He told her next morning, passing it off as a joke.
Her face, normally less expressive than her voice, twisted strangely. “You mean, you plan to spend your life at this?”
“Other men do it, Sandy.”
“You never consider anybody but yourself, do you?”
“What kind of talk is that!” He had never thought about it before. “You play the big hairy fisherman, and think of your woman as chattel you can take or leave. Well, I’m sick of pretending to be that kind of woman. I want a life of being first choice, not the one after all the boats and fishermen have left.”
“I guess Adele Henry makes it all right.”
“I’m not so sure.”
He forced a laugh. “Come on, dear. A man has to make a living, and this is my way.” He could hear his own voice, coming deep and confident from his chest. “Of course you’re my first choice of woman.”
“Oh, a man’s living. Body all achin’ and wracked with pain? What a noble sacrifice to your living, to set us up for a trip to Hawaii, then cancel it for the first boat that came along. I know that really tore you up."
“I am sorry about that, and I’m going to make—”
“Make it up when there’s no crab, shrimp, salmon, or halibut running? My God, you’ve only got a heart for one thing in this world, Hank, and it’s not me!” Tears streaked her face. He went to hold her, but she brushed him away as she began to name all the times he had chosen boats instead of her.
Hank listened, subdued. He knew she was right. He did not love her, but he wanted badly to comfort her and make it up. When her tirade was finally lost in sobbing he drew her close and rocked her, wondering what he could do that would not trap him.
They had a quiet, sad meal together before he went fishing again. The next time his boat returned to town, the apartment was empty.
CHAPTER 21
Saga of the King Crabs and Tanners
THREE major species of crab are fished in Alaska, and two are biological imposters. The true or ten-legged crab, genus Cancer, is the dungeness, western brother to the smaller East Coast blue-claw of the Chesapeake Bay and points south. King crab is a member of the genus Paralithodes, a fellow crustacean but one that possesses a different joint structure and one fewer set of legs. The second imposter, tanner crab (commercially often called snow crab), belongs to the genus Chionoecetes, again a creature of differently proportioned parts. All three live in shells consisting of a carapace (central body) and legs, which they molt at intervals in order to grow larger. All three provide meat that is white, chunky, and succulent. To fishermen, cannerymen, and consumers, the latter is all that really matters.
In appearance, the dungeness crab has a thick central body and relatively stubby legs, two of them claws that it uses with agility. It weighs two to three pounds, and among the crustaceans resembles a boxer, always coiled ready to fight. (The Chesapeake Bay blueclaw is less than half the size, but many times the fighter.) The king crab is three and four times as weighty—seven to eight pounds is the commercial average, but ten-plus pounders still appear in the crabpots hauled north of Kodiak. The king’s carapace is a many-hued purple, rounded, and covered with thomlike protective spines. It resembles a big medallion. Many people in Alaska polish and mount them. The carapace breadth of mature male kkigs (six to nine or more inches) is no greater than that of the dungeness, which has a brown, smooth, oblong shell, but the bulk of the kings rounded body, along with its meat-filled legs which extend more than a foot (for a total span of three to four feet), make it a vastly larger creature. Compared to the boxer dungeness, however, a king crab has a sluggish nature. It’s two pinchers, inexorably strong when they close on an object, are just as likely to wave open. Last of the three, the tanner crab, has long spidery legs which emanate from a frail brown carapace that few would think of displaying over a fireplace. It’s weight may reach four pounds, but compared to the feisty dungeness or the heavyweight king, it is unimpressive, an Ichabod Crane with a watery constitution.
To say which of the three crabs is the best eating is a matter of choice. Prepared under equal conditions, each is so good that one forgets the competition. There are beer ways and wine ways to eat a crab. The great beer way is straight from the steam pot, with the crabs warm and their natural juices still flowing from the shell. The San Francisco and Chesapeake Bay method involves a leisurely ceremony with mallets and fingers, as one picks out lumps and slivers of meat throughout the shell and claws. Dungeness and blueclaw are the ideal picking crabs, the ones around which the ceremony was developed. Their compact structures concentrate the meat in chunks throughout their body and legs. The tanner is the least satisfactory picking crab because its meat clings to the shell. King crab contains the richest meat, but a single tube from one leg provides the entire meal, so it is no pick crab. With kings, try rather the wine ways: elegant cold salads or sauteed in butter. As for tanner crab, one could make a case for it having the best flavor of them all. Place a bottle of wine beside it.
