In late August, we tore down Bandit’s two 425-horsepower main Cummings engines, checked and adjusted the valves, and replaced filters. Each of the boat’s four engines—two main and two auxiliaries—has separate fuel lines and filters for safety. Our brother Neal, who operates the hydraulics on deck with the grace and precision of a puppeteer when we are fishing for crab, also serves as Time Bandit’s engineer. He is constantly belowdecks running his hands over the engines, listening to them, and feeling their pulse. They are the heart of the boat, and without them, we would be at even greater risk on the Bering Sea in winter.
As we do before each new season, we prepared for the worst that the Bering Sea can give. We repacked the life rafts, two Satellite 406 EPRIBs, life rings, and life jackets and checked the integrity and check-by dates of our $800 survival suits. We nearly obsess over these with good reason: The many stories of how these suits of 3mm-thick neoprene have saved countless lives in the Bering Sea justify our attention. We upgrade with newer suits every couple of years and last year only added new strobe lights to the ones we already had. Next, we restocked our first aid kits. The Coastal Pilot that tells mariners where boats can transit had to be updated with new locations of buoys and navigational lights.
We take fire at sea, and sometimes fires at the dock, seriously. Not even a hole in the hull can sink a boat faster than a fire. We take the extinguishers to Eagle Safety for inspection every year. We carry twenty-four of them—four in the engine room, one in each stateroom, one in the forepeak, and two in the wheelhouse.
Not long ago, a fire onboard Time Bandit underscored the value of working extinguishers. At the time a crewman came back from town drunk; he was smoking a cigarette in the stateroom, someone complained, and a fight started. The cigarette in his hand landed in a pile of clothes. A half hour after the fight—and by then the crew had returned to town—I smelled smoke. I opened the stateroom door and flames roared out. A fire extinguisher emptied on the flames saved the boat. After that, I asked the crew to stop smoking in their stateroom. Besides, Andy, who does not smoke, hates the smell.
Andy and I once saved the crew off the Princess Tamira, which had a fire off the Barren Islands on a flat calm day. The engine was sucking water with the rear lazarette flooded, and water was popping out the exhaust tube, but despite everything, the Tamira refused to go down. The captain came on our boat. He did not want the Tamira to beach herself on the shore of the Barren Islands. He wanted her to sink in deep water in order to realize the insurance money. Tamira was going down but at her own slow pace. Her captain had named the boat after his daughter, and he was yelling at the boat, “Sink, you son of a bitch! Sink! You are as stubborn as my daughter. Sink!” Only at the last minute, Tamira did what she was told, stern first.
Another time, we thought we had a fire; Andy and I were crewmen on a boat named Caprice. We went to sleep, and sometime later a crewman awoke us, screaming “Fire!” We did’t smell or see anything. The crewman ran to the wheelhouse, still yelling “Fire!” The captain pushed him aside to get downstairs with an extinguisher, yelling at us, “Where’s the fire?” The crewman would not stop yelling “Fire! Fire!” We had no idea what was going on. It was then that we realized in our panic that we had never seen him before. He was not part of Caprice’s crew. We asked him, “What fire?” He had no time to reply. He ran out on the deck. We followed him and watched him jump overboard. We assumed he was a nutcase, until we saw him race off in a Zodiac in the direction of a fishing boat that was lying about fifty yards off our starboard side, on fire. Its crew jumped into the sea in survival suits. We pulled them out, and together on the deck of Caprice, we watched their boat sink.
And there was a time when we were tied to the dock in Kodiak in front of the cannery. A purse seiner boat was moored with its stern nearly touching ours. Andy was conducting a fire drill on Time Bandit. In the middle of the drill one of our crewmen yelled “Fire!” I was looking around for smoke or flames.
“What fire?” I yelled back at him. I was freaking out. Black smoke rolled out of the purse seiner. We were not on fire. It was. We sprayed down their cabin with extinguishers. The flames spread. We needed saltwater, but the water was turned off on the dock. We ran a hose from the cannery instead and shoved it up the vent. About that time, we heard sirens in the distance. Trucks arrived, and an official in a white fireman’s hat came up to the boat and angrily kicked our hose. He told us we were idiots and sent his men down in the cabin with re-breathers. Minutes later, they came out; the chief put the hose back where we had placed it, and Andy and I were going like, “First responders, yeah!” making fun of him.
