Time Bandit

by Andy Hillstrand

  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 funct
ions 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.

  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.

  After 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 de
ck 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.