Time Bandit (19 page)

At last, Alaska Fish & Game determined that something had to make crabbing safer, and in the process, they decided to give the crab fishery a new structure to sustain its health over the long term. They called their plan “rationalization.” It was not an entirely new concept, but it had never been applied to crabbing. My brother and I hate the new system as it is unfair and stacked in favor of the Alaskan natives and the giant processors. Begrudgingly, we will say that Alaska manages its fisheries fairly well. Each year, the North Pacific Council Management, which includes Alaska Fish & Game and the National Fisheries Service, accesses the crab stocks in the Bering Sea—how many are out there, how many are males, females, and juveniles. Crabs, the state reminds us fishermen correctly, are a shared resource that does not belong to us. Crabs belong to the 700,000-plus people of Alaska. The state, in setting up the new regulations for crab, assigned each boat an IFQ based on each boat’s average catch over the previous five years; the owner then was allowed either to lease his quota to another fisherman for half the profit or fish for the quota himself for full profit over an extended time.

The state arrived at each IFQ, expressed in a percentage of the total catch limit, by removing the best and worst year’s catch of each individual boat between 1998 and 2002, and averaging what remained. The state eliminated from IFQs the fishery boats with averages below a set minimum. In other words, boats had to be real crabbers and not part of the mob that went to the Derby now and then.
Time Bandit
received an initial IFQ of 90,000 pounds of king crab and an original IFQ of 225,000 pounds of opilio crab, less 50,000 pounds that we lease out each year.

In 2005, the first year of rationalization, we decided to sit back and just fish our own quota. We should have leased other crabbers’ quota, too. In the 2006–2007 crab season we acquired extra quota, but only so much was available. Ten percent of our catch goes automatically to the native Alaskans. If we lease quotas, we have to give 50 percent of what we catch for opilio and about 70 percent for king to the lease owners. With the new system of IFQs, we fishermen are risking our lives catching crabs for one half or one third of what it is really worth.

We need a sixth crewman—an accountant.

After rationalization, pressures on us remained, of course, in spite of the relative sanity created by the new system. Diesel fuel costs (from $1.50 per gallon in 2005 to $3.10 in 2007) created one constant pressure. With fuel costs rising, fishermen do not dawdle on the Bering. The competition still spurs the fishermen to desperate lengths, as before. Fish & Game is not quite willing to accept responsibility for accidents at sea, which remain as high as ever. Anyone can read anything in statistics, and safety looks good on paper, but from where I sit in the wheelhouse of
Time Bandit,
safety will always be a mixed bag. What can ever prevent pitfalls on the deck floor, the pots, the launcher, the picking hook that swings through the air, the heaving deck, the open hatches to the holds where a crewman easily can crack an ankle bone or break a leg with a single off-balance misstep or fall through the hatch twenty feet to the bottom of the fish hold? Or what safety measure will ever stop a heavy steel deck door from slamming shut on a leg with the shift of the boat in a heavy sea? Last year the deck door slammed on a crewman’s lower leg. He came up to me later and said, “I thought it was cool that my leg was still attached when I looked at it; it felt like scissors cutting it in two.”

Comparatively, crabbing has grown into a less deadly job on a still-violent and still-injurious sea. We are guaranteed to catch crabs. We know where to find them, year after year, with the use of plotters and knowledge of their migratory habits. We catch 225,000 pounds of opilio without fail under rationalization. We try not to catch a single pound more. We never catch less. And while we are given the time, we rarely take the time to soak the pots and rest the crew. Time is money. I might feel comfortable telling fishermen in port where to find crabs, whereas my lips were sealed before. That removes an element of mystery from the process and, some say, it may not qualify as fishing anymore. It’s more like
catching.
I disagree. We are guaranteed money under rationalization, but nothing else. Will crab fishing become nothing more than a numbers game? Must the fleet become corporate in order to survive? Probably so.

No wonder what we fear from rationalization is the future.

Alaska does not enjoy the luxury of diverse industries, like Washington and Oregon, which also are home ports for Alaskan crabbing boats. Alaska has oil on the North Slope and fishing in the Bering Sea. The oil aside, the state consists of remote communities that depend on fishing for their livelihoods. Unemployed workers cannot simply drive across town for a job at Boeing or Microsoft, as they might be able to do in Seattle. Without fishing, they have few if any real alternatives. When the oil is depleted on the Slope, the state will have to rely on fishing for employment, which means jobs on
land
as well as on the sea.

When Fish & Game first considered the rationalization of crabbing, they looked to stabilize the fishery over the long term. The Derby had brought jobs to places like Dutch Harbor in the short run; rationalization, by reducing the catch and the fleet, reduced the number of jobs. Before rationalization, more than 357 boats with 1,500 fished for king and opilio crabs. Dutch Harbor swung from boom to bust by the month. Boat captains and processors flew workers in. When their work was done, they flew them out. Nobody stayed for long.

