Captain Phil Harris (18 page)

For an instant, the
Cornelia Marie
remained poised at the summit of the wave, a crab boat suddenly feeling very tiny at the top of the world. Looking through his wheelhouse window, Phil realized that the
Cornelia Marie
was at the edge of a cliff.

Over the boat went, dropping one hundred feet down before loudly smacking the surface of the sea. It hit with such force that it broke off one of the boat’s two solid-steel rudders. That landing set off every alarm on the boat, but Phil was able to maintain control.

When he recounted the story to his sons, Phil laughed as he remembered a call from another boat in the area asking him how the waves were.

“To know, I would have to turn around and look behind me,” Phil told the caller. “But I’m not going to do that because I just might have a heart attack.”

•   •   •

Almost every crab boat captain has tales of frightening voyages to tell. Forty-six-year-old Sig Hansen, a captain for the past twenty-four years, was twenty-nine when he took the
Northwestern
into a violent Bering storm in frigid temperatures, a combination that generated an alarming amount of ice.

“Most of the other captains didn’t fish through that storm, choosing instead to go back in,” Sig said, “but I was pretty greedy and still
young enough to feel like I had to prove myself. So we kept fishing, but as we did, we became riddled with ice.”

Even the spray off the water froze when it hit the surface of the boat. The windows in the wheelhouse iced up, severely limiting Sig’s vision.

The wise thing to do at that point would have been to order all hands on deck to concentrate on removing the white menace that was piling up all over the ship.

“I didn’t want to stop for three or four hours to bust the ice,” Sig admitted. “But collecting so much, you’re building weight. I didn’t realize how much ice we had accumulated.”

The worst spot was the bow, where the ice was four feet higher than the rest of the ship.

“It created a giant soup-bowl effect,” said Sig.

The accumulation of a massive amount of water in that bowl, where it would be trapped by the high sides, would leave everybody on board in the soup. And that’s exactly what happened.

“When this one wave rolled over the bow,” Sig said, “the damn ship started sinking on her nose, then on her starboard side halfway down. I couldn’t believe the boat had become that heavy. I learned my lesson.”

That offered no solace to the deckhands.

“Panic started spreading,” Sig said. “Everybody was freaking out.”

He could certainly understand that reaction when he looked out his wheelhouse window. He could clearly see the rolling waves but not a great deal of his own boat, because it was underwater.

Crab boat captains know that the difference between death and survival is often a matter of seconds and always a matter of steering the right course.

Sig calmed everybody down with his quick response.

“I throttled as much as I could,” he said, “to get the boat to spin around, trying to get the water out of that bowl.

“Fortunately, another wave came along and hit us on the starboard
side, getting some of the water out. That made the boat light enough to come back [level], buoyant, but just barely. That second wave saved us.”

Then came the hard work Sig had tried to avoid.

“It took us eighteen hours to get the ice off,” he said. “Then we turned around and went right back at it, fishing for crab,” undeterred by the near disaster.

•   •   •

Sig’s motivation to fish through the horrible conditions was a reflection of derby days, the old system for Bering Sea crab fishing.

Derby days was a lot like another Alaskan dash for cash, the gold rush days. In the 1890s, prospectors flooded into the territory in search of wealth, limited only by their energy level, toughness, and knowledge of the terrain. So it was with crab fishermen from 1965 until 2005. Come one, come all. Bring your boats, your bait, and your deckhands and grab all you can.

The only limit was time. The National Marine Fisheries Service, federal regulators for the fishing industry under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, set up a crab season that ran only three to four days. Such a short span might seem wise as far as safety was concerned, since that would mean less time for accidents to occur, but it was actually the worst scenario possible. With such a tight window of opportunity and approximately 250 boats battling for the same catch, captains sometimes became reckless, ignoring hazardous conditions or other boats that had already staked out a spot.

