by Josh Harris
In those first few days on the job under those conditions, Josh made a decision. After this trip, I am out of here, he thought. This is insanity and I want no part of it ever again.
The thoughts were similar to those expressed by Phil so many years earlier on the American Eagle at the start of his shot at crab fishing. And much like his father, Josh reconsidered after surviving and being handed a large wad of cash for working less than three full days.
• • •
In the years Josh was out of his life, Phil still had to handle Jake, and that became increasingly difficult as his son grew older. The kid who didn’t speak much until turning five was, by the time he had become a teenager, looking for his own distinct voice. That wasn’t easy because he was always in competition with his older, more articulate, more aggressive brother, leaving little wiggle room for Jake to verbalize his feelings.
There were other ways to get attention, but they always seemed to backfire on Jake.
When he was sixteen, he took off without permission on Phil’s favorite Harley. For a couple of hours he ran the hell out of it, king of the road with the wind whipping across his face.
It was a euphoric journey until he tried to return the bike to the sanctuary of Phil’s garage. Pulling into the driveway, he lost his balance and crashed his father’s pride and joy on its side, damaging the handlebars.
Jake struggled to get the mammoth machine upright, but he just wasn’t big enough or strong enough. Frantically, he called a friend and, between the two of them, they got the motorcycle up and slid it into the garage. Now they just had to pray that Phil didn’t notice those not-quite-right handlebars.
Not a chance. That was Phil’s baby, and the next time he hopped on the seat, it took him about ten seconds to see what had happened and about five more seconds to figure out who the culprit was.
“I had to replace a lot of stuff on that bike,” Jake said, “and that shit’s expensive.”
After that, Jake was forbidden to drive any of Phil’s toys until eventually Phil relented and let his son use his fancy Chevy Silverado. Jake was cruising around Seattle in the truck when he decided to roll into a drive-through Starbucks. Determined to be extra careful with Phil’s vehicle, Jake pulled up a little farther out than normal from the takeout window.
The pert redhead on duty, noticing how Jake was keeping his distance, couldn’t resist teasing him.
“Is that truck too big for you?” she asked.
That was the wrong thing to say to Cool Hand Jake, who promptly replied, “Well, hell no,” slapped the gear into reverse and punched it.
The truck smacked into the railing, scratching up its bright, distinctive paint job.
Once again, the first question in Jake’s mind was: Can I hide this from the old man?
He shuddered at the probable answer.
The next day, Phil and Jake were driving another vehicle on a stretch of road in a heavily forested area outside Seattle. The sun was peeking out for one of its rare appearances, and Phil was doing what he loved most, telling a funny story.
Jake wasn’t reacting, sitting there silent as a mime, wondering how he was going to break the news of his latest accident.
“Why so depressed?” Phil asked. “You look like someone who crashed their father’s truck.”
Damn, got me again, thought Jake, giving his father that all-too-familiar hand-in-the-cookie-jar grin.
“I’ll get it fixed,” said Jake softly.
Phil almost literally hit the roof of the car. He had just been teasing his son, totally unaware of what Jake had done.
“You what?” Phil yelled. “You idiot!”
He eventually decided to just give the truck to Jake, who added a whole new paint job featuring gnarly skulls and flames. Jake still has that Silverado today, a treasured tie to his dad.
Jake may have driven his father into a rage at times, but he also made his dad proud by graduating from high school, and grateful for the crucial role he played in the house as a buffer between Phil and Teresa.
When Jake moved out, Phil was left alone with Teresa. All the birdhouses in the world wouldn’t be enough to make that situation work.
In 2003, ten years after they married, Phil divorced Teresa.
While nearly everybody else thinks that was the best thing for Phil, Cornelia Marie isn’t so sure.
“I really, seriously believe Phil loved Teresa,” said Cornelia. “I think they were alike. They had the same type of personality. Phil put a lot of effort into the relationship. He tried to make her happy any way he could. This is a man who would send his wife a dozen roses on their anniversary every year. He also did that every year for her birthday. He was always trying to please that woman, going the extra mile to try and make their marriage work. His passion for her really caught me off guard. To give that much effort, he must have truly loved her.
“The divorce was very hard on him. I believe it took two years off his life.”
Teresa’s life ended in 2011 when she died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three, the same age Phil had been when he passed away a year earlier.
“I didn’t even feel bad when Teresa died,” Josh said. “She was a mean-hearted lady, one of the meanest people I ever met.”
CHAPTER 10
DEADLIEST VOYAGES
Crab fishing is not a job, it’s a mentality. You can get past the physical pain. What we endure, you could train a monkey to do. It’s when you deal with your own demons, dwelling on them because you have all that time to think at sea, that’s when you crack up.
When I get panic attacks, and I’ve had my share, I try to think about home. But if I focus too much on stuff back on land, I might make a mistake and kill somebody. Or kill myself.
It can be really fucked-up out there. So why do I keep getting back on that boat? Because it’s the only thing I know how to do. You get addicted to the lifestyle. You earn fast money and then you come home, party your ass off, forget what you had to do to earn the money, then go back and do it all over again because you ran out of cash. You’ve got bills to pay and there’s no other way you can make money like that except perhaps dealing drugs.
