Highiliners

by William B. McCloskey Jr.

  He started questioning Langhorn on specific international agreements. Chief Mack became more and more restless, frowning as he shifted from one foot to the other. Finally he said, “Look, uh, Crawford, Tve got things to do. See you later at the Elbow Room.” It freed Hank to follow Langhorn to his cabin in officers country for maps and documents, and then to the wardroom to spread them on the table. A young ensign named Sollers sat in. His principal duty was foreign-ship inspection, and he had the same zest for the subject as the Fisheries agent. They showed Hank profiles of various Japanese and Soviet fishing ships with their specifications and produced copies of the international agreements. The material was more complicated than Hank had imagined, with rules and quotas for specific areas bargained separately with each fishing nation, Canada included, that changed with each annual or biennial renegotiation.

  Sollers said earnestly, “And we know they’re cheating out there, don’t we, Mr. Langhorn?” He turned to Hank. “You know, half the violations we see can’t be enforced? We find incidental salmon and halibut aboard a Jap boat and it’s only a violation of the INPFC agreement, we can only turn them over to their own government. We find a Soviet trawling through a pot sanctuary, we can report him, nothing but report him! Our only chance is to catch him in the CFZ, somewhere between shore and twelve miles. Even then, we have to surprise him in the act of fishing, have to prove his gear was in the water. Their radars are as good as ours—better. If they see us coming they pull their nets before we can get close enough.” He screwed his face with a kid’s impatience. “I want to nab me one of those pirates so bad..

  Langhorn glanced at Hank, amused. “This one never leaves the bridge when were on patrol. The Exec or the Old Man’s going to court-martial him for pestering to play hide-and-seek in the fog.”

  Back with Jody, Hank became more and more preoccupied with buying his own boat. He decided to talk to Swede Scorden about credit as soon as they returned to Kodiak, and meanwhile he asked the advice of Jones Henry and any other skipper willing to listen. His equity for a down payment had risen nearly seven thousand since the start of the spring season, with the price of king crab having grown through cannery competition from thirty-five to sixty-five cents a pound. Fifty thousand dollars (Hank’s thirty-five previously saved and Jody’s disputed eight thousand plus the new money) could make a ten percent down payment on a new ninety-foot Bering Sea crab boat like Jones Henry’s that could take on anything. At the other end of the line, it could buy outright a decent little purse seiner, most of a fifty-eight-foot limit seiner, or a sizable portion of a seventy-five-foot shrimper-crabber that would handle anything the Kodiak waters had to offer. What kind of fishermen did he want to be? That was the question.

  “Nothing beats fishing salmon,” he began tentatively with Jody and Jones Henry. “Those bays around Kodiak Island with all the mountains, why would anybody ask for more?”

  “That takes care of mid-June to mid-August, and mebbe stretch it a few more weeks for silvers if you like to scratch,” said Jones. “I first started fishing nothing but the salmon, but that was a different life. You can’t live in Kodiak any more and count on salmon for it all, except in some shack in a cove and cut your own wood. By the way—all that money you say you’ve got for a down payment—you putting anything aside for a house, or... ?”

  “We’d live on the boat,” said Hank. Jody shrugged.

  “Well, I had to raise three kids. And Adele was a game girl, but I always planned to keep her and the boat separated. With fishing, you know, some years you hit it big enough to pay your old debts. Then some years they don’t run, or you break down at the height of the season, and you haven’t made expenses, so back in debt you go. That’s why Kodiak fishing’s become better than most. If the salmon run poor, there’s the shrimp, then the crab.” Jones tilted back the visor of his cap to include both Hank and Jody in his wink. “Anyhow, now that Kodiak has things to fish at other times of the year, who wants to be the only boat tied up for nine months? I’d set Adele crazy. That’s the polite way to put it.”

  “If I had a fifty-eight-foot limit seiner I could still convert to crab and shrimp, but never on any scale. Have to stay close around Kodiak.”

