Time Bandit (18 page)

In 1976, with the passage of the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act, and the international fishing boundary expanded from 12 to 200 miles. Effectively, the act Americanized Alaskan fisheries. Without the Russians and the Japanese ships scooping crabs in tons aboard their industrial boats, Alaskan fishermen were finally left alone to catch what belonged to the people of Alaska. This was the good news. The bad news was that a new and alarming lethality crept into an industry that was already dangerous enough.

From the start, the crab catch was organized around
The Derby,
jargon for “open access.” I loved the Derby, which had a wild anarchy of the kind that is not much sanctioned in America anymore, on the sea or off. The game was every man for himself, a virtual free-for-all, with no regulation once the starting gun went off, and it suited my nature, which probably says more about me than I should admit. Put another way, the Derby was like a cattle drive on the sea, from the days of the Chisholm Trail, when real cowboys herded their longhorns to the railheads.

Crews like ours on
Time Bandit
worked without sleep in all weather and seas to catch as many crabs in an allotted time as our holds would take and our bodies would allow. Johnathan and I, who know better than to take unnecessary risks at sea, went ahead anyway in search of the
red gold
that we call king crabs. Secrecy was the guiding rule. No boat captain ever told another captain about his hot spots, where he reliably would find crabs year after year. The crabs shifted their grounds, and no one spoke over the single sideband what their prospect pots showed or where they were successful. Meanwhile, ships were going down at a rate that everyone knew was unacceptable, even criminal, and yet no one knew what could be done to stop it. No one was really even certain why.

The Derby created the dawning of a perfect storm for Alaskan fishermen. Whether anyone ever meant the crab fishery to become a breakneck race against time, elements, and the fishing of a species of sea creature that, while it does not swim, moves freely over the sea floor, the circumstances began to kill men. Any captain with a license and a boat, no matter what size or concern of its captain for safety, could enter the Derby just by showing up. Boats went out on the Bering Sea that did not have the seaworthiness to handle the wind and weather. The State of Alaska’s Department of Fish & Game set catch limits to protect the long-term health of the crabs; but Fish & Game, acknowledging the cussedness of fishermen, let them take care of their own long-term health, which was something that the fishermen clearly would show themselves incapable of doing.

The Derby frenzy started each year, usually in September, on a precise day at an exact minute. Aware that the season might last only fifty-two hours, the fishermen worked ceaselessly and took alarming risks to plug their holds. In some years, forecasts of storms on the Bering forced Fish & Game to delay the opening for the protection of fishermen who would simply ignore their better judgment to remain in port and face whatever the Bering Sea had to throw at them. The catch was like sand dropping through an hourglass. Fish & Game continually estimated the catch according to the numbers and sizes of the licensed boats and the tonnage of their deliveries to the processors. They knew within hours when the fleet would reach the preset limit, and an announcement over single sideband signaled a day and an exact time of the season’s end. The boat crews worked with increased fury, knowing the minutes were ticking down. Tired, aching, and groggy, crews and captains made fatal mistakes.

Unwittingly, the federal government made a bad situation even more dangerous with an unintentional consequence. The National Marine Fisheries Service, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), invited crab fishermen to reinvest what they otherwise would have paid in taxes in capital construction. At first, boat owners used the tax money to rebuild their vessels. They added new technologies that increased their speed and the tonnage of the catch. With their existing vessels updated, the captains plowed more tax-free money in two, three, five, or eight
new
boats that they designed to ply seas in any weather, with larger holds for greater tonnages of crabs. They built in booms for sodium lights, allowing them to work night and day, and decks strong enough to hold megatons of pots.

This overcapitalization created a frenzy of too many boats with larger capacities racing for the same limit of crab. Captains were stacking more weight on their decks than the boats were designed to carry; stability suffered, and boats and lives were lost. Accidents began to alarm officials at the Alaska Fish & Game. Boat captains determined the numbers and sizes of the pots they carried on deck. Pots, of course, are a blessing
and
a curse. For the deckhands and boat owners, they trap the crabs that fill our pockets with cash. But they can also kill us. Pots like the ones we carry on
Time Bandit
can slam against the deck with 30,000 foot-pounds of energy; we do not wear steel-toed safety shoes because the force of a falling pot is greater than the steel plate in the shoes can withstand, and the plate would cut flesh and bone like a scalpel.

