Captain Phil Harris (6 page)

On one occasion when he was well into adulthood, he drove his orange Corvette, a 1972 model in pristine condition with a tan interior, over to visit the owner of a gas station where he had worked while in high school.

As the two stood talking, a teenager snuck into the Corvette and took off.

While the gas-station owner called the police, Phil jumped into another of his cars, a Porsche parked nearby, and roared off in pursuit of his beloved Corvette.

The police were soon fully engaged in the chase, but not as engaged as Phil.

Heading northeast out of Bothell, the car thief was about four or five miles into his joyride when he looked in his rearview mirror.

There’s no way to determine his precise reaction, but it’s safe to assume he did a double take. Yes, the police were hot on his trail, but so was Phil, who had somehow managed to get ahead of the cops.

What could be more frightening than seeing Phil Harris, hair flying, murder in his eyes, bearing down on you?

Perhaps a distraction like that contributed to what happened next. Or maybe it was just the fact that, at the speed he was traveling, the thief wasn’t able to handle the ninety-degree turn in the road.

Whatever the reason, with Phil helpless to do anything about it, his treasured Corvette missed the turn and crashed into a telephone pole.

“It almost broke the car in half,” said Jeff.

“I was ready to kill that kid,” Phil later told Joe, “but the cops pulled me off.”

Was the teenager seriously hurt?

“Hopefully, but I don’t know,” said Joe. “We never asked.”

On another occasion, Phil and his Porsche went from pursuer to pursuee. It occurred on a highway about fifty miles south of Seattle.

Heading north, Phil pulled even with a cop, stared at him, then, for no obvious reason, flipped him off and floored it.

To Phil, flooring it meant reaching speeds well in excess of a hundred miles an hour.

“From what I heard,” said Joe, “he was really cooking.”

As he approached Bothell, Phil could see traffic had slowed to a crawl. He wasn’t particularly concerned, because there were no longer any police behind him.

Must be an accident, he figured.

But as Phil inched along, he could see that the delay was being caused by a roadblock up ahead. As he got closer, he realized there was a contingent of heavily armed police checking each vehicle.

They had been letting the cars ahead of him pass unimpeded, but once they spotted Phil and the Porsche, the police zeroed in on him and jerked him out of the car.

“Turns out they were looking for me,” Phil later told Joe. “I had forgotten all about it.”

A furious search of Phil’s car ensued, from top to bottom, but when the police, who were very familiar with his antics, couldn’t find anything, and an attorney intervened, claiming Phil’s rights were being violated, he got off with just a ticket and a stiff fine. In any other city, he’d have wound up wearing an orange jumpsuit.

•   •   •

Phil loved nothing more than to roar through Bothell at a breakneck pace, but his fellow travelers weren’t always up to his speed. After Phil dropped a small fortune on a new Corvette, he asked his friend Dan Mittman to take care of it while he chased crab.

When Phil returned from the sea, he was delighted to see that his car was in perfect condition. But he was also puzzled.

“Hey, this car only has two-tenths of a mile added on since I left,” said Phil, his eyebrows raised.

“You were gone three months,” Dan told him, “and in that time, I moved the car around to avoid any sun spotting or tire rot. Two-tenths of a mile was precisely what was required to do the job.”

“I’m not tripping ’cause you only moved the car two-tenths of a mile,” said Phil, his voice starting to rise. “I’m telling you, that damned car is like a fuckin’ thoroughbred and has to be driven, and driven hard.”

Phil’s friends appreciated the much-needed reprieve provided by his return trips to Alaska. It allowed them a chance to calm down from the high-octane surge he injected into their everyday lives. Running with him was exhilarating, but it sure wore a body out.

Teenager or adult, Dutch Harbor or Bothell, Phil himself never seemed to slow down. Until he reached his fifties and his body finally rebelled, he remained an oversized kid, Peter Pan with tattoos.

When I was just a deckhand, wet and freezing my ass off, I’d look up at the wheelhouse and see the captain up there, all dry and warm, wearing slippers. I wanted to be the one wearing slippers.

