Captain Phil Harris (3 page)

Grant’s judicious use of language was illustrated when he asked his grandson Jake, fifteen at the time, to pull down a fence in his pasture. Enjoying a bottle of soda out in the field before getting to work, Jake spotted an old coffee can and kicked it. To his surprise, a swarm of bees flew out and attacked him, stinging him five or six times.

In a panic, Jake decided on a drastic course of action to chase them away: setting the field on fire. The flames quickly spread, consuming about fifty square feet of grass.

Grant, working in a nearby shed, didn’t know what had happened until he heard fire trucks, called by a neighbor, approaching with their sirens blaring.

“What in the hell are you doing?” Grant asked his grandson as the firemen extinguished the flames, avoiding further damage.

“Trying to chase those bees away,” said Jake.

In typical Grant fashion, he succinctly replied, “I think you got them.”

Grant’s calmness served him well on the most dangerous trip of his life. It occurred in late October of 1978 aboard the
Golden Viking
. Grant was the captain of the eighty-five-foot crab boat as well as a minority owner. With a crew of six, including Phil, Grant had left port in late August.

About two months into the trip, Phil got his hand caught between a line and the hydraulic power block that lifts and lowers crab pots.
The machinery cut off a chunk of his finger, right at the tip, leaving the top of a bone exposed and his nail bent back.

When the injury was stabilized, the
Golden Viking
steamed back to Dutch Harbor, the fishing hub in the Aleutian Islands eight hundred miles southwest of Anchorage, to get Phil proper medical treatment.

Unfortunately, in Dutch Harbor back then, there was no hospital or clinic. An EMT treated Phil’s wound preliminarily, but there was only so much he could do without the proper facilities. He put Phil on a flight to Seattle, nearly two thousand miles away, along with a dark prognosis: Phil’s finger would likely need to be amputated upon arrival at the hospital there.

Grant was spared the bleak news because, after Phil was dropped off, it was back to the Bering Sea for the
Golden Viking
. That’s the hard part of being a captain with a son in the crew. As a father, Grant would have loved to stay behind to be there for Phil. But as a captain, his first obligation was to the ship and its remaining crew.

The
Golden Viking
unloaded its catch at Akutan, a town in the Aleutians East Borough about five hours east of Dutch Harbor, then headed north in search of more crab.

But about a day and a half out of Dutch Harbor, the boat was hit by the tail end of a typhoon.

“The weather conditions were so bad,” recalled Grant, “that we stopped for the night because we couldn’t see what the sea was doing.”

They soon found out in one terrifying instant. The vessel was hit by a gigantic rogue wave that struck with such force that it knocked out windows and filled the wheelhouse with water. The antennas, attached fifty feet above the deck, were knocked off, all the electronic systems fizzled out, and even the compass was torn loose from the wall.

“That wave took everything with it,” Grant said.

Such mountains of water are also known as freak waves, monster waves, killer waves, extreme waves, and abnormal waves. Whatever
they are called, those large bursts of water, caused by a combination of high winds and strong currents, are the most frightening sight in the sea.

When Grant looked around, he realized the tempered glass in the windows, half an inch or more thick, had not just broken but shattered. The pieces had smashed through the wall behind him, leaving Grant with cuts all over both ears.

The entire chart table, including all the drawers on the bottom, had been blown out into the sea. There was no radio, no radar, no way to determine the ship’s immediate surroundings or location, and certainly no way to communicate with the outside world.

“We might as well have been in a canoe out there,” Grant said.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, a fire had ignited inside the wall of one of the staterooms, caused when the salt from the seawater shorted some wiring.

The boat’s engineer tried to race downstairs to the engine room to pull the breakers on the electrical panel. But with paper and charts from the wheelhouse strewn all over the stairs, he slipped, bounced off a wall, and went tumbling down, step after step, injuring his hip.

The crew managed to extinguish the fire, and Grant and several crew members were able to board up the blasted-out windows by cutting the plywood out of several of the bunks and securing the wood with bolts. With a passable defense against the elements, the boat was in decent shape. It still had power, an adequate supply of food and liquids, and, most important of all, it had Grant, a captain so familiar with that area of the Bering Sea that, to his trained eyes, it was as if there were a highway in front of him with markings as clear as signs leading back to land.

