by Todd Lewan
“DeCapua.”
“Thanks.”
Mork said, “I know him.”
“You do?” Morley said. “Well, isn’t that nice. Just like family.” He laughed. Then, to Bob Doyle, he said, “Giggy knows fishing. Been at it his whole life. He’s from Pelican. He knows his way around the waters here.”
Bob Doyle smiled.
Morley turned to DeCapua. “I hear you’re a pretty experienced fisherman, too.”
“You heard right.”
“Who you been out with?”
DeCapua mentioned the names of skippers and vessels he had fished with, but Bob Doyle could see Morley did not recognize them.
“How’d you get started?”
“On my own boat.”
“Your own boat?”
“Then I realized I was a better deckhand than a skipper, so I went to that.”
“What’re you good at?”
“I can coil. Bait.”
“You know your way around a boat?”
“I know how to make a set. I know what everybody’s job on deck is.”
Morley pushed up his glasses. “I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet you do.” He looked up. “Giggy, you say you know this guy here?”
DeCapua and Mork traded nods. They were not friendly nods, but not cold ones either.
“Giggy and me go back some,” DeCapua said. “We fished all the way from Ketchikan to St. Paul. And man, that fucking St. Paul is a great place to party. You ever been there?”
“No,” Morley said.
“Well, shit, you ought to go. There’s a Native woman behind every tree on that island. Only one problem with St. Paul —it ain’t got no trees.”
They all laughed.
“So what kind offish you like to catch?” Morley asked DeCapua.
“Depends on where I go fishing,” DeCapua said.
“Well, we’ve been doing mostly inside waters,” Morley said. “Chatham. Peril Straits. Tenakee Inlet. Freshwater Bay. Whitewater Bay. Shayek. Places where gray cod hang out.”
“Right.”
“I bet you’ve done some rockfishing, too,” Morley said. “I’d be willing to put money on that.”
“Done my share.”
“I’ll bet you have,” Morley said. He paused for a few seconds, and then he said to DeCapua: “All right. I’d be willing to take you and your buddy, Bob, along with us and give you both a ten percent share of our catch. We’d be leaving day after tomorrow. Probably be gone a week. Of course, if you guys do good work, then I might keep you on through February to do some tendering.”
“Sounds good.”
“Great,” Morley said. “There’s just one thing, then. Old Bob here is an old Coastie. Now that’s all right, but he’s green on a fishing boat. He’s going to need some watching. You’d be willing to keep an eye on him, am I right?”
“Sure.”
“Good. That’s good. All right. Anything else you want to know?”
“I’d like to see the boat.”
“Sure,” Morley said. “I’d be happy to introduce you to the old lady.”
NINE
As schooners went, she was no beauty. The hull was bruised and loose in spots. The decks were worn, buckling under the weight of too many booms and too much rigging. Worms were eating the frame around the rudder. The hold hatches leaked. Mildew grew up and down the cabin walls and made black spots on the ceilings where water got in. The head was stopped up. The lazarette was a shambles. Water had to be pumped from the bilges every couple of hours, even in dock. The engine room looked as though it had been taken apart and never quite put back together.
Mike DeCapua pulled himself up out of the front hold, clapped his hands and rubbed them on his sweatpants.
“Well?” Bob Doyle asked him.
“I like her,” DeCapua said. He pulled out a pinch of tobacco and rolled himself a cigarette.
“Why?”
“She sits firm in the water. She ain’t tippy.”
“Oh.”
“She was set up as a buyer boat,” DeCapua said. His eyes skipped around the foredeck. “She’s tired, all right. I hate to see a boat get treated bad. And this girl’s been treated bad for a long time. But she’s solid. Notice when I go walking over here, or walking over here? See how she just stays where she is?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s a good boat.”
“She needs work.”
“All boats need work.”
“I guess.”
“She’s got soul,” Mike DeCapua said. “She don’t tip and she’s got soul.” He pinched his cigarette, lit it and looked vaguely up at the rigging. “Fucking people don’t know how to treat a boat, is all.”
