The annual molting occurs at the same time as mating, nor can the king-crab female perform her part of the reproductive function until she first molts. During late winter, both sexes start moving in from the hundred-or-more-fathom shelves to kelpy ocean banks or shorelines of forty fathoms and less. Upon arriving, the females occasionally pod together, apparently to emit a collective sexual attractant strong enough to guide the males to their location. Males follow a less regular schedule. Some “skip-molt”: pass by a year. If males molt before meeting the females, they must harden for about ten days before they can take their part in the mating. The younger females are taken first. Nature gives the male the instinct to grasp the female of his choice for several days. This may serve merely to guarantee his presence when the crucial moment arrives, but it also protects her at a vulnerable time and furnishes help in sloughing her old shell. The female—doomed to be one of the most eternal egg-bearers in all the creature kingdoms—may still be carrying the fertilized eggs of the year before if she has not just released them, and may actually hatch them during the days while the male is grasping her. When her molt is completed with the male’s help, the male in a few minutes deposits sperm externally around her gonopores, and releases her. He goes his way to rest a while and then to do his duty by another female. She at once extrudes her new eggs—50,000 to 400,000, depending on her size—which are fertilized immediately as they pass through her two gonopores into her abdominal pouch. She then starts the long crawl back to deep water, carrying the eggs she will shelter and care for throughout the coming year.
King crab eggs hatch to liberate larvae one-thirty-second of an inch long. For two months they live within the water column and swim weakly with the currents, a zooplanktonic meal for any larger creature with a taste for them. On the fourth molt they acquire an exoskeleton half resembling a crab. By now they are a third of an inch long. They settle to the bottom for the rest of their lives and never swim again. The next molt delivers them into crab shape, complete with jointed legs, claws, socketed eyes, and soft abdomen. About eighteen molts and four years later their carapaces have grown to four inches, they reach sexual maturity, and they separate for good into male and female groups.
Males may be mature for two seasons before they reach commercial size, and they can fertilize several females during each season. Thus the process of reproduction is not threatened by the harvesting of large males. However, all the forces affecting king crabs are not yet known. Biologists have noted that large females (the ones carrying the most eggs) primarily mate with large males.
In the early days, fishermen took king crabs when they chose, being regulated only by size. Later, while being forced to respect the molting season by conservation regulations, they would fish the crabs during the three summer months following, when the meat was still lightweight and watery before it had filled out the new shell. Since 1970, king crab has been regulated by quota. Since quotas are limited, the canneries and Alaska fishery officials have eased the Kodiak and Bering Sea seasons into a period late enough for the crabs to have filled to their heaviest. (By careful processing a cannery can recover 25 percent of a full king crab’s total weight as meat, but only about 15 percent from a recently molted crab.) By the time the crabs have grown heavy again, most in Kodiak have migrated farther to sea, and the autumn storms have begun. Thus smaller boats may compete for only that portion of crabs which remains in some large deep bays, and men who want to stick with the king crabs must finance larger boats that will take them farther seaward.
Dungeness crab provides a relatively small commercial fishery in Alaska despite its abundance. Thus far it has been caught principally for live-tank sale to West Coast restaurants such as those on Fishermen’s Wharf in San Francisco, during a time when the crabs fell off on California and Oregon shores. This great picking crab lacks the large sections of meat that in kings and tanners can be shaken or rollered free on a cannery line.
Dungeness crabs spend their lives much closer to shore than the other crabs discussed here, and the fishery for them is not as strenuous. As already noted, they are fished with circular pots weighing up to 150 pounds. The dungeness around Kodiak mate in late summer, after molting as do kings, with the same grasping procedure. However, the male sperm remains dormant in the female’s abdomen for several months before the eggs are fertilized. The eggs then hatch in the spring, and the planktonic larvae float free before several molts send the creatures to the bottom. Dungeness are noted for eating their young. Their lifespan is about eight years if they survive themselves. As also noted, their carapace span can be as great as that of king crabs (six and a half inches is the usual legal commercial size) but they are considerably smaller, with a weight range of two to four pounds.
