Time Bandit (3 page)

We often stayed with Grandma Jo and Grandpa Ernie in the summers in our preteen years when our father was out fishing. Grandpa Ernie shot two bears from the door of the house one summer. He dressed them and hung their carcasses from a tripod; they looked just like skinned humans and the sight haunted me. From then on, I had bear nightmares. We ate bear meat, and Grandpa Ernie cured the hides for blankets. Their bathroom was an outhouse about fifty yards across dangerous bear terrain. When nature called in the middle of the night, I could beat the speed of light getting to that outhouse. More than once, a bear loomed out of the moonlight, and I sat shouting for help until the bear moved on.

Even though she is now ninety-one and weighs no more than eighty pounds, Grandma Jo faced down a moose alone not long ago when she was walking down her sloped driveway with her little dog Allie, who loved to eat pancakes. Grandma Jo was picking up the mail on the Sterling Highway, where she lives about five miles north of Homer on forested land, when a moose cow stepped out of the trees onto the gravel drive. At first she was worried that the animal was a bear; she was less afraid of a moose. She hurried her pace, looking back over her shoulder, and did not see a bull moose standing almost in front of her until it was too late.

He charged her, knocking her flat on the snow. Grandma was unconscious. She woke up in an instant to see the moose rising on its rear legs to attack her with its front hooves, and she thought, “This is it.” But her dog Allie barked and snarled and frightened the animal away. He stood guard over Grandma Jo and then helped her back to the house. Grandma did not think she was injured in the attack. She drank a cup of tea in her kitchen and turned on the TV. She enjoys game shows. When our brother Neal insisted that she visit the hospital, just in case, she found excuses until he drove her into Homer days later. The doctors said she had cracked her ribs. She still refused to believe that she was hurt. Neal asked her if she would rather live closer to town for safety’s sake. “I wouldn’t live anywhere else,” she told him, which ended that discussion.

Living off nature, indeed being
in
nature, drew people closer to life and death in Alaska than in other places. Whether it was a Sunday picnic or sport fishing for halibut, the most intense fun came from the excitement of near disaster. Not long ago, friends and I traveled Homer’s shoreline on four-wheelers on a picnic around a point that floods at high tide. A tree branch swept one friend off his four-wheeler and knocked him senseless. A woman lost her camera. A kid hit a rock and fell into the water. I took a wrong turn and went up a mountain, and by the time we got back to the shore, the tide had trapped us. We hoisted the four-wheelers over rocks. We forged on. We were laughing so hard we were crying. What a greater day of fun that was than if everything had gone right.

The same thinking applies at sea. Fishermen must be natural gamblers and eternal optimists; otherwise we would live in fear of the unknown, of failure, of death and injury. As fishermen, we do not know what the next season portends. We can only get our gear together the best we can and be ready for what nature has in store. From our experience of disasters, hard winters, broken, burned, sunk, and adrift boats, hunger and sickness, and the need for grit that physical isolation demands, commercial Bering Sea fishermen know our place in a unique and very dangerous profession. Alone on the sea—as I am now—we may not survive, but we start with the premise, as do most Alaskans, that our own rock-ribbed self-sufficiency will see us through.

W
e keep our fishing gear and
Time Bandit
in Homer in the off-season. But before we were ready to set out to fish for crab last year, we had to gear
down
from a summer of tendering, which is the monotonous but profitable work of hauling other boats’ catch of herring and salmon to the canneries. We offloaded transvac pumps and weight boxes, and once the boat was stripped, we gave
Time Bandit
some overdue TLC.

Time Bandit
is a 298-ton, 113-foot house-aft boat with a beam 28 feet across and a hold capacity of 120,000 pounds for king crab and of 175,000 pounds for opilio. The boat is a Hillstrand family affair. Our dad designed her, and together with my brothers, we built her in dry dock in Coos Bay, Oregon, for about $1.6 million. Dad decided to name her after the eponymous Terry Gilliam movie fantasy about six dwarves in a time ripple who set out to get “stinking rich.” I suppose Dad was wishful thinking about his sons.

