by Josh Harris
But with Phil, it seemed, there was always another side. Lynn might not have thought of him as being so warm and protecting if she had known it was no accident that the bear was prowling around. Ever mischievous, Phil deliberately left fish outside in order to lure bears so he could watch them strut and growl.
While his neighbors respected Phil’s privacy, snooping fans were not as considerate. They would drive through the park and pause at the famous fifth wheel, trying to get a glimpse over the hedge of the captain in his natural habitat, like tourists on a Hollywood tour of the homes of the stars. One overzealous fan pounded on Phil’s door at six in the morning, demanding to shake his hand. What he got instead was a shaking fist.
Phil’s invited guests got a lot more. In case they decided to spend a few days with him, he installed another massive fifth wheel on his next-door lot.
• • •
By 2008, at the peak of his fame at fifty-one, Phil finally seemed at peace with himself, whether in Lake Connor or still reigning as the master of the Bering Sea.
But while he appeared to be sailing on calm waters, inside him a storm was brewing, fueled by decades of self-destructive behavior.
When it came to the surface, it didn’t seem that serious at first. Phil had been experiencing aches in his legs for a while due to a minor design flaw in the Cornelia Marie. The configuration of the wheelhouse makes it difficult for the man in control to stand up. His knees would be pinned between the bolted-down chair and the control panel. Sitting is much easier, but over a prolonged period it can be hard on the legs.
What might have been nothing more than an irritating inconvenience for someone else soon grew into a potentially deadly situation for Phil, worse than any wave he ever faced. He developed blood clots in his knees from sitting in that chair day after day, month after month, year after year.
Of course, it didn’t help that, while he was sitting there, he puffed away on pack after pack of cigarettes. Phil could go through five packs a day. His record was eight.
Add the drug addiction, alcoholism, and a lifetime of eating junk food, and it’s hardly surprising that his body wore out prematurely.
The blood clots spread to Phil’s lungs, causing a pulmonary embolism.
He was at sea when he was stricken. When he began coughing up blood, he refused to head to land for treatment. He tried to rationalize his condition by insisting he was merely suffering the aftereffects of a rib cage injury he had suffered a few days earlier when a powerful wave had banged him into the side of the wheelhouse. It was going to take more than a little blood to blur Phil’s tough-guy image.
But soon, there was more than just a little blood. Red was becoming the dominant color on both his chin and his blue shirt. His breathing sounded more and more labored.
But Phil’s first concern remained the Cornelia Marie.
“My dad always put the boat first before his own health,” Josh said.
Finally, Phil conceded this could be far more serious than any of the countless injuries, including many broken bones, he’d suffered over the years.
This was a man who was once in extreme pain from an abscessed tooth while in Dutch Harbor. With no dentist within eight hundred miles, Phil ordered an emergency medical technician to remove the tooth with a pair of pliers, a claw hammer, and a chisel without the benefit of anesthesia.
Grudgingly, he had to admit that this time he was in need of more than a pair of pliers. He agreed to cut short the trip, no small concession for Phil, and head for St. Paul Island, largest of the four Pribilof Islands, located north of the Aleutians. From there, he was flown to Anchorage, 775 miles away.
It didn’t take extensive tests for doctors in Anchorage to realize this was a man in serious need of a stress-free environment, a healthy lifestyle, rest, and exercise. They wanted to take away two of Phil’s greatest joys, fishing and cigarettes. He was grounded indefinitely and told to quit smoking.
He tentatively agreed to go home to Seattle to recuperate, but give up smoking? No way.
Phil wasn’t about to give up his more serious vices either, as Mary was to discover when she came to visit him on his first night back in the fifth wheel at Lake Connor. She stayed over, waking him every hour because he was still coughing up blood and she wanted to make sure it didn’t seep into his lungs.
When Mary came in to check on him one time, she caught him doing coke.
“Damn you!” she yelled. “What’s wrong with you?”
Phil had alarming health issues, and he paired them with an equally alarming tendency to deny reality.