Now, under rationalization, 80 boats catch their crab quotas with the help of about 400 crewmen. Workers in the canneries can be assured that their work will be steady through most of the year. The catch is delivered on an orderly schedule. The big processors have turned dorms for their workers into living quarters for men and their families. Roads are paved on Unalaska for the first time. Schools are growing, and decent public facilities have sprung up. Dutch is no longer a camp with a couple of saloons. But where does any of that leave the fishermen?

We crabbers crab with good reason. We want to know why we cannot sell our total catch to any processor who offers us the highest price. That was how it used to be. Now, we can sell only ten percent of our catch on open market. We must deliver the rest to a contracted processor who tells us what he will pay us per pound. Selling 100 percent in an open market, isn’t that the American way?

As matters stand, we fishermen receive an average of $4.20 ($3.85 in 2006) for each red king crab we take to the processor. That may not seem like much given our efforts and the risks. But we have nothing to say about the price. The world market determines that. Russian and Norwegian boats harvest crabs in the Barents Sea at a rate that is flooding the markets and driving prices down. Consumers of crab care about what they spend, of course. Crab meat is an expensive delicacy. If a consumer can buy Russian king crab at Costco for $11 or $12 a pound, why should he pay more for Alaskan king crab, even if Alaskan crab is demonstrably better processed and prepared? With the Russians and Norwegians sweeping the Barents Sea clean, our share of Bering Sea’s crab is declining on the world market. Last year, the Alaskan fleet brought in 15.5 million pounds of king crab. That quota was down about 15 percent from the year before to guarantee the health of the crab stocks. By contrast, Russia crabbers owned up to catching 33 million pounds in the Barents Sea, but they cheat on statistics. Their real catch was probably double what they reported.

We whine about price, but as long as Alaska supplies only a small percentage of the rapidly increasing volume in markets like Japan and the United States, Alaskan fishermen and processors will have little to say about the market supply and virtually nothing to say about the price of its king crab.

The state is now encouraging us crabbers to join co-ops.
Time Bandit
is a member of one out of its own self-interest. If we catch more crabs than the limit our IFQs allow, instead of paying a fine, or worse, dumping the crabs back into the sea, other boats in our co-op that have not yet fished can account for our excess, which they can sell without catching. The state would like us to go even further with our co-ops by joining forces with the processors in true cooperation. We are not yet ready to take that step. It will never work; as we see it, cooperation would be like putting a fox in the henhouse.

We are afraid of becoming hourly salaried workers with the adventure, traditions, and romance of crabbing buried under pages of quotas and rules and regulations. We do not want to be part of a bureaucracy. We do not sit well on committees and at meetings around boardroom tables. We are men who work with our hands. Debates are meant for bars. We work harder in short bursts than any other laborers in America. We have seen what industry and cooperatives did to farmers. Fishermen are independent, ornery, and wary of change. We sense that once we let go, we will lose ourselves. What worries us crabbers is how quickly our way of life might simply disappear.

Have we reached the last frontier? Yes. The old ways are disappearing in a blur of speed. Yet fishermen hold on to what only God can change. As long as we fish for crabs, nothing can diminish the dangers inherent in our work. Nothing will change the winds and the sea. The Bering, then, is our last frontier. It is our Wild West, our Lonesome Dove, played out on waves.

I Fear What Lives
Under
the Sea

Johnathan

The sea is rougher now,
and
Fishing Fever
is in the troughs. I have no power to jog the boat into the sea. With a motor I could take the waves bow-on, but without power she is turned broadside in the troughs. The ride is rough; the boat is light and no match for the swells. The tide has turned against the wind. The seas are fifteen or sixteen feet, not yet of a height that threatens to capsize me, but they are nearly half as high as my boat’s length. I am a little worried.

I strip down in order to layer warmer clothes. I must be ready for anything. I am standing on the floor in the wheelhouse in my underpants when suddenly I start to laugh. This is a funny, not a psychotic, laugh, although either would be appropriate. I have not thought about this in years, but once, not too long ago, I was staying on the thirtieth floor of a hotel on the opposite side of the casino on the Las Vegas Strip. I ordered lunch from room service. When I finished eating, I pulled back the covers and went back to bed. I must have slept for four or five hours. The clock said it was the late afternoon and downstairs the casino would be coming to life with suckers just like me. I like to gamble; it is a pleasure, not a need. I like the action and the life. The lunch leavings smelled, and I pushed the cart out the door into the hall. I was turning around when I heard the door click. I straightened up like I had heard a shot. I was standing on the carpeted hallway in my tightie-whities, nothing but pure WalMart BVDs. I was thinking,
If I only wore boxers
! I saw no alternative to taking an elevator to the ground floor. I walked through the casino, all across the casino to the other side. People did not know what to think. They were like, “What the fuck? Just look at that. They took everything from him but his underpants.”