  “Tell you one thing,” Jones said, choosing his words as if they might be used against him. “I’ve built slow all my life, each boat about ten foot longer than the one before. Now look at my new ninety-footer, a real beauty. I’ve got to earn the kind of payments every quarter that used to cover a whole year’s rent. Now that it’s all done, I don’t know. Steve and Ivan and me, we like to fish hard. But out here it’s a different kind of push, a wild man’s game. Fishings no fun any more, not the way it used to be on the old Rondelay, or even on the Adele H. Remember how we’d lay over a couple days and go hunting if we felt like it? Out here, you can’t even show me a safe little cove, even if there was something to hunt besides eagles.”

  “End of the earth,” said Hank absently. “Bering Sea’s no kind of life. Pulling a crab pot every ten minutes, over and over, it’s dull compared to all the steps in setting a purse or a trawl. And if you make a pile, taxes take it.”

  Jody had let them talk, but now she said to Hank, “Don’t fool yourself. I’ve never seen you happier than trying to outwit the crab and playing rough-weather Norwegian. And you’d get tax breaks on money you plowed into boat payments.”

  “Are you telling me to put us both in hock for half a million bucks with a big Bering Sea crabber?”

  “I’m not sure, Hank, not sure.”

  “What makes you think,” asked Jones, “that a first-year skipper’s going to find that kind of credit? Just because you made money one year don’t guarantee you’ll make it other years. Banks and canneries both know it.”

  In mid-September, Hank was finishing his final Bering Sea trip, with a layover ahead until November before the Dutch Harbor season began. He and Jody planned to return to Kodiak for a few days of nothing but sleep, then fly to Hawaii for a delayed honeymoon. He was stacking pots for storage when word flashed along the radio bands: the Coast Guard cutter had surprised a Japanese trawler with its gear in the water nine miles from land, and the trawler was fleeing with the cutter in chase. News bulletins said the Coast Guard termed it a “hot pursuit.” The chase started at noon. By late afternoon it still continued strong.

  “Damn Coast Guard ships ain’t fast enough,” declared Jones Henry over the sideband. “Think they’d have caught ’em by now.”

  “Hear you on that,” said Hank. “This Coast Guard ship cruises nineteen knots and has auxiliary engines for more. I just visited her. But you think one ship’s going to ram another just to make it stop?”

  “Don’t the Coast Guard carry guns?”

  “They entered international waters as soon as they left the twelve-mile zone.”

  “Ha!” Tolley announced. “Were steaming to give an assist. If we intercept the cocksucker don’t think we won’t shoot.”

  Given his own boat, however illogically, Hank would have followed. He listened to the news with the itchy excitement of a hunter left behind.

  One bulletin gave some details. The Coast Guard had a hot pursuit procedure. It started as the cutter cruised alongside the fleeing trawler, sending stop signals by radio, bullhorn, and flag hoist. An hour later, when a Coast Guard C-130 plane joined the chase, it flew low over the trawler, first dropping smoke pots ahead, then dropping a message block on deck with written orders in Japanese to stop. The plane crew saw a Japanese take the message block to the bridge. But the ship continued full speed.

  The American fishermen commented to each other with growing interest and exuberance, as if the entire foreign problem was being brought to a showdown. Other boats besides Tolly’s had abandoned gear to head for an intercept. Hank kept the radio at blast level so that his crew could hear as they continued to work. The whole convoy was steaming northwest. There was gray cloud cover, but no worse than a light choppy sea; given the Bering, it was perfect weather for a chase.


  “If the bastard keeps in that direction he’ll hit Bristol Bay. Too bad their salmon fleet’s done for the season. Japs have ruined their sockeye runs, and plenty fellows up there would like to get them a Jap.”

  “Roger that, but you have Jap factory fleets working that area. Jap probably figures he’ll lose himself in the dark with all the other boats, or maybe luck out if the weather kicks up.”

  At twilight, around eight, the pursuit continued. At ten, and then at midnight, the news was the same. Judging from the sideband commentary, even the crews that had stopped fishing for the night stayed awake. Then, a bulletin at two in the morning announced that the Japanese ship had stopped and turned on its decklights. The Coast Guard with a Fisheries agent would board in the morning.

  “Yahoo!”

  “Those Coast Guard better carry handguns tomorrow,” Jones announced. “Don’t underestimate Japs for treachery.”

