by Chris Riley
And then it dawned on me: where was Danny?
“Danny!” I hollered. No one seemed to hear me, my voice drowned out by the cacophony of smashing steel, crashing waves, and howling wind. “Where’s Danny!?” I repeated.
For a brief moment, the pot wedged itself between the portside rail and main-stack. It was a moment of tense hesitation, allowing just enough time for Salazar to take some slack out of the picking crane’s cable. I saw Loni at Salazar’s side, holding him steady, keeping the deck boss from falling down once again. I still couldn’t find Danny, and I continued to scream out for him.
All eyes scanned the area, and then panic set in. Man overboard? I was about to call it out, fearing that my friend had been swept away by that forty-footer, but then the pot broke loose from the rail, swinging again. I had to get down.
I ducked, and the cage missed my head again—another disturbing attempt at bashing it in. And that’s exactly how it felt at that moment—like that crab pot had a mind of its own, was hell-bent on taking one of us out. Fear told me that it already had, that it had knocked Danny clean into the raging waters of the Gulf, and now that steel menace wanted more.
Once the pot cleared the deck again, I stood and looked out into the waters surrounding our boat, hoping and praying not to see a man in yellow raingear bobbing in the sea. I was terrified, for myself and the entire crew. For Danny, not knowing where he was, fearing he was somewhere down there in the deep. I was terrified by the sheer tenacity of the force that had so rapidly taken control of our lives—all in a matter of seconds. The uncertainty was staggering. It seemed the villainous seas of Alaska were wantonly toying with our lives. I loathed everything about being a crabber just then. I felt cold, sick to my stomach. I felt helpless, and errant in my own way.
“Man overboard!” I finally shouted. “Man overboard!” I repeated, and Fred signaled the alarm—a siren that blasted from stem to stern in the riotous night. Everyone moved so fast, all hands on deck, all eyes blinking over the rails. Suddenly, just like that, Danny stood up from the center of the deck.
Danny had been covered by two feet of water, hidden in plain sight. My friend looked at me with a dumb smile only he could have pulled off. No big deal, it’s only water. Those might have been Danny’s thoughts at that moment, and I might have laughed right along with him, but we were hardly in the clear.
“Get down!” This time we all screamed. The rogue crab pot crashed toward him. The pot moved in slow motion, yet too quickly for me to do anything. I was simply too far away to help Danny. He was on his own. The rest of us could only offer our high-pitched warnings.
Danny locked eyes with the incoming pot as if mesmerized. My friend seemed incapable of movement. He was about to get slammed over the portside rail and into an icy graveyard—gone forever.
But Danny surprised us all. Moving like a linebacker, he stepped to his left and the pot brushed past him. Amazingly, he was clear. Relief washed over my shoulders and down my back. My friend had escaped certain death.
Gesturing with my hands, I shouted, “Get off the deck, Danny!” He was three steps away from safety, which would put him next to Loni and Salazar. Yet to my horror, he did something shocking. Still crashing out of control, the crab pot had swung to the starboard side, when Danny reached out and … grabbed it.
I’d never doubted Danny’s physical strength. Most certainly, he was the strongest person I had ever known.
But Danny was no match for that wild pot, swinging from the sway and list of our fully loaded vessel in the angry Alaskan sea. Danny was no match for the tantrums of Mother Nature.
“What the hell!” Dave bellowed, running along the rail, barely escaping the path of Danny and the pot, as both went sailing out over the rail and above the water.
I rubbed my knuckles into my eyes. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Here was my friend, hanging on to that pot by his fingers, legs dangling inches above the icy sea, all that strength and stamina now put to the ultimate test. If Danny lost his grip now, he’d be a goner.
“Get him over here!” Our captain was frantic, jumping down the steps near the wheelhouse. Instantly soaked from the heavy rain, Fred shouted repeatedly, waving his arms to get Danny and the pot back over the rail.
“Hold on, Danny!” I screamed, looking around for the gaffing hook, or anything to grab him in case he went into the water. Loni lunged over and grabbed the life ring near the cabin door. Salazar worked the hydros frantically, to no avail. Over the rail and above the sea, Danny and the pot hung like some freakish maritime gibbet. Nothing seemed to be happening, and the entire situation stayed on “pause.” The Angie Piper leaned far to her starboard side, caught in the trench of the roaring waves.