Andy and I were on Time Bandit one time at the dock in Homer when a fire erupted in the oven. It was spreading fast. I grabbed an extinguisher, aimed it at the oven, and pulled the trigger: nothing happened. Andy looked through the window from the dock and yelled to me, “PULL the F U C K I N G pin.” I thought I would burn to death. I was so excited I had forgotten to pull the safety pin. The third time he yelled, I heard him. I pulled the pin, and the extinguisher went Whooooosshh.
With as much time as we spend checking for safety, anyone would have reason to think that safety was always our first concern. But crab fishermen are famously independent. The truth be told, we resisted attempts at safety regulations that are compulsory in other industries. We did not want a faceless government telling us how to do our job. Our thinking was that if you could not figure out how to save your ass you should not go out there in the first place. In 1988, against our strident objections, Congress passed the first and only law aimed at improving the fishing industry’s safety record. The Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act mandated that boats carry life rafts, survival suits, and emergency beacons. But crab fishing on the Bering Sea remains the nation’s most dangerous occupation. Once the new safety measures were in place, we liked them. And then we began to rely on them. Now we will not go fishing for crab on the Bering Sea without them.
In the final preparation stage, the work can be tedious. Last year while Neal and I worked on the boat, Andy shouldered the hard, miserable tasks of completing forms and other paperwork that one government agency or another require. He filled out Economic Development Reports (EDRs) indicating exactly how much crab we had caught the previous year and how much fuel Time Bandit had consumed. He applied to register and license Time Bandit and signed up with a crabbing co-op and for our Individual Fishing Quotas (IFQs) with the State of Alaska. The bureaucratic requirements seem endless and often bewildering. And while the reasoning behind the paperwork seems sound to me—to bring order out of chaos—it also seems excessive to fishermen and boat captains. My brother is not an accountant. Five or ten years ago we sent money to the state for a plastic king crab permit card. We jumped on a boat and went fishing. Now Andy has to contact our attorney, our accountant, and our co-op manager and make sure they have our paperwork, and only then do we go fishing.
Finally, we reloaded the deck. We hoisted onboard bin boards, which prevent the crab from being crushed in the holds, and crab pots, spare buoys, lines, baradai hoods, cod triggers, extra shots of line, door rubbers for the pots, hooks, hoppers, sorting tables, new crane lines, and rigging.
Bering Sea crabbers conceivably could do away with every other item of fishing equipment except for the pots and, of course, the boat. The pots weigh around 780 pounds and though they range in size, ours measure 7’ x 8’ x 32”. Their frames are made of solid steel tubing covered with tough nylon webbing. Last year Time Bandit carried 137 pots on her deck. We moved them over to the Bandit on trailers from the cannery dock on the Spit and used our own crane to stack them. Then we rigged them. And finally, we repainted our numbers on the pot buoys and tagged each with the Alaska Fish & Game license authority.
Preparation, like what we do for Bandit, does not come cheap. A rebuilt main engine costs $60,000, and the Bandit has two. Swapping out the motor costs $110,000. A normal paint job costs $100,000, with the sand blasting at $40,000
and paint at $60,000. New fire extinguishers cost $350 each and $100 to service, and a ten-man raft costs $2,000 to repack, times two. New pots cost $750, and with line the cost rises to $1,000, plus shipping, which is another $200. Red king crab and opilio bait costs $50,000. Diesel fuel costs $2.60/gallon and the tanks hold 20,000 gallons—or $52,000 for fuel that lasts a month. We pay $10,000 for groceries. Travel and lodging comes off the top. Boat and crew insurance costs $45,000 a year, and before we started pooling with our co-op it was $90,000.
In short, Time Bandit needs to gross $1 million before my brothers and I start to make money. My salary is roughly $4,000/month plus a crew share that averages $100,000-plus as a boat share if any money is left over. Outsiders think we are rolling in cash. But we ask ourselves, “You know how a crab fisherman makes a million bucks? He starts with two million.”