  But at noon the next day, after a long radio silence, the anti-climactic news came that the Japanese trawler had been seized without incident and that the Coast Guard cutter was escorting it to Kodiak.

  “Hey, think the Kodiak jails big enough to hold forty-fifty Japs? Course they’re used to crowding like pigs.”

  “Jail? More likely the State Department flies up from D.C. and tells the Coast Guard it’s violated some big treaty, and Uncle Sam pays the Japs a fuckin’ fine. Probably donates the Coast Guard captain’s head to hang in the Japs’ chowhall.”

  But, a week later in Kodiak when Hank arrived, a forlorn Japanese crew watched from the deck of their rusty ship moored under guard at the Coast Guard Base, as “Blue Jesus, yes, that’s them!” roared Chief Mack from the rail of the victorious cutter. His wide face kept breaking into a grin and his voice continued full volume as he invited Hank aboard and regaled him with details of the chase.

  “There was a rumor when I left Dutch,” said Hank, “that the Japs were let off. That’s why I came here direct from the plane.”

  “From Anchorage? Keep your eyes open. You flew with our people just come back from the trial. Let ’em off? Ha!” Mack pounded him on the back and dragged him to the chief’s mess. Along the way they passed sailors who were affected with a similar exuberance. Inside, the Quartermaster was describing to a half dozen other chiefs the trial from which he had just returned as a witness. The story had long before covered the main incidents, and now explored details such as the meek nature of the Japanese captain ever since he stopped running. Hank interrupted politely to ask if there had been a fine or other penalty.

  The chiefs turned collectively to look him over as if he were the ultimate Jap. “Fine? You’re fuckin’ A there was a fine. Biggest one yet for a Jap ship, two hundred thousand, and another thirty thousand against the captain. Who are you? Oh, that fisherman from Dutch. You still think the Coast Guard sits on its ass?”

  It was too much a family affair for Hank to join. In a few minutes even Mack had forgotten him, but no one threw him out. After they discussed the slippery behavior of the Japanese at the trial as well as the cool displayed by all the Americans—including the U.S. Attorney, who took no crap from foreigners—the talk shifted to old events. The stories were fragmented enough—punch lines without preamble—to be on their hundredth repeat.

  The Engineman chief who had once shown Hank around had been one of the six in the custody crew that occupied the trawler for the three-day trip to Kodiak. They had brought aboard their own supplies—sleeping bags, food, water, and first-aid kit—and had lived in the pilothouse. Only four could sleep on the deck at one time, but they were alternating watches anyhow. The Japs ran their own ship, but the Americans kept a check on the navigation gear and relayed the course changes as they trailed behind the cutter. “Nobody gave us trouble, but it was cramped as hell, and stuffy.”

  “Full of fuckin’ Jap smells, you mean?”

  “Oh, the smells wasn’t so bad. The Japs neither, real quiet and polite, to tell the truth. But the Jap captain . . . wish I had that note he gave Lieutenant Smith.”

  “Tell us about that note again.”

  “Scratched in big blocky letters like a kid. How did it go? ‘Dear United States. Please excuse me from breaking the law.’ I tell you that was comical, after all the chase they put us through.” Hank laughed with the rest.

  As he left the cutter, Hank encountered Ensign Sollers. He had seldom seen such pure cloud-floating. “We did it,” Sollers exclaimed, pumping his hand. “Just wish our patrol wasn’t over. I’m applying for transfer to the Confidence or Storis out of Kodiak here, since they sail patrols all year long. Like a hunt for big game out there, you know?”

  When Adele Henry had welcomed Hank and Jody at the airport with hugs and exclamations, she declared: “Tell me this if you can: How many matrons of honor have to wait six months after the ceremony to see the bride and groom? I think we should have a proper wedding up at St. James the Fisherman. Meanwhile, the guest room’s all fixed for you at home, a bottle of champagne’s in the refrigerator, and we’ll have a special dinner tonight. Then we’ll celebrate again when Jones gets back to town. Why couldn’t he leave his boat at Dutch Harbor and fly back the way you did?”

