Time Bandit (24 page)

Andy was disappointed in the whole IFQ system under rationalization.

The next eighty pots began to show a difference. After a couple more pots, we knew we were approaching a hot spot. Pots began averaging 200 crabs—huge for baradai. The mood of the crew lightened. The weather cooperated. We thought we could bring up our baradai quota in no time. But at sea, no one counts his crabs too early.

Andy heard the sound of the engine change. He throttled back and on the loudhailer told Neal to come to the wheelhouse. Neal knew right away the meaning of the engine’s sound. A wave had pushed a pot line under
Time Bandit
’s hull and the starboard main prop had tangled around the three-quarter-inch line. The shaft seized up as the line tightened. Andy ordered the crew to cut the line from the pot. And a $1,000 plus pot plummeted to the bottom.

“What’s going on?” Andy asked Neal.

“We’re fucked,” he replied.

To disentangle the prop, Andy would have to dive under the hull and check out the damage. And right now, a couple hundred miles from Dutch, he had to make certain that he did not further entangle line in the other prop. We had no choice but to limp back to Dutch on one engine with dicey steering.

Times like these test a fisherman’s patience. But on that day they gave us an appreciation, which we do not always admit to, of the new rules of crab rationalization. Under the Derby, this prop snarl might have doomed our opie season, but probably not. Now, with new rules, no one could take our IFQs from us. There was no reason for dismay. Maybe rationalization took away our license to catch a bonanza of crabs, but it gave us a safety net. Right now, we felt disappointment but not despair.

Back in Dutch, with
Time Bandit
tied up at the dock, Andy donned a dry suit, flippers, gloves and hood, a regulator, and a compressed air tank. He dove into the thirty-six-degree water off the dock: a pot line had indeed wrapped around the prop shaft. He cut through the nylon-and-hemp line with a serrated knife. The repair took an hour. A short time later, as we were preparing to cast off, a state police pickup drove on the dock and stopped beside
Time Bandit.
A trooper waved at Andy to come down from the wheelhouse. He wanted to talk.

“What now?” Andy asked me.

I could only shake my head.

What now was Caveman.

I have no idea how or why we hired him. He seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. Andy and I already knew that Caveman, wherever he was from, loved to sleep; he truly never seemed fully awake. For the other men in the crew, getting him out of bed was a regular chore. He never “got” it the same way the others did. And now, the police wanted him on an outstanding warrant for DUI in Alaska. The officer explained that Caveman’s name had triggered a hit when he was running crew licenses through a national police database.

I told Andy, “I thought he told us he had postponed his court date.”

“I guess he lied.”

Caveman was one of Neal’s hires. Andy gave Neal an evil look. Caveman’s crime was not serious, as crimes go, but the officer cuffed him anyway. He was frisking him spread-eagle against his truck, when I offered him a parting thought. “Don’t worry, Caveman. For dinner they have sandwiches and cocks, and they are all out of sandwiches.”

Richard said, “Why don’t we just leave him in jail?”

We might have, too, if we were not a man short on deck and had to catch up after too much prospecting and too little to show in the holds. Added to that was the delay with the entangled prop. Luck was not giving us a break, and now we had no other choice but to bail Caveman out and bring him back on the boat. We had no time to trawl the bars for another crewman.

That afternoon we paid out $500 with cash from our pockets and an ATM; the whole crew chipped in. The paperwork for Caveman’s release was ready when we arrived at the jail. He came through the security doors looking sleepy. What could we say? Nothing would change him. He looked as if the prison experience had exhausted him. The minute after we cast off
Time Bandit,
he was fast asleep.

A Fork in the Road

Russell swore he saw a flare. Its distinctive red light was so fleeting and tiny against the sky it could have been a trick of his eye, or something
in
his eye. But it was something, where for hours there had been nothing. He jumped on the radio to call Johnathan’s boat. There was no reply. He stared in the flare’s direction for fifteen minutes through the binos. If it was a flare, it came at a moment when he had nearly reached a fork in the road. The Kennedy Entrance lay to his left, the Barren Islands were off his port bow, and the entrance to the Shelikof Strait was off his starboard bow. He had to choose which direction to take. The flare, if that was what it was, came from the right, and without further hesitation he headed there.

