was determined to shake off the pain and fatigue and, like his brother, show his dad he was worthy of the Harris name.

If hard labor and freezing temperatures were his biggest problems, Jake figured, there was nothing he couldn’t handle at sea. The ever-present danger and frightening nexus between life and death on a crab boat had not yet been impressed upon his mind. They soon would be.

January 15 dawned as just another endless day of crab fishing. The seabirds shrieked and the waves pounded incessantly at the boat, roaring with rage. But the howling wind sounded uncannily eerie to Jake on that day. A hot spasm ran through his body, surely a harbinger of trouble. He wiped the sudden burst of sweat from his brow before it froze into place, and returned to his task.

Just a few short hours later, the call came. The crab boat
Big Valley
was in distress. Phil punched the
Cornelia Marie
’s motors into full power and raced to the scene, his stomach churning as he rode over wave after wave, agonizing speed bumps impeding his dash to the disaster.

The sight that awaited the
Cornelia Marie
sent a chill down Jake’s spine.

“To me,” he recalled, “the
Big Valley
was the biggest boat I’d ever seen, so when I heard she might have gone down, I was almost in shock. Then we got there and I looked at the bodies in the water and I thought, Damn, dude, this is real shit going down out there.”

The
Big Valley
was a ninety-two-foot steel-hulled crab boat that sank in the Bering Sea while fishing for snow crab seventy miles west of St. Paul Island. Five of the six crew members—Captain Gary Edwards and deckhands Danny Vermeersch, Josias Luna, Carlos Rivera, and Aaron Marrs—perished. The sole survivor was thirty-year-old Cache Seel.

The
Cornelia Marie
was one of several Good Samaritan boats that responded to an alert by the U.S. Coast Guard, supplementing federal and state rescue boats, planes, and helicopters. There had been no opportunity for the
Big Valley
to send out a Mayday call, but its emergency location beacon was activated as it went down.

Seel, who was found alone on a raft by rescuers, was asleep when the crisis began. He awoke to find that, to his horror, the boat had turned on its side while he slept.

“I was dang near standing up in my bunk when I woke up,” he told the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

With rescuers on the scene and faced with the anguish of seeing the corpses of friends who had fallen victim to the Bering, Phil understood that, since he couldn’t do anything for the crew of the
Big Valley
, he needed to think about his own crew. What they required at that moment was the reassuring feeling of a routine day at sea.

“All right,” he yelled, “let’s get back to fuckin’ work.”

At first, Jake just went through the motions, numb as the deaths preyed on his psyche. Finally, he shrugged it off.

“You go back to fishing,” he said, “but you’re real damn careful, ’cause you know that shit can happen. I never really felt that way until I saw those dead fishermen.”

Four years earlier, Josh had seen his first fatality at sea, also on his first trip as a
Cornelia Marie
crew member. It was not as catastrophic as the loss of the
Big Valley,
but it was still a shocking tragedy. A deckhand aboard the
Exito
, thirty-six-year-old Scott Powell, lost his life when he was swept off the boat after it was hit by a forty-five-foot wave while engaged in crab fishing. The power of the onrushing water swung around a thousand-pound pot that was hanging on a crane and sent it barreling into Powell’s head, perhaps killing him even before he went over the side. Another deckhand received severe lacerations on his skull, and a third man suffered fractures to both arms when he was caught between colliding pots.

The force of the water not only knocked the entire wheelhouse back six inches but pulled the captain’s chair, bolted to the floor, out the back of the wheelhouse and sent the captain flying all the way to the stern of the boat, where he was able to grasp a railing to prevent being hurled overboard himself.

“That wave was so bad,” Josh remembered, “that it blew out all the windows, windows that could withstand a bullet fired from point-blank range.”

In Jake’s initial experience with death on the water, all the damage had been done by the time his boat arrived. But in Josh’s case, he was forced to see the terror unfold.

