HIGHLINERS
A Novel
William B. McCloskey Jr.
Skyhorse Publishing
Copyright © 1979, 2013 by William B. McCloskey Jr.
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10 987654321
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-62087-700-5
Printed in the United States of America
To Ann
Who kept our home stable and loving while I wrote and went fishing, and who gave the encouragement without which dreams seldom leave the ground. The book could not have been written alone.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE thanks to every one of the people who helped form and encourage this book would make a chapter by itself. Where to start? In Kodiak, perhaps with Torn Casey, former manager of the United Fishermen’s Marketing Association and activist for the rights of fishermen, whose vigorous mind showered me with information and perspective, and whose house always had a place for my sleeping bag. Other perspectives, along with hospitality and friendship, were provided in Kodiak by Don and Rusty Thomson; Norman and Dorothy Holm, Norm a longtime Kodiak fishermen and now marine surveyor for western Alaska; Hank Pennington, Kodiak Marine Advisory Agent for the University of Alaska’s Sea Grant Program; and Bart Eaton, highline crab skipper and fighter along with Casey for adequate two-hundred-mile legislation.
On the boats, humble thanks to the skippers who hired me for a crew share and then tolerated my inexperience as I struggled to pull a semblance of my weight: Thorvold Olsen of the salmon seiner-crabber Polar Star, Merle Knapp of the shrimp trawler Pacific Pride, and Monte Riley of the seiner Norman J. Also to my crewmates, who refrained from throwing me overboard and chose to teach me instead, notably John Van Sant, “Oley” Olsen, and Andy Kuljis. Among those who took me aboard to let me learn the gear, thanks especially to Leiv Loklingholm and his hard-driving crew on the Bering Sea crabber American Beauty—Dale Dorsey, Frank Tegdal, Steve Dundas, and Terry Mason. And to Dick Ryser, skipper next to God of his open siwash seiner.
Of cannery managers who hired me on their lines, permitted me to trail them and ask questions, found me boats, even bunked me out in remote areas, let me thank: Glen Behymer and John Pugh of Alaska Pacific Seafood; Bob Erickson of B&B; Chuck Jensen, Willy Sutterlin, and Ben Bullinger of Pacific Pearl; Blake Kinnear and Carl Wyberg of Pan Alaska; Bill Hingston of Kodiak King Crab; and Ivan Fox of New England Fish Company.
Within the Coast Guard, my former service and longtime love: many, many pilots of helicopters and planes flying out on fishing patrols in the wretched Kodiak weather; administrators and support people at the Kodiak Base, District Headquarters in Juneau, and National Headquarters in Washington, D.C.; and the officers and crews of the cutters Boutwell, Confidence, Gallatin, and Tamaroa (the latter two from the East Coast). With apologies for all those not named, I must single out both the commanding officer (1976-1978) of the Kodiak-based Confidence, Commander Terry Montonye, and Leo Loftus at Washington headquarters.
In the National Marine Fisheries Service, again, there were more able agents and administrators who helped me in Kodiak, Juneau, and Washington, D.C., than I have space to name. They include, but certainly do not stop with, Harry Rietze, Alaska Regional Director in Juneau, and Jerry Hill at Washington headquarters. The fisheries agents with whom I had the privilege of visiting foreign fishing ships were dedicated and rugged men, as were the Coast Guard men who manned the power boats in sloppy weather and climbed the Jacob s ladders with them.
Among many helpful members of the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, I must thank especially Ed Huizer, deputy director in Juneau, and Jack Lechner, westward regional supervisor in Kodiak.
At the Kodiak Daily Mirror, I am indebted to publisher Jack Clark for his hospitality in letting me occupy a desk during long perusals of back issues. Thanks very much to Jerry Martini for the dust-jacket photo he took of me fresh from ten days king-crabbing.
