Authors: Andy Hillstrand
Dutch, and its home island of Unalaska, has tried to change its well-earned Wild West image; prior to the 1960s the island had no image to boast of at all. It had history, which was hardly triumphant. The only land in North America, besides Pearl Harbor, that Japanese Zeros bombed during World War II, to this day U.S. Army bunkers, Quonset huts, and barracks dot Unalaska’s green hills in summer. But the results of the conscious effort to upgrade Unalaska’s image to date are decidedly mixed.
Twenty years ago, bankruptcy threatened the local government when Unalaska defaulted on loans to build an airport, which was eventually completed and counts now as an essential transportation hub, albeit one with the single most terrifying landing strip in the United States if not the world, with gale-force winds, ice, blowing snow, and a jagged rocky ledge yards away from wing tips. Airplanes approach from the sea or the harbor only yards off the end of the strip. An official airport pickup truck drives to the end of the landing field and blocks auto traffic before each airplane takes off on the chance that it will crash into cars and trucks driving to the docks. Flights not infrequently abort approaches because of rapidly changing weather and divert forty minutes away to Cold Bay’s runway, which NASA maintains in pristine shape as an emergency strip for the space shuttle. There are always surprises flying into Dutch. Not long ago a woman sitting beside me, looking out the window, exclaimed, “My, what a big fish.” I looked. “Lady, that’s a humpback whale.”
Civilization of sorts came to Unalaska a few years ago when the world’s largest cannery, Unisea, built the Grand Aleutian Hotel with the Chart Room, its superb restaurant. After king crab season last year, the crew of the
Cornelia Marie
was in the restaurant at an adjoining table with the crew of
Time Bandit,
and through the meal we exchanged toasts, barbs, wisecracks, loud conversation, and stale jokes, like, “You know you’re a crab fisherman when your wife changes her name to Sharon Peters.” The chef in the Chart Room presided over an eight-foot table of desserts that he was rightfully proud of. Without much warning, a crewman from the
Cornelia Marie
started a food fight. Soon the air was thick with profiteroles, tiramisu, mousse au chocolat, and globs of homemade ice cream. The hotel security guards and the Unalaska constabulary arrived with their pistols and Tasers holstered. Restoring order, they seemed embarrassed for us, with our faces and hair covered with sticky sweets. The chef kicked out anyone in the room with frosting in his hair. That was most of us. The party continued in the downstairs bar, which was where we were going anyway.
That kind of official vigilance keeps the island less rowdy but it robs some of its soul. Such is progress. Latitudes is closing, which is yet another sign of the times. Last year, the Dutch police stopped me for driving
one
mile an hour over the speed limit of twenty-five in bright daylight. The deputy must have been new. I told her, “Ma’am, you have to be kidding.” She told me to stay in the car. She said, “Sir, I am saving your life.” I drove away with a ticket and a sinking feeling for the island.
As further evidence of changing times, the bars close at one a.m. And services on Sundays at the historical Holy Ascension Russian Orthodox church, with its beautiful blue onion domes and sturdy concrete walls to fend off icy blasts of wind, help to give the island a family feeling that is at once new and, among the crabbers, not altogether welcome. Most of the island’s thirty miles of roads are paved, but then each year the hard winters reduce the surfaces to rock and rubble. I have the suspicion that rubble would be the fate of the long campaign to civilize Dutch if the crabbing fleet had not been forced to cope three years ago with epic changes, which had been a long time coming.
U
ntil the 1970s, Russian and Japanese industrial fleets dominated the Alaskan crab fishery. When I was younger, out fishing with my dad, I remember seeing giant Russian ships scoop “red bags” of twenty to thirty tons of fish and crabs from our coastal waters. My dad and his generation could do nothing but stand by, watch, and lobby their congressmen. They were forced to fish for crab closer inshore. In 1973, for example, Russian ships took 2.2 billion pounds of fish and Japanese took 4.6 billion pounds from Alaskan waters, within the 200-mile limit, while Alaskan fishermen took only 1.4 billion pounds from the same waters. My father’s generation stayed out of the Russians’ way and remained all but strangers to the grounds in the Bering Sea. I listened to my dad complain that the Russians were depleting our stocks of fish and if they continued, fishing in Alaska would die. He felt personally about it. He bitched to anyone who would listen, and it was usually me. I grew to hate the Russians, and I dreamed of reprisals. It was the Cold War. They were twice my enemy, and I vowed to get even.
