Seth accepted.
The pilot wore hip boots as he walked the pontoon plane into the water while the others eased it from the land, then jumped aboard. The flight over bays and mountains to the sheltered water of the cannery cove took no more than twenty minutes.
“Wait,” said Nels to the pilot. He told Hank and Seth to unload their gear but not to follow him, then walked along the wharf and climbed down to a boat as sturdy as himself. He entered the cabin. Shortly after, there were some shouts. Another few minutes and a man emerged with sleeping roll and duffle bag. He dumped the gear on deck, tied a line to it, climbed the ladder, and pulled the gear up after him. Nels appeared on deck in rolled-down hip boots, puffing a cigar. He motioned Hank and Seth to come aboard.
“That’s what I figured,” said the pilot. “Nels has a time finding guys to satisfy him.”
They passed the crewman on the ramp. His face was tight with anger. “Shee-it” was all he said.
“Sorry,” murmured Hank. “We didn’t...”
“See you back in Kodiak, suckers.”
The shrimp trawler Delta was a trim, clean boat. The only thing out of order was the engine room, reached by ladder below the bunks and storage, which was a mess of oil and dismembered parts. For four days neither Hank nor Seth saw much else, except to climb topside for a few hours sleep or to eat a sandwich protected in a paper towel against the grease on their hands. Nels Hanson said little, and it became obvious he disliked others to talk around him when he worked. He knew his way through his engine. The job of his crew was to stand by at all times, to hand him wrenches, hold flashlights, or strain free a bind. He ignored their questions about the way the engine functioned or what he was doing. His own capacity for remaining with the job was prodigious: they arrived from Kodiak at nine in the morning, and at four the next morning he grudgingly guessed they all could sleep a while, but at eight-thirty he shook their bunks to get moving again. As he said, “You know a boat not by her galley and engines, but by her crew’s sack time.”
At last they went fishing. Hank was not surprised to find Nels Hanson a driver. He smoked a cigar constantly, and he never swore. His favorite expression, shouted from the wheelhouse as he monitored the shooting and drawing of the net, was “Hop to it!” His voice carried easily over the engine noise, although he never became excited. When it came time to maneuver the full bag over the side, he placed the boat on automatic steering and jumped down on deck to take charge, as Jones did. But it was the engine room again all over, with Nels racing to set the tackle himself while muttering and pointing instructions. On the first set he held out his hand toward Seth and said, “Double block.” Seth looked around, uncertain. “Double block, stupid, hop to it.” Hank hurried to free it and hand it over, leaving the bag to swing free momentarily. “Why’d you drop your lazy line, stupid? Get back there.” When it came time to wash the shrimp Hank grabbed the pressure hose and cut the layers expertly. He had become proud of the way he could handle the operation. Nels grabbed the hose from him and, with his fist poked into the opening, intensified the volley of water so that the shrimp were cleaned and stacked in a fraction of Hank’s time. A few minutes later he was shouting to make them shovel faster. Nels seemed to enjoy running the net. Unlike Jones, who let it soak for one to two hours, Nels Hanson hauled it in again the minute his crew had finished the icing. Under his goad, this occurred every thirty to fifty minutes. No matter how hard they worked to catch up, there was never a moment for rest.
Fortunately for Hank, the tackles and machinery were rigged exactly as they had been on the Adele H. It turned out that Seth, on his three grub trips, had been employed at shoveling and taught little else. Hank coached him, sometimes almost desperately under the shouts from Nels, warning him about mistakes and dangers that Steve had monitored for him only two weeks before, explaining as they went and alerting him to adjustments as they were about to occur. The weather was brutally rough and icy. Seth remained perpetually bent with sickness. Under the running pace that Nels dictated, he slipped often to gather cuts and bruises. Hank showed him how to keep his knees loose to lower his balance. In Seth’s sudden deference and gratitude he saw himself under Steve, and marveled at how quickly his role had reversed.
Day after day Nels maintained the pace. He fished them beyond exhaustion and doled short periods for food and sleep as if he were being cheated personally. With their skipper the common enemy, Hank and Seth became a team, exchanging wry jokes, pushing themselves to maintain Nels’ pace until they felt pride at being able to hack it.
They talked enough for Hank to learn that Seth had spent a year at Berkeley before deciding that campus life was “Unreal, so fuck it.”