The boat construction left us with plenty of time to get into trouble. Andy was the worst, which is usually not the case. I was arm wrestling with a man we met in Joe Tang’s, which had become our hangout after we were kicked out of every other bar in Coos Bay (naturally, we called Joe’s sexy daughter “Poon”). For a reason that only Andy can explain, he jumped on my arm-wrestling opponent and began to beat the crap out of him. Andy grabbed him around the neck and Joe tried to pull him off by the legs, but Andy would not let go. Finally the police stopped the fight. I guess Andy thought that the man had insulted me; Andy is my bodyguard, as I am his. He can say anything to me, but if anyone else crosses me with even an evil look Andy will be all over him like a cheap three-piece suit.

When we finished
Time Bandit
’s construction, after nine months, Dad said to us, “Okay, boys, this is your boat now.” He was not
giving
it to us. He was offering it for sale. But we had no savings. He demanded a 33 percent share of the boat off the top from what we would earn crab fishing and for salmon tendering; in return he would make the payments on what was owed of the capital costs of
Time Bandit.

He asked us, “Okay, where’s your fuel money?” Of course, we had none. “Where are you going to get it?” he asked. We started with a $50,000 loan. Dad assumed we would fail. He was never one for optimism where his boys were concerned; we rarely could do right. “You’ll never make it,” he told us, which made us want to work like hell to succeed. Over eight tough, lean years we split what was left between us brothers after we had paid Dad, the crew, and upkeep on the boat. We did not have much to show, but we had a boat and loved the life. Dad gave us no breaks. In fact, he gave us nothing for free. At the final tally, we paid him $1.7 million for
Time Bandit.
We paid him off in full.

What we had bought from him was an incredibly stable platform seaworthy nearly beyond nautical measure.
Time Bandit
was designed and built for work and only work. She has an elegant and shapely bow, but the rest of her is pedestrian and squat as a potato-eating peasant. We decided, since we were going to spend more than half our lives aboard, to give ourselves more creature comforts than are customarily found on boats in the Bering Sea fleet.
Time Bandit
has a four-man sauna in the forepeak, staterooms with queen-size beds, and two bathrooms, one en suite in the stateroom that Andy and I share as co-captains. Ours looks like a normal bathroom with a vanity and sink, a full-length bathtub with a shower, a regular toilet, and cabinets for towels, cleaning chemicals, and gear. Below, the crew’s bathroom contains a full-size clothes washer and dryer and a stand-up shower. And in the galley, we installed a dishwasher, microwave, full oven and range, a large refrigerator, and a wide-screen TV for viewing hundreds of DVDs that we catalog in a drawer.

Last year, before the start of the season, we hoisted
Time Bandit
up on the grid in dry dock to have the barnacles blasted off her hull and a fresh coat of paint sprayed on. This past year, with stricter environmental laws, we did not paint her ourselves, and the cost skyrocketed. When the paint was dry, we bolted new zincs to her keel to help preserve her bottom from rust. We repaired and refurbished her interior, replacing cabinets, carpets, the microwave, and the seat cushions, and we patched a square hole in a door where a massive rogue wave had flung the microwave off its bolts across the crew quarters and through the door. The same rogue ripped the oven and range unit off its moorings and skidded the refrigerator from one wall to another.

In late August, we tore down
Bandit
’s two 425-horsepower main Cummings engines, checked and adjusted the valves, and replaced filters. Each of the boat’s four engines—two main and two auxiliaries—has separate fuel lines and filters for safety. Our brother Neal, who operates the hydraulics on deck with the grace and precision of a puppeteer when we are fishing for crab, also serves as
Time Bandit
’s engineer. He is constantly belowdecks running his hands over the engines, listening to them, and feeling their pulse. They are the heart of the boat, and without them, we would be at even greater risk on the Bering Sea in winter.

As we do before each new season, we prepared for the worst that the Bering Sea can give. We repacked the life rafts, two Satellite 406 EPRIBs, life rings, and life jackets and checked the integrity and check-by dates of our $800 survival suits. We nearly obsess over these with good reason: The many stories of how these suits of 3mm-thick neoprene have saved countless lives in the Bering Sea justify our attention. We upgrade with newer suits every couple of years and last year only added new strobe lights to the ones we already had. Next, we restocked our first aid kits. The Coastal Pilot that tells mariners where boats can transit had to be updated with new locations of buoys and navigational lights.