“Hydros aren’t working!” Salazar shouted. “They’re stuck. Must be a leak!”
“What are you saying?” Fred didn’t wait for an answer. He ran back up to the wheelhouse.
“Hang on, Danny, just hang on!” Dave shouted, standing at the rail, reaching for his leg. “The captain’s gonna steer you toward us.”
Dave knew exactly what was going on. Somewhere in the hydraulic system that ran the picking crane and launching table, there was a sudden leak that had caused a loss of pressure. Until fixed, that pot, along with Danny, would stay as they were—ten feet from the safety of the deck. The timing of the leak couldn’t have been worse, and in order to get Danny back, the captain was going to have to steer the Angie Piper a hard left, portside, allowing gravity to bring Danny and the pot closer to us. It was a desperate measure, to say the least, but it was also our only hope to save my friend.
“Hold on tight, Danny-boy!” Loni wedged himself between the rail and the main-stack, the aft-most point of the boat accessible. He had a life ring ready to throw, and his eyes squinted against the barrage of wind and rain. If Danny fell, his body would travel toward Loni, and there would be less than one second to grab that life ring before Danny got sucked down into the engine prop.
“Keep your legs up!” Dave shouted. “Grab on with your heels if you can!” Finding the gaffing hook, I ran up next to Dave and reached out, attempting to grab the pot. “Just hold her steady!” Dave advised. Salazar cursed from behind us, still working at the controls, trying to get the pot moving. Still, nothing happened. We were at the mercy of the infuriating sea, Fred’s ability to get our boat to turn quickly, and Danny’s extraordinary strength and endurance. How long could my friend hold on?
The Angie Piper rode high, cutting into the top of another enormous wave, and we all knew what was coming next: the fall. It was the descent of our boat into the trough, or valley of the waves, and it might actually be our chance to get Danny back on board. Splitting seconds, Fred cranked a hard left and we lunged down between two fifty-foot monstrous walls of water, effectively swinging the errant pot back over the rail.
I threw the gaffing hook to the side and grabbed Danny’s waist. Dave had him by the legs. Together we pulled him down onto the deck. In mere seconds, it was over. We had saved Danny from certain death. I sent forth a silent prayer, thanking God.
Inexplicably, I was convulsed with laughter just then, and so were Danny and Loni. The three of us sat for a minute, midship, hugging and laughing hysterically. Even Dave seemed relieved as he looked at Danny. “You okay?” he asked.
Danny nodded in reply, and then gave his most pathetic “Hooyah” ever, which made Loni and me laugh even more.
But the humor was short-lived, as Dave broke into a rant. “That was pretty fucking dumb, you know that? You could’ve gotten yourself killed, Danny. Or one of us, for that matter.”
Dave stood and walked over to Salazar. Back to business as usual, but who was I to complain? Most certainly, Dave had been instrumental in saving Danny’s life—an action I would never forget. And for the briefest of moments, I no longer saw Dave as malevolent.
I looked up and saw the captain leaning outside the wheelhouse door. His face was ghostly white, but
I thought I spotted a small grin hidden under his beard. Dodging back inside, he slammed the door against the storm and calmly said over the loudspeaker, “Cut her loose, boys. Then get the hell inside already!”
With that, Dave pulled out a pocket knife and sliced rope, sending the dangling crab pot, that menacing beast that started it all, straight to the bottom of the ocean. Business as usual.
Chapter 17
Shipping in the Gulf is considered the most dangerous job in the world. How we all managed to escape those fast, short minutes of peril without injury or death is still beyond me. Certainly, a combination of skill, luck, and lots of quick thinking. But aside from the components that allow a man to survive from one season to the next, year after year, in the end, it all comes down to fate. When it’s your time to go, then it’s your time.
