Captain Phil Harris

by Josh Harris

  Grant didn’t even need to be at sea to find trouble. Artist Mike Lavallee, a friend of Phil’s, noticed something strange about Grant one day in 2010 when he walked into Mike’s custom automotive airbrush studio in Snohomish, Washington. Grant’s shirt was twisted into a knot centered at chest level.

  “Grant, what’s going on with your shirt?” Mike wanted to know.

  “Well, I almost screwed myself today,” he replied.

  He meant it literally.

  Grant, who likes to do everything for himself, was attaching a shroud to his truck’s radiator. Although the protective guard was going to be in the front, he had to stretch his body out and drill a hole from the back end.

  Once the electric drill pierced the back side, it came shooting through to the front, emerged, and kept going right into the seventy-seven-year-old Grant.

  For an instant, he looked like a man committing suicide by plunging a sword into his midsection.

  Fortunately for Grant, the drill stopped just in time. The bit, having enveloped itself in his shirt, came to a halt as it touched the skin in front of his heart. He escaped with nothing worse than a scratch and yet another tale of dodging his demise.

  When Mike expressed amazement at how close he had come to sudden death, all Grant said was, “Yep, that’s kind of how it goes.”

  “The Bering Sea never got him,” said Mike, “but a drill almost did.”

  Three centuries separate Vitus Bering and Grant Harris, yet they share a common bond unbroken by time and technology. Both of them sailed the Bering Sea, accepted its frightful challenges, rode its deadly waves, and experienced moments of dread and exhilaration unequaled on any other body of water in the world. And both set a course for future generations. Soon to sail in Grant’s wake was Captain Phil Harris, to be followed by Josh and Jake.

  CHAPTER 2

  LEAST LIKELY TO SUCCEED

  “He tried harder than everybody else because he wanted to be accepted.”

  —Joe Wabey, Phil’s first captain

  Phil Harris had some close friends growing up: Jeff Sheets, Joe Duvey, and Mike Crockett were all constant companions. But there was also another group that Phil spent a lot of time with, though not necessarily by choice: the Bothell Police Department.

  When they heard an engine roaring through town at high speed, be it that of a motorcycle or a car, the name Phil Harris usually came to mind.

  Grant Harris tried to be a diligent father, but with his wife dead from cancer and his obligations as a carpenter, handyman, and part-time fisherman occupying much of his time, Phil had plenty of opportunities to run wild. And he was about as easy to handle as a bucking bronco.

  By the time he was in the seventh grade, Phil had a routine. He’d wait until his father left for work, then grab a couple of pillows, stuff them in the driver’s seat of the second family car, and hop in, the added height enabling him to see over the steering wheel.

  He didn’t get too far because the police also knew his routine. They would pull Phil over and drive him back to his house. Knowing there was no mother at home, the police would then call Grant and tell him, “You can’t have your kid out driving around.”

  Occasionally, if Grant wasn’t available, they would take Phil to the police station, where he ended up spending so much time he might as well have been the department mascot.

  When Phil turned fifteen, he moved out. He was the drummer in a band that also included Jeff and two other friends, and he decided that he and his fellow musicians needed an apartment where they could live, work on their songs, and entertain the ladies.

  Of course, Phil’s attendance at school became dismal. But whenever he missed a day, he would simply write a note to explain his absence. They were often long, rambling excuses. After a while, school officials didn’t believe a word Phil put down on paper, but what could they do? Since he was living with his friends, there was no adult to verify his claims.

  At the end of one semester, out of all his classmates, Phil was voted Least Likely to Succeed after being nominated for that category by a school counselor.

  Outwardly, he never seemed to care much about school, treating everything about it with apparent disdain. But deep down, being labeled Least Likely to Succeed cut to his core.

  It was a tag he never forgot, even long after he had succeeded beyond the greatest expectations of school officials and the wildest dreams of his classmates.

