Time Bandit (21 page)

Off the deck, one essential dominates life at sea: lack of sleep. No clocks tick on a crabbing boat. Last year Shea remarked, “There is no such thing as time out here—no hours, and only days. You work until you go home. Sometimes it is light outside. That’s the only difference.” Sleep takes over when and where waking stops. There is no middle ground between sleep and wakefulness, no slow settling into the soft arms of Morpheus. Heads will rest on arms on the galley table. Crew will sleep sitting up, and sometimes, for brief seconds, standing up, in daylight or starlight, in bright electric light, in the forepeak on spare rope lines and buoys, in the sauna, or the galley—indeed, any place at all. In the extremes of exhaustion, sections of the brain simply drift into sleep, leaving the rest of the thinking process on its own; in moments that can stretch into hours, the crew loses its ability to shape thoughts into words. They become blithering hulks with blank faces and strangely addled eyes. They begin to hallucinate sleep. These are the moments of maximum danger to themselves and fellow crewmen, and unless the deck foreman gets them off the deck, bad things can happen. The trick is to maintain a balance between alertness and a groggy, stumbling, incoherent state. The mark of a great deck crew is the ability to continue working on this brutal edge.

Last year on the
Time Bandit,
the staterooms, which are fitted with two single bunks each on the main deck and two double beds in the captain’s quarters a half level down from the wheelhouse, had a frat house ambience: dirty pants and sweaty T-shirts, filthy underwear and socks that smell like fish strewn on the thinly carpeted floor, a dank, musty smell of rancid mushrooms, CDs and portable players set up on milk crates, sleeping bags and blankets rumpled on the beds, paperback books and magazines opened here and there. A crab boat is a neat freak’s worst nightmare. Out in the galley, ashtrays overflowed with butts, girly magazines were left open, and candy and snack food wrappers built up in a layer of trash. Strewn on the galley’s counter were mixings like CoffeeMate in different flavors for the drip coffeemaker, jars of peanut butter and jams, and bread wrapped in plastic bags. (But the boat comes into port spotless after the whole crew turns-to, scrubbing and vacuuming, polishing and buffing, as if they were their mothers on cleaning day.)

Next in popularity to the refrigerator and freezer (with their gallon buckets of ice cream) a wide-screen TV monitor plays DVDs night and day, often without anyone watching. The monitor rests on a built-in dresser bolted to the floor across from the crew’s table. The dresser’s top drawer contains at least a hundred DVDs. Most feature action and techno-violence, although not all. Last year, Russell was debating whether to watch Reese Witherspoon’s
Just Like Heaven.
He mentioned the title to Richard, who was taking a break. Their conversation went like this:

Russell: “You seen it?”

Richard: “Once.”

Russell: “Does she show her tits?”

Richard: “Naw. But she almost does.”

Russell: “She doesn’t do that?”

Richard: “Naw. But it’s good anyway.”

Off the deck last year, the conversations revolved around sea tales, jokes, food, money, gear, and women. Shea lamented his loneliness and yearning for his girlfriend. He was describing how before he departed, leaving her for the first time since they met, she told him she would not be lonely without him. She had a dildo, the mention of which made him blanch.

Russell asked Shea, “What kind?”

Shea looked down at his hands: “She calls it her ‘Pink Elephant.’ Shit, that’s not something a guy wants to hear before he goes out on a trip. It’s gotta have an effect on you, as a guy.”

Russell: “And what were you expecting her to get, a one-inch dildo?”

“No, but…”

“It’s like us with our toys. We want a big-assed Harley, not a little scooter.”

Shea was ruminating. “Still…‘Pink Elephant.’ It’s weird.”

Russell: “No. What’s weird, Shea, is that you sound like you are jealous of an inanimate object.”

The chatter can drift to any subject, and usually does. Richard was already planning a vacation to a warmer climate the minute the opilio season closed in March; he was considering Hawaii or Mexico.

I advised him to stay away from Mexico. He asked me why. I told him I have visited Mexico five times. I was thrown into jail three. The first time I got into a fight with a Mexican karate expert. I did not fight back so it was not much of a fight, but I was sent to jail anyway. Another time, someone stole my wallet from me, and when I complained the police put me in jail because I had no ID to show them. The last time I do not know what I did. I told Richard how I could write him a position paper on how to get out of Mexican jails. You need to convince them you have no money, or they will keep you there until hell freezes over, or you convince them you are poor. If they think you come from a rich family, they will go for the family’s money. They do not care where the money comes from. Like they asked me, “Do you live in a house?” I told them, “No, I live in a trailer.”

