Time Bandit (20 page)

He is a jack of all trades. He knows woodworking, welding, and engine mechanics. He says often longingly that he would like to have been a fireman or an explosives man, like the ones who implode entire buildings. He might have made careers of them but he could never stand the nine to five. One time he sold furniture in a store. He quit soon after he started. He told me, “I don’t like bosses.”

He is also
Time Bandit
’s cook, and nobody gets in his way when he is working in the galley, which has less space perhaps than a kitchen in a small apartment, although with a grand view of the sea out a single porthole over the sink. Neal clearly enjoys cooking. Though he is not a great chef, his staples—eggs, pancakes, bacon, hash, spaghetti with meat sauce, etc.—are as good as they can get on a boat. He cooks roasts and other high-protein dishes that he can prepare in advance and puts in potatoes and vegetables at the last moment. His specialty is crab plucked from the sea and immersed in a large pot of seawater. He serves the delicacy with a brush of butter. When crab is on Neal’s menu, which is not often, the crew never complains. He plans the timing of the meals, as best he can, around the schedule of the captain, for example, asking me when I estimate the crew will get a break between launching and lifting the pots.

The crew eats like starved beasts. No matter what or how much, the food vanishes in minutes of silent gulping. The crew hardly comes up for air. A gallon of milk will disappear as quickly as the spout will pour. An enormous eighteen-pound roast beef, fresh from the oven, was reduced to bones last year at three in the morning. The men eat dessert from two-gallon containers of ice cream. Whatever is placed on the table is never enough, and though he knows that food for the crew is nothing but fuel, Neal still takes a measure of pride from cooking for them.

I take nothing for granted about what Neal achieves in the galley. The miracle is that he can cook anything on the Bering. The seas are rough all the time. If we can let go of a stationary, steadying object like a wall, counter, bed, or sink, for
five seconds
without falling off balance, we think of the sea as calm. It happens rarely. To cook in that shifting, topsy-turvy world requires Neal to rig the stove top with adjustable braces for pots and pans, and boiling water sloshes on the counter or floor anyway. One time a boiling pot went straight up in the air nearly to the ceiling. He has cooked bacon in twenty-footers. Scrambled eggs seemed easy; he would not attempt to cook an egg over-easy.

Last year, Neal brought onboard a month-old Jack Russell terrier puppy that he named Bandit, with a semicircle of brown around his left eye. Bandit was learning to coordinate his legs, and he moved around the boat less to the places he might have wanted to visit than according to the motion of the boat. He slept with Neal and played on the deck with live crabs. Richard and Shea trailed after him with newspapers when Neal notified them that it might be time for Bandit to “go poopoo.”

Dogs at sea are an old tradition. Mine was named Jake, a mutt, part boxer, part lab, with evil white eyes. Jake weighed about 100 pounds. I took him fishing each year to Togiak in Bristol Bay. He would not go to the bathroom on the boat. I would go, “Come on, boy, you can do it,” but he never did. He never sniffed crotch and was no ass sniffer either. He knew he was a dog. He was my buddy.

One time, Jake fell off the boat eight miles off Togiak. He had smelled the land. I did not notice that he was gone until much later. A fisherman named Larry Jones was following my boat three hours behind me. He saw what he thought was a seal. He looked closer. He said, “Sonofabitch, that’s a weird-colored seal. That ain’t no seal. That’s a dog. That’s Jake. What’s he doing out here?”

Jake had treaded water for three hours. He was a lucky dog, and a pampered one. He had his own taxi account. When I would go out drinking in Homer, I would call Nick at Night, the cabdriver in town who would take Jake home. He had his own tab. Jake was fourteen when he died. It was tough on me. Two days after I lost him, I started crying, “Goddamned dog.” He was just a dog, but I knew him for so long.

O
nce we started launching prospecting pots, everyone, including Bandit, went out on deck, with me the sole exception. Richard took charge of the bait station; he shoved through a mechanical grinder that amounted to tons of herring by the end of the season. He smelled of an evil overpowering stench of ground-up herring and fish puke that quickly permeated his rain gear, hair, and skin. Even his farts started to smell of rotted herring. Richard, who is as good as they come, filled the plastic bait boxes by fistfuls and gutted the cod with his knife, before clambering into each pot on the launcher to hook the baits on the pot’s webbing—hundreds of times, over and over again. The bait station demands grinding stamina. Wrists, forearms, and hands ache and swell and chafe in the cold and ice.