  • • •

  Where did Phil see himself going after high school? The fishing trips with his father as a youngster had certainly put ideas in his head about a career path. But it wasn’t Grant who convinced Phil that fishing was the way to his fortune. It was a classmate.

  While Phil was driving around in a beat-up ’59 Volkswagen, which he referred to as a “piece of crap,” the classmate pulled into the school parking lot every day in a new Chevelle SS.

  How did he get that sweet vehicle? His family owned three crab boats.

  Phil remembered hearing how a crab fisherman could walk into a bank and get a six-figure unsecured loan because it was assumed he was good for it. That got Phil’s attention.

  After graduating from high school at sixteen—school officials were no doubt glad to be rid of him—Phil got a job in the fishing industry.

  It wasn’t catching fish. He wasn’t old enough to convince anyone to hire him. But his stepbrother Pat Lamaroux, son of Grant’s third wife, Paula, got Phil a job at Pelican Seafoods in Pelican, Alaska, located on the Lisianski Inlet near Juneau.

  He worked there for a year, watching with envy as ships would come, unload, and head back out to sea. He desperately wanted to go with them. That was where the adventure and the money lay. But until he was older, all he could do was dream.

  In 1974, at the age of seventeen, Phil figured he was ready, but he realized his résumé was lacking a key element: experience. Phil had never been to sea except for those outings with his father as a kid. And that wasn’t going to impress anyone.

  Still, he was determined to quit Pelican Seafoods, where his job had turned into working as a roofer at the company facility.

  When the American Eagle crab boat pulled into port, Phil decided this was going to be his ship. Boats were often looking for a greenhorn, the term used for a raw beginner. The only problem was, thirty other guys also had their eyes on the American Eagle.

  How was Phil going to stand out? Very simple, he thought, after hearing his rivals discussing wages. He would work for free. Who could beat that deal?

  “He was this scraggly, long-haired kid, a skinny, unkempt rat,” said Joe Wabey, relief skipper on the American Eagle. “We weren’t even looking to hire anyone, but he was a persistent little prick. Phil hung around the ship and kept bugging us. He kept saying, ‘Can I go with you? I got to go with you guys. I don’t want to be a cannery worker. I fish. My dad is a fisherman.’ ”

  Seeing that the crew of the American Eagle was less than receptive, Phil played his hole card.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll go a whole entire year and you won’t have to pay me. I’ll go for free.”

  That got him some attention.

  Joe and the other three members of the crew huddled, then gave Phil the thumbs-up.

  “Sure,” said Joe, who must have looked like a grizzled veteran to Phil, even though Joe was all of twenty-three. “Come on, throw your shit on the boat.”

  Joe realized this could be a pretty good deal.

  “We figured, hell, this will ease our burden a little bit,” he later recalled. “We get some free labor out of this guy. And if it doesn’t work out, we’ll leave him on the beach at Dutch Harbor.”

  Phil was too elated about getting on a boat to think of the possibility of failure. He rushed to call his dad, anticipating that Grant would be proud.

  Worried was more like it. “You might have bit off more than you can chew,” Grant told his son. “You get sick on a little boat. And these guys are tough.”

  Phil also had hi
s doubts, but he hid them well.

  Those doubts faded when the boat reached Adak in the Aleutians and Phil found conditions that could not have been better. The sea was calm, the weather tolerable. He sat on a pot and chugged down a beer with a fellow crew member. Life was beautiful.

  But not for long.

  The next day, the winds started blowing—Phil figured they must have been swirling at 120 miles an hour—and the waves started rising.

  He was chopping up herring for bait when the water started pouring across the deck and those old feelings of seasickness overwhelmed him. Now he remembered why he had hated going out with his dad in the beginning.

  The greenhorn quickly turned green. Phil crouched on the deck, throwing up until his guts were sore.

  It was freezing and the waves kept pounding his body, but he could have put up with all that if only he wasn’t so sick.