Still, in such uncertain conditions, there is always the danger that the ship will be tossed around so much that even a captain as knowledgeable as Grant could become disoriented.

So he picked up the fallen compass and bolted it to a shelf in the wheelhouse.

“Whether it was right or not, I didn’t know,” Grant said, “but at least I would know we weren’t going around in a circle.”

Navigating by the stars wasn’t a practical solution because the skies remained overcast much of the time while the storm continued.

“I knew that, as long as I could stay in the direction I was headed,” Grant said, “I was eventually going to get to an island, because the Aleutians stretch out over a thousand miles.”

While he had a pretty good idea where he was, he had lost all lines of communication to the shore. Back on dry land word soon spread that the
Golden Viking
was missing at sea.

The bad news traveled quickly back to Seattle, where Phil was recovering. Arriving at a Seattle hospital the day after his emergency treatment in Dutch Harbor, he had been assured that amputation was totally unnecessary. The EMT had done such a good job—stitching up Phil’s finger and grafting on a piece of skin from his forearm—that the new skin was successfully melding with the old, keeping his finger intact.

Phil was overwhelmed with relief, but the good news was quickly overshadowed when he learned that contact had been lost with the
Golden Viking
. Among the crew of five were not only his dad, but also several others to whom Phil had grown close.

The Coast Guard began a wide search, both by sea and air, but as one day turned into two, then three, four, and five, hope began to fade.

Phil was crushed. The thought of losing his remaining parent was more than he could bear. Still, by then twenty-one years old, he was grudgingly ready to deal with reality. He began to make funeral arrangements for Grant.

Back on the
Golden Viking,
there was no talk of not making it home.

“I wasn’t worried about that,” said Grant, “as long as we were floating. You can go a long way if you stay above the water.”

He had rigged up a method for getting the throttle and steering working, but he still couldn’t go much faster than one or two knots.

Slowly, the crippled ship made its way back to Akutan. Not once in that time did Grant see another vessel on the water.

About 6:00 a.m. on Halloween Eve, five days after contact had been lost with Grant’s boat, a crewman on a processing ship resting in Akutan Harbor was shaving by a porthole when his eye caught a boat approaching in the distance.

Recognizing it as the
Golden Viking,
the crewman got so excited, he cut himself.

In his typical style, Grant, looking back at the moment, shrugged and said, “They were quite surprised to see me.”

“The whole bow was caved in,” said Phil. “My dad did a million dollars’ worth of damage, but he saved everybody’s life.”

•   •   •

Grant was still saving lives in his seventies when he was supposed to be retired, though he will never be completely retired as long as he can walk onto a boat.

At age seventy-one, Grant was in his familiar role as a hero on a cod-fishing trip off Unga Island, also in the Aleutians. Joining him on his forty-two-foot fiberglass craft,
The Warrior
, were Phil and Jake.

As the boat headed to nearby Sand Point in choppy seas at the end of their outing to unload their haul, a leak was detected in the hose leading to the oil filter.

While Phil got on the radio to issue a Mayday alert, Grant went down into the engine room with a patch and clamps to cut off the flow of escaping oil. It was the kind of repair job he had been doing for much of his life. Given a little time, he could have done it with his eyes closed.

But he didn’t have any time. A strong wind and a fifteen-foot swell were pushing the boat on a collision course with a huge pile of rocks dead ahead.

Because of the angle of the leak, Grant was forced to lean against the engine’s exhaust manifold in order to complete his task. The urgency of the moment denied him the opportunity to find a better position.

Without flinching, he focused on patching up the leak, even though his arm was getting burned by the exhaust pipe.

“I’m kvetching,” said Jake, recalling the scene, “because I got hot oil sprinkled on my arm while I was holding a flashlight for my grandfather. He had third-degree burns on his arm and he didn’t say a fucking word. Four hours later, when all was said and done, he just calmly and quietly peeled his shirt off his arm. The skin was all gone, leaving this huge, raw burned spot. He didn’t complain or nothing. I felt like a damn wimp.”