“It was really intense,” said Sig. “Phil and I would be right on top of each other, and he wasn’t bashful about getting down and getting dirty. If he smelled crab in an area, he was going to jump in even if you were already there. He wasn’t going to be polite about it. It was like pot for pot and let’s go. That was okay with me. It was the name of the game.”

Sig wasn’t in a position to challenge Phil if he intruded into Sig’s
fishing area. Phil was ten years older and an established leader of the crab fleet.

“I’m not going to be on the radio barking at him,” Sig said, “because he had more clout and had earned more respect. So I didn’t say nothing.”

But Sig showed little respect for the elements, his near-disastrous encounter with ice being only one of many hazardous trips he undertook.

“It could get really bad out there,” he said. “Our last trip before the end of derby days was a three-day king crab season. The wind was blowing over seventy miles an hour the whole time, gusting up to ninety at times. Most of the other boats had to stop for a while. But I was dead set on getting my pots [down in the water]. It was just insane stupidity on my part. It took us two and a half hours to set twenty-five pots over a three-mile string, where normally that would take thirty minutes.”

The difficulty was twofold: high winds and high waves.

“We couldn’t make any headway,” said Sig. “We’d plow over one wave and the next one was right down upon us. We were basically at a dead stop.”

“Derby days was insane,” said Thom Beers, creator and executive producer of
Deadliest Catch
. “I was up for thirty-six hours with those guys one time. It was nuts. It was so dramatic because the rule was, catch as much as you can until they tell you to stop. They’d cut each other’s throats to get that crab.”

Fishermen didn’t literally kill one another, but the Bering Sea claimed many from their ranks during the forty-year span of derby days, with the mad dash considered a prime cause for the high number of fatalities. The Bering Sea Fishermen Memorial Page lists 196 deaths from the start of derby days in 1965 through its conclusion in January of 2005.

Concerns about the death rate contributed to the demise of derby
days, but there were also worries about the damaging effects of over-fishing and environmental changes in the once crab-rich areas north of the Aleutian Islands.

In the early 1990s, more than 300 million pounds of snow crab were caught in the Bering Sea, earning fishermen $200 million. But by 1999, overfishing had devastated the crab population. To avoid the eventual extinction of crab in the Bering Sea, federal regulators severely limited their availability to fishermen. By 2004, snow crab season, previously measured in months, was cut to just five days. By 2005, the snow crab haul was down to 19.3 million pounds, worth $35 million.

“If you broke a [drive] shaft, or had a breakdown or an injury,” Kale Garcia, owner of the crab boat
Aquila
, told the
High Country News,
“it could cost you your season.”

Eventually, a quota system was implemented to replace derby days. But after the change was announced, there was still one last run by the full crab fleet beginning on January 13, 2005.

“This is it, the final one,” Kevin Kaldestad, owner of nine fishing boats, told the
Anchorage Daily News
as his personal flotilla joined the last unencumbered hunt for crab. “We’re all ready to get it over with safely and move on.”

When he spoke of safety, Kaldestad did so in response to the pain of a horrible memory that had not dimmed in a decade. In 1995, his crab boat, the
Northwest Mariner
, facing forty-knot winds and twenty-four-foot waves, sank northwest of St. Paul Island. There were no survivors among the crew of six on board.

But Kaldestad’s words about a safer future were quickly followed by a grim reminder of the disastrous past, affirmation of the need to phase out the Wild West days of crab fishing. The sinking of the
Big Valley
and the loss of deckhand Manu Lagai Jr. (swept off another crab boat,
Sultan
) both occurred in the first seventy-two hours of the last derby days.

When crab season resumed later that year, fishermen operated
under the new system. The old method, TAC (total allowable catch), set a limit on the amount of crab that could be caught by the entire Bering fleet. Under the new rule, IFQ (individual fishing quota), each boat had its own quota.

And there were fewer boats to divide up the spoils because twenty-five of them, about 10 percent of the fleet, were removed from the competition through a $97 million federal buyout plan. The remaining boats had to account for that money through a tax.