I know that that might sound like a shallow statement, but it’s about the only thing a deckhand can hang their raingear onto when they’re dead tired, cold, and wet, and simply done for the day. That’s how I felt, and how we all looked once we came in from the storm and actually did hang up our raingear. No one said a word for at least fifteen minutes. I suppose each of us had to process the ugly ordeal we had just survived: a massive wave pounding over the deck, a cage of steel swinging madly for us, Danny hanging on for dear life over the water. It was all too much, and that’s not counting the fact that we had been working gear for over twenty-four hours without sleep. As for those last ten pots of the string, I don’t think any of us would have complained if they just went straight to hell.
But it wasn’t like we had a choice in the matter. With the hydraulic controls now shot, we couldn’t retrieve those pots even if we wanted to.
“Captain says we’re gonna ride the storm, wait till it breaks,” Salazar mumbled, coming down from the wheelhouse. He still had his raingear on, and his body was shivering intensely, making him slur his words. Salazar sounded pretty much like Danny. But he moved quickly and his demeanor was serious. He slid his beanpole frame out of his wet clothes, and then flung water off his hands. Face drawn into a rigid scowl, he fished his pockets for a pack of cigarettes, found them, spirited one out, then lit it with a lighter he produced out of thin air. “And next chance you get, find that leak, Dave,” Salazar said, glaring through a vague sheet of smoke. “We’re shit out of luck otherwise.”
The hydraulic controls were the backbone of our entire operation. If the leak was too difficult to access, or too big to patch, we would be forced to head back to Kodiak for repairs. Even though this would give us time to offload our current catch of crab while in port—a rather thin silver lining, if there was one—the opportunity lost from fishing would cost us thousands of dollars. As it was, our crab tanks were only half full, and the captain wanted to drop all our gear onto a spot that had so far yielded the biggest and cleanest numbers of crab. If his hunch were correct, we would fill our boat in less than two days. That notion appealed to all of us, except for Danny perhaps, who up until a few minutes ago had seemed indifferent on the matter.
For all intents and purposes, Danny appeared to love his job as greenhorn. Even though he still couldn’t do the more complicated or dangerous jobs, such as chaining down the gear, he had become a master at all the annoying tasks no one else wanted to do. Making bait setups and clipping them into the pots before launching now seemed trivial for him. Danny had also mastered the routine of preparing gear dialed in, never missing the opportunity to bring pot lines and buoys over to the launcher. When the time came for sorting the crab, I had long since stopped advising Danny. I’d grown comfortable with his skill at measuring clean crab and spotting the “dirty” ones, and his speed with clearing the table in time for subsequent pots was quick enough. But the best thing about Danny Wilson was the fact that he never once complained … about anything. He never griped over working long hours or moaned about the incessant wear and tear on his body. He never bitched about working with anyone, either. Although Danny only had a few jobs on deck, he was as relentless as a bull shark when it came to getting those jobs done. He stayed on top of them, oblivious to who he was or what others thought of him, and he never once let his inabilities get the better of him. Danny damn near made the rest of us complainers feel as worthless as an empty crab pot.
That said, I wondered how Danny felt after almost losing his life.
Presently, he sat next to me. Shivering on a stack of buoys and coiled rope, he struggled with his rain boots. He was shaking worse than Salazar. I worried that maybe he had been dipped into the ocean after all, while hanging onto that pot.
“Did you go in?” I asked. Danny gave me a blank stare. “Did you get dipped in the water?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I did.” Reaching down, Danny pulled off his other boot, tipped it, and then chuckled as a stream of water fell to the ground. “Wow. I’m really cold, Ed.”
“I can see that, buddy. Let’s get you into some warm clothes and into the rack.”
Dave, the only one of us still wearing his raingear, stepped up next to me. “He never went in,” he said, flipping the switch to a flashlight, “but he’s still soaked. Get him into the rack before he gets too cold. And get him some coffee … or something hot.” He left us then, headed back out onto the deck, but I thought I heard him mumble, “And keep him there,” before slamming the door.