Last, before leaving our base in Homer, we hire our crew. I do not take this process as seriously as I might, and Andy has to clean up my mistakes. That has earned him the nickname Axe Man. A crew properly chosen can make a fishing season. And we invest too much time, effort, and money in the season ahead to let deckhands determine our fate. We choose the best we can get. Unfortunately, the best at sea are not always the best on land. The crew who work best on deck are animals who should be dropped off at the sea buoys on the way to port; we could pick them up on the way out. They are only trouble on land and end up in fights and in jail. I want the animals. But I do not want to take care of them.
Not long ago, Bering Sea crewmen were a motley lot of lowlifes mixed with a few of the best guys in the world. The work appealed to drifters and misfits and men running from the law, wives, alimony and child support payments, debt, addictions, and themselves. They looked for work on crab boats for fast money. They sought a quick way to get ahead so that they could start their ruined lives anew. They had nothing whatsoever to lose. They fought with their fists and complained and whined about the food, the work, and the weather. Time Bandit hired a crewman once who, never having worked on the Bering Sea, lived in a state of perpetual terror in the short time he was on the water. He was useless. Another young man told me after only a day at sea that either I agreed to take him back to Dutch Harbor or he was going to jump overboard, which I pointed out to him would be suicide. He did not care. I took him back. And last year, an African from Sudan jumped overboard in a calm sea. He had shaved his whole body the night before as if he were preparing for some sort of suicide ceremony. His life vest was found over in Beaver Inlet on the beach. His body was never found; either he made it ashore on Unalaska Island, or he drowned or died of hypothermia.
Add seasickness to everything else and a first-time crewman’s work quickly turns to the worst misery. As a rule, we make even first-timers work through seasickness, which can strike down the biggest, strongest guy. I never know how a new crewman will work out until we are out in the middle of the Bering. One crewman of my choosing was seasick for three days. On the third day, with his pants wet and squishing in his boot, he told me, “I just filled my boot with pee.”
I thought, “Oh, God!” I knew that his incontinence meant that his body was shutting down.
I told him to lie down in my wheelhouse stateroom. The sea was rough, but I think he was seasick because his mind was telling him to be seasick. He would have been seasick on a pond. I gave him pills to ease the symptoms. I called the Coast Guard flight surgeon in Kodiak on single sideband for advice. He told me on the radio to give the man Saltines and grape and apple juice. “Get the food in him even if it comes back up,” he told me. He started peeing in his bed again. He came to the wheelhouse and told me, “I’m peeing orange foam.” I took him straight back to Dutch. It took thirty-six hours and in that time, his body was shutting down from severe dehydration. He could not eat or drink. His liver was failing. He was shaking and pissing and puking and shitting on the floor. That was the worst case of seasickness I ever saw.
If a crewman gets seasick, more than likely we are already a day and a half out at sea. If he does not drink for a day and a half, he is in trouble. He will be in critical condition by the time he gets back to port, unless I can convince the Coast Guard to get him. But he would have to be dead for that.
We do not hire crewmen who have not fished before. There is usually a reason why a guy needs a job, because he is a piece of shit; these are the guys who come out and say, “I’m the best and baddest ass you ever had.” I ask them, “Why don’t you already have a job if you are the best and baddest guy who ever was? Every boat should want you.”
My hiring techniques for crew often are left wanting. I will meet guys in bars who are looking for work. After a few shots of Crown Royal, I will offer them work. We throw back more shots. The new hire gets friendly. He thinks I am now his new best friend. He makes the mistake of gauging himself by me. I tell those guys, “Don’t hang around me or you’ll get fired.”
Firing is where Axe Man comes in. He has dismissed eight or ten of my hires over the last few years. Lately, some real ding-a-lings have come aboard thanks to me. Last year I hired one crewman in a bar. I told him to be at the dock the next morning at seven. He showed up five hours late.
Andy asked him, “What are you doing here?”
He said, “Showing up for work.” It was noon. “I was drunk with your brother.”
Andy told him, “Yeah, but my brother was here working at seven.”
He said, “Well, he won’t fire me.”
Andy said, “He already did, dude.”