She hadn’t always been so tired looking. The day she came out of the Tacoma shipyard, she had the simplicity and sleekness of a kayak and the sweet scent of Washington fir. The G.W. Hume Company, her first owner, named her Narada. That was in January of 1919.
Though quite slender, she was seventy-seven feet long and built as sturdy as a pocket battleship. Her deck planks were two and a half inches thick. Her beams were seventeen inches in width; her frames and crossbeams, eight inches square. Her hull, two inches of creosoted, vertical-grain fir, had been overlaid with an inch of ironwood to keep her from bruising on docks. At sixty-six tons—with her holds and fuel tanks empty—the Narada was no lightweight, and sat low in the water. Whenever she sailed full offish or tanked down with ice, she looked like a surfacing submarine, her decks constantly awash in frothing brine.
Through inside waters she moved like a saber, her high, up-curving bow handily slicing the chop. But her slender figure betrayed her on the open seas; on the great swells of the gulf or the Pacific she would heave and wallow, and when big combers broke against her hull the full length of her would shudder —a shudder that brought a pallor to the cheek of the staunchest deckhand.
Originally, she had been commissioned to tender fish caught by trap vessels to packinghouses in Ketchikan and Petersburg. In the twenties Alaska fishermen used nets framed in fir and cedar, anchoring these traps at the mouths of bays or leaving them to float in channels or near rivers. They worked so well they wiped out salmon and cod stocks up and down the Inside Passage. By the early thirties the traps were outlawed, leaving most trap tenders, including the Narada, sitting in dry dock, as jobless as the rest of the country.
From then on, the boat was revamped, remodeled and refitted so many times for so many different jobs and owners that she lost something—her identity, some put it. During the gold rush of the thirties, the Dupont Dynamite Company chartered the Narada to haul barges of explosives to Skagway. During World War II she tugged weapons and military cargo. In the seventies she was converted into a tender, only to be reconverted a decade later into a longliner. Her two original holds were replaced with diesel tanks, which were in turn changed to fiberglass-lined tanks, which were later ripped out in favor of refrigerated holds. Dupont upgraded her engine to a 425-horsepower, Cat-343, but the mechanics dispensed with the muffler to make her go twice as fast as the speed she was built to go, seven knots. A third fish hold was put in, along with a twenty-ton compressor and a new network of wiring and three-inch piping to carry chilled seawater to the holds. Different owners updated her navigational instruments at different times. Her original, spoked wheel was swapped out for a stainless-steel model. Three new cargo booms were added, followed by a second mast, an extra set of rigging, new bulwarks and a bait shed. (Although it could now load fish simultaneously from four different vessels, the extra weight on top made it harder for the boat to recover from rolls.)
Not even her original name lasted; in 1971, she was reregistered as the La Conte— the Count.
In 1987, a tugboat broadsided her at the mouth of Wrangell Harbor, and the La Conte sank faster than a packed crab pot. She was raised, beached and put up on the gridiron. It didn’t look good. The schooner had lost thirteen hull planks, seven frames, eight beams, six deck planks, and there was extensive da
mage to the structure that fastened the galley to the deck.
After eighteen months of litigation, the boat went on the market and sold, as was, for twenty thousand dollars. The buyers were the only people who made an offer, Jeff and Shannon Berg, a young Petersburg couple with fishing experience and romantic notions about aging vessels. They restored the hull and deck with the same, aged Washington fir the boat’s builders had used, gave the La Conte a top-to-bottom painting and put her to work. For ten years they tendered together up and down southeastern Alaska, as far north as Prince Rupert Sound, sometimes even fishing halibut, black cod and salmon.
As it turned out, the boat lasted longer than their marriage. In the spring of 1997, as they waded through a divorce, the Bergs put the boat up for sale. Within a month, a buyer came along.
Unlike the Bergs, the La Conte’s new owner was no fisherman, and no more Alaskan than a keg of nails. His name was Scott Echols, a plump, smooth-tongued salesman from Empire, Georgia, who had made a small fortune in suckling pigs and goats.