“That boat was right next to us,” he said. “We watched it all go down, but we couldn’t do a damn thing about it. We couldn’t turn around to help them because of the possibility that we would roll our own boat over.”

While the jaw-dropping fact that people could and did die all the
time in their chosen profession was impressed upon both Josh and Jake by these unforgettable examples, their father had a long and ever-expanding log of such frightening memories accumulated over his years on the Bering Sea.

One of the most painful, Phil told his sons, was the loss of Mike Bosco, who died along with two others when the sixty-five-foot
Bering Scout
crab boat sank in 1981.

After losing his wife and infant child in a car accident, Mike had fallen into a depression so deep that it landed him on skid row.

He had, however, been plucked from there by a sympathetic boat owner who gave him a job as a deckhand. Mike worked for three years alongside Phil, found a new woman, got engaged, and asked Phil to be the best man at his wedding.

First, however, Mike decided to go on one short blue crab outing.

The fact that his dreams of finally finding marital happiness again ended before they began was tough enough for Phil. But what made it even worse for him was arriving on the scene, seeing the
Bering Scout
upside-down in the water, and knowing Mike was under there, perhaps still clinging to life, but also knowing there was no way to get to him. Phil carried that bitter memory with him until the day he died.

There was also the radio cry that Phil would never forget. Actually, it’s a cry that will never leave the minds of many captains, because the voice of impending doom went out to the entire fleet.

It came from the wheelhouse of a sinking boat. The vessel was on its side, and the only way out was through an empty window frame where the glass had been blown out. All of the crew members made it through that escape route except for the engineer, who was too big to squeeze through.

Unable to wedge himself out and seeing the boat slip lower and lower into the sea with water pouring in from everywhere, he screamed, “I’ve got a family. I’ve got kids. I’m going to die!”

Unfortunately, those were his last words.

A deckhand on Phil’s boat was once swept overboard and never found. It was more than five minutes before anyone knew he was gone and, by then, all anyone could see was an empty sea in all directions.

Although Phil frequently looked out the wheelhouse window to make sure he knew where everyone was, and despite the fact the crewman had failed to heed Phil’s warning to never go out on deck alone, the captain was still left with the feeling that perhaps there was something more he could have done to save him.

“That’s a brutal feeling to live with because you think it’s your fault,” said Phil in the book
Deadliest Catch: Desperate Hours.
“I didn’t do anything wrong, but you can’t convince yourself of that at the time. All you know is that they are dead.”

It was a terrible burden to bear, but one Phil was eventually able to push out of his mind by reminding himself that, unfortunately, death was an inevitable part of his chosen profession.

“If I didn’t accept that,” he told Josh and Jake, “I couldn’t do this job.”

•   •   •

But not all of Phil’s harrowing stories had unhappy endings. There was, of course, the dramatic survival story involving his father, Grant, aboard the
Golden Viking
after it was hit by a massive wave, and Phil himself experienced a similar incident on the
Cornelia Marie
.

Having been in the wheelhouse for more than two days on a king crab trip, he was about to turn command over to his relief skipper, Tony Lara.

“It’s rough out there,” Phil was telling Tony. “You’ve got to watch out for waves like this one right here.”

The wave he had pointed to was big and it was close, getting closer by the second.

And then it was on them, popping open the wheelhouse window, allowing hundreds of gallons of water to pour in.

“That wave,” recalled Tony, “also knocked the lights off the top of the wheelhouse and dented the front.”

But like his father before him, Phil boarded up the open frame with plywood and made it back to port safely.

That wasn’t even Phil’s scariest moment at sea. That designation has to go to the time the
Cornelia Marie
was confronted by a wave Phil and others estimated to be one hundred feet high. He certainly didn’t want that liquid leviathan to hit the boat sideways, and so, with no escape route available, Phil took the wave head-on, going higher and higher up the wall of water like a car chugging up a steep mountain road to the peak.

Except in this case, there was no road leading down the other side. As with any wave, there was no backside.