  Pulling himself up, Phil staggered into the galley, where he threw himself across the dinner table and hung on, trying to ride out the waves as if he were on a wild amusement park ride that had to end sometime soon. The captain, Gary Bryant, came in, took one look at Phil, and mockingly told him that he had already predicted this greenhorn wasn’t going to make it.

  The beach at Dutch Harbor beckoned.

  But Phil wouldn’t have it. He was hearing “Least Likely to Succeed” all over again. The anger flared, the adrenaline flowed, and the resolve returned.

  Not going to make it, eh? We’ll see.

  With vomit and fish bait dripping from his saturated rain gear, he pulled his shaking body up, steadied his legs as best he could on the bobbing and weaving floor, managed to compose himself enough to give Bryant a defiant glare, and stumbled out into the face of the raging waves to resume his duties.

  From that moment of utter vulnerability and failure—spread out on that galley table, a portrait of defeat—Phil Harris, greenhorn, would eventually generate enough will, determination, and work ethic to turn himself into Phil Harris, the fearless captain of Deadliest Catch.

  But, of course, such a transformation was beyond his comprehension at that moment. All he wanted to do was figure out a way to get through the day. Or even the next hour.

  For seven days, try as he did to ignore the seasickness, the frigid weather, and the mountainous waves, Phil couldn’t push the thought out of his mind that he might well die, right there on the American Eagle.

  At first, he didn’t get much sympathy from the rest of the crew. They were just as cold, just as wet, and just as susceptible to the dangers of the job as he was, and they weren’t complaining.

  But beneath their gruff exteriors, crew members gradually felt some admiration for the wide-eyed, eager kid. “There was something likable about the guy,” said Joe. “You’ve got to admire somebody with that much persistence. He tried so hard that he was almost a nuisance. You’re working and you’ve got this little puppy dog following you around, two steps behind you.

  “He had a lot to learn and he was a slow learner, but we kept giving him opportunities. We broke him in right. Phil didn’t need bossing around because he was willing to work. If you told him to do something, he would do it.”

  And what the crew told Phil to do were the things nobody else wanted to do.

  “We gave him all the shit work,” said Joe. “His number-one job was to chop bait. He would sit there all day and do that, and never complain.”

  Nobody else complained about Phil, just as long as they didn’t have to share a bunk with him. He had a problem with personal hygiene, and while it’s not as if any of the other crew members looked as if they were going to the school prom, Phil was particularly grungy.

  “He was always dirty,” said Joe. “He never washed. He was filthy. I don’t even think he brushed his teeth.”

  His nickname became Dirt.

  That name stuck like the substance itself. Thirty years later, Joe would still greet Phil with, “Hey, Dirt.”

  Phil didn’t care what they called him on the American Eagle as long as they kept him on board.

  “His attitude was his greatest asset,” said Joe. “He was always fun, never down, even if he had his face in the dirt all day. He always kept everybody laughing.”

  But it wasn’t always easy for Phil to laugh along with them, because he was the number-one target of crewmembers’ pranks. That was a given, a rite of passage that must be endured by all greenhorns. But in Phil’s case, one prank went over the line, even for a crab boat.

  “The thing about practical jokes on a boat,” said Joe, “is that they tend to escalate. Each guy tries to outdo the next. With Phil, it ended up with us taking a live, forty-pound octopus and putting it in his bunk. We then covered it up with his blanket.”

  Even happy-go-lucky Phil didn’t laugh that one off. “That was the last straw,” Joe admitted, “because that octopus made a mess. After that, we decided that maybe the bunks should be sacred. Practical jokes were fine everywhere else, but you’ve got to have a place to sleep.”

  Phil knew that, for the foreseeable future, he would be stuck on the receiving end of every prank. Considering his status at that point, he didn’t dare go after any other crew member.

  “He knew he was on thin ice,” said Joe. “We could let him go in a heartbeat.”

  After a couple of months of watching Phil do the grunt work day after day and remembering he was doing this for nothing, crew members began to ease his burden.