For every full pot of crab we pull up, there are fifteen blank ones. On the show, fans see us bring in all that crab, but they don’t see how long it really takes to get it. People think we are out there for a couple of weeks. No, it’s more like nine months.
You work thirty-six hours and get four off. It’s not real good for your health, screws with your emotions, and you become coldhearted and arrogant. There’s no pain in the world like the pain you feel up there in the Bering Sea.
You never know what’s coming. You can go from calm conditions with a little overcast to, thirty-five minutes later, ninety-mile-an-hour winds and thirty-five-foot swells. You get slapped in the face by Mother Nature, your face freezes, and layers of your skin just start falling off.
People meet me and say I look a lot bigger on TV. It’s not my size they see on the screen. It’s the size of my job.
—Josh
In 1983, Phil was scheduled to leave on the Golden Viking in search of blue crab. While the boat was being loaded at the dock, Mary, on hand for her husband’s departure, experienced a weird vision unlike anything she had ever seen. The Golden Viking suddenly appeared to her as a black silhouette, no longer three-dimensional.
“It looked like a death ship,” Mary later recalled, still shuddering at the image.
She told Phil of her vision and begged him not to go.
“Why don’t you just say you want to spend another night with me,” he said, “instead of lying about it.”
He was grinning, but his wife had ignited an old fear. Phil was a product of a fishing culture that had adhered to superstitions for centuries. Considering the ever-present threats fishermen face, it’s not surprising that their desperate desire for a safe voyage causes them to latch on to anything that can give them hope, false though it might be. Historically, some sailors didn’t
believe in leaving port on the first Monday in April because that was thought to be the day Cain slew Abel. Friday departures were also verboten, as was the presence of bananas, priests, or flowers on board. Some seamen thought it was bad luck to encounter a redhead while heading for the boat or to allow their left foot to touch the deck first when they board the vessel.
After Mary spooked him, superstition kicked in, and Phil agreed to stay ashore.
The Golden Viking shoved off without him. And on the first day of September 1983, as it was fishing off the coast of St. Matthew Island in the middle of the Bering Sea, 220 miles west of the Alaskan shoreline, the Golden Viking capsized and sank nine miles south of the island. Rescuers aboard the fishing vessel Tiffany found four of the six crew members alive on a raft, suffering from hypothermia.
The missing two crew members, Michael McKee and Nick Moe, had drowned. Both were close to Phil. It was a tragic blow, and a tough reminder to the entire crab fleet of the treacherous aspect of their trade. Yet it wasn’t something the crabbers could allow themselves to dwell on. Not while fishing in the same waters. Not while there was still crab to be caught. As Phil later told his sons, “You can’t take it personally or it will drive you insane.”
Yet as Jake found himself asking after his first encounter with disaster at sea, how can you not take it personally when you see the bodies of dead fishermen floating right past you?
It was 2005, and Jake, just nineteen at the time, was on board the Cornelia Marie for his first opilio season. The grind of the arduous work was slowly searing into his worn muscles, but he was determined to shake off the pain and fatigue and, like his brother, show his dad he was worthy of the Harris name.
If hard labor and freezing temperatures were his biggest problems, Jake figured, there was nothing he couldn’t handle at sea. The ever-present danger and frightening nexus between life and death on a crab boat had not yet been impressed upon his mind. They soon would be.
January 15 dawned as just another endless day of crab fishing. The seabirds shrieked and the waves pounded incessantly at the boat, roaring with rage. But the howling wind sounded uncannily eerie to Jake on that day. A hot spasm ran through his body, surely a harbinger of trouble. He wiped the sudden burst of sweat from his brow before it froze into place, and returned to his task.
Just a few short hours later, the call came. The crab boat Big Valley was in distress. Phil punched the Cornelia Marie’s motors into full power and raced to the scene, his stomach churning as he rode over wave after wave, agonizing speed bumps impeding his dash to the disaster.
The sight that awaited the Cornelia Marie sent a chill down Jake’s spine.
“To me,” he recalled, “the Big Valley was the biggest boat I’d ever seen, so when I heard she might have gone down, I was almost in shock. Then we got there and I looked at the bodies in the water and I thought, Damn, dude, this is real shit going down out there.”
The Big Valley was a ninety-two-foot steel-hulled crab boat that sank in the Bering Sea while fishing for snow crab seventy miles west of St. Paul Island. Five of the six crew members—Captain Gary Edwards and deckhands Danny Vermeersch, Josias Luna, Carlos Rivera, and Aaron Marrs—perished. The sole survivor was thirty-year-old Cache Seel.
The Cornelia Marie was one of several Good Samaritan boats that responded to an alert by the U.S. Coast Guard, supplementing federal and state rescue boats, planes, and helicopters. There had been no opportunity for the Big Valley to send out a Mayday call, but its emergency location beacon was activated as it went down.
Seel, who was found alone on a raft by rescuers, was asleep when the crisis began. He awoke to find that, to his horror, the boat had turned on its side while he slept.