In time he passed Augustine Island. Ahead looming in the dark was the protrusion of Cape Douglas at the northeastern end of the Strait, which poses a constant danger to boats traveling between Anchorage and Cold Bay, out the Aleutian chain and beyond. There are no lights and radar reflectors to mark the cape, but Johnathan might not have been in a position to benefit from those aids anyway if he had discharged the signal flare.

Russell could only estimate the distance and time to Cape Douglas. He was less than trusting of Dino’s
Livers End.
Since he did not know its traits, its strengths and weaknesses, he wanted to take her easy. The engine sounded strong and steady. The generators worked fine. The boat was lit up like a lighthouse. He was making progress, he hoped in a direction that would end with
Fishing Fever
in his sights by full morning light.

I Had Better Get It Together

Johnathan

The tiniest hint
of the pre-glow dawn shows in the east behind the peaks of towering mountains along the coast. Darkness is all around
Fishing Fever,
but the promise of light lifts my mood. I shake out one of two remaining Winstons, fire it up, and suck down its delicious, calming smoke. I restrict myself to two inhales and pinch off the ember with my thumb and forefinger. I slide the butt into my pocket for later.

Fishing Fever
tells me what she is feeling. She reacts to the water sloshing at her hull; she sends me indications of changes in rips and currents and tides. She seems in the grip of competing forces. There is the height of the sea, which has not increased through the night but remains around fifteen to sixteen feet. This causes me discomfort. The boat rocks in the troughs. The wave frequency has changed; the boat sways like a toy in a washing machine on wash cycle. The currents are strong here and move against the tide. This body of water is fighting itself and anyone riding on it.

I remember the time I was captaining the
Debra D,
out of Mount Vernon, Washington, during opie season in mid-January on the Bering Sea. The boat was carrying 24,000 pounds of frozen bait cod in boxes on the forward deck. We were jogging into heavy seas when we took a huge wave over the bow rail that knocked the entire boat sideways, and the bait broke loose of its chains and slid across the deck to the launcher. In less than ten seconds, we were in those seas with a 40-degree list to starboard; we were going over. The crane controls were underwater. I started jerking out our survival suits, and we waited and watched; the crew ran down to the deck. By some miracle, the boat stabilized itself long enough to allow the crew to shift the eight tons of bait back into the center of the boat. That was as close as I ever have come to sinking aboard anything but smaller boats and skiffs when I was a kid.

I am hungry now but have no intention of eating another raw salmon. In the last hour, my hand touched the bottle of Crown Royal, which remains sealed. There will be time to quench that thirst when I am out of this
stupid
mess, one of those incredible incidents that happens to other people. My stomach growls, probably from the Winston, and in the wheelhouse I twist open a bottle of water, which soothes my stomach and makes me feel like smoking the remainder of the butt.

W
e launched again from Dutch last year with a clear prop and a court date for Caveman. We pointed our bow in the direction of the Pribilofs. With our quotas intact and a different processor ship on station, we approached St. Paul Island in fair but extremely cold weather and began to pick up the pots we had left on the seafloor when the prop snared the line.

The soak proved helpful. We went from snails when we last pulled pots in this string to 500 a pot now. The storm had moved the crabs onto our gear. Finally, we were finding good fishing. The crew was feeling good enough to joke with Caveman. He clearly resented what he perceived as their lack of respect. It seemed obvious to me that he had not earned points when he told me that he had cleared up the matter of his court date. He was getting on my nerves.

After the storm, the sea calmed. But the calm I detected around St. Paul was different, by which I mean unique. These seas were small with high winds and extreme cold. That signaled that the Arctic ice pack was moving south.

Two types of ice haunt the Bering Sea. One is called fast, which is another term for ice that holds fast to a point of land. Fast ice can spread a few yards to hundreds of miles depending on the depth of the water, the air and water temperatures, and the winds. Usually, fast ice does not threaten mariners. It gives a home to polar bears, walrus, and seals.