The rest of us headed to our staterooms for dry clothes. Outside, the wind howled ferociously, like two lions battling to the death. Wave after wave slammed into our vessel, rocking us side to side, up and down, as if we were nothing at all, just some errant piece of driftwood. That thought dawned on me, as I struggled just to get down the hall. Compared to the mighty ocean, the Angie Piper really was nothing. I also thought about the guts it took for a captain to sail a boat against Mother Nature. As Fred had told me earlier, it took an unlimited amount of courage and an unwavering spirit. It took a blind attitude, with perhaps a sprinkle of insanity. Once more, I questioned my aspirations of owning a boat some day. Who am I kidding? I thought to myself.
For all his ugliness, Dave captured everyone’s respect on that night. Like the captain, he apparently did not fear certain things. Minutes after helping to save Danny’s life, there he went, alone on deck with a flashlight, attempting to diagnose our problem with the hydraulic system.
“Man, we gonna be in bad shape if Dave can’t fix that leak,” Loni said, guzzling hot coffee.
“He’ll fix it,” replied Salazar.
“We don’t know that for sure, do we?” I asked, looking at Salazar. “What if it’s a big-ass leak, or a crack in the line? What if it’s a couple of leaks, for that matter?” Salazar didn’t reply. He sat in the galley booth, sipping coffee, his face impassive as ever. None of us could possibly know how bad our situation was with the hydraulic system. Yet Salazar seemed to have faith in Dave’s ability as an engineer.
We were in dry clothes now, in the galley, warming up before returning to our staterooms for an indeterminable amount of sleep. Coffee in one hand, donut in the other, I considered the unique talents of a ship’s engineer. I had known several other deckhands who had run with that title, and in a way, they were all similar to Dave. After talking to them, I came to the conclusion that many engineers had little formal training in their craft, and that they simply acquired their knowledge while satisfying their own natural curiosities. They were the “tinkerers” of this world, quick to take apart radios, drive shafts, and computers, just to see how these things worked. And in the course of these explorations, more questions arose. Nevertheless, as these men picked and pried into the labyrinths of mechanical and electrical constructs, riddles were ultimately solved, encouraging childish laughter and magnanimous comments such as, “I’ll be damned!”
The storm was rough. So rough that it made the act of “sitting” in the galley booth difficult. Wave after punishing wave had each of us gripping a corner of the table. More than once, I thought I might be sick. I pictured Dave out on deck, the wind blasti
ng through his raingear, the pitch of night surrounding him like mountainous, slavering jaws, circling swells of murderous ice water, a single-beam flashlight in hand, peering under slick floorboards into the gritty blackness of the Angie Piper for a single, small leak. That he expected to find anything seemed absurd. Absently, I gazed into my coffee cup, realizing just why Salazar had so much faith in Dave’s ability to diagnose our problem. To find that leak.
“Maybe one of us should go check on him,” I said. But just as I said this, we heard the metallic creak of the outside door opening, followed by a howl of wind so fierce, it sent shivers down my spine. “Never mind,” I added.
Seconds later, Dave shuffled into the galley. His raingear was off, and his clothes were a sodden mess. He left behind large puddles as he made his way to the fridge. The rest of us looked at each other as if trying to determine who would be given the task of asking that dreaded question: so what’s the status?
“Well … did you find it?” Salazar finally asked.
We all looked on, the suspenseful moment hanging dead in the air, while Dave casually explored the contents of the refrigerator. He moved containers to the side then back again, as if deciding what to select. Settling for his usual can of Mountain Dew, he popped the lid and then turned to face us.
“Yeah, I found it,” Dave replied, before he kicked back all twelve ounces of the soda. The way he leaned his weight against the counter and guzzled that drink evoked a vision of Dave in his own house, slamming his twelfth beer of the night, his wife and kids tiptoeing down the hall.
“And …?” Salazar asked.
“It’s fixable.” That’s all Dave said before grabbing another can from the fridge and leaving the room. Fixable by whom? I wondered. The mechanics in Kodiak? But such was not the case, and I think we all knew it. Everyone seemed to sigh with relief, the tension in that room melting like grease in a hot skillet. I thought about Dave, the obscurity of his past and the complexities of his personality. The range of his talents. Some things, he made look so easy. Things that no average person could come close to accomplishing. And this baffled me. How—or what—had gone into the making of that man?