“He never took care of himself,” Mary said.
Nevertheless, being off the boat at least removed the stress of his job. It was absolutely what Phil needed at that point in his life. It just wasn’t what his heart and soul demanded. He was Captain Phil Harris, and crab fishing had defined him long before fame had come his way.
Phil may have been the star attraction on Deadliest Catch, but nobody connected with the show was rooting for him to return anytime soon.
“He wasn’t well and we were really concerned,” said Thom Beers, the show’s executive producer. “Concerned about him, not the show. We loved it when the doctor told Phil he had to stand down. It was amazing that the guy had even lived through that first attack.”
Phil later admitted to his friend Mike Crockett that even he was surprised that he’d survived.
“He smoked more cigarettes in a day,” said Phil’s father, Grant, “than most people did in a month. And he did it day after day.”
Though he knew the futility of trying to change his son, Grant tried.
“How much longer do you think you can do this?” Grant would ask him. Grant already knew the answer, and it scared him.
Phil’s friends also appealed to him.
“Phil knew that he needed to cut down on his smoking, but it wasn’t going to happen,” said custom design artist Mike Lavallee. “I told him, ‘You’ve got to be careful. You need to ease off on all this stuff you’re taking. It almost killed you this time. You dodged a bullet.’ ”
Phil would growl, “I know, I know.”
It was his standard response, a way to placate friends, but nothing more.
Because his shop was inundated with paint fumes from floor to ceiling, Lavallee prohibited smoking on the premises, but he made an exception for Phil.
“Whenever he left here,” Lavallee said, “it was like the place was on fire.”
When Phil was nervous, he would light up three or four cigarettes and keep them all going at the same time, a nicotine juggler.
It wasn’t hard to spot the remains of Phil Harris’s cigarettes: they had distinctive marks on them because he didn’t like dangling a cigarette from his lips. Instead, he kept it firmly gripped in his teeth. If Phil didn’t finish his smoke, he would offer it to his friends. But after they saw the trademark punctures down each side, Phil got no takers.
“I remember one of the last nights I was with him,” said his friend Jeff Sheets. “We went to the Tulalip Casino. Phil was really nervous that night. His leg was jiggling a hundred miles an hour and he was chomping down on a cigarette. That’s how he coped with things.”
Nowhere more so than in his wheelhouse. Phil would get in there, kick off his shoes, put on his flip-flops, make sure the windows were tightly shut, turn up the heat, crank up the music, and light up his cigarette.
His lair was nicknamed the “cigarette sauna” by Deadliest Catch producer Jeff Conroy. It would be eighty-five degrees in there with no ventilation, the cigarette smoke sometimes so thick the wheelhouse looked like a London street on a foggy morning.
• • •
While removing him from the cigarette sauna certainly figured to improve Phil’s health, removing the key items in his diet would have been just as beneficial. His favorite foods were jumbo hot dogs, pizzas, and barbecued pork. He loved greasy food, the greasier the better, and washed down most meals with sodas or a cold brew.
&nb
sp; “He had the worst diet ever,” said Tony Lara, relief skipper/engineer on the Cornelia Marie. “And he never really reflected on the effect it might have on him.
“Maybe that changed when he got sick. But before that, it was high speed all the time, balls to the walls.”
Phil’s time on hiatus was a period of great frustration, and reminders of his new limitations often caused that frustration to boil over. One such moment came on a trip Phil and Russ took to Las Vegas for an appearance by Phil at a motocross race. As they were driving down the Vegas Strip, Phil got a call informing him that Sig had been selected to be the 2008 grand marshal of the Seattle Seafair.
Along with the designation came the opportunity to ride with the Blue Angels, the Navy and Marine flying acrobats.
Being Seafair grand marshal was a big honor to those living in the Northwest. Others selected have included Seattle Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren and quarterback Warren Moon, speedskater Apolo Ohno, a Seattle native, and comedian Drew Carey.