Its cousin, pack ice, presents a grave danger to men at sea. This ice is not anchored to land but drifts with the wind and currents on the Bering southeast from the Siberian coast. The extreme weight and thickness of pack ice dampens the sea swells and with a less agitated motion of the water, the sea turns more rapidly to larger and thicker fields of pack ice. The sea breaks up the solid ice to create ponds of open water called
polynyas
and long, linear, open cracks called leads, which form a maze of navigable water for boats trapped in pack ice. But the thickness of the ice can tear open the thin three-eighth-inch metal hulls of fishing vessels like
Time Bandit.
A one-two punch hits when pack ice slowly pushes a boat toward fast ice or simply toward the shore with no means of escape. This rarely happens, but every captain on the Bering Sea in February and March worries about the peril.

This happened to the F/V
Alaskan Monarch
in the winter of 1991 when she lost steering and was caught up near St. Paul. The Coast Guard was called out to rescue her, but by the time a helicopter arrived the pack ice had already pushed
Monarch
onto the heaps of jagged rocks leading to St. Paul harbor. The helicopter crew rescued four of the
Monarch
’s six crewmen off the deck but two others were swept into the sea by a wave backing off the shore. The helicopter quickly plucked them to safety. Ever since, the twisted, rusting, and torn bow section of the
Alaskan Monarch
on the rocky shore has served as a grim warning to any boat that enters St. Paul harbor.

By reading the signs of the wind blowing from the southeast at thirty-five knots and the seas an eerie calm, it was clear to me that the pack ice and the
Time Bandit
were on a collision course—off St. Paul Island. Usually by April, the pack’s southernmost fringe, which angles across the sea from northwest to southeast, slicing our opie grounds in half, extends as far south as the Pribilofs. I know how to maneuver a boat in ice but what worried me was that the processor had anchored the
Stellar Sea
’s 360-foot replacement,
Independence,
close to the shore, indeed, close enough to trap a boat in the pack.

We needed to meet our delivery date and time, or else the processor would send
Time Bandit
to the back of the line. And that meant the added worry that the opies in our tanks would not survive. That would count as a loss to the boat of more than $200,000.

This seemed screwy. We were about to push into the ice pack to reach the
Independence
with the hope that we could deliver the crabs to the floating processor and get out again before the ice trapped us.

But a 113-foot boat is a challenge to navigate in icy alleyways. With Andy gone—he had abruptly left the boat in Dutch to fly home to Indiana; Sabrina had asked him as a special favor to come home to attend the wedding of her nephew, and of course he agreed—I was alone in the wheelhouse, and there was never a time in our lives when I needed his calm and confidence more than I did now.

During most of the fishing year, I take the
Time Bandit
for granted. She is seaworthy and trustworthy. She can go anywhere safely. I can operate and maneuver her with the certainty and finesse of twenty-seven years’ experience. Her quirks are second nature to me. Her sinking or foundering would never enter my mind, just as anyone else would never imagine his house burning to the ground. But now, the thought of trapping the boat more than entered my thinking. And if anything happened to her, I would be to blame. Her loss would be equivalent to losing our father. My brothers would understand the events that led up to her loss, but they would have doubts about me forever after, and I would lose part of myself. My confidence would shatter; it would not matter to me one bit that pack ice had wrecked her.
I
had wrecked her. And I would live with that guilt the rest of my life. I have visions of ice sheets around her hull, with nowhere to escape, and the engines straining to move her through ice thirty inches thick, with the bow creasing and the water pressing in. I had better get it together.

We continued to pull pots; we were filling our holds with opie gold. Each pot that contained 1,000-plus opies rang up the cash register at $1,800. Shea looked at one brimming, squirming pot and said, “There’s a new pair of skis.” Russell wrestled Richard to the deck; they were behaving like happy puppies. “We are finally making big money,” Russell said. “This is what I
live
for.”