Nimble Caveman, a crewman last year who shall go unnamed, scrambled on stacks of pots five high that rose from the deck to the wheelhouse windows. The dangerous stack work required a delicate balancing act. Pots swung overhead on the end of a picking hook on the bridle. Caveman guided their weight and bulk into ordered rows, risking crushed hands and feet with each pot that settled off the line. The boat heaved and wallowed as if it were trying to throw Caveman into the sea. At any instant, a rogue wave might have whacked the boat and unsettled his footing high on the stack. If
Time Bandit
needed to come around to rescue him, he would have been beyond saving by the time we reached him. The safety line might have saved him, but there never are guarantees on the Bering.

That reminds me of a friend named Mongo, who I thought would never die. He seemed immortal and somehow protected by fate. He had a reputation for skating death at every turn. Nothing could kill him. He had survived a head-on crash with an eighteen-wheeler, lost fingers, broken bones, and finally, when he had enough of testing fate on land, he tried the sea. He worked on the stacks without a life jacket or safety line, again with the feeling that accidents happened to someone else, and he fell off the stack and was dead in minutes. He could collide with an eighteen-wheeler but not the Bering Sea. That is why when I am sitting in the captain’s chair I insist that the crewmen on the stack wear a life jacket and hook themselves to a safety line. Sometimes they argue that the safety line inhibits their movement. Even with the line, the work still amounts to a delicate and deadly dance on a heaving platform. Nothing will ever change that.

Each movement of each deckhand is refined to its essence; economy of effort translates into stamina, which means the difference on a crab boat between success and failure. The drama is usually played out to the accompaniment of deafening music strained through monster speakers stacked in front of the forepeak bulkhead. Heavy metal music drowns out even the howl of the Bering Sea winds. The music gives the crew its edge. Last year, Slayer, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Deep Purple, nu metal, trash metal, and glam metal—they all went down. The sounds jolted the crew and kept them alert. Seal bombs did too, when I would throw them out of the wheelhouse window onto the deck below. Like cherry bombs but louder and waterproof, seal bombs are meant to chase marauding seals away from fish caught in gill nets, but I do not know of anyone who actually uses them for that.

The crew comes aboard to work in a blur of day and night. The routine rarely changes, starting with launching pots, usually at half-mile intervals along routes or “strings” determined by the boat’s captain and his instincts for where to find the crabs. A pot is lifted by crane from the stacks at the end of a picking hook and deposited on the deck at a launcher, which is a labor-saving metal platform on the starboard forward rail behind the forepeak. Neal, standing at his station behind the crewman at the pot block, raises and lowers the launcher with his controls. But before he lets the pot go, Russell and Shea must first dance the pot in line with the launcher and finally onto the launcher itself. A careless crewman can easily get caught in the launcher’s jaws, which can cut him in half. The pot is dogged down with metal hooks, also activated by Neal, that slide into place and clamp around the solid steel shafts on the pot to hold the pot on the launcher in heaving seas. Shea then detaches the picking hook from the pot’s rope bridle while Russell opens the pot’s gate and removes three buoys attached to shots of heavy three-quarter-inch line about 400 feet in coiled length. One shot is slung atop the pot, and one (and sometimes more) is either held by Russell or Shea or laid on the deck.

Meanwhile, Richard, the bait man, slithers into the pot to snap the gutted cod (or salmon) and the box of ground herring to the roof of the pot. Shea closes the gate with rubbers. At a signal from the captain in the wheelhouse, usually the sound of a buzzer on deck, Neal pushes levers that lift the launcher. At the angle of repose, the pot slides into the water followed in quick succession by the remaining shots of line and buoys. The boat continues to drive at a steady speed. A half mile later, the picking hook is swung over to another pot on the stacks, attached to its bridle, and another pot is swung to the launcher, and so on.

The pots soak up to forty-eight hours on the sea bottom. Common wisdom holds that the longer a pot soaks, the more crabs will crawl in after the bait. When the boat returns to retrieve the string, the crews work in reverse.