The last time I was in jail in Mexico, I stayed long enough to convince them I had no money. They had thrown me in with thirty filthy Mexicans and a couple of stupid gringos. One old guy told me that he had put his money for safe keeping—five grand in cash—in a locker at the airport. The stupid bastard had no idea that some Mexican rifles those lockers each day. He wept when I told him. When they let me out, I went home with nothing except the clothes on my back. Jails are rough and corrupt in Mexico, I told Richard. In the end, for a Bering Sea crab fisherman, jail, no matter where it is, sucks.

A
fter two days of pulling an average of eight king crabs a pot, we were getting frustrated. The fishing for us was as bad as it has ever been. Nothing explained it but bad luck. The other boats were reporting crab (
Northwestern
was pulling eighty crab averages in their pots), and we were lagging well behind the fleet. One pot came up with nothing. Andy said, “There must be a hole in it.”

We had our IFQs, which meant we were fishing with 100 pots for a total of 133,000 pounds of king crab. I had no doubt about meeting the quota, eventually, but starting out like this was making me wonder where the crabs had gone. My confidence was slowly leaving me. Hard work with nothing to show grinds on a fisherman’s soul. As Andy said, working the deck, “We have to launch the pots anyway, and we have to pull the pots whether there is one crab or 100 in them; the effort is the same.” It was clear to me that the crew wanted to fish somewhere else.

Russell added injury to insult. He slammed his funny bone hard against the steel block. For a minute, he was thrown into a paroxysm of real pain, like he had a football “stinger.” He had no idea what had hit him. Watching from the wheelhouse, I saw him fall to the deck and roll over screaming. In another minute he reassured himself that the pain came from a pinched nerve and a sprained elbow. Andy taped his arm, and Russell was off the deck for the day. The funny-bone incident created a pause in the routine. I thought about what changes I needed to make.

Andy and I have hunted crabs for twenty years and we know their habits. We know where to look for them if we are not finding them. Male crabs congregate along the creases in sea bottom inclines like narrow gullies or arroyos. They snuggle against the ridges at around 400 feet where the feeding is good. These inclines, when viewed on a bottom sounder, form silhouettes that unmistakably remind us of different objects and people. Andy and I refer to them in terms like Sombrero, Butt Cheeks, Can Opener, Goose, and Magoo, for the one with the profile of the cartoon character Mr. Magoo. I knew from the evidence in our prospecting pots that the males were not yet separating from the females. They were congregating in potholes on the bottom. We had to go up to the undersea hills where the separation would begin, and I told the crew on deck over the loudhailer in a booming—I hoped ominous—voice, “Let’s go where no man has gone before.” I told Caveman to chain the stacks for safety’s sake, and we struck a heading to take us 220 miles north-northeast of Dutch and well above the other boats in the fleet.

Even in the worst of times, I prefer not to follow the herd. The younger captains will trail behind other boats in hopes of picking up pockets of crab left behind, but they are learning the grounds. Andy and I like to think we know where to find crabs based on long experience. First of all, we know what we saw last year. We have kept notes where we brought up the babies, which we call the recruits. We see what we see from the previous year and find the trends. If we cannot locate crabs quickly, they are probably not there, or so we tell ourselves. We wanted the mother lode—full pots until we plugged our holds with crab.

The weather as usual was miserable, with seas around thirty feet and the temperatures well below freezing. In that area of the Bering Sea, the weather seems never to know what it wants to do. In one thirty-minute period, snow blowing sideways can turn to sleet that forms sheets of ice on the deck and rigging. And then it will stop. It was one of those days to be indoors and snug.

Once we reached the new—and we hoped, unexplored—grounds we set a prospecting string, which we allowed to soak while Neal and I filled a thirty-gallon plastic trash bag with five pounds of flour, tied it off, and out on the deck near the block, attached the bag to the shot line and sent it down with a pot. We used to fill bags like that with shit so that anybody pulling our pots illegally would get shitbagged, but those times have changed. Nobody raids pots anymore.