I went down on deck to share in the fun. I told them, “This is a good way to end the season,” and the crew renewed its efforts, knowing that we were back on our original schedule. The day continued bright and the ocean’s calm made the work easier and faster on deck. Ice from 20-degree ambient temperatures coated the boom and the forepeak and the planking, but the crew was jubilant, knowing they could now return early to Dutch. Neal winched the last pot on the launcher and in another few minutes, Richard flicked his fingers signaling 650 opies. We were ready to deliver. We wanted to go home.

W
ith the crew tucked in bed for the night, I headed for St. Paul Island. About three miles off the island, the ice pack appeared out of the mist. I cut one main engine and crept with one prop at one knot through broken chunks of ice, praying that this would be the worst of the pack until we had offloaded the crabs and headed south. Over VHF I learned that the state had closed the St. Paul harbor, warning that even those protected waters might freeze over in the cold. I did not like the sound of that. According to what the State Wildlife Police reported, the temperature had dropped enough to freeze even the protected salt water in the harbor. I wanted the backup of a place to shelter
Time Bandit.
The harbor was the only safe haven for nearly 280 miles around.

I waited to see what happened. For right now, I was trying to maneuver
Time Bandit
like a 113-foot skiff, around this sheet ice and down small opening leads. When the ice, with some sheets thirty inches thick and weighing 125,000 pounds, came in contact with the bow,
Time Bandit
boomed with a hollow sound like I had pressed my ear to an abyss. I
felt
for the boat. This was not
Time Bandit
’s role. Her hull was not made for this kind of sea, and her rudder and props were too fragile for contact with the thick ice blocks. She would go anywhere at sea that I asked her except here, against this solid water.

Three miles of ice stood between the
Independence
and the
Time Bandit.
I could see her boom lights. But those separating miles might have been the circumnavigation of the globe. We had to get through the ice to that processor. Something weird was happening to me. I felt that if I could huddle
Time Bandit
close to the processor, which was anchored firmly on the bottom and enjoyed the protection of a double hull,
Time Bandit
would be safe from harm. Maybe the old safety-in-numbers bromide had taken over, but seeing the sodium lights on the processor’s booms comforted me. Our progress was a slow agony. We moved three miles in five hours; we could have walked the same distance across the ice in less than two hours.

At last we tied up alongside
Independence
’s dark and yet welcoming hull. The day was cold and bright, but the worst seemed behind us. The crew came out on deck and assisted with the offloading. Deck hatches had frozen shut in the night, and Neal and Shea snapped four stout lines trying to free one lid with the crane. But eventually the
Independence
’s crew was able to hoist down the brailers into the hold, and their workers stood on the crabs while pitching them into the canvas-sided containers; each was weighed and tallied as it was lifted out. The brailers signified money—a total that day of $216,551, which was not bad considering at one point only a few days ago I thought I would have to write off the opilio season completely. The crew had money to take back to Dutch; they could add opilio shares to their king money and live until the next season. I felt that I had done my job.

With the last brailer emptied, I braced myself to cast off from
Independence.
But in reality, I had nowhere to go. I could have forced my way into St. Paul Island’s harbor, against the advice of the State Wildlife Police, but I did not; for once I chose to follow their advice. That left me with no choice but to run for clear water three or five miles south of
Independence
and hope for the best between here and there.

The crew had no further work to do, and after a day of laboring with the offloading, I told them to take it easy; sleep. Caveman snapped to like a plebe at West Point. The sky was darkening. Night was falling. It was bitter cold. I did not dare to run the boat on two engines in the ice and so, as before, we headed out at an even slower pace—half a knot—than when we entered the pack.

As darkness closed around the
Time Bandit,
the temperature fell. The ice moved south. The slow progress ground us down; each hollow sound of the hull hitting the ice slabs made me wince. Over the span of two hours we moved one mile away from the
Independence.
Mother nature was telling me that I was not going home tonight. In light of this, I laughed, but not a funny laugh; it was a psychotic sound that reflected the sheer insanity of this predicament. We ground to a complete halt in the ice, which was tightening its hold. The breaks simply froze together and disappeared. I could see neither
polynyas
nor leads in the reach of the sodium lights. I had nowhere to move.