On the deck, the pots swing at the end of the crane hook above the deckhands’ heads. The greater the greed, the faster the pace. The rhythm of the crew working together cannot be accelerated beyond the speed of the slowest man or the most complicated task without creating further risks. The pots can slide like runaway trains along wooden deck boards slick with ice and crab slime. In icy conditions, a loose pot can take down a crewman without warning or crush him against the rail or the wave wall or any number of steel surfaces near the deck. They can smash fingers and snap limbs in an instant of inattention and, when attached to three buoys at the end of 33-fathom “shots” of three-quarter-inch line, they possess the terrifying potential of dragging a crewman overboard down into the depths of the Bering Sea.

The enormous collective weight of the pots when stacked on the deck raises a boat’s center of gravity and thereby creates a continuing threat to the entire boat. Too much weight destabilized and sank boats during the Derby with an alarming regularity. Adding a further and even more unpredictable element of instability, in the Bering Sea ice forms in thick sheets on deck and the pots. This factor makes the difference, often, between safety and disaster. The ice can build up with alarming speed. The initial weight of ice a foot thick on the decks causes a boat like
Time Bandit
to push bluntly into the bow waves, and this in turn throws cascades of salt water and spray on the deck and forepeak. This spray sometimes turns to ice
in the air,
falling to deck in frozen drops with the rattle of marbles in a tin can. Soon, the boat turns sluggish at the wheel and refuses even to respond. With the ice weight now added to the pot weight and with the boat sluggish, one wave can capsize the boat.

When a boat is “making ice,” the crew must be prepared to hit the deck, literally, with sledgehammers, baseball bats, axes, and lengths of pipe to break up. The work is slow and hard. Frostbitten ears and hands are not uncommon. The ice is pitched overboard or shoved out a scuttle. Breaking ice is a race against time. Sometimes, keeping even with the new ice is all that a crew can do. The crew knows the importance of getting ice off the boat, and few seriously complain when I tell them to get at it.

Another hazard peculiar to crabbing boats, the crab tanks can detract immeasurably from the boats’ stability. These tanks are filled with water to keep the crabs alive until they are delivered to the processors. Pumps must continually replenish the seawater in the tanks, and if for some reason the pumps fail, the water in the tanks may slosh from one side to another and destabilize the boat. That may have happened to Cache Seel and his ninety-two-foot crabber
Big Valley
in January 2005, while surrounded by other crab boats seventy miles off the Pribilof Island of St. Paul’s.

The
Big Valley
was caught in the trough between waves twelve to fifteen feet high when without warning a twenty-eight-foot rogue wave turned the boat on its side 60 to 70 degrees. In his bunk, Seel was flipped nearly vertical; the engines quit and the generators shut down. In the pitch dark he struggled into his survival suit and went to aid another crewman crying for help. On deck another crewman deployed a life raft, which howling winds blew away. The deck tipped 90 degrees within two minutes and threw two crewmen into the icy waters with their survival suits in their hands. The boat gradually rolled and settled about two-thirds upside down. The rolling chocks, fins that run along either side of a keel from the stern forward and are normally underwater, were exposed to the air. Now a cascade of events pointed in a single direction. The other four crewmen walked along the hull as the boat rolled. Seel ended up near the stern in the water. Enough of the boat was still afloat for him to cling to a protruding fixture on the hull. But as the boat settled down farther in the water, waves broke over the hull. Seel could not see his crewmates in the dark but he could hear them yelling that the EPIRB emergency beacon had floated free. For the next hour and a half, he held on, as higher waves washed over the upturned hull. The boat sank deeper into the water, and Seel finally had to let go. For the next twenty minutes, he swam free of the boat until he saw a white strobe light beaming from a raft. After thirty minutes more swimming, he climbed into the raft to safety, vomited seawater, and waited for the Coast Guard to hoist him into a helicopter two hours later.