Echols specialized in slaughtering his goats halal—in such a way as to be ritually fit, according to Muslim law. It was a niche market and Echols had it locked. At the top of his game his company slaughtered three hundred goats a day. To a friend he once joked that he must have killed every goat within a hundred-mile radius of the Georgia line. Echols never did figure out why Muslims made such a fuss about getting their goats halal. But it mattered little to him. He was no Muslim. He was a businessman. The goat king of Georgia. And he had the bank account to prove it.
How he made the jump from halal goats to Alaska seafood was, like all of his ventures, something of an accident. Out of college he went to Hawaii to get a master’s in robotics, then was hired by Arco to be an analyst in Anchorage. He quit his job and started his own robot company, WARP Industries. The company received a lot of state grants, was written up in a lot of magazines and in two years barely broke even. Alaska, he had learned the hard way, wasn’t ready for robots.
So Echols took a job as a systems analyst for a Japanese fishing conglomerate. Day after day the company’s accounting figures passed across his computer screen, and each day the numbers left him speechless: his employer had been buying Coho salmon at $15 a pound and selling it for $250 a pound. He was so excited by the balance sheets he quit his job and tried his hand at fishing. That was not a good idea. He got seasick and couldn’t give away the bait at the end of his line. In 1992 he took his master’s degree in digital communications engineering and flew back to Empire.
After three years of dealing in pigs and goats, Echols returned to Alaska in the fall of 1996 to start his own company, World Seafood Producers. He had since married his childhood sweetheart, Cherie, whom he had met when she was four and he eleven, and had picked up front money from some Japanese and Korean investors he’d met during his robotics days. His latest idea: to sell to Japanese and South Korean buyers the part of salmon everyone else in Alaska tossed in the garbage —salmon roe.
He set himself up in Juneau in a lakeside duplex and shopped around for a cheap tender to move his product to cold storages in Bellingham. He drew his share of looks. At the University of Georgia he had been a second-string cornerback, but now Echols was somewhat beyond athletic weight, with the shoulders and dignified gait of a grizzly. He had a small, round head, eyes the color of blueberries, a pug nose and a quick grin. He wore European colognes, crewneck sweatshirts under ski jackets, Levi’s 505s, designer hiking boots and a blue beanie.
The first thing he heard about the La Conte came from a cod fisherman in Juneau, Fred Damer. Damer had a friend, Jeff Berg, who wanted to unload an old tender to pay for a divorce. “You won’t find another boat that big for that cheap,” Damer told Echols. In the end, a final price of $109,000 was agreed upon. Echols turned up at the closing $4,000 short, however, so Berg kept the boat’s sideband radio and Uniroyal life raft-items Echols never bothered to replace.
Echols put Damer in charge of making the La Conte seaworthy; a month later he fired him. Damer sued for severance pay. When Echols didn’t show up for the proceeding, a judge ordered him to compensate his former employee to the tune of $8,578.77, mustering-out pay, as it were.
And he soon realized there were more bills coming. A Petersburg shipwright told Echols it would cost eighty thousand dollars to fully repair all of the vessel’s hatches, cracked frames, decking and hull. Echols nodded and told him to lead-patch the loose, worm-eaten planks on the stern. Then he told him to caulk the grid and add an aluminum bait shed on the aft deck. There went thirty thousand dollars.
Everything else would have to wait.
By that time it was nearly summer and Scott Echols wanted his boat to start making money. He turned to a man he’d met the previous winter in Seattle, Rob Carrs, to skipper the first boat of his dream fleet.
Carrs was college-educated, a New York native with big-city savvy who had moved to Seattle in the eighties to live the Alaska adventure —part-time, summer adventures. Carrs was good. He knew boats, he had sea smarts, and he had the right palaver with fishermen and Alaska natives. He had never seen the La Conte, but told Echols he’d accept the job for $30 an hour. Echols offered $26.25—all in cash, all off the books. Carrs muttered and took it.