One guy I hired was arrested and thrown in jail on an outstanding felony warrant before he reached the boat. He was wanted for spousal abuse. The court had ordered him to stay no fewer than 150 feet away from his erstwhile girlfriend. The judge who had granted him bail told him, “I want to remind you what you did to this lady,” and showed him photographs of a woman with raccoon eyes and a swollen face with deep purple bruises. The judge was pissed off. The guy defended himself, arguing that he and this girlfriend had been drunk and were fighting as usual. But he should have known that there is no excuse for hitting a chick.
We paid his bail and while we were driving back to the dock, he tried to explain his felony to me, and I told him to just shut up. Onboard, to keep him in mind of what he had done to his girlfriend, I put stickers on the corkboard, “No excuse for abuse.” We gave him a hard time. While we were offloading our holds at the processor, he called his girlfriend, the same one he had beaten up and the judge had ordered him not to contact. We went out again for opilio, and he drank a bottle of booze and was shit-house drunk while working the deck, which is dangerous to do sober. I told him to throw the hook, and he fell over. I ordered him to move away from the rail, and he fell on his ass a second time. I told him to stay in his stateroom until he was sober, and he started to have seizures. He pissed himself and was shaking and doing the fish flop on the bed. I asked him what was wrong, and he said he had epilepsy—a “mild case,” he added.
I said, “Trust me. It’s not that mild. Where are your pills?”
He said, “I don’t have any.”
I pointed out that we were 350 miles from Dutch Harbor. He told me how his epilepsy came about. He was snorting cocaine with some guy in port when the guy shot him in the mouth with a .22 and the bullet lodged in his spine. The surgeons could not remove the bullet without killing him. The Axe Man told him, “You are GONE.”
Some crewmen remind me of Homer Simpson repeating the same dumb behavior over and over again. Once on Time Bandit I told a crewman to change the air filter on one of our auxiliary engines. While he was down in the engine room, he thought he would put his hand over the turbo, which sucked his hand down its throat and chopped off the middle finger of his right hand. He came up to the wheelhouse dripping blood and said, “Dude, I cut my finger off.” The turbo had shot his finger through the engine and out again. I put the finger part in a Baggie and stored it in the cold-cuts drawer of the fridge. When we reached Cold Bay late at night, before leaving th
e boat for the hospital, I put a hot dog in a Baggie. I told the guy, “Here’s your finger. Now don’t lose your finger.” I had his finger in my pocket. At the hospital, he rolled out the Baggie.
He asked, “Doc, can you put this back on?” He was feeling sorry for himself.
The doctor said, “I don’t know. This looks like a hot dog.”
Andy and I went back to the boat. The finger was way past reattaching and the doctor pitched it, along with the wiener, in the garbage. The crewman got shit-house drunk and told the doctor to fuck off and never went in again for treatment. We went out fishing. On the seventh day, another crewman who had given Hot Dog Finger a hard time for chopping off his finger in the turbo chopped the same finger off his hand in the bait chopper. We had to take him back to the same doctor. She went, “You made him stay out for seven days with no finger?”
I said, “No, this is a second guy.”
She did not understand.
We have a crewman, on and off, named Eddie, whom we call Pineapple Head, because he is Hawaiian. One year Eddie broke his ankle while we were all out fishing the Bering. He said it hurt but “pain didn’t bother” him. After a week or so went by I took him to the clinic in Dutch Harbor, where the doctor put his leg in a plaster cast. That night Eddie was feeling constrained. And his leg itched. He slammed down several drinks. Slowly at first, he tore off the cast with his hands. And he scratched his leg with a sigh. Leaving the shards behind, when he got up to leave the bar he was weaving, either from the booze or the absent cast. At the time, no one thought to ask him which.
Some crewmen can be rough and difficult to deal with, and the captain must respond to insubordination with severe measures, like fists and guns. I keep an AK-47 aboard and zip-ties and 200-mph tape to restrain them. In one sense crabbing on the Bering Sea today is no different from when Captain Bligh ran the HMS Bounty. The captain must keep absolute authority over the crew. On Time Bandit, Andy and I are co-captains, which does not mean that we perform as captains at the same time. He is master of the boat in opilio season, and I take command when we fish for red king crab. Only one of us at a time has ultimate authority, which we never question between ourselves. The captain must be prepared to whip a crewman’s ass or even his brother’s ass when words fail to stop him.
Time Bandit: Two Brothers, the Bering Sea, and One of the World's Deadliest Jobs Page 3