Those Who Came Back, and Those Who Never Did

The winds are blowing out of the southeast today about 25 knots. No sailboats are out, and most of the swell is blown flat. It’s not the day to surf or sail. It’s hot. About 90 degrees hot. I’m trying to tie up a lot of loose ends, so it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m a slave to this fucking computer because in about two weeks I have to go in for a surgery on my left arm, which will leave me more useless than usual, being as I’m left handed. I’ll probably be on sabbatical for the whole month of June.

The knife count to date is two knee surgeries, a surgery to the right elbow, and now one on the left. And probably both wrists before it’s over. In another life, in another line of work we used to joke about this, saying; "right now, somebody is paying me for this, but someday I’m gonna pay for this”.

It appears that someday has come.

Last night I watched “ Deadliest Catch” or some such shit on the Discovery Channel. It’s another reality series, this one about crab fishing in Alaska.

Years ago, after I got out of the Coast Guard I stayed on in Kodiak Alaska, and like many 22 year old kids then I didn’t have a clue about what I wanted to do. In order to make ends meet and bankroll my bad habits I had to make money, and some of my bad habits took lots of money. Since Kodiak is a fishing town, the easiest way to make money is doing something in the industry. Kodiak touts itself as "the town where crab is king".

So first I started working in the canneries during crab season, unloading crab from the holds of the boats that were coming in. Burrowing down through mountains of live King and Tanner (“Snow”) crab, loading them into a never-ending string of two thousand pound buckets to be hauled up into the busy, steaming processing plant where they are summarily killed, gilled, cooked, frozen, boxed and shipped out to eventually find their way south, to grace the tables of consumers rich enough to pay for the delicacy. Boat after boat, day after day was backbreaking and boring work that paid about minimum wage, but that was the place to be in order to get hired on to a crabber. You just had to wait until somebody got killed, hurt, quit or fired.

Crabbing is what most guys wanted to do at the time. It was an opportunity to make real money in short order, hopefully enough to live on for the rest of the year without having to do any real work. Besides, crabbers were cool, they held the top of the dockside food chain, the macho order of the northern lights.

Eventually I got hired on. No, I actually lied my way onboard a big crabber, the Express, a 135 foot vessel skippered by an old ex-coalminer with blacklung named Sam Jackson. Years later after I left the industry I heard that the Express sunk in the Gulf of Alaska just south of Kodiak. So I lied my way into a job, told them I could coil.

Crab pots are big square cages made of welded steel rebar, usually three feet deep and seven feet by seven feet square, covered with netting and weighing seven hundred pounds, unloaded. They rest on the seafloor in about six hundred feet of water waiting for crabs to crawl in for the bait. Hauling the pots off of the bottom is done by passing the poly line through a big round hydraulically powered sheave ( a roller device that funnels, or jambs the line) called a powerblock. The uphauling line then gets coiled on the deck until the pot is landed on the pot launcher, picked, rebaited and ready to launch again. Before the advent of the mechanical coiler (“Kinghauler”) the job was done by a crewman, and it was an artform. The line exits the powerblock at around a fathom (6 feet) per second, and in a smooth rhythmic hand-over-hand motion the coiler lays it into a nice neat pile as the other crew stands by ready to land the pot. It was an artform that some could and some couldn't do, deckhands who could coil were always in demand, and the attrition rate was high. So I lied my way onboard by saying I was proficient at the art. Thankfully, one of the other crewman was a friend of mine, and miraculously, the deck boss was patient once he learned the truth, and amazingly enough, after just a few turns at a half speed block, I had it down. I could coil, and before the trip was over I was as good as any.

Later, I wrote a story about this incident, which got published in the Alaska magazine, my first attempt at writing a short story, my first submission for publication. They paid me something like 350 dollars, and I think it was as ecstatic a moment as when I coiled my first pot at full speed block.

My crab fishing days lasted for three long seasons, seasons that stretched from November through March from Cape Chiniak to far out the Aleutian chain. We worked what seemed like twentyfour-seven days, the only rest to and from the gear, catnaps between endless strings of crab pots. I figure that I coiled something like 350 miles of line all told. It was brutal work, and I think most of us were scared shitless a lot of the time, but we never really knew it because we were always too busy or bone weary to feel it. Even the biggest boats are mere specks in the jaws of the bitter Alaskan waters. One season, eight people I knew never returned from the sea to drink with the rest of us in the bars.

I ended up falling in love with fishing. The sea, the fish and the crustaceans became a powerful drug in my bloodstream. So I fished more than just crab, I fished for shrimp and halibut, become a bonafide floating predator, and eventually skippered my own small halibut boat.

Eventually I left Alaska, bound for my first attempt at college when commercial fishing took a big downturn because of resource depletion, and season wages fell to poverty levels. It was a doldrums that lasted a good many years for the crabbers of Alaska. I eventually got my education, but my heart always remained on the fishing boat deck.

Ultimately, the repetitive motion of coiling, handling pots and fighting a bucking deck probably KO'd the majority of my joints, cartilage and bone. And, this has made several orthopedic surgeons a few dollars off of my insurance, but I can still coil a line and you should see me tackle a mighty garden hose or the anchor line to Le Menagerie.

Three years ago, I had the opportunity to subcontract on a sixty five foot double-rigged shrimper up at Aransas Pass. The boat was specifically rigged to catch and relocate sea turtles as part of a US Army Corps of Engineers dredging project requirement. I accepted the job, though it was difficult to go offshore now that I had a family.

The captain and crew were Hispanic and it didn’t take long for Spanish to become my own dominant language, and I found myself comfortable speaking no English. Besides taking my turn on the deck, I took my turn in the galley cooking breakfasts of migas con huevo and making ceviche from freshly caught cobia. I developed an immediate friendship with all on board. Cliché, but true, there is kinship and commonality among all who go to sea, regardless of where you’re from, where you’ve sailed or fished.

As the on board biologist I quantified and identified bycatch- everything from sharks to starfish, and of course any seaturtles that might get hauled aboard in the specially modified shrimp nets. I worked in twelve hour shifts along with another biologist, which was reminiscent of other commercial fishing I had done, things like shrimp and halibut. I worked the night shift, which was even more reminiscent of my commercial fishing days, working under the glow of the sick yellow halogen deck lights. The only thing missing was the freezing spray and the pitching twenty foot seas. I didn’t miss that part. I even enjoyed handling the nets, pulling the lazy line and shooting the big trawls back into the inky depths. The job evoked a world of emotions and sensations long buried. Sleep was deep and restful against the hum of the diesel engine, the sound of deck machinery and the smell of the salt air. I remembered, for a vague instant another scene, passing through the Shelikof Straights as the sun sank over the western horizon, mountains turning from brown to gold in the last dying remnants of the day and asking the question among ourselves, as we lined the rail watching this passion play unfold, “Why would anyone want to work on the land?”.

The job though was prematurely cut short when the dredge sucked in a Kemps Ridely turtle, and was shut down. I returned home on a bus.

Today, I get my fix of the sea as often as possible aboard Le Menagerie, the drone of deck machinery and diesel replaced by the song of the wind in the sails and rigging, and the sound of the water slipping by the hull. Each time, my soul reaches back from the present and reconnects to something, probably much older than I am. And sometimes when we're out there, and the sun is setting, lighting up the water in the same way, I say a prayer for my friends from the sea, those who came back, and those who never did.