We take fire at sea, and sometimes fires at the dock, seriously. Not even a hole in the hull can sink a boat faster than a fire. We take the extinguishers to Eagle Safety for inspection every year. We carry twenty-four of them—four in the engine room, one in each stateroom, one in the forepeak, and two in the wheelhouse.

Not long ago, a fire onboard
Time Bandit
underscored the value of working extinguishers. At the time a crewman came back from town drunk; he was smoking a cigarette in the stateroom, someone complained, and a fight started. The cigarette in his hand landed in a pile of clothes. A half hour after the fight—and by then the crew had returned to town—I smelled smoke. I opened the stateroom door and flames roared out. A fire extinguisher emptied on the flames saved the boat. After that, I asked the crew to stop smoking in their stateroom. Besides, Andy, who does not smoke, hates the smell.

Andy and I once saved the crew off the
Princess Tamira,
which had a fire off the Barren Islands on a flat calm day. The engine was sucking water with the rear lazarette flooded, and water was popping out the exhaust tube, but despite everything, the
Tamira
refused to go down. The captain came on our boat. He did not want the
Tamira
to beach herself on the shore of the Barren Islands. He wanted her to sink in deep water in order to realize the insurance money.
Tamira
was going down but at her own slow pace. Her captain had named the boat after his daughter, and he was yelling at the boat, “Sink, you son of a bitch! Sink! You are as stubborn as my daughter. Sink!” Only at the last minute,
Tamira
did what she was told, stern first.

Another time, we
thought
we had a fire; Andy and I were crewmen on a boat named
Caprice.
We went to sleep, and sometime later a crewman awoke us, screaming “Fire!” We did’t smell or see anything. The crewman ran to the wheelhouse, still yelling “Fire!” The captain pushed him aside to get downstairs with an extinguisher, yelling at us, “Where’s the fire?” The crewman would not stop yelling “Fire! Fire!” We had no idea what was going on. It was then that we realized in our panic that we had never seen him before. He was not part of
Caprice
’s crew. We asked him, “What fire?” He had no time to reply. He ran out on the deck. We followed him and watched him jump overboard. We assumed he was a nutcase, until we saw him race off in a Zodiac in the direction of a fishing boat that was lying about fifty yards off our starboard side, on fire. Its crew jumped into the sea in survival suits. We pulled them out, and together on the deck of
Caprice,
we watched their boat sink.

And there was a time when we were tied to the dock in Kodiak in front of the cannery. A purse seiner boat was moored with its stern nearly touching ours. Andy was conducting a fire drill on
Time Bandit.
In the middle of the drill one of our crewmen yelled “Fire!” I was looking around for smoke or flames.

“What fire?” I yelled back at him. I was freaking out. Black smoke rolled out of the purse seiner. We were not on fire. It was. We sprayed down their cabin with extinguishers. The flames spread. We needed saltwater, but the water was turned off on the dock. We ran a hose from the cannery instead and shoved it up the vent. About that time, we heard sirens in the distance. Trucks arrived, and an official in a white fireman’s hat came up to the boat and angrily kicked our hose. He told us we were idiots and sent his men down in the cabin with re-breathers. Minutes later, they came out; the chief put the hose back where we had placed it, and Andy and I were going like, “First responders, yeah!” making fun of him.

Andy and I were on
Time Bandit
one time at the dock in Homer when a fire erupted in the oven. It was spreading fast. I grabbed an extinguisher, aimed it at the oven, and pulled the trigger: nothing happened. Andy looked through the window from the dock and yelled to me, “PULL the F U C K I N G pin.” I thought I would burn to death. I was so excited I had forgotten to pull the safety pin. The third time he yelled, I heard him. I pulled the pin, and the extinguisher went
Whooooosshh.

With as much time as we spend checking for safety, anyone would have reason to think that safety was always our first concern. But crab fishermen are famously independent. The truth be told, we resisted attempts at safety regulations that are compulsory in other industries. We did not want a faceless government telling us how to do our job. Our thinking was that if you could not figure out how to save your ass you should not go out there in the first place. In 1988, against our strident objections, Congress passed the first and only law aimed at improving the fishing industry’s safety record. The Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act mandated that boats carry life rafts, survival suits, and emergency beacons. But crab fishing on the Bering Sea remains the nation’s most dangerous occupation. Once the new safety measures were in place, we liked them. And then we began to rely on them. Now we will not go fishing for crab on the Bering Sea without them.