Shea stands ready on the forward starboard rail as the boat approaches a pot’s buoys. He throws a grappling hook attached to a thin line, and then reels the line in with the shot line that is itself attached to the pot on the sea bottom. He threads the end of the shot line around the top of the pot block, a circular steel hydraulic winch designed to rapidly raise the heavy pot; the buoys, once they are removed from the water, are thrown out of the way on the deck and the end of the line is placed in a Marco rope self-coiling machine, shaped like a barrel. When the pot reaches the surface the block is halted momentarily while Russell attaches a picking hook to the rope bridle. The pot is swung by crane a few feet along the outside of the rail in line with the launcher, and two crewmen dance the pot onto the launcher where Neal dogs it down. The picking hook is secured. Shea or Russell rolls the stainless steel sorting table from the center of the deck under the pot’s gate, which is then opened and crabs pour out with a helpful shake of the dogged-down launcher. Richard removes what remains of the bait. If the pot is not to be returned to the sea, Richard or Shea place the coiled shots and buoys inside the pot. They close and tie down the gate and attach the picking hook to the bridle. Neal swings the pot across the deck to the stacks.

Meanwhile, once the crew has attended to the pot, they sort the crabs. They set females and juveniles aside, measuring their carapaces with hand-held plastic gauges to ensure their legality. State law allows us to keep red king crabs six and a half inches or greater and opilio/snow crab of four inches or greater and tanner/baradai of five and a half inches or greater. Alaska Fish & Game, along with the state police, fines boats that return with more than 1 percent of their catch under the legal size. And the fines amount to $2,500 and $25,000 for the boat. The crew measures with justifiable care, and usually when Russell joins the crew he takes responsibility for ensuring the legality of the catch. Why all these regulations? Simply to make certain—or as certain as anyone can be—that fishermen like me will be catching Alaskan crabs fifty years from now.

As they measure the crabs, either with the eye or the plastic gauge, the crew skids the keeper crabs along a ramp to a stainless steel funnel above the holds. The crew throws the rejected crabs—females or those too small—into large plastic bins called shovel-nosed totes, which the crew eventually empties out an opening at the starboard rail. The crabs sink safely to the sea bottom. The keepers stay in the holds of seawater where bin boards prevent them from being crushed under the weight of their collective mass; one dead crab, which emits a toxin when it dies, can infect and kill every crab in the hold. The crabs can remain on the boat for around two weeks, but not many days more.

The crew repeats the process until their eyes glaze over and limbs sag from fatigue. Each separate action takes place on a platform with the stability of a roller coaster. At some point soon after they first start working on the deck, the crew catches the rhythm of the sea and the boat. The shuffling step needed for balance on a pitching deck becomes unconscious, and the crew can turn its full attention to what they are doing with their hands. The balancing mechanism in the inner ear adjusts to the motion of the Bering Sea, and man and sea become as one. But back on land, when the sea must separate from the man, the effects are as maddening as they can be bizarre. Men look drunk when they have had nothing to drink. They weave and sway while they are standing still, their bodies and minds telling them that they are still at sea. Sometimes sea legs take days and even weeks before they grow steady again on land.

Everyone in the crew watches out for everyone else. Because of the speed of their work and its dangers, the men form a tight team where five different functions are happening at once. But after seventy-two hours of straight and flat-out work, exhaustion wears them down and even can, in the extreme, break them apart. Someone on deck has to be aware of morale. Neal screams at the crew to keep them alert. Russell misses nothing when he is on deck. Through three days of sleeplessness, no one escapes the degrading of senses and alertness. In those final hours, accidents happen and deaths occur without warning.

It is as if crab fishing in the winter on the Bering Sea were combat without the bullets but with all the tensions and mortal fears intact. As with a military unit, at any moment, a crewman may be called on to save a life, and if he is distracted or his senses are dulled by exhaustion, he will not be in a position to save his own life, much less that of anyone else. An attitude of “every man for himself” does not work on a crab boat where shit can happen quickly. In a crisis, with the training of a rifle fire team in a fight, a crewman can find himself in serious danger if his mind wanders. I tell my crews to wipe their minds of girlfriends, debts, or what they will spend their money on—wipe
everything
away but the job. Each crewman must hold up his end of the bargain each minute. Otherwise, another deckhand must cover for him. And that forms resentments, which can be dangerous. Bottom line: A teammate can kill you. You have to trust that he will save you instead.