I am extremely grateful to Bob Browning, author of the comprehensive Fisheries of the North Pacific, both for his encouragement and for specific comments on the fishing sections of the manuscript. Others who commented on parts of the manuscript included Norm Holm, Bart Eaton, and Ivan Fox, all mentioned above, as well as Jack Knutsen, skipper of the halibut schooner Grant, Guy Powell and Jerry McCreary of Alaska Fish & Game in Kodiak, Richard Myhre, Assistant Director of the International Pacific Halibut Commission, and Ned Everett of the House Merchant Marine Committee.
At the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, I am indebted to Albert Stone, who recognized on several occasions that a restless writer needed leaves of absence, and to my supervisor Bill Buchanan and my secretary Alice Knox for their patience over three years as I worked both job and book under pressure.
In New York, without the imagination and enthusiasm of three sea-struck individuals, Highliners might never have left the notepad. They are: Torn Lowry, my agent; editor Steve Frimmer of Reader’s Digest Press; and Bruce Lee, my editor at McGraw-Hill.
The book is dedicated to my wife Ann for good reason. Then there is my son Wynn, who shared fish boat and cannery experiences with me in Kodiak, and my daughter Karin, who kept us in letters from home, both of whom have bolstered me with pride at their non-fishing accomplishments. And, not in Kodiak except often in spirit, my father Bill and my mother Evelyn.
Bill McCloskey Jr.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Part 1:1963, SUMMER
1. Fishing
2. Kodiak
3. Whale Pass
4 Sockeye Sunday
5. Rondelay
6. The Fated Salmon
7. Hang Tough
8. Spitz the Prophet
9. Boats That Go Down
10. Russians
Part 2: 1964, SPRING
11. Winter Pots
12. Waves
13. Mud
Part 3: 1970, WINTER TO FALL
14. Shrimp Boats
15. Norwegian Steam
16. The Cockeyed Halibut and the Tum-sex Shrimp
17. Swede Scorden
18. Inbreaker
19. Trial by Cannery
20. Horse’s Head
21. Saga of the King Crabs and Tanners
Part 4: 1972, FALL, to 1974, SPRING
22. Dutch Harbor, Aleutians, and Bering Sea 279
23. Kiss a Crab
24. Maneuvers
25. The Bering Sea
26. International Fish
27. Hot Pursuit
28. The Kodiak Sea
Epilogue
Introduction
FISHING is one of man’s basic, hardest, most honorable occupations.
It shares with farming a reliance on nature, despite the aids of technology in providing machinery to perform some of the heaviest work. The occupation has changed little over the centuries. Man still catches his seafood in any quantity by one of three methods—po
ts, hooks, or nets. The sea remains a force of primal brutality, and the experience of fishing in it for a livelihood remains universal the world over for the whole range of fishermen, from those who row out in little boats open directly to the weather to those who buck into open seas with the relative security of a warm cabin and a high-powered engine. This book focuses on a segment of that worldwide picture, the area of fishing communities in western Alaska from Kodiak waters to the Bering Sea.
The land mass of Alaska combines with water in a dual arrangement of watercourses and continental shelves that produces one of the great fishing grounds of the world. Ranges of mountains throughout the state accumulate snow, then yield it off in thousands of rivers and streams that serve as spawning areas for salmon. Extending underwater from shore are vast seafood-breeding continental shelves, those areas of relatively shallow water down to about one hundred fathoms which occur before the ocean floor plunges to several thousand fathoms.
Most of the seafood of the world is generated on continental shelves. The motion of wind and currents circulates the relatively shallow shelf waters all the way up from the seafloor, thus moving even the deepest water to the surface to mix bottom nutrients with sunlight and oxygen. The result is a stimulated growth of the organisms that fish and crustaceans feed on, and a consequent abundance of sea creatures. To give some idea of the Alaskan potential, the shelves off Alaska cover 550,000 square miles, including a huge crescent of shelf around the Gulf of Alaska and the single 340,000-square-mile swath of shelf in the eastern Bering Sea. This compares to 300,000 square miles of shelf off the entire remaining United States, or, to take other major fishing grounds, to the 70,000 square miles of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and the 12,000 of Georges Bank off New England.
