Penny and I and the Denise, Saltspring Island, B.C. 1971
But first I figured I needed some training. Turns out there was… FISH U (actually the commercial fishing program at the University of Rhode Island). So.. went there, learned all about diesel and gas engines, hydraulics, navigation, net building and vessel operation. We had our own fishing vessel and built a series of different kinds of nets, rigged up the boat and fished… shared what we caught.
There was a classmate there who had gillnetted in Alaska and said he would lease me his gillnetter. He even marked up charts showing me the way up to Alaska through the islands of the Inside Passage. I was more than thrilled. It even had a flying bridge and I had visions of my girlfriend and I up on the flying bridge drinking a fine bottle of wine as we headed up the Inside Passage of Alaska. This was before cellphone cameras so he didn’t have a picture of the boat, but he drew a picture. I was sure it was at least a 40 footer…
So I arrived at Fisherman’s terminal with my clothes and toolbox, walked down the dock, excited to move aboard my big Alaska fishing boat. The docks were full of big handsome 40 and 50 footers, with eager crews getting ready to head “Up North.”
Then I came to the number of the boat slip my friend had given me and stopped. There must be some mistake. What was tied up there was more like a kid’s drawing of a fishing boat. The flying bridge was just for looks; if you actually tried to get up there, it would probably tip over. The Denise was all of 26’. Then I remembered: my friend had never actually said how big it was…. Then, as if to warn me of all that lay ahead, the automatic bilge pump tripped on and spewed out a few gallons of dark, oily, smelly water.
All those hours in class, learning how to find your position three different ways, we never had a moment’s discussion on how to tell a bad boat, how to walk away from a bad deal. In reality, after my first job in Alaska and having been to fishing school, I could have probably landed a really good job. Instead I plunged into the disaster that was the Denise, determined to GO TO ALASKA IN MY BOAT!
Hired a mechanic, totally rebuilt the engine, painted, rewired it myself. Got to know other fisherman on the dock.. all excited to be heading up north, and at last, I was one of them on my own boat!
Right across from me on the dock was this all aluminum gillnetter, with just a single piece of wood that I could see - above the door to the cabin. One day a guy showed up, with a paper bag with a single piece of sandpaper, a paint brush and a hobby-size can of paint. Whistling as he worked, he sanded that board, painted it a nice white and walked away up the dock, tossing paint, etc in the trash as left. And the next day showed up with a nice wife, a little boy, a couple of dock carts full of groceries and supplies, loaded up, untied the lines. And left for Alaska.. just like that!
A week later, I was ready too. We just had to do a quick test run with the rebuilt engine, then it was load up with groceries and… join the parade up to Alaska!!
The engine blew up - threw a rod right through the block. The boat caught fire. After we put out the fire the mechanic and I sipped our supposed-to-be-celebratory champagne as we waited for a tow. Then the killer: the mechanic turns to me and sez, “It’s weird