The quota system is a catch-share program, similar to a cap-and-trade environmental plan. Begun in the 1970s in Iceland, New Zealand, and Australia, and successfully implemented in U.S. waters in the 1990s for halibut and black cod, the rule allows boat owners to buy a certain amount of quota, based on their catch totals in previous years, and fish for it, or they can sell or lease their quota to other boats while retaining a large chunk of the profits.

“This is going to help,” said Kaldestad when the quota system was implemented. “It’s not going to calm the ocean or make the crab come on board, but we can choose our window of opportunity, and we won’t be racing anymore.”

But the change didn’t come without controversy. Some of the owners of the smaller boats felt they had been squeezed out of the market, and others resented the fact that some of the older boat owners could sell or lease their quotas and make a lot of money without lifting the anchor on their boats.

With the shift to the quota system, the number of boats fishing for red king crab dropped from 251 to 89 in one year. Those pursuing snow crab fell from 164 to 80.

For those left, however, the pace gradually became calmer. After four years, the snow crab season had stretched to more than seven months. The total allowable catch had also been moving back up, reaching 88.9 million pounds in the season just past, up 64 percent from the previous season’s 54.3 million.

By knowing before they left port exactly how much crab they
could catch, boat owners could also engage in financial planning, a concept previously foreign to men who made their living at the whim of the sea.

Financial institutions loved it. “You know that a fisherman is going to be allocated
x
percent of the crab,” banker Erik Olson told the
High Country News
. “You can translate that into dollars, and you can get a pretty good idea of what their revenue will be. That is a huge change. It’s the difference between ‘Grab a case of Red Bull, pray for good weather, and buckle up’ and ‘Now we have a business plan.’ ”

“As a younger guy I liked the derby days,” Sig said. “At my age now, I’ll take the quota system. That’s only from a business perspective. If the weather gets so bad that you have to stop, you can. You can take a break if you need to shut her down. Before, you just wouldn’t do it.

“Phil also learned to like the quota system because he could stop, but his fishing style didn’t stop. He was still just as aggressive.”

However, even with the switch to the quota system and ever-heightened safety measures, the number of fatalities has not dropped much. From 2005 until the spring of 2012, thirty-seven fishermen were lost. That’s an average of more than four and a half a year. Under the derby days format, the rate of deaths was nearly five a year.

The Bering Sea is still the Bering Sea, and “the deadliest catch” is still an accurate description of crab fishing.

•   •   •

Helping to balance out the constant threat of death and disaster always hanging over a crab boat are the laughs, pranks, camaraderie, and the sight of pots full of crab emerging from the sea.

Whenever the talk about lost seamen and capsized ships got too heavy aboard his ship, Phil loved to break up the somber atmosphere by telling the story about the greenhorn who came on board his boat with his chest puffed out, bragging about how tough he was. He would talk about his days as a college quarterback, dismissing the idea of being overwhelmed by a rogue wave by saying it couldn’t be any more
fearsome than the gargantuan linemen who tried to overwhelm him on the football field.

When the
Cornelia Marie
left port with this cocky greenhorn, she encountered the usual hazardous conditions, winds as strong as sixty miles an hour, waves up to twenty-five feet high. To veteran deckhands, it was just normal working conditions.

Not to the quarterback. He raced up to the wheelhouse as if he’d just seen a ghost, fell on his hands and knees, and started crying, according to Phil.

“He said we were all going to die,” Phil recalled. “He thought we were nuts. He wanted to go home. He expected me to call the Coast Guard.”

Phil just looked at him with utter disdain and asked, “What is your problem?”

If you’re not taking a little bit of a risk, you’re not living. If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.

—Sign on the wall in Thom Beers’s office

Thom Beers is very familiar with the edge. He has been living there for a quarter century. Fascinated by those who flirt with danger and death on a regular basis, whether for money, glory, research, or just plain fun, he has made a very successful career out of showing these true daredevils to the world in an ever-growing series of highly rated reality shows.