I kept my eyes straight ahead, my hands folded like I was going to communion. At the front desk the line stretched, it seemed at the time, from here to eternity. I got in the rear, and waited. I looked up at the ceiling. Remember when you were a kid and had nightmares about going to school in your underwear and you would wake up screaming? That was happening. We inched forward, and at last I was talking to an employee, who glanced over the counter and with admirable self-control did not give a single hint of anything out of the ordinary. I asked for a new card key. I explained the circumstance.

She was a cold bitch. She asked me, “How do we know it’s you? Do you have an I.D.,
sir
?”

I said, “Come on, man.”

Security on either elbow escorted me back to my room.

A plug of Copenhagen soothes me now. On the shelf in the wheelhouse sits a bottle of Chantix that is supposed to help me stop smoking. The pills work. That is why I do not take them. With Chantix I do not feel like smoking or anything else that is bad for me, like eating greasy McDonald’s. You would be surprised how bad that little sonofabitch gallbladder can make you feel. You do not actually need one either. Chantix makes me feel like shit. I might as well take diet pills.

In seas like these, I can get seasick. In the crab season, I almost always puke the first night out. I am feeling like doing that now. My stomach is queasy, and I am half prepared to run for the head, but
Fishing Fever
has no head; I have the whole wide sea to hurl in. I lie down on the bunk and roll with the waves. Normally this calms my stomach, but right now the motion of the waves is not what is giving me butterflies. A boat can be more relaxing than anything else when everything is going right. When it is like now, anxiety can churn my guts. There is nothing I can do, which makes the queasy feeling only worse.

In the dark, I distract myself by thinking of what I am not afraid of. I do not fear heights; in fact, I love to freefall from airplanes. I do not fear the sea, though I have been afraid
on
the sea. One night last year in the king crab season, a 100-foot rogue wave with a 30-foot whitewater “viper” slammed into
Time Bandit. That
frightened me beyond the measure of I-thought-we-were-done-for. Andy was in the captain’s chair and I was in my stateroom when a wave hit us from behind. I did not know what was happening. Everything was falling. I could not reach the ladder to the engine room. Then that huge rogue, following behind that wave, punched us upright. Andy told me later that the impact tossed him up to the ceiling. It threw the microwave right through the galley door. It tore the refrigerator and stove off their bolts. We were sixty feet under the water. The whole boat was shuddering
—dut dut dut dut.
The engines sputtered. I thought it was over. I did not see how we could
not
go over. This was the kind of wave that takes out small villages. No one onboard said a word. We collected like crows up in the wheelhouse. Andy was clutching the wheel. I thought,
We are going to see Davy Jones.

More than anything, more than rogues, I fear what lives
under
the sea. I used to work, when I was not fishing, as a commercial diver, mostly pulling propellers. I would use regular scuba gear and wear a dry suit. I used wrenches and hammers and welding equipment, whatever was needed to do the job. I was happy with this work, but then I saw the movie
Jaws,
and the underwater world was never again the same for me.

One time I was working to repair a shaft about twenty feet under the water when I noticed that a sea lion was swimming around me. I imagined that he wanted to see what was up. I watched him out of the corner of my eye as I worked. Suddenly, he swam straight at me, grabbed my shoulder with his teeth, and pulled me through the water. I knew exactly the feeling of being in a shark’s mouth. I kicked loose of him and came straight up to the surface. My eyeballs were big as saucers.

I only dove twice more after that, but I watched my back in a big way. Now I am afraid of sea lions even when I am
not
under the water. They congregate in Kodiak harbor because people feed them off the dock. A man was sitting with his ass over the pier, and a sea lion grabbed him and took a big chunk out. He got his gun and shot the sea lion dead, and the police arrested him. Does that make sense to you? If a bear comes into town and starts eating your kids, you shoot him, don’t you? What’s so different about sea lions eating ass?

Thanks to the movie
Jaws,
I am more scared of sharks than I am of drowning. I was long-lining off the East Coast once when a fifteen-foot blue shark swam up to the transom. At the time, I was drinking a cup of coffee. He looked up at the transom. He scared the shit out of me. I hit him on the head with the cup, which fell into the water, and he ate it. I
wanted my cup back.
No shark was going to take it without a fight. The shark followed the boat for three days looking, I supposed, either for more coffee cups or for a chance to eat me. I hooked up a big bait bag on a grapple, and the shark grabbed that grapple hook with all the power in its jaws. I fought him on a line for six hours. And then I got tired and I dragged him to death at eight knots. At the dock, I opened his gut with a knife. My coffee cup fell out with a broken handle. I glued the handle back on and called it even with the shark. I have every reason to believe that if he ate my coffee cup he would have eaten me if I had fallen overboard.