“This real enough world for you?” asked Hank one night as they groped aching into their bunks.
“Jesus.”
The deck loads they pulled were not as full as most on the Adele H, but Nels trawled closer to the rocky shore, and he found bigger shrimp. “When they buy from my boat,” he once declared in a rare moment of explanation, “they’re paying for the best, and they know it. You fish around the rocks, you never soak your nets long each set, then you don’t cut up your nets so bad.”
At last the four days of almost steady shrimping ended. (Nels could push an extra day over the usual limit of three because his shrimp, being bigger, stayed fresh longer.) As the boat bucked toward Kodiak through the dark, Hank and Seth had the leisure to sit around the galley table. Their bones hurt and their hands grasped objects stiffly, but they had survived it. They debated whether to stay with the boat or leave. The low crew share rankled, especially for Hank, who had known better under Jones Henry. Maybe, in the calm of harbor, it could be discussed.
“This guy’s a prick’s prick,” Seth declared. “But thanks to you, buddy, I’ve learned ten times what I knew a week ago. I hope you’ll stay.”
They tied to the cannery around nine in the morning, having fished until three and then run the rest of the night. Nels had stayed awake by his wheel all the time—he never seemed to need sleep—and had roused them a few minutes before docking. He then turned them to scrubbing the boat, topside and cabins, as the cannery gang unloaded. They knew the guys from the cannery, and joked with them from the superior level of boat’s crew. Hank also found it gratifying to glance up and see the Shalimar headed out, to wave, and to have Jody recognize him and call back a greeting while Mike tooted their whistle. Nels stomped from boat to cannery and back again, monitoring both his crew and the scales. When the loading was finished, Nels sent them into the hold with hose and brushes. “Take up all the deck boards, scrub everything twice with disinfectant. Hop to it.” It was dark outside when they had finished. They climbed to deck, talking about a beer uptown and then some sleep. There had been no time to think of visiting other boats. But they had discussed it all day, and had decided they’d paid for their berths on the Delta with their hides and might as well stick it. Even eight-and ten-percent shares should bring them three to four hundred apiece with the catch they delivered. And at least they’d be known on the floats as crew for a highline skipper.
Nels inspected the hold minutely, then handed them each a check. “Okay, boys.” He held out his enormous hand, and squeezed each of theirs slowly to crushing. “I only work with green crew when I can’t find nothing else. So pack your gear and go home. Hop to it.”
“You mean we’re fired?”
“I got a couple fishermen coming aboard, and as soon as they get here I take off.”
Their checks were each for seventy-five dollars. Hank contested it. “We even worked four days on your engine.”
“I took out for plane fare, fuel, all the food you ate—never stopped eating, either of you—and then for the parts of my tackle and net you messed up. I ain’t paying for stupid crew, they pay their own mistakes.”
“I’d like a written accounting,” said Hank quietly.
The eyes remained dispassionate. “I got bad enough things to say to other skippers about your kind of weakling crew
without putting stuff on paper. If I was to do it again I’d take off more. Now pack your gear and hop to it.” Nels scraped his palms one against the other. His body in front of them had the bulk of a boiler.
Hank did not want to face Adele and her ministrations. He followed Seth to the shut-down crab cannery. Seth introduced him to the watchman, and they rolled their sleeping bags over flattened cartons on the concrete floor. When they had changed in the unheated warehouse into their only clothes not wet with perspiration—stinking, but dry— and started drag-footed toward town to vent their anger, they saw the Delta leave the cannery for the ice and fuel piers. On deck, the two new crewmen hustled under Nels’ direction.
Hank spat. “Goddam it, if I can ever do that bastard a bad turn, I will.”
Seth spat and seconded the vow in stronger terms.
CHAPTER 16
The Cockeyed Halibut and the Turn-sex Shrimp
ALASKA’S fishing fame rests with the salmon and the crabs, but this by no means completes the story of commercially valuable species. The waters also teem with shrimp, halibut, herring, pollock, cod, sablefish (“black cod”), perch, rockfish, turbot, hake, and with other sea creatures such as clams. This chapter considers both the smallest and the largest of the species around which major fisheries exist, with a sideways glance at two others.