Tanner crabs have been around as long as any of the others. The Japanese know them well from their own coasts as well as from Alaska, and they have marketed them in the U.S. for years as snow crab. While king crabs were abundant, Americans generally ignored tanners, since they were less meaty and more difficult to process. However, now that U.S. king-crab fishermen have payments to make on their million-and-a-half-dollar Bering Sea boats, they need a crab fishery for longer each year than kings alone can provide. With better tanner-crab markets in recent years, higher prices, and improved processing technology, tanner crabs are filling the gap.
Ironically, the Japanese spurred American interest by sharing some of their tanner-crab processing technology. In the late 1970s, the allotment of Bering Sea tanner crab to the Japanese became the first test of the 1976 Fishery Management Act (the “two-hundred-mile law”) as American fishermen acquired the boat capacity to fish virtually all of the eastern Bering Sea tanners and the Japanese, with the future of two factory fleets at stake, fought at the diplomatic level to remain in the fishery.
The tanner crab weighs in at half that of a king crab. The name derives from one species within genus Chionoecetes, C. tanneri, which is neither of the species found at commercially viable depths in Alaskan waters. The principal Alaskan species, abundant from the Gulf of Alaska to the Bering Sea, is C. bairdi. The bairdi is two and a half times larger than C. opilio, which frequents the northern Bering Sea shelf. As the Japanese are eased further out of the fishery, they are being allotted quotas of opilio or nothing.
The cycle of tanner crabs is different from that of kings, so the two can be fished in separate seasons. At present, the boats in both Kodiak and the Bering Sea follow the king crabs from September into January (until the quotas of different sizes have been taken), and then fish the tanners from mid-January to April around Kodiak and to mid-June in the Bering Sea.
The tanner reproductive process differs from that of the other two crabs in that the female does not molt when she mates, but rather keeps the same shell from maturity until death. She has a considerable range of egg capacity—24,000 to 300,000—which appears to have nothing to do with size. Tanners live eight to twelve years. Males, as with the other crabs, are bigger than females, with a fat bairdi keeper weighing from three to four pounds. Tanners inhabit shelf waters as deep as 250 fathoms, but they also school in the hundred-fathom areas of the king crabs. It appears, however, that tanner crabs and king crabs compete for the same food and normally do not coexist. Except for juveniles, king crabs would be the obvious winners of a territorial dispute. On the other hand, waters in which large king crabs have been fished out may suddenly become abundant with tanners, providing at least a compensatory crab fishery for several seasons.
The experimental early days of king crabbing only three decades ago are over. An established king-tanner fishery now employs thousands. On the boats, it makes for some of the roughest fishing in the world.
Part 4: 1972 FALL - 1974 SPRING
CHAPTER 22
Dutch Harbor, Aleutians, and Bering Sea
THE tandem settlements of Unalaska and Dutch Harbor on the Aleutian island of Unalaska he six hundred miles southwest of Kodiak and about two thousand miles northwest of Seattle. They dot
the shore of the only major harbor near Unimak Pass, which in turn is the first entrance to the great fishing grounds of the Bering Sea.
Unalaska is the third of the fifty-odd principal islands (there are hundreds more) that form what is called the Aleutian Islands chain. Beginning at Unimak, the chain curves westward a thousand miles to Attu, then two hundred miles farther to the Soviet Komandorskyie Islands, None of the islands are more than a few miles from water to water, yet the interiors of many have never been formally explored. It is a mountain land of fogs and gales, of shorelines peppered with shoals, of dormant volcanos that sometimes erupt, an ocean-dominated world of primal austerity.
This thin Aleutian barrier is one of the world’s most famous swirling points for foul weather. It is the clash line between the equatorial warmth pumped by the Japanese Current along the Pacific side of the islands and the arctic cold that blows down across the Bering Sea. Sixty-knot winds are commonplace, hundred-knot storms to be expected, with fog and slanting rain or snow a virtually perpetual condition. However, the islands have their own beauties when the fogs allow them to be seen. The mountains rise from the sea in big lumps and cones. Snow stays atop some the year round, streaking down extinct volcanos like melted ice cream. There are no trees, excepting stunted handfuls planted by lonely Russian fur traders two centuries ago and by lonely American soldiers four decades ago. But in summer, the hillsides are covered with greenery of an intensity usually associated with Ireland. And even in crevices among the high rocks, wildflowers bloom with a profligacy not seen in the tamed portions of the earth.