“I was dang near standing up in my bunk when I woke up,” he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
With rescuers on the scene and faced with the anguish of seeing the corpses of friends who had fallen victim to the Bering, Phil understood that, since he couldn’t do anything for the crew of the Big Valley, he needed to think about his own crew. What they required at that moment was the reassuring feeling of a routine day at sea.
“All right,” he yelled, “let’s get back to fuckin’ work.”
At first, Jake just went through the motions, numb as the deaths preyed on his psyche. Finally, he shrugged it off.
“You go back to fishing,” he said, “but you’re real damn careful, ’cause you know that shit can happen. I never really felt that way until I saw those dead fishermen.”
Four years earlier, Josh had seen his first fatality at sea, also on his first trip as a Cornelia Marie crew member. It was not as catastrophic as the loss of the Big Valley, but it was still a shocking tragedy. A deckhand aboard the Exito, thirty-six-year-old Scott Powell, lost his life when he was swept off the boat after it was hit by a forty-five-foot wave while engaged in crab fishing. The power of the onrushing water swung around a thousand-pound pot that was hanging on a crane and sent it barreling into Powell’s head, perhaps killing him even before he went over the side. Another deckhand received severe lacerations on his skull, and a third man suffered fractures to both arms when he was caught between colliding pots.
The force of the water not only knocked the entire wheelhouse back six inches but pulled the captain’s chair, bolted to the floor, out the back of the wheelhouse and sent the captain flying all the way to the stern of the boat, where he was able to grasp a railing to prevent being hurled overboard himself.
“That wave was so bad,” Josh remembered, “that it blew out all the windows, windows that could withstand a bullet fired from point-blank range.”
In Jake’s initial experience with death on the water, all the damage had been done by the time his boat arrived. But in Josh’s case, he was forced to see the terror unfold.
“That boat was right next to us,” he said. “We watched it all go down, but we couldn’t do a damn thing about it. We couldn’t turn around to help them because of the possibility that we would roll our own boat over.”
While the jaw-dropping fact that people could and did die all the time in their chosen profession was impressed upon both Josh and Jake by these unforgettable examples, their father had a long and ever-expanding log of such frightening memories accumulated over his years on the Bering Sea.
One of the most painful, Phil told his sons, was the loss of Mike Bosco, who died along with two others when the sixty-five-foot Bering Scout crab boat sank in 1981.
After losing his wife and infant child in a car accident, Mike had fallen into a depression so deep that it landed him on skid row.
He had, however, been plucked from there by a sympathetic boat owner who gave him a job as a deckhand. Mike worked for three years alongside Phil, found a new woman, got engaged, and asked Phil to be the best man at his wedding.
First, however, Mike decided to go on one short blue crab outing.
The fact that his dreams of finally finding marital happiness again ended before they began was tough enough for Phil. But what made it even worse for him was arriving on the scene, seeing the Bering Scout upside-down in the water, and knowing Mike was under there, perhaps still clinging to life, but also knowing there was no way to get to him. Phil carried that bitter memory with him until the day he died.
There was also the radio cry that Phil would never forget. Actually, it’s a cry that will never leave the minds of many captains, because the voice of impending doom went out to the entire fleet.
It came from the wheelhouse of a sinking boat. The vessel was on its side, and the only way out was through an empty window frame where the glass had been blown out. All of the crew members made it through that escape route except for the engineer, who was too big to squeeze through.
Unable to wedge himself out and seeing the boat slip lower and lower into the sea with water pouring in from everywhere, he screamed, “I’ve got a family. I’ve got kids. I’m going to die!”
Unfortunately, those were his last words.
&
nbsp; A deckhand on Phil’s boat was once swept overboard and never found. It was more than five minutes before anyone knew he was gone and, by then, all anyone could see was an empty sea in all directions.
Although Phil frequently looked out the wheelhouse window to make sure he knew where everyone was, and despite the fact the crewman had failed to heed Phil’s warning to never go out on deck alone, the captain was still left with the feeling that perhaps there was something more he could have done to save him.
“That’s a brutal feeling to live with because you think it’s your fault,” said Phil in the book Deadliest Catch: Desperate Hours. “I didn’t do anything wrong, but you can’t convince yourself of that at the time. All you know is that they are dead.”
It was a terrible burden to bear, but one Phil was eventually able to push out of his mind by reminding himself that, unfortunately, death was an inevitable part of his chosen profession.
“If I didn’t accept that,” he told Josh and Jake, “I couldn’t do this job.”
• • •
But not all of Phil’s harrowing stories had unhappy endings. There was, of course, the dramatic survival story involving his father, Grant, aboard the Golden Viking after it was hit by a massive wave, and Phil himself experienced a similar incident on the Cornelia Marie.
Having been in the wheelhouse for more than two days on a king crab trip, he was about to turn command over to his relief skipper, Tony Lara.
“It’s rough out there,” Phil was telling Tony. “You’ve got to watch out for waves like this one right here.”
The wave he had pointed to was big and it was close, getting closer by the second.
And then it was on them, popping open the wheelhouse window, allowing hundreds of gallons of water to pour in.