In the early 1990s, I finally had my chance. The Cold War was ending, but the Russian navy patrolled their side of the international border. Their boats were not raiding our waters anymore, but one day I fished their grounds, with what I decided would be a symbolic Cold War payback
—Time Bandit
vs. the Russian navy.
At the time, I was cruising eight nautical miles inside Russian waters, near the Siberian coast, dropping crab pots in thick fog, when out of the gray a battleship came straight at me. I honestly shit my pants. I am more foolhardy than I am brave, and this confrontation now required me to be brave on steroids. The Russians were paranoid. They probably thought
Time Bandit
was a spy ship but exactly what it was spying on would have been hard for even them to say. A couple years before, they had seized an American crabber in these same waters. The sad thing about that episode was that the American boat was not poaching Russian crabs like I was trying to. The crew had stopped for souvenir T-shirts on Little Diomedes Island three miles over the Russian line. The Russians locked up the crew, brought them to their mainland, tried them
naked
in court, convicted them, and only after months of diplomacy, released them. The Russians impounded their boat, which remains in Russia to this day. I knew the risks I was taking. But I was not worried, until I saw the battleship
Potemkin
headed my way.
In those years, the Global Positioning System (GPS) was a new technology that the U.S. Air Force did not make available to the public until 1993. Until it arrived on the scene I rarely bothered taking longitude and latitude fixes while out fishing in the Bering Sea. I knew our locations out of habit, and
Time Bandit
’s compass guided me. I knew where to find the best opilio crab grounds. I cared about nothing else.
On the radio the Russians asked me to identify myself. They spoke in broken English, and I mumbled a reply in the hope they would not understand. I called the U.S. Coast Guard on single sideband. The Coasties sounded panicked when I told them. I wanted them to send Air Force jets to my rescue. But that would not be the Coast Guard. Their orders to me were very specific: “DO NOT STOP! DO NOT LET THEM BOARD YOU. KEEP COMING.”
Apparently, my call stirred up an immediate commotion that reached back to Washington. Those waters were sensitive, I guessed later, mainly because the Air Force and U.S. Navy had a submarine and missile base on one of the farthest islands in the Aleutian chain, Adak, not that far from where I was dropping pots.
I told the Russians I would stop my engines as they had demanded, and of course I would wait for them to board us. And then, hanging up, I gunned it.
I do not know how fast
Time Bandit
was going, but that battleship was going faster. Those things move like speedboats. I calculated how much time I needed to cover the eight miles—about an hour, the longest sixty minutes of my life.
Time Bandit
crossed the line into American waters with the Russian warship about a quarter mile behind, and we aboard
Time Bandit
were high-fiving each other and shouting and jumping around on the deck like we had won the Cold War. The battleship slammed on its brakes, turned around, and headed back toward Little Diomedes. We waited until dark. As the hours went by, our radar showed five more warships, then nine, waiting for us to come back to retrieve the four crab pots we had left behind to soak.
Their boats moved north and south, up and down their side of the border, while we stood off several miles on our side. I think they figured out we would not leave our remaining pots behind. And if we came for them they would not let us get away again. I debated whether we should call it quits, but I decided no. I had to uphold the honor of the American flag, represented by those four American pots!
The crew voted for the raid. I had expected them to. But I did not influence their decision. In fact, they were excited, because part of the cost of those pots, if they were left behind, would come out of their pay. And that money could be better spent at Latitudes in Dutch. We made our plan.
We had dropped the pots a quarter mile apart. The deck crew can bring up a pot in three minutes. We needed forty-five minutes to reach the first pot, at least another fifteen minutes to pull them in, and a further forty-five minutes to get back over the line. The warships by now were nowhere on my radar. We were emboldened by the first escape, and besides, if the Russians saw us pulling pots they might change their minds about us being a spy boat. This, of course, was wishful thinking.