Until two decades ago, dungeness was the West Coast crab. The Japanese had maintained a Bering Sea factory fleet to harvest and can king crab from 1930 until Pearl Harbor, but Americans had seen little of it. When I first visited Kodiak in 1952, in the Coast Guard, and then returned home to Chesapeake Bay country with a photo of myself holding a four-foot king crab across my middle, people thought I was playing a joke with papier-mâché.
Before World War II there had been tentative U.S. endeavors at a king-crab fishery, principally from aboard the Tondelayo. This small factory ship was first outfitted for Bering Sea king crab in 1938 by a canneryman named Kinky Alexander, and then in 1940 explored the same grounds under a one-year government grant. The true pioneer of the fishery is conceded to be Lowell Wakefield, member of a cannery family who processed herring at the time in a small plant to the north of Kodiak. Beginning in 1946, Wakefield organized a series of king-crabbing forays into the Bering Sea, principally aboard the ship Deep Sea, which he built especially for the purpose. In a work combination which has generally proved impractical to U.S. investors (including Wakefield), a fishing crew aboard the Deep Sea harvested the crabs with nets, later pots, and sent them directly belowdeck to be frozen and canned by a separate crew. The Deep Sea survives as a floating king-crab processor anchored in Aleutian harbors—she stopped performing her dual role in 1956—respected by Alaska crabmen, many of whom, like the fictitious Swede Scorden, learned his profession aboard her.
By the 1950s king crab was a small fishery, controlled mainly by Wakefield, which had shifted its operations to Seldovia at the mouth of Cook Inlet. This area had good king-crab grounds within commuting distance of shore-based plants, making it possible to bypass the heavy logistical problems of the remote and turbulent Bering Sea. By the 1960s the center of king crabbing and the men most active in it had moved a hundred miles south to Kodiak and a seemingly endless superabundance of the huge crustaceans. In 1953, the total Alaska king-crab industry delivered 4.6 million pounds. By 1960 it had grown to 28.5 million pounds. Then came the Kodiak years, when in 1965 and 1966 Kodiak alone delivered 76.8 and 90.7 million pounds of king crab. Kodiak was a crab-crazy town, with plugged boats sometimes waiting days in line for a cannery to unload them, and the crabbing going year-round except during the spring mating season. Suddenly the Kodiak catches tumbled: 63 to 22 to 13 million pounds in the next three years. While by the mid-1970s it had risen to the 20 millions again, the superboom was obviously gone, apparently through overfishing, and the fishery shifted westward toward the Bering Sea and the Aleutians. The Alaskawide harvest of king crabs today is approximately that of the peak Kodiak year.
In most fisheries, the road of trial and error to a general technology has been lost in time, but with king crab many of the men who worked out the methods are still active (Lowell Wakefield died in 1977). These men, who experimented with new processes, grounds, boats, and gear, were individual cannerymen and fishermen, not funded GM research executives or universit
y researchers subsidized to compare notes at annual symposia. They had a living to gain, but their shirts to lose.
For the embryo cannery operator there was first the basic problem of preserving the king-crab meat with flavor and texture—even color—that people would buy. For preparing the meat, there was a literature of general seafood knowledge, even regarding other crabs, but the modifications to king crab were far from automatic. Many variables had to be balanced. Canning and later freezing problems included discoloration in the can and mushy thawed legs, needing adjustments—e.g., in cooking times, volume of washes, degree of brine quick-freeze.