But what bothered Phil the most was that Sig was getting into a Blue Angels cockpit ahead of him. Phil loved to push the boundaries, whether it was roaring through the Bering Sea or down a Bothell highway. To him, the Blue Angels offered the ultimate thrill ride, a trip to the outer limits.
“Get me on the Blue Angels,” he had been telling Russ for a while, “before anybody else.”
As Phil hung up his phone in the car, he let out a loud “F-u-u-u-ck.”
“The more guttural it was,” said Russ, remembering his friend’s speech pattern, “and the longer he sustained the vowels, the angrier he was.”
Looking over at his fuming companion, Russ asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Fucking Sig,” said Phil. “He’s riding with the Blue Angels. I told you to get me on one of those planes first.”
“Phil, I called the commander of the Blue Angels,” said Russ. “He is not going to let a guy who had a pulmonary embolism dive at a force of three Gs at five thousand feet in a flight suit only to have another embolism and die. So I’m sorry, but I tried.”
Phil was pissed off all day.
Barred from the Bering Sea on doctor’s orders, Phil hung out at his trailer, built his beloved birdhouses, worked on the grounds surrounding the fifth wheel, and still smoked like a 1959 Buick with bad piston rings. At least he wasn’t completely off the show. Deadliest Catch cameras kept America in touch with their favorite captain through frequent airings of his activities and progress.
During this time, he surreptitiously broke all the rules doctors had placed on him, but he acted like the perfect patient when he was around them in order to get the medical release he so desperately wanted in order to return to the boat.
Phil figured he could tough it out. Those who knew him well expected nothing less of him.
“I want to go back,” he told Thom.
“No,” insisted Thom. “Just stay home.”
Phil didn’t listen to Thom, didn’t listen to his family, didn’t listen to his friends. The pull of the sea trumped them all. Phil decided to go back to the Bering Sea in 2009, assuring doctors he would keep all harmful substances out of his body.
Good luck with that, said anybody who knew Phil.
Nevertheless, he was going to return to his favorite place in the world, the wheelhouse of the Cornelia Marie.
“Are you coming back too early?” asked Keith Colburn, captain of the Wizard.
“Yeah,” said Phil, lowering his eyes. “I probably am.”
He made it through that year at sea, but it was obvious that the personal storms he had battled in life had battered him far more severely than anything he had encountered at sea.
On December 15, 2009, Phil came to see Mary at her apartment in Bellevue, east of Seattle. When she asked him how he was feeling, Phil bragged that he was down to three cigarettes a day.
“He told me he was sorry he had kept the boys from me for all those years,” Mary said, “and that he was going to try to make my life better.”
Phil presented her with a gold and ruby ring and offered to pay for her to go back to school.
Then he again asked Mary the question he had first asked thirty-one years earlier: Would she marry him?
It was as if Phil knew that the party was over, and he wanted to go home with the girl he had brought.
Mary turned him down. “You are a much better friend,” she said, “than a husband.”
Phil understood and walked out the door. It was the last time Mary ever saw him.
CHAPTER 14
THE FINAL VOYAGE
When he left, it was like a hole in the universe was created that nobody will ever be able to fill.
—Lynn Andrews
Whenever the captain was about to head back up north to chase the crab, Lynn, who cleaned his fifth wheel and occasionally cooked for him, would come by to “batten the hatches,” as she would describe it. That meant removing the rotten-smelling leftovers inevitably found in the fridge, cleaning up the perennial mess, and locking every-thing up.
After doing her chores prior to Phil’s departure in January 2010 for what would prove to be his last trip up north, Lynn sat around on the porch with Phil, Jake, and several others.
Phil could be a gruff boss, but Lynn had long ago seen through the bluster to the good-hearted soul at his core. But even she was surprised at how openly grateful and complimentary he was that day.
“I just want you to know,” Phil told her, “I’m really happy that you work for me. You do a good job and I’m very appreciative.”
He then handed Lynn a small white box. Inside was a sapphire stone.