The fishing scene in Alaska is varied and volatile. The people it includes have differing interests, and the communities range in size from large towns to seasonal settlements. Ketchikan, the leading city of the southeastern inland waterways (which also includes Sitka, Juneau, and Petersburg), once called itself accurately “The Salmon Capital of the World.” In the 1960s, whether through Japanese and Soviet interception of salmon on the high seas, simple American excess by both sport and commercial fishermen, careless logging practices which destroyed spawning streams, destructive freezes at crucial biological times, or a probable combination, the great southeastern runs of salmon dwindled. The major salmon packs today come from a wide area around Kodiak Island at the western end of the Gulf of Alaska and from Bristol Bay, east of the Bering Sea.
Kodiak waters teem with salmon, halibut, cod, herring, and pollock; with five varieties of small pandalid shrimp; with dungeness, tanner, and king crab. It was natural that fishermen would discover the place. The town of Kodiak, which because of its remoteness had been for decades merely the base for local salmon boats and stopoff point for the halibut fleets of Seattle and Prince Rupert, became in the late 1950s the home of men who were developing entire new fisheries first in king crab and then in shrimp. (A fishery is a combination of elements, the essentials being the harvestable sea creatures, the boats, the fishermen, and the processors.) The Alaskan earthquake of 1964 generated a tsunami that washed out the lower town, boat harbor, and canneries. In retrospect, the disaster and its attendant demands for reconstruction vitalized the town. New boats were commissioned with the demands of crabbing and shrimping in mind, as was the case with new canneries. Kodiak today is one of the major salmon ports, the largest U.S. halibut port, and the center of both a ten-month shrimp fishery and a seven-month king and 2 tanner-crab fishery. Fishermen and processors out of Kodiak and Dutch Harbor are now engaged in developing from scratch an industry for pollock and other bottomfish which may evolve into the largest Alaskan fishery of them all in terms of volume. In terms of value landed, Kodiak is consistently the number-two port in the U.S., second only to the California tuna port of San Pedro.
However, just as the dominance in salmon shifted from Ketchikan to Kodiak, the dominance in crab shifted in the early 1970s from Kodiak to Dutch Harbor. Dutch is still barely a settlement, adjacent to the small Aleut village of Unalaska on an island in the Aleutian chain, but it is the closest large harbor for the American boats which fish with increasing concentration in the rich grounds of the Bering Sea. A difference in the shift is that the Kodiak crab men participated, financing expensive new boats to meet the Bering Sea demands, then driving them the 600 miles to Dutch Harbor to compete with Seattle-based crabbers and Japanese factory fleets. Dutch Harbor now runs Kodiak a race for position as second-in-value fishing port of the U.S.
Within the rough-and-tumble context of coastal Alaskan towns, where wilderness is always in sight and destruction at sea a constant possibility, Ketchikan has turned mellow, Kodiak bursts at the seams, and Dutch Harbor—still a raw outpost—perches on the edge of a frontier boom.
Alaskan fishermen come from several backgrounds and interests. Traditionally, Alaska has attracted a seasonal population of friendly, hard-working carpetbaggers—fishermen, loggers, construction and pipeline workers, and the like—who make their money and then return south with it to enjoy the comforts of more urbanized areas. The pattern has begun to change despite the wretched Alaskan winters. Most men fishing from Ketchikan and about half those of Kodiak are now residents, having been attracted to the open life of Alaska from all parts of the U.S. and from that traditional land of northern seafarers, Scandinavia. Dutch Harbor, on the other hand, is called home by few except native villagers. The American halibut fleet (there is also a Canadian one which fishes the same Alaskan waters) is crewed largely by first-and second-generation Norwegians who live in Seattle, and this group also dominates a large share of the Bering Sea crab fleet. (In Dutch Harbor, it sometimes seems as if no other food is served from boat galleys but lamb, fish balls, and goat’s-milk cheese.) Then there are the natives, who lived by fishing for centuries before the white man came. Boats from all the native villages have indigenous crews, especially in the far-north Eskimo country where whites are few. In the Tlingit country of the southeast around Ketchikan, voluntary segregation is sometimes strong, with certain areas of the same grounds fished tacitly by native boats and others by whites. The boats of Kodiak have an easier racial mixture, with Aleut-Koniag and American-Norwegian often combined in the same man.