Back at the time of man’s first evidence on the islands 8500 years ago, the present continental shelf of the Bering Sea was exposed land. Apparently some of the Asian peoples who migrated across the land bridge far to the north traveled down this territory, where now the king crabs burrow in abundance under sixty fathoms of water, following the ledge of the exposed shelf as they sought seafood. They spread in both directions, to dead-end in the west on Attu, to move northeastward up the Alaska Peninsula and over to Kodiak Island. These were the ancestors of the present Aleuts. By the time they reached Kodiak they had evolved into the subgroup Koniag, the name from which Kodiak derives.
When the Russian fur barons “discovered” the Aleutians in 1741, the islands were inhabited by an estimated 12,000 to 25,000 natives. (The name Aleut, pronounced Al’-e-oot, derived from a Russian perversion of a native word, but scholars disagree on which word.) The natives lived in sunken sod houses, in hundreds of small groups throughout all the islands, dividing the coastline into sustaining parcels much as small farmers divide land. Their life was harsh beyond the most marginal present standards. With no trees and scarce driftwood, the Aleuts had no steady fuel supply beyond small quantities of sea-mammal oil. Their buried dwellings were rarely heated, and they ate most of their fish and seal meat raw. Nor could they fire pottery utensils. While the land supplied some roots and berries in season, the sea was their supplier—one of the roughest of the world. When they put out in their skin boats, they often had to paddle miles from shore, in waters that still regularly sink steel ships. Many never returned, and the general life expectancy was short.
When the Russians came, the meeting of civilized and primitive man followed the ugly conquistadorial pattern. Some natives were friendly, some fought, but all were subdued. Under Russian guns and whips, the skilled Aleut hunters were enslaved to provide gluttonous quantities of sea-otter pelts. The otters became practically extinct. The Aleuts themselves fared little better, dying both from mistreatment and from white man’s diseases. Ninety years after the Russian arrival, the native population had been reduced to approximately a tenth of its original number, an estimated 2200, with most of their settlements wiped out entirely. The 1970 census counted 1635 Aleuts in thirteen villages, only six of which are actually located on the Aleutian Islands themselves. Ironically, the Aleut people today, from Atka to Kodiak, have only one church—the Russian Orthodox. And the overlay of their culture, especially in the Aleutians, remains predominantly Russian, however many ballots they may cast for American presidents.
Until World War II, the Aleutian Islands were considered little but an appendage to either Alaska or the United States. When military strategists began to pay attention, they saw what a dangerous bridge of air bases the islands could provide an enemy who wanted to bomb the U.S. West Coast, and conversely what a convenient platform the islands might provide for bombing Japan. By the time of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had built a base in the wasteland of hills known as Dutch Harbor and had stationed about 5000 men there.
Japan moved quickly after its stunning Pacific victories in early 1942 that ended with the fall of Corregidor on May 6. Prime target was Midway Island, west of Hawaii, but as a tactical diversion, and also for a double victory, the Japanese decided to take the Aleutians simultaneously. The battle of Dutch Harbor took place June 3 and 4, 1942. It resulted in two bombings by Japanese Zeros and a loss of seventy-eight American lives. However, the burning fuel tanks and dense smoke along the hills were deceptive, and the long-range effect on the Dutch Harbor base was one more of harassment than of destruction. Down south, the Battle of Midway had turned into an unexpected Japanese disaster, and Japan changed its plans for taking any but the farthest western Aleutian islands. Three days later they occupied Attu and Kiska.