Once we were picking up the pots, Caveman was working the block for Russell, whose elbow was still hurting, and Caveman was not keeping pace with the boat. He was expending too much energy; he had not yet learned to streamline his movements, and he was getting tired. We rubbed our hands together as he hooked a buoy and pulled in the shot line. He was standing next to the block as Neal, on the hydros, winched up the pot. When the trash bag hit the block, it exploded like a bomb, spraying flour over Caveman, who leaped backward. His face was white and everyone laughed at his surprise. We were still smiling a short time later when our humor turned to alarm.

We were retrieving the last of our pots, moving from one to the next in the string, when another boat, a 130-foot crab scow named
Trail Blazer
appeared on our starboard about half a mile out. We were moving in opposite directions roughly on parallel tracks. When we came abreast we were about 400 yards off. In the wheelhouse, I noticed that the barometer was dropping. We were in for a hard blow. I looked out the windows with my binoculars and fixed on a crewman on the
Trail Blazer.
He was clambering on the pots chaining the stack in anticipation of rougher weather. He was walking on the pot webbing and bars six widths of pots off the deck. It was dangerous to be on the stack in those seas, and the captain of the
Trail Blazer
unaccountably had allowed the boat to drift into the trough. A port-to-starboard wallow threw the boat heavily from side to side.

Andy came into the wheelhouse carrying his video camera. He had mentioned earlier that he wanted to experiment with the new camera. He said he was freezing on deck; he was wearing only rain pants, a sweatshirt and boots. I pointed to the
Trail Blazer.
With only a glance he sized up the danger. He said to me that the crewman had better watch out. The seas were rough; he could be swiped by a wave and disappear overboard and nobody would see what happened. We watched him with our naked eyes; he was now hanging over the side of a six-high stack trying to attach a chain. The captain of
Trail Blazer
was unaware of what his crewman was doing. The scow remained in the trough.

Andy went out the wheelhouse door behind the captain’s chair with the video camera. The
Trail Blazer
wallowed with each wave, which swung the crewman, who seemed unaware of the danger he was in, nearly into the freezing water. I looked over again, thinking,
This is fucked.

Usually when a captain orders a crewman over the side like that, he will jog into the waves and cut his speed. I was about to warn their skipper on the radio of what was happening from our point of view. Andy came back inside the wheelhouse and said, “God, my hands are cold.” I told him I was going to call the
Trail Blazer
’s skipper, and I asked him, looking out the window again, “
Where’d that guy go
?”

Andy said, “I just saw him on the stack.” But the man I had seen turned out to be another crewman running to tell the skipper.

Seconds later, the captain was screaming on the radio, “
Time Bandit,
man overboard! Man overboard!”

I swung the binoculars. The man was now in the frozen sea two boat-lengths behind
Trail Blazer.
He was blowing air into a malfunctioning life vest. Just as before, when the F/V
Troika
’s captain died on
Time Bandit
to my everlasting shame, my legs started to shake with dread. I was not going to stand off this time and watch while another boat fumbled a rescue; the
Trail Blazer
was making a 180-degree turn but the man in the water would have succumbed by the time they reached him. I could angle
Time Bandit
directly without turning and reach the man in minutes. It was go time. I forwarded the throttles to maximum rpms. We could save this guy. I
knew
we could.

I thought of the water temperature—38 degrees—and the condition of the man, who was virtually defenseless in that sea. Seagulls hovered over his head probably imagining him as garbage. I watched the
Trail Blazer
turn, but her crew was not yet deploying a life sling from the crane and no crewman was on deck in a survival suit.

I flipped the switch to activate the general alarm. A siren screamed through the boat alerting the crew, who knew about the emergency without my telling them. Russell was dumping a survival suit out of a bag onto the wheelhouse floor. I do not think I ever saw him move faster. I steered the
Time Bandit
to bring our starboard alongside the man overboard. Down on the deck in the bow Neal was maneuvering the crane in position for a rescue. I thought of the brass key around my neck. For a year after the
Troika
tragedy, I wasn’t locking that door again. We were ready to save this man’s ass. My feelings were incredibly intense. Right or wrong, I felt that this man had only a few more seconds to live, and
Time Bandit
was all that stood between him and oblivion.