To Hank and the rest of us, involved at whatever level of trawl, pick line, or grocery shelf, the shrimp may be worthy of no greater respect than that due a cucumber. Nevertheless, varieties of shrimp feed millions of people along such diverse world coasts as those of India, China, Japan, Malaya, Australia, Ghana, Brazil, Ecuador, Spain, and Norway. Fishermen in the United States have earned more money from shrimp in recent years than from any other single species of seafood. (Pacific salmon has been second, tuna third.) Alaska since 1971 has led all other states in volume of shrimp landed.
The little shrimp fished in Alaska are vastly different from the fat whites and brownies of the Gulf fishery. They fetch only a fraction of the price per pound, but an Alaskan boat haul is reckoned in thousands of pounds compared to hundreds on the Gulf. The two types of shrimp come from different families within the hierarchy of Crustacea. Gulf Coast shrimp are section Eucarida, family Penaeus, while Alaska shrimp are section Caridea, family Pandalus, and therein lies all the difference required here between the jumbo and the cocktail shrimps.
Pandalid shrimp—the ones in Alaska—have an interesting distinction not shared by the southern varieties. They change sex in midlife. After maturing as males, they fertilize their quota of eggs for two or three seasons, then are transformed into egg-bearing females.
Most Pandalid shrimp follow the same cycle, but the following life history is geared to Pandalus Borealis, the little “pinks” which furnish the most abundant shrimp harvests around Kodiak and other parts of Alaska (as they do in that other land of northern water, Norway). To begin with eggs, the female carries them for six months attached to her underside as a greenish mass. Her egg capacity can be as high as three thousand, depending on her size—which depends on her age. Hatching time is generally March or April. The larvae emerge as specks three-sixteenths of an inch long. They swim free, traveling as part of the plankton mass while feeding on smaller plankton.
By midsummer they have molted six separate exoskeletons to reach a length of three-quarters of an inch. Their molts have brought them to the form of little adult shrimp, and they assume adult behavior by settling to the bottom. By now their numbers are considerably less since they have helped nourish all manner of passing fish.
The young shrimps, all males but for the sort of exceptions that nature provides, reach maturity in the fall of their second or third year (one and a half or two and a half years from hatching). The fertilization process occurs in September or October. The male and female grasp each other, and the male deposits his sperm on the female’s underside. The female, whose body has molted into a special spawning shell with hairlike structures in the abdomen for carrying eggs, extrudes eggs from her oviducts. They pass through the sperm mass and lodge in her abdominal hairs, which will hold them fast for the next six months.
The transformation from male to female takes about six months, and is completed by age four and a half. Dad of one season has become Mom by the next. Males are necessarily smaller than females, since adult shrimp continue to grow throughout their lives. They grow, as do all crustaceans including crabs, through molting one shell, then occupying a larger by absorbing water into their tissues until actual growth takes place to fill out the shell. Mature male pinks average two to three inches in length, females three to four inches and more. A Kodiak pink shrimp that eludes the trawl lives six years, and during that time has participated in either one or two matings as a male, then in two as a female.
Alaskan waters provide four other varieties of Pandalid shrimp: humpie, which is smaller than a pink (neither to be confused with the pink or humpie salmon of the same waters); sidestripe, coonstripe, and spot, which are all larger. All but the latter seek smooth bottom mud. The spot shrimp, as large and fat as any brownie from the Gulf of Mexico, sticks to rocky areas that would tear apart an otter trawl and are fished only to a limited degree in Alaska, using baited pots.
The mud-dwelling Pandalids remain on bottom during daylight, then rise to feed in the night hours. Because of this, most but not all Alaskan shrimping is done during the day with trawls dragged along the bottom. (On the other hand, Gulf Coast Penaeid shrimp follow a pattern that enables them to be fished best by night.) Most Alaska shrimp are harvested at depths between thirty and a hundred fathoms, compared to seven-and ten-fathom depths for those on the Gulf Coast.
Pandalid shrimps feed on crab larvae, smaller shrimps, and other living planktonic organisms as well as on dead plant and animal material called detritus. Reciprocally the shrimps, both as larvae and adults, furnish food for salmon, halibut, rockfish, cod, sablefish, sole— whatever large fish comes their way.