We ran up to the international border. We cruised parallel to the imaginary line by a couple hundred yards, until I reached a point that gave
Time Bandit
a direct shot to the first pot in the string. I turned ninety degrees to port and chugged across the international boundary, expecting to see the Russian armada on radar at any minute. We reached the first pot. The crew was ready at the block and the crane. They worked fast to haul it in. I brought
Time Bandit
up on the second pot, then the third. By now, I wondered if the Russians had given up. I was beginning to feel…well, almost relaxed. We approached our last pot, and the crew was about to throw the hook, when what looked like the entire Russian navy came up on the horizon. I pushed the throttles. On the loud hailer I told the crew to forget the last pot and come inside. Seeing the Russian navy, and assuming that they were watching us through binoculars, we gathered outside on the stern deck of
Time Bandit
and shot the Russians the bird and pulled down our pants and mooned them. I turned the boat east. The race was on. This time, the Russians did not try to radio us. They were coming to seize
Time Bandit.
I imagined an engine frying, the steering going bad, a man overboard. Any problem now could spell our doom. The thought recurred of standing in a Russian court naked. The crew came in the wheelhouse to watch. We were yelling and screaming. We were losing ground to the Russians. Eventually, they would catch us. I did not have an exact fix on the boundary, but I knew the Russians would turn before they reached it. And turn they did. We cut our engines and more or less floated and gloated. It was a feeling of triumph at least as satisfying as returning home with plugged tanks of crabs.
I
am aware, as is nearly every crab fisherman, that superstitions are created to give us the illusion of control over what we have no control over—the seas, the weather, the catch, the boat, and our mortality. Some of the beliefs seem stupid to me—like the one about bananas onboard a fishing vessel bringing bad luck. But my attitude changed one day about ten years ago out in the Bering Sea when a long-winged glaucous gull, sleek and white with a “blood” spot on its yellow bill, hovered over my boat’s stacks, I thought, like a harbinger of nothing good.
By all reason, the gull should not have been there. Sea birds fly over us all the time looking and waiting for scraps of bait, but they ground themselves on the sea when the wind blows 70 knots, like it was that day. The gull’s appearance, when the other birds had settled on the sea, made me curious at first, and in the next moment gave me an uneasy feeling. Alone in the wheelhouse, and for no reason that I can think of, I recalled an ancient superstition that the soul of a drowned sailor departs his body only to be adopted by a hovering gull, like this one. The recollection gave me the shivers.
Flying with the wind, the gull sped past, and it could barely keep up with the eight knots we were making when it circled around. The seas in the Bering, as I have said, can be brutish. This day, the swells were rising around forty-five feet with some rogues coming in at sixty. I had to push the throttles to keep the boat straight into the oncoming wave, then relax the screws for the sleigh ride down into the trough, where all that I could see ahead was the mountain of the next wave rising almost impossibly, higher and higher, above the boat—a sight to make my knees quake—and behind, another mountain of a wave above the transom. The “money shot” in the
Perfect Storm
movie, when the boat climbs up the 100-foot wave and falls back to its doom, draws an exaggerated but nevertheless accurate picture. Cut that image in half and that was my day.
The Bering is a shallow sea, and the winds and currents churn the water up off a deep-water shelf along the sea bottom north and south of Little Diomedes, creating huge seas. Each cubic yard of water weighs 1,500 pounds, and a rogue, when it washes over our rails, dumps hundreds of cubic yards in one hammer-like blow against the deck. In a storm the sea swirls a boat in several unsettling directions at once, with the hull, stern, and bow each trying to accommodate the waves.
The Bering is a dark, ugly sea. The sky presses down on the water, gray upon gray, creating a morbid feeling of being trapped in a coffin in a storm. The grays of the Bering after a while form a palette of shades—blue bruise grays, black grays, light grays, green grays—until no gray is a good gray. Gray to me means weather, and the darker the shade the worse I expect from the sea. That day, I was holding on for my own safety, with my legs spread wide and one hand clutching a shelf and the other hand hard on the throttles. If I lost my balance, I would possibly fly across the interior of the wheelhouse, ending in a bruising collision with the port side bulkhead about twenty-five feet away.