“I wanted you to have something to remember the old captain by,” said Phil.
“What do you mean, remember?” said Lynn. “You’re just going to Alaska.”
It was a conversation she’ll never forget.
“Phil had never talked like that before,” said Lynn after he died. “It just didn’t feel right. Maybe he had a premonition something was going to happen.”
To this day, Lynn keeps the stone in a safe, but every once in a while, when she misses having Phil in her life, she takes the sapphire out and gazes at it, thinking of him.
Joe Wabey, Phil’s first captain, came to visit him on the Cornelia Marie just before he pulled up anchor for his last voyage.
There was a look of joy on Phil’s face as he watched the Deadliest Catch film crew installing their cables and adjusting their cameras. Soon, Phil knew, those cameras would be focused on him, showing him on the high seas where he belonged.
Joe didn’t share the happiness of his friend of thirty-six years. Looking into Phil’s face, Joe could see a weariness beyond Phil’s years, a man in an alarming state of decline. “You don’t have to do this,” Joe said. “Why don’t you just get yourself well, starting with giving up smoking?”
“Are you kidding me?” snapped Phil. “My lungs were tested and they are so good I can absorb all the oxygen I need.”
“You are so full of shit,” Joe told him. “Five packs a day and you’re okay?”
Before he left, Phil called Mike Crockett, admitting that, while he loved the idea of returning to the ocean, he hated opilio fishing.
“Then don’t go,” Mike told him.
“I got to do this,” Phil insisted.
When Phil got back on board the Cornelia Marie, it was soon obvious he didn’t belong there. His characteristic nervousness, evident even in the best of times, was now amped up to an alarming degree. Josh could see the stress ingrained in his father.
Jake didn’t help the situation when he attempted to steal a few pain pills from his father’s quarters to feed his addiction, but was caught by Phil. Jake’s use of drugs and alcohol had been a constant source of tension with his father for about six years, but when he got caught with his hand in the prescription drug jar he felt the full wrath of Phil’s anger. Jake broke down and admitted to his father, in front of a Deadliest Catch camera and a worldwide audience, “I’m an a
ddict.”
“Dad and I were glad,” said Josh, “that Jake was finally being honest with us and, perhaps for the first time, with himself as well.”
“Then go to treatment,” Phil told Jake. “That’s the only thing that’s going to save your ass.”
For once, Jake listened, agreeing to check into a rehabilitation clinic in Seattle when the trip was over.
While that eased Phil’s tension a bit, Josh remained concerned about his father’s uncharacteristic sleeping pattern on the trip. As long as Josh could remember, Phil never slept more than two hours a night when he was at sea, awakening with a full supply of energy. Then, when the boat would come into port to unload its crab, he would catch up on the lost hours of sleep. Unlike in his younger days when he would party away the time in the harbor, Phil, by then in his fifties, would be sound asleep for the full sixteen to twenty hours the boat was docked.
But on his first trip back from his year of recuperation, Phil spent much of the time at sea in bed. He’d sleep eight hours, then pull himself up and try to retake command of the ship, but it was obviously difficult. He dragged himself around the boat, struggling just to keep his eyes open.
“I thought it was really weird the way he was acting,” Josh said.
One night, as the Cornelia Marie headed toward St. Paul to off-load its catch, the Wizard was leaving the island after bringing in its load of crab.
Captain Keith Colburn vividly remembers the moment when their two ships passed a few hours out of St. Paul. Their radios remained silent, no words spoken, both captains busy in their respective wheelhouses.
“I’m kicking myself to this day that we never even spoke,” said Keith.
There was, of course, no way for him to know at the time that it was the last chance he would ever get to speak to Phil.
When the Cornelia Marie docked at St. Paul, Phil went to bed, saying he’d be sleeping in the next morning. The rest of the crew got up at dawn, but eight hours later, Phil’s door was still shut. When some maintenance issues arose, Steve Ward, the engineer, called him in his stateroom.