The harvesting of the little northern pink shrimp is a major Alaskan fishery of only the past decade. It centers in Kodiak and in Sand Point, 250 miles southwest down the Peninsula. Until the 1960s, the cocktail-sized Pandalus Borealis were known as Petersburg shrimp, for the town in southeastern Alaska where since 1916 a small fleet has caught them to be processed by hand picking. Such individual attention made for a luxury product delivered at too great a price to be practical for a large commercial venture.
A fishery starts with the natural abundance of a stock, but only becomes significant with a means to preserve the stock in commercial quantity. Many credit Ivar Wendt, Swedish-born founder of Pacific Pearl Seafoods, with pioneering the Alaska shrimp-canning industry. The key to successful processing of the small Pandalids was easy shell removal. Wendt imported and modified the first peelers from the Gulf of Mexico, and much subsequent trial and error with this and other shrimp equipment was under his aegis.
The importation of Gulf technology also figured in the boats and gear to catch the shrimp, even though Kodiak fishermen soon started to figure their own local modifications. The Alaskan shrimp boats of the late 1960s were stem trawlers like the Adele H, rigged to fish with a single otter trawl. In 1971, larger and more efficient double-rigged boats began to come from the Gulf. The double-rigger carries a separate smaller otter trawl on each side, hung from extended booms. This increases the area of seafloor that can be dragged in a single pass and can enlarge the catch considerably. Also becoming available at the time were scanning sonars and more sophisticated depth recorders, which enabled fishermen to rely less on broad open gulleys in the seafloor that they could locate with simple fathometers and to seek the more productive contour edges while keeping an eye on the shrimp mass itself. The newest shrimp boat modification in Alaska is one the Russians and Japanese on their big trawlers knew all the time: a ramp up the stern, so that the bag of catch need never be suspended dangerously to be lifted to deck over the side rail.
A new fishery for Alaskans has just begun sin
ce the passage of the 200-mile law in 1976 made possible an American allotment: bottom-fish. This is a ubiquitous term that includes a variety of commercial species, from the pollock (heretofore dragged in quantities by Japanese and Russian factory fleets) to the cod (which have not been harvested commercially by Americans in Alaska since the days of salting). The trawl gear and the processing machinery are again a new show—or an intelligent modification of an old one—and the fishery has not yet unfolded beyond the experimental stage.
Another Alaskan fishery is based on herring, the little strong-flavored oily fish which, as Joe Spitz knew, has caused wars. While Europeans eat herring as daily food, Americans use them most for bait and fertilizer. A herring is seined much as a salmon but with web of a finer mesh. It was once harvested in Alaska for reduction to meal and oil, before South American fish meal outpriced it. Now it is chiefly used as commercial bait for bigger creatures—king crab and halibut—and for the roe, which is a Japanese delicacy. The frenzied springtime roe herring harvest in a few places like Prince William Sound, northeast of Kodiak, is a strange little fishing saga of its own: boats that lay over a month waiting for the imprecise arrival of the fish and for the opportunity to make a single set (which usually, given the number of boats on hand, accounts for the entire quota), and of nets full in such quantity that every year a boat or two is dragged under with its seine when a million captured herring decide to make a run for it. Herring is a small fishery in Alaska, but as wild as any.
The halibut has little in common with the shrimp, pollock, and herring, harvested en masse by net, except that they all contribute to its food supply. Halibut is one of the giants of the fish world, caught as an individual on hook and line.
A commercial halibut fishery has operated in Alaskan waters since 1888, when sailing ships began to voyage north seasonally from Seattle and Vancouver. Fishermen worked from two-man dories which the ship lowered each day, drawing in their long baited lines by hand or through a hand-cranked roller. The work was excruciatingly hard, and so dangerous in the capricious northern seas that many men and dories were lost each year. Halibut fishing has changed completely only once since that time: sixty-odd years ago, improvements in diesel engines and machinery made it feasible to haul a vastly extended string of hooks directly to the deck of a moderate-sized boat. The dory ships gave way to sturdy wooden schooners of fifty-to eighty-foot lengths. Some of these same schooners, built from 1913 through the 1920s, with modernizations still comprise the nucleus of the present fleet. The fleet now also includes smaller and multi-purpose vessels that fish halibut between other seasons. With the declining stocks of recent years, the halibut season lasts for only intermittent periods between April and October.
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