—Phil

Despite all the wild times on shore, when Phil was on the high seas, he was all business. It was sometimes hard to believe he was the same person. But once his boat left the dock, the drunken, drugged-out partier became a responsible, hardworking, no-nonsense fisherman.

He fell asleep on Joe Wabey that one time, but never again. Wabey’s anger awakened Phil to the demands of the job, but what really inspired him was Joe’s work ethic.

Joe never asked his crew to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. While fishing, Joe would average only one hour of sleep a night. He once went seven days without shutting his eyes.

“You learn to function,” Joe said. “I enjoyed fishing. I liked the thrill of it. And when you’re running a three-man crew, who is going to take your place? I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to fill the boat up with crab and get back.

“Normally, we’d work anywhere from twenty-four to seventy-two hours and then take a break.”

A break meant getting a few hours’ sleep, and then it was back to fishing.

“That’s not a normal schedule,” Joe conceded. “I was kind of the extreme when it came to captains. At least I was told that. A lot of the people who worked for me over the years said I was the hardest skipper they ever had. Most of the time, they didn’t say that in such nice terms.”

Phil wasn’t intimidated by Joe’s demanding schedule. He was challenged.

“I think Phil tried to compete with me, outwork me,” said Joe. “He couldn’t keep up, but he put in some long hours. I think he got his work ethic from me.

“He was a good fisherman. I really came to respect him for that.”

That respect was especially meaningful for Phil coming from someone like Joe who knew as well as anyone how difficult it is to master crab fishing.

The success of any hunter depends on the depth of his or her knowledge of the history, location, tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses of the quarry being sought.

So it is with crab fishermen. Beneath the bravado and tough exterior, these are calculating professionals with a deep understanding of the creatures they pursue below the surface of the sea.

“There is a lot to learn and you can’t get it from a book, a video, or even by watching
Deadliest Catch,
” said Josh. “Like our dad before us, Jake and I have soaked up the knowledge we need to do the job—everything from the nature of crabs to the operation of the boat—in the middle of the Bering Sea.”

There are five primary types of crab caught in the Bering Sea—red king, blue king, golden king, bairdi, and opilio snow crab. Although the seasons have varied somewhat over the decades based on weather and migration patterns, the year generally begins with the hunt for opilio in January, and bairdi in winter and spring, shifting to golden king in late summer, then red and blue in fall.

Crabs have five pairs of limbs. Four pairs serve as legs, allowing
the crab to walk along the ocean floor, while the front pair, called chelipeds, are claws that function like arms. The crab uses them for holding or carrying food, cracking shells, digging, or attempting to ward off obstacles and potentially hostile life forms. If a crab loses a leg, it has the ability to regrow it.

A red king crab can travel up to one mile per day on those legs and up to one hundred miles a year in order to migrate.

A crab’s outer shell, called the carapace or exoskeleton, does not grow along with the crab. Therefore, as it increases in size, the crab must shed the shell, a process called molting. In preparation, it reabsorbs calcium carbonate from the old shell, secreting enzymes and absorbing seawater to aid the process. The crab backs out of its shell, also leaving behind its esophagus, stomach lining, and part of its intestine. It secretes calcium to create a new shell that hardens over a few weeks. Crabs molt fifteen to twenty times during their lives.

Some crabs live ten to twenty years and weigh an average of six to ten pounds, but some grow in excess of twenty pounds. The world record belongs to a red king crab caught in the northern Pacific Ocean that weighed 33.1 pounds.

•   •   •

In his early years aboard the
American Eagle,
Phil learned many lessons, some harder than others. One of the toughest came in his first year on the boat. He was being taught how to operate the crane that lifts the eight-hundred-pound cages—or pots as they are commonly called—used to catch crabs.

“It takes a little bit of finesse to work that crane,” Joe said.

On deck, the pots are stacked and tied tightly together until they are needed. On that particular day, they were piled high in the stern.

Phil was being instructed on how to lift one of those pots in the grasp of the crane, but he could only get it to rise a couple of feet before the crane stalled. Phil soon discovered the problem: there was one line still keeping that pot tethered to the stack.