When Jake suggested to his grandfather that he get medical treatment for his arm, Grant just shrugged, went to his first aid kit, got out some balm and a bottle of iodine, and that was the end of the conversation.

Grant had repaired the hose with no more than fifty feet separating the boat from the rocks, saving three generations of the Harris family.

To this day, he has a scar down his arm as a reminder of that day, but no regrets about allowing himself to be painfully branded.

“That was a lot better,” he says, “than drowning or crashing on those boulders.”

A sea captain requires more than bravery and nautical skills. Sometimes patience and determination are also necessary. On one trip in 1964, Grant, with a load of processed crab aboard the
Reefer II
, set out from the south end of Alaska’s Kodiak Island bound for Cape Spencer.

That journey across the Gulf of Alaska would normally take two and a half to three days. But because of violent storms that lasted the entire voyage, the boat’s journey stretched to eighteen days.

“We weren’t sinking or anything,” Grant said, “but we were taking on water that whole time. We had the pumps going. If we had sprung a leak, I’m sure we would have sunk.”

Barely able to make any headway, the boat limped along.

“We were going just as slow as you could possibly go,” Grant said. “It wasn’t a good trip.”

Grant didn’t even need to be at sea to find trouble. Artist Mike Lavallee, a friend of Phil’s, noticed something strange about Grant one day in 2010 when he walked into Mike’s custom automotive airbrush studio in Snohomish, Washington. Grant’s shirt was twisted into a knot centered at chest level.

“Grant, what’s going on with your shirt?” Mike wanted to know.

“Well, I almost screwed myself today,” he replied.

He meant it literally.

Grant, who likes to do everything for himself, was attaching a shroud to his truck’s radiator. Although the protective guard was going to be in the front, he had to stretch his body out and drill a hole from the back end.

Once the electric drill pierced the back side, it came shooting through to the front, emerged, and kept going right into the seventy-seven-year-old Grant.

For an instant, he looked like a man committing suicide by plunging a sword into his midsection.

Fortunately for Grant, the drill stopped just in time. The bit, having enveloped itself in his shirt, came to a halt as it touched the skin in front of his heart. He escaped with nothing worse than a scratch and yet another tale of dodging his demise.

When Mike expressed amazement at how close he had come to sudden death, all Grant said was, “Yep, that’s kind of how it goes.”

“The Bering Sea never got him,” said Mike, “but a drill almost did.”

Three centuries separate Vitus Bering and Grant Harris, yet they
share a common bond unbroken by time and technology. Both of them sailed the Bering Sea, accepted its frightful challenges, rode its deadly waves, and experienced moments of dread and exhilaration unequaled on any other body of water in the world. And both set a course for future generations. Soon to sail in Grant’s wake was Captain Phil Harris, to be followed by Josh and Jake.

“He tried harder than everybody else because he wanted to be accepted.”

—Joe Wabey, Phil’s first captain

Phil Harris had some close friends growing up: Jeff Sheets, Joe Duvey, and Mike Crockett were all constant companions. But there was also another group that Phil spent a lot of time with, though not necessarily by choice: the Bothell Police Department.

When they heard an engine roaring through town at high speed, be it that of a motorcycle or a car, the name Phil Harris usually came to mind.

Grant Harris tried to be a diligent father, but with his wife dead from cancer and his obligations as a carpenter, handyman, and part-time fisherman occupying much of his time, Phil had plenty of opportunities to run wild. And he was about as easy to handle as a bucking bronco.

By the time he was in the seventh grade, Phil had a routine. He’d wait until his father left for work, then grab a couple of pillows, stuff them in the driver’s seat of the second family car, and hop in, the added height enabling him to see over the steering wheel.

He didn’t get too far because the police also knew his routine. They would pull Phil over and drive him back to his house. Knowing
there was no mother at home, the police would then call Grant and tell him, “You can’t have your kid out driving around.”