Inspectors later determined, based on speculation and Seel’s recollection of events, that “free surface,” which describes slack water in the boat’s compartments, was either full of water or completely empty. A pump had failed in the crab hold and the water was slack; a cutlass bearing broke and water flooded the engine room; or water poured through doors that were not secured in the rear lazarette. Water sloshed around inside the boat, and the weight moved to one side as the boat rocked with the actions of the waves in the trough. At some point the side-to-side motion grew extreme. The boat could not recover from a roll, and went over.

That was the end of
Big Valley,
but the sea was the killer only as an instrument of man’s stupidity. Usually this is the case, although no one wants to talk about stupidity leading to the deaths of crewmen. We are aware of the dangers we face, and we are not afraid. Most of the time, we work without a thought of drowning or freezing to death. We fishermen are not especially brave but we have a healthy capacity to deceive ourselves. Consider our rates of survival against other dangerous jobs. In 2006 the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ranked commercial fishing in general as the work with the highest fatality rate in America with 141.7 fatalities per 100,000, almost thirty times that of an average industrial worker. And the Bureau lists Alaskan waters and in particular the Bering Sea, which has claimed 2,066 lives since records were first kept, as far more dangerous still.

But you are never the one who is going to die, until the night you wake up and men are screaming and the engine room is half full of water, and suddenly you are in the water, alarms going off, and you are in shock. You tell yourself, “I don’t believe this is happening to
me.
” Five minutes later, you are crab food. You cannot allow yourself ever to think you are going to be the one who dies. That is what, I suppose, keeps us sane. It is also what molds our character. A slip, a careless instant, a spasm of hand movements of the crane operator on his controls and someone on deck can die. The sea rocks and heaves the deck under our boots. Standing upright without holding on takes constant effort, and when a crewman is sorting crabs or working with buoy lines—indeed, any of the tasks on the deck—his life is at risk. Waves of water crash over the bow. The boat rolls, starboard to port, often with a heave from the stern, corkscrewing crewmen off balance and toward the rails. At any instant, a twisted ankle, an unexpected rogue wave, a slip on fish guts, a crab scuttling over the deck, or plates of ice, and a crewman can go to his death. It can happen fast. No wonder we do not grow up. If we did, we would have no choice but to quit crabbing.

We think of ourselves as neither crazy nor foolish. Other people can think that, but it is a luxury we do not acknowledge. We are men working at our chosen profession. Every fisherman knows what kills. We understand that if we enter the water unprotected, we are probably as good as dead. A crewman will be irretrievably wounded by hypothermia in four or five minutes if he is not wearing a survival suit when he enters the Bering Sea. His extremities will quickly go numb as his body struggles to protect its central core, and he will die when his heart reaches 86 degrees Fahrenheit. We are not afraid of the sea; we are
terrified
of the water.

In our world of denial, we turn away from certain risks as part of the cost of crabbing. But denial is more complicated than that. Some fishermen invite their own destruction. Captain Ahab lives on the Bering Sea! Men bring about their own peril through greed, complacency, and desperation. The same stupid motives apply whether men are racing NASCAR or picking stocks and bonds. A person who is desperate for money
will
act stupid. Any crabber who says he has never known desperation is flat-out lying. Anything I ever did in desperation turned out wrong, like it did with the
Perfect Storm
guys, whom no one forced into that storm. They had lost refrigeration and chose to run for the money. And only when they were in peril did they realize that all the money in the world was not worth dying for. I should not criticize them for what they did. The stresses at sea can make fools of men. Out on the Bering, the crew on deck is looking up at me making decisions in the wheelhouse, and I see the faces of their wives and kids looking back at me too. I have to make them money,
and
I must bring them home alive. I may worry about drowning, dying in a ship’s fire, or from a falling pot, and making it back to port, for whatever good worrying will do, but I
have
to make money for my crew. On the sea, my back is to the wall. One bad season, I can borrow to make ends meet; after two bad seasons in a row, I am close to going under. Three bad, and I go directly to jail without passing go; I am back twenty years working the deck where I started. Either way, I have lost my dream. And
that
thought alone can lead to disaster.