  “You kind of felt bad for the guy,” Joe said. Bad enough that crew members began slipping Phil food known to settle the stomach and money out of their pockets. It was only walk-around money, a couple hundred bucks, but that all changed when one of the crew members got hurt. Needing a quick replacement and with no other options, they went to the only other person on board, the greenhorn.

  With the benefit of the harsh lessons he had learned over the previous few months, Phil proved ready for the promotion.

  By the time the season was over, he was a full-fledged crab fisherman, earning the same share of the revenue as everybody else, $120,000.

  • • •

  Putting $120,000 in the hands of any seventeen-year-old would be a questionable move. Putting it in the hands of a wild kid like Phil could have been downright disastrous.

  But when he came home to Bothell, his first thought wasn’t drugs and alcohol. That would come later. Phil’s first desire was for vindication. He just couldn’t shake that label that had been put on his head, “Least Likely to Succeed.”

  The female counselor who had nominated him for that embarrassing category lived in the neighborhood where Phil had grown up. Driving down the block, he saw a for-sale sign in front of her house. Asking price: $38,000.

  He deposited his $120,000 check in a nearby bank, then asked for $40,000 back in cash.

  Phil was told he could get a cashier’s check for that amount.

  Nope, he insisted, I want it in cash. In a paper bag.

  Soon, there was a knock on the door of the counselor’s home. When her husband answered it, Phil barged right past him, paper bag in hand, marched into the kitchen, and dumped the cash on the table.

  Amazed, the couple were also defiant. They told Phil to take his $40,000 and leave. They weren’t interested in selling the house to him.

  That was fine with Phil; he wasn’t really interested in buying it. He just wanted to show the counselor that he had succeeded after all.

  That moment of satisfaction, however, wasn’t enough to prevent a lifetime of insecurity. That label of derision stuck in his head until the day he died.

  In later years, Phil admitted that, despite all his success, he never felt he was equal to his rival captains, always believing he was an inferior fisherman, always the greenhorn, the seventeen-year-old on the American Eagle who was treated with such disdain. As a result, Phil decided that he had to be the hardest worker, the last one to head for port after all the other ships had set a course for home.

  • • •

  By the
following year, with Bryant gone and Joe promoted to captain, Phil was hired by the American Eagle to be part of a three-man crew. That should have been a boost to his ego.

  “When you a hire a guy, he has to be pretty exceptional,” said Joe, “because, with only three crew members on deck, you can’t have a bad guy. It just doesn’t work. There’s no cushion, no margin for putting up with a slacker. Efficiency is the key with three men. But I felt Phil could handle it because, by then, he had earned our respect.”

  Phil’s reputation as a competent fisherman grew in his second season aboard the American Eagle, but the respect he had gained was not unconditional as he learned the following season when he was given the responsibility of manning the wheelhouse at night while the rest of the crew slept.

  “When you start out on a boat,” Joe said, “you normally move up to higher and higher levels of duty. Putting a guy on wheel watch means moving him to the pinnacle of trust. You ease someone into it, starting him out when there is still daylight.”

  When Phil was promoted by Joe, it was back in the seventies when wheelhouses weren’t equipped with all the electronic backup systems built in today.

  “We didn’t have the watch alarms and the monitoring equipment,” Joe said. “You have to have a lot of trust in the guy you put up there, trust that he’s going to check the machinery when he’s supposed to, run the course properly, watch for traffic, and not run over buoys.”

  One night, after the American Eagle had left Dutch Harbor and was heading east through Unimak Pass, Joe put Phil, who had worked day watch, on his first night shift, a two- to three-hour session.

  “Everybody who is sleeping,” Joe said, “trusts you to do the right thing.”

  Interaction with foreign ships, some four hundred to five hundred feet long, the majority Japanese or Korean, began quickly after leaving port. While communication with those ships is relatively good these days, back then, there was little if any talk back and forth. Most of the operators of the foreign ships, unable to speak English, would simply ignore any transmission from a U.S. boat.