  “Not sure Jones plans to fish out of Dutch any more.”

  “But he bought that big boat. Not that I don’t miss him—it’s awful to be alone so long. But the whole world was going to pass him by if he didn’t get out there in the Bering Sea. Now I can’t wait to question him.”

  “Adele, we’re too tired to think until we’ve rested, both Jones and me. Bering crab’s the longest pull of them all. I plan to sleep for a week before we go south. Jones will too. He won’t make any decision that counts until after that.”

  Rest or not, Hank called on Swede Scorden at the cannery next afternoon. They started with the usual ceremony of cigar, bottle, and feet on the desk before starting to talk, but it lacked the atmosphere of ease. Swede was tense. Through the big window Hank watched a shrimp boat unloading and others tied around it. Nothing physical seemed to have altered.

  “Good shrimp season out there?”

  “Best in my time, these last two months. Fantastic. We’re not even buying from boats that don’t deliver to us regular, and we work two cannery shifts around the clock.”

  “Well then,” he joked for openers, “I guess you’re going to make me an offer to return to the cannery business.”

  “These days, I wouldn’t wish it on that Agnew crook.”

  Hank came to the point. “I’ve skippered two boats now for a total of a year, both for winter shrimp in Kodiak and every one of the king crab seasons to westward—Bering, Dutch, Aleutians. I’ve saved fifty thousand, and I’m ready to get my own boat.”

  Swede questioned him on the kind he wanted and the fishery he hoped to enter. “New Bering Sea crabber on ten percent and a year’s experience? Never. To begin with, banks expect nearly a third down.”

  “Don’t they see the kind of money being made out there? Crab prices have doubled, and that’s not the end.”

  “No need to tell me about prices. It’s changed my life.”

  “You know it. Doubled. Can’t a bank compare catch records to see if a skipper has the balls to make it? At new prices it’ll only take a few years to pay off a boat, maybe just one super season.”

  “The basic help a cannery usually offers is to supply the gear— the pots or the nets—for ten percent of the catch and a delivery guarantee until the debt’s paid. Not a bad deal, since we don’t charge you interest as long as the product keeps coming. Next thing a cannery might do is co-sign, if they think you’re good. You take the risk, and we get the boat if you fail. But now, you’re talking a ninety-foot Marco-type crabber like Jones Henry’s. That’s five hundred thousand before gear. You don’t have the reputation yet to float something like that.”

  The door flew open without a knock, and a Japanese wearing a dark suit and hornrimmed glasses entered as if he owned the place. “Yes, Scorden, excuse me please. The effi
ciency report,” he said in good English, handing Swede a file. “We’ll have conference in one hour, at four-ten sharp, and decide where to cut. Please, you will make sure to read it so we don’t waste time.”

  Swede removed his feet slowly from the desk as he introduced Hank as a highline Bering Sea skipper. Hank towered over the Japanese by a head. Mr. Ato offered a hand to shake that had no grip as he studied Hank and smiled slightly. “Yes, highline? Very good. You fish for our plant in Dutch Harbor? Give me your card, please. Here is mine.”

  Hank’s stock sank visably when he failed to produce a card, although the politeness continued. He said that he had visited a Japanese factory ship, and had been impressed with its efficiency.

  It roused a spark. “Ah, yes, of course, they must be efficient. This is one of the fleets of our conglomerate. I know the fishing master. He brings in very good quantity.”

  Alone again, Hank stared at Swede. “Our plant?”

  “I warned that something would give, Hank. We’ve been paying overprice for the raw product just to keep from shutting the plants. Had to find new capital or quit. You think there was American money for such a shaky seasonal industry? Our Seattle man spent weeks in New York. The only money ready to invest in fish was yen, my friend. Favorable exchange, historic interest. This Japanese fishing conglomerate made a decent offer. It saved us, at the price of controlling interest. Don’t think we’re the only ones. Whitney-Fidalgo, with plants in Kodiak and all over Alaska, went ninety-eight percent Jap this year.”

  “Oh, Jesus, they’re everywhere.”

  “You might as well be realistic. You wouldn’t have a plant left here to buy your fish if the Japs hadn’t bailed us out.”