The mechanical stages to prepare the crabmeat, from butchering and cooking to extraction and packing, had to be translated both into special machinery and into cannery lines where one step would flow efficiently to the next. (Often, still, a crab canneryman sets up his lines with enough personal innovations and specially tooled equipment to bar visitors and cameras to prevent his ideas being scouted.) New terms that entered the cannery vocabulary indicate some of the jobs in the process of preparing large crabs: the breaking table, where the workers twist the cooked crab legs in two at the joints; the wringing station, where rollers press out the narrow strip of meat in the lower leg; the blowing line, where compressed-air jets shoot out the fat tube of meat from the main leg; the shake line, where with the flick of a wrist the chunks of meat closest to the body are shaken free.
On deck, the king crabs were first brought up by net, both trawls and tangle nets. The weight of the catch in a trawl crushed enough crab for Americans to abandon the method even before a law was passed against it. Tangle nets enmesh the crabs, so that many, including females and juveniles, are torn apart and killed while being picked out. The U.S. outlawed tangle nets to its own crabbers in 1954, but was powerless for the next two decades to prevent their use by the Japanese and Soviet king-crab factory fleets.
For Americans, crab pots appeared to be the solution. The existing near-shore fishery for dungeness crab used circular pots that weighed up to 150 pounds. Fishermen first enlarged the openings of these to try them for king crab. They were certainly neater than nets, but they were so light that they tumbled and drifted with the tides. The pots evolved by trial and error are square, with steel frames and nylon web. They are generally three feet wide by six and a half to eight feet square (650-pound “seven-bys” are most common these days), and they have the shape and weight to stay solidly on the bottom at fishing depths of fifty fathoms or more. Crabs, attracted by bait hung inside, enter through a web corridor that tunnels upward, then fall off into the pot itself. One of the early design problems was the tunnel. In the first versions it was horizontal, and too many crabs crawled free as easily as they had entered. Somebody had to think through the angular tunnel, while still leaving some escape route if the pot became full (king crabs jammed too tight to move soon become the prey of sea lice that eat them alive). The initial pots also had wire mesh, which disintegrated in a few months through an electrolytic interaction in salt water with the steel frames. Although nylon web is now used, pots still have a zinc bar attached to reduce this batterylike exchange within the framework itself.
Then the deck machinery had to be developed to haul these vastly heavier pots. In the early days the pots were winched strenuously and slowly with boom and deck-mounted hauler. The present hydraulic crab block self-adjusts to take up sudden slacks in heavy seas, and it moves so rapidly that a pot loaded to 3000 pounds can be drawn up from sixty fathoms in about three minutes. One of the principal developers and manufacturers of this crab block, Marco of Seattle, had also placed into production the Puretic Power Block which, as noted earlier, changed the seine fisheries of the world. Marco president Peter Schmidt had accepted Puretic’s invention after several larger manufacturers had turned it down, and it furnished the bedrock of his young company. This was a time for many to gamble their substance on the future. Some—like Schmidt, Wakefield, and many individual fishermen—came out splendidly. Others, if not dead or crippled, ended up fishing on somebody else’s deck for a living.
The boats had the problem of keeping crabs alive until they could be brought to the canneries. On the first small boats out of Seldovia and Kodiak, crewmen stacked the crab belly-up in holds primarily meant for salmon, and delivered them, still sluggishly waving their claws, to the nearby canneries within twelve hours. For a longer-range operation it was necessary to develop tanks with pumps that circulated fresh seawater completely at least once every thirty minutes.
And the crab boats themselves! The first ones were converted from other fisheries, including old Monterey sardine seiners, and larger Alaska salmon seiners (legal size limit fifty-eight feet) whose owners wanted to fish more than the summer salmon runs. Limit seiners for the shore-hugging salmon were not built for the steady punishment of open sea where the king crabs schooled, and the Monterey seiners suffered from superannuation. Both had stability problems when several layers of pots stacked on deck raised their center of gravity. Many of these makeshift crabbers, cruising to the grounds with a deckload of pots, caught a sea and capsized, or simply broke apart. Early king crabbing was a death-and-disaster fishery, the wonder being that it was not more so given the typical weather around Kodiak and the Bering Sea.