I also do not like killer whales, which swim in pods in Alaskan waters. I have seen what they do to creatures smaller than they are. They throw sea otters up in the air like eating popcorn. They would probably not
intend
to eat me, a man, but what would that matter if they mistook me for a sea otter? Tourists might shake their heads if they knew that an orca had eaten a human. But if they heard that an orca had eaten a sea otter, they would demand action. Nothing on or under the ocean is cuter than a sea otter. They are like puppies…. you could make slippers out of them. But they eat every clam and every crab from the shore to ten miles out to sea and then they move somewhere else and do the same thing there. Orcas and sea otters, I say, are a balance of nature. Orcas and me, not so much.

And last of all, I am afraid of marriage. That is why I never came close or met the right woman. A relationship with a woman should grow and not be like a roller coaster ride. Getting married is not going to make it smoother. Like I say, when I drink, I drink. When I work, I work. When I am with a lady, I’m with that lady. I treat ladies real good. I treat boats good, too. I would have to work at a marriage, and crabbers like me are working too hard at fishing to have something worthwhile left for marriage. Besides, crabbers say, “You don’t lose your wife, you lose your turn.”

Here is what happens: You come home from fishing after three months to find your wife in the bar, and that is not good. The fishing life is hard on them, too. I stayed with two women because we had babies together, and I put investments and stuff like houses I owned in their names, so it was
like
we were married. That ended our relationships as we had known them and would have ended our marriages. With the arrival of kids, there was no more sex on the kitchen table. All the romance went out the window. The babies slept in bed with us. I had to take their mother to a motel once a week for sex.

The irony of my own children is that they have brought me untold happiness. My daughter gave birth to my second grandchild, Tiana, last October. My son’s wife had my first grandchild, Sawyer, last September. I became a double grandpa within a month, and am happy to say I am proud. I hope their parents do a better job of raising them than I did raising my children.

My son Scott had a tough childhood partly due to me being a fisherman. He hardly saw me for nine months out of the year. He lived in Homer with my Grandma Jo and in Idaho with my mother and with my stepfather Bob. Scott’s mother was not around. When I was in town as he got older, he went with me on the boat, catching fish and tendering, and, more or less, he grew up on boats. He tells me how one of his first memories was tendering when he was five. At the time, his cousin Chelsey was on the boat, too. One morning, the crew and Andy and I were asleep when a boat came up to deliver salmon. Scott and Chelsey tried to wake us up, but Andy and I told them to go away. Without another word, they went up on deck and tied up the boat themselves.

I gave Scott tough love. He was fifteen, failing at school and into drugs. He totaled my truck. I told him he had to pay me. At the end of the summer, he had made $14,000; I took out $2,000 for the IRS and $8,000 for my truck. I told him, “Welcome to the real world.”

To get his life in order as a teenager, I gave him two options: Go out fishing with me or straighten out by yourself. He quit school and went to sea with me. At the end of that year, I wanted him to return to school. He asked me if I would go back if I was making $14,000 a year when I was only fifteen? He fished with me and bounced boats for the next seven years. Fishing became a celebration for him. He never thought of the dangers. He turned himself into a working machine as a deckhand. The sun went up and went down, up and down, while he did nothing else but work. And he liked it. He liked the sea. It was an escape. For Scott fishing meant living the life of a rock star. When he walked into the bar and rang the bell and was throwing down $100 bills, life was cool.

O
nce at sea last year, we started out slow. The king crabs were not cooperating with
Time Bandit
’s timetable. We traveled east and north to a line approximating the area between Bristol Bay and the Bering Sea that had served us well the previous year. About two hours after leaving Dutch Harbor I started feeling seasick and gave the watch to Richard and went below. I lay down on my bunk, and before I could count to one hundred it was time for me to drive the porcelain bus. Once I puked, I felt fine. But I did not see the point of going back to the wheelhouse, and I went back to bed.

The next morning, we launched prospecting pots, and the deck routine went as usual. I rank the jobs on the deck according to risk and skill levels. Last year, Neal operated the crane with economy, precision, and speed; he always does. Neal on the hydros eases the minds of the deck crew. He works in a smooth rhythm. Nothing ever surprises him at the controls. The hydros may look easy to operate but they come with a cost of pain. Neal must stand at his station in the freezing cold and wet. He cannot move. His hands and feet freeze. He has had arthritis in his knuckles for years. In spite of the agony of the cold and discomfort of the wet, he has never laid a pot on a crewman’s head or pinned one against a rail. He has reason to be proud of his skills. He never gets sloppy. One “oops” from him, and a crewmate can end up injured. Neal says little. He is a pro who stays out of the way. As a captain in the wheelhouse looking down on the deck, sometimes I wonder if he is even there. That is how good he is.