A crewman named Bob Mason, armed with a knife on the end of
a stick, climbed up on an adjoining stack to cut the line, but it was just out of reach, the stick a little too short. So Mason got on his stomach and stretched his body down in order to sever that final restraint.

At that instant, Phil eased up on the crane, and the pot came hurtling down. “I don’t know if he had a brain fart or what,” said Joe. The eight-hundred-pound pot came crashing down on Mason’s head, squeezing it between two stacks.

“Fortunately, he was wearing a leather flier’s cap with earflaps,” said Joe, “but still, that pot almost took his ears off. He was bleeding from both of them.”

Joe and the other crew members lifted the pot off Mason and gently lowered him to the deck.

“Phil was beside himself,” Joe said.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Phil shrieked to no one in particular. “What have I done?”

Mason had suffered a skull fracture and was taken to a nearby clinic, then flown out to a fully equipped hospital. Although Mason survived, no one on the
American Eagle
ever saw him again.

Neither Joe nor the rest of the crew criticized Phil for what had happened. “He felt bad enough already,” said Joe.

•   •   •

Phil stayed on the
American Eagle
for nearly four years. As he gained experience and confidence, his desire to be more than a deckhand grew.

He could see, however, that his dream would never be fulfilled on the
American Eagle.
“I certainly wasn’t going to let go of the throttle and turn the boat over to him,” Joe said. “He had higher aspirations than working for me, and I could certainly understand that.”

But opportunity beckoned elsewhere. Phil’s father, Grant, an engineer on the
Golden Viking
at the time, had accepted an offer to buy a piece of that crab boat and become its captain in 1976.

Grant assured Phil that, if he joined him, he would soon make that coveted climb to the wheelhouse to be the relief skipper.

So in 1977, Phil said farewell to the only crab boat he’d ever known and joined his father who, a year later, let him live his dream by taking command of a boat.

Grant didn’t make Phil the relief captain just because he was trying to further his son’s career, although that was certainly on Grant’s mind. He wouldn’t have allowed Phil to become a captain if he didn’t think his son could handle it. Not with the lives of the crew dependent on the competence of the man in charge of the boat.

“As a matter of fact,” said Grant, “Phil was a much better fisherman than I was.”

“Phil was ready when he went over to the
Golden Viking
,” said Joe. “I knew he’d become a captain because he had more drive than Grant. I don’t mean any disrespect for Grant, but he was more of a gentleman fisherman.

“If Phil had stayed on the
American Eagle,
he might have wound up like some of the crew members that were there fifteen, twenty years and never advanced.”

While he advanced quickly, Phil’s quick promotion to relief captain didn’t go over so well with some of the deckhands.

“He went from bait man to the wheelhouse really quickly,” said Tony Lara, who would later be Phil’s relief skipper on the
Cornelia Marie
. “But it took him twenty years to earn the respect of the industry. He sat in the wheelhouse chair in his early twenties, but he certainly wasn’t the best back then. He wasn’t the fisherman he later became. He didn’t have the esteem of his peers. That’s because he was the kid whose father was captain and part owner of the boat, and so he was given a shortcut to the wheelhouse. That’s two strikes against you right there.”

Deckhands would walk by, muttering, ‘The only reason he’s sitting in that big chair is because of his old man.’ ”

Sensitive to the feelings of the crew and realizing that if Grant stuck up for Phil he would lack credibility because of their relationship, Reidar Tynes, one of the major owners of the
Golden Viking,
stepped in and told the disgruntled deckhands, “We’re giving this kid the boat because we think he can do it. You guys have been with us a lot of years, so please, help him in any way you can.”

Tynes had sought to give the crew an olive branch. But any goodwill he created was squandered by Phil on his first trip back into Dutch Harbor as captain. Entering the port, a boat must make a sharp right turn to reach the cannery. The young Phil miscalculated and tipped the
Golden Viking
over on its side.

He was able to right it without causing any injuries or major damage to the boat, but the same could not be said for his image. Phil later admitted he was terribly embarrassed by not only looking to his crew like an inept greenhorn behind the wheel, but by doing so in full view of all the other captains docked in Dutch.