Later, he almost wished he hadn’t. Figuring out how the boat worked and overhauling the engine took three months. The La Conte did not go out again until September, when Carrs took her tendering between Sitka and Juneau. There were no worries —until the day in October that Carrs filled all three of her holds with chum salmon.
Halfway across the Chatham Strait, Carrs noticed the sluggishness: the engine room was filling up fast with water. Hurriedly, he connected a hose to the powerful Maxi-Flow that circulated refrigerated seawater through the holds and began pumping water in a six-inch-wide stream over the side. It took him more than an hour to get things under control.
In port, he traced the leak to several loose planks around the fantail.
A week later, after one final longlining trip near Petersburg, Carrs returned the La Conte to Sitka and told Echols he was quitting. The boat was an icebox, he said, he was sick of repairing everything, and there wasn’t a single dry bunk on board. The two men settled money matters, shook hands and wished each other luck.
Nothing was said about the water problem Carrs had eight days earlier.
In mid-November, Scott Echols got a call from Mark Morley. Rob Carrs had introduced them eleven months earlier in Juneau, before taking Morley along as a deckhand on a black cod trip. Morley told him straight off that he wanted to take the La Conte out rockfishing.
“Rockfish?”
“It’s the only fishing this time of year,” Morley told him.
Echols hesitated.
“Listen,” Morley said. “There’s a bunch of two-day openings in December all around Baranof Island and a big opening on New Year’s Day.”
Echols was listening now.
“Yellow eye is getting a good price,” Morley continued. “It’s close to two bucks a pound now. That’s better than black cod.”
“Is that right?”
“Check around.”
Echols told him he’d think it over, and he did. He remembered that Mark Morley had tidied up the pilothouse, rewiring the electronics, installing a new dashboard, stripping layers of ancient paint off the cedar woodwork. And he hadn’t demanded a penny.
That night Echols called Rob Carrs at his Seattle apartment.
“What do you think about Mark?” Echols asked. “He wants to take the boat out rockfishing. Give it to me straight. You think he’s up to it?”
“No,” Carrs said.
“No?”
“No,” Carrs said. “I wouldn’t hire him. Not for this boat.”
“But he’s your buddy.”
“You wanted it straight,” Carrs said. He paused. “I like Mark. He’s not a mandy-pandy guy. He’s gung ho. He wants to be a skipper. But I don’t think he could park the thing, let alone dri
ve it.”
The following night Echols and Morley sailed out to the Icy Strait. The chop kicked up. Echols told Morley to cut the motors and to pull in the skiff, which they were towing.
“Relax,” Morley told him. “It’ll be all right.”
Not five minutes later the retainer broke. The boat skipped away in the darkness. A day later, Echols saw the skiff sitting in his neighbor’s driveway in Juneau. He phoned Carrs again. Raving.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Carrs interrupted, “I don’t need to hear this.”
Echols sighed. “Look. I need to do something with this boat. I need it to start making some money, only I don’t have many options.”
“Well,” Carrs said, “if you don’t have many options, I guess you gotta hire him, right?”
“I guess so,” said Echols.
TEN
They were standing on the dock, looking at the hull of the boat shadowed against the dark. Gig Mork had already gone back to stowing ice in the holds.
“So,” Mike DeCapua said, “when are you planning on heading out?”
“Midnight tomorrow,” Mark Morley said. “But I’ll need help getting her ready before then.”
“What’s there to do?”
“Got lines to check, hooks, fuel, maybe thaw some bait. And then there’s the motor, too.”
“That’s a full day.”
“Yeah.”
“And where were you thinking of fishing?”
Morley told him he planned to drive north and east up Peril Strait to Chatham, then south along the back side of Baranof Island and straight on down to Coronation Island. He wanted to fish the shoals west of Coronation.
“Then what?” DeCapua asked him.
“That’s a lot you want to know,” Morley said.
“Well,” DeCapua said, “I like to know who my dance partners are.”
“I bet you do,” Morley said. He dug a finger in his ear. “All right. If Coronation doesn’t pan out I figure to try the shelf along the Hazy Islands.”