Fishermen in Alaska, then, are a generally compatible mixture of whites and natives, Americans and Scandinavians, residents and nonresidents. There is, however, another force of fishermen, most of whom never come ashore, that has for years thrown doubt and unbalance into the picture. These man the factory fleets of Japan and Russia.
For a decade before Pearl Harbor, Japanese ships had fished crab and bottomfish in the waters off the Aleutians, which are closer to Tokyo than to Seattle. In 1952, with self-government restored to Japan, the U.S. allowed the Japanese to come fishing again off Alaska. Soviet ships entered the scene off both coasts in 1959, followed on the East Coast by ships from Poland, Spain, and a dozen other nations and in Alaska by ships from South Korea. The foreign fishing effort increased steadily, often destructively to certain species, until 1976 and the passage by Congress of the Fishery Conservation and Management Act. To cite a typical year, the fishing grounds off Alaska were worked in 1972 by 907 different Japanese ships and 544 Soviet ships. The Japanese effort included eighteen factory fleets. The total 1972 foreign catch off Alaska was over five billion pounds, compared to half a billion pounds caught in the same waters by U.S. boats.
The American fisherman, both in Alaska and on the other coasts, is a different creature than the man on the Japanese and Russian fishing ships, despite what they might share of the fishing experience. The American owns his own boat or works for a crew share directly under the man who does; the Japanese is a salaried employee for a huge conglomerate, the Russian an employee of the state. The American works on a boat ranging in size from a 30-odd-foot purse seiner to a 110-foot crabber, as part of a deck crew that seldom exceeds five. The smallest Japanese vess
el is a 90-foot salmon gillnetter with a crew of a dozen, the largest a 650-foot factory ship with a work force of more than 500. Both the American and the foreign vessels often fish around the clock, but the foreign crews with their greater numbers do it in shifts. The Americans work gear as individuals and as seamen, while the foreign crewmen are often as specialized in their duties as a standard millhand.
Thus the concept of an American fishing “industry” is loose at best, comprising the freelance interests of many boatmen and processors. A fishery of this sort has no collective resource beyond the biological research of government agencies, and no coordinated battle plan. Compare this to Japan, where the government supports two colleges and more than sixty high schools of fishing, and where large conglomerates like Taiyo, Nippon Suison, and Marubeni control and operate in a single package their boats, seafood plants, research teams, and marketing facilities. These fishing conglomerates work so closely with the cabinet-level Japan Fisheries Agency that the one seems an extension of the other. With such an interlock of Japanese capital and administration, support is always available to develop the most modern fishing ships and equipment, and the risks inherent in a single fishery are buffered by options on a corporate scale.
The Soviet fishing fleets, as might be imagined, are financed and controlled entirely by the government. The Soviet Ministry of Fisheries runs the show by regions, allotting budgets and projecting requirements. The ships (many more modem even than those of the Japanese) have been built under five-year and seven-year plans, with a conscious goal of achieving a strong Soviet fishing fleet. As soon as Soviet ships entered the fisheries off the U.S. coasts, they began to abuse the tacit fishing privilege by equipping “trawlers” with electronic surveillance equipment, and they still do. The Soviet multiyear plans for fishing ships began before the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 had revealed a Soviet weakness in seapower. The plans locked after this event into the larger strategic goal of building the Soviet Union into the maritime power that it is today of military, merchant, and fishing ships.
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