The Aleutian expedition yielded a small, temporary, and expensive victory for the Japanese. They remained on Attu and Kiska for less than a year. The U.S. gathered its forces and established a base on Adak, an island halfway between Dutch and Attu. (A large American naval base remains on Adak today.) The battle to regain Attu lasted from May 11 to May 30, 1943. It was a battle to the death second only to Iwo Jima in the Pacific Theater for the ratio of U.S. casualties to men deployed, with 549 dead. The cost to the Japanese was even greater, with 2351 counted dead and hundreds more presumed buried before the count.
Only twenty-eight Japanese allowed themselves to be captured, none of them officers. At the last, 500 Japanese soldiers collected for a final stand, then held grenades to their chests.
Dutch Harbor-Unalaska had survived the bombing and remained a naval base throughout the war. The 2000 military men remaining in Dutch Harbor gladly closed down when the war ended. They left behind the ghosts of their dead, along with tons of equipment, plus hundreds of empty buildings and Quonset huts. The ruins remain, and, depending on the structure of an afterlife, so do the ghosts. The approximately 200 inhabitants of Unalaska village had been evacuated. When the war ended they were returned, and the reduced human activity of the area shifted back across the strait to their collection of frame houses clustered around the domed Russian Orthodox church.
The ghosts should remain even more deeply for the Japanese. They are closer geographically to the Aleutians than are most Americans (Attu is approximately 1200 miles from Japan, 3000 miles from Seattle). They lost more men, and in despair rather than victory. A nation of traditional fish-eaters and fishermen (the United States at this point is neither), they had been harvesting king crab in the American Bering Sea since 1930, and in fact had always known the Aleutian geography and marine biology better than its owners. In 1952 the U.S. decided that the punitive aspect of the war was over and allowed the Japanese to resume fishing around the very islands where they had been defeated and committed mass suicide less than a decade before. The fact that the Japanese, and then the Russians who followed in 1959, exploited the Aleutian and Bering Sea fishing grounds with little thought for either conservation or American fishermen is another story.
As the word Dutch is used now by fishermen and cannerymen, it encompasses both the natural estuary called Dutch Harbor on five-mile-long Amaknak Island within Unalaska Bay and the Aleut village of Unalaska on the shore of the main island only a few hundred feet east across a narrow strip of water. Without a bridge or steady ferry, one is isolated from the other except by boat. Processor ships have located on both shores over a space of miles. Each is self-con
tained, with shore-based or floating bunkhouses and chowhalls. Unalaska village is the only formal community among the diverse cannery complexes. It’s center consists of a white-clapboard general store, a new small post office, a pizza-type carryout set up in a trailer, a shacklike building that houses the bar, and the little Russian church. The village runs a few buildings deep along the shore, with an unpaved road connecting the other houses behind.
When the crab are running—which, with kings and tanners combined, occupies more and more of the year—the Aleuts are so outnumbered that they barely seem to exist. Fishermen accept them as part of the general melange, but give them no further thought. Some crew on the big boats, and some own smaller boats, but most are absorbed into the canneries at the picking levels. Whether the new power given the Unalaska Aleuts by the Alaska Native Claims Act will make them masters of their ancestral area, or at least larger participants in the fishing boom, remains to be seen.
Whatever happens, Dutch Harbor-Unalaska is now a place of the future, at least for outsiders, where the future is closing fast. Dutch will undoubtedly remain the major port for American boats fishing the Bering Sea; the Aleutians lack a choice of large sheltered harbors. And the American boats on the scene increase every year as the U.S. uses the provisions of the 200-mile law to loosen the hold of the Japanese and Russian fleets on the available seafood stocks. The continental shelves of the Aleutians and the Bering Sea are one of man’s biggest graineries. And Dutch has become the place where he keeps the silos.
CHAPTER 23
Kiss a Crab
HANK CRAWFORD waited packed against the bar of the Elbow Room in the village—the only bar in Unalaska and Dutch Harbor combined—until Charlie sold him two Scotches and the others passed them overhead. With Jody alongside he would have chosen to sit at one of the few booths, had there been space, but standing on the puddled planks was at least better than drinking outside in the snow. The chatter and smoke were terrific.
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