As king crab began to promise high payoffs, men afforded long-terms debts for boats better adapted to the work. By the 1970s there were extensive conversions of large surplus military vessels and of shrimp trawlers bought from yards in the Gulf of Mexico. However, in the late 1960s, Seattle yards had begun building boats 90 feet and longer which were especially designed to cope with rough seas and unwieldly crab pots. These “Bering Sea crabbers” have become the standard king crab vessels of western Alaska. They are big, full, heavy boats—tailored to be stable all-weather work platforms—characterized by a large square deck for carrying a maximum number of pots, by equally large hold capacities to permit extended fishing without the need to return often to unload, and by a full bow structure that keeps the boat from plunging deeply in heavy seas. The boats have heavy-duty marine diesel engines ranging in horsepower (figures for Marco boats) from 575 in the 90-foot class to 1200 in the 120-foot class.
Except for the big tuna seiners, these Bering Sea crabbers are the largest and most elegant fishing boats in the United States. In their spacious galley and berthing areas they seem like the vessels of a different profession than the little Rondelay-type seiners. Yet nothing inside can mitigate the brutality of the weather the crews must face on deck, the maverick swinging of ton-weight pots, or the endless hours required to work the pots. It is a hard fishery, considered by most fishermen second only to halibut longlining for the toll it takes in danger and physical strain.
The king crabs themselves, subject of this attention, are bottom-dwelling creatures. While slow-moving and sluggish when viewed from minute to minute, they commonly migrate more than a hundred miles during a year, walking or scuttling but never swimming as they move inshore to shallows for spring mating, then return to the deeper flats of the continental shelves.
Studies by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game indicate that, despite this movement, crabs school in tribes that do not mingle beyond their own distinct areas. There are five such areas around Kodiak Island. Kings also appear to return to the same grounds within their area after mating. They are gregarious, but tend to stay segregated by sex and size for much of the year after reaching maturity. This makes a bonanza for the skipper clever or lucky enough to set his pots on a colony of keeper-sized males—and misery for the crew that pulls a string of picking pots jammed with nothing but throwbacks.
Young king crabs of about age two (still sexually mixed and half a decade away from harvestable age) sometimes are found in an extraordinarily gregarious state, clinging together in a pod that may measure twelve feet across. The six-thousand-odd crabs thus podded all face outward from the center and circulate within the mass so that the top layers move continuously around to the bottom where the foo
d lies. Sometimes they disband temporarily to feed, then all pile together again. Divers have observed several pods joined together into a long mound across the seafloor containing collectively up to 500,000 crabs. Presumably the podding is for protection, since small crabs furnish dinner for many large fish, including halibut. By their third year the young crabs have peeled off and gone their ways in more horizontal packs to graze the ocean floor for food. The diet of a king crab includes detritus, sea plants, clams, snails, other crustaceans, fish, sea lice, barnacles, worms, sea plants, echinoderms, sea urchins—virtually anything living on the bottom rocks and mud that fits their claws.
According to the best calculations of biologists king crabs may live as long as twenty years. Big older males have a crusty, weighty look, with barnacles covering their spiny dark purple shells. Both sexes of king crabs grow at the same rate until they reach sexual maturity at age five. Then the males become progressively larger. By age seven or eight the male has attained a carapace width of six and a half to seven inches, which makes him legally harvestable depending on the area, and he continues to grow, while a female seldom reaches this size no matter how long she lives. A male keeper weighs seven to ten pounds, depending on his age, with Bering Sea crabs smaller and basically about a pound lighter than those around Kodiak and Dutch Harbor. The largest female ever documented weighed ten pounds, while the largest male weighed twenty-four pounds six ounces and stretched out five feet from leg to leg.
The king crab, like all other crustaceans including the shrimp, grows by molting. It sloughs one exoskeleton and takes water into its tissues to swell its size, after which a new shell hardens around its body. It then grows solidly to fill the new shell. During the initial years of growth king crabs normally molt twenty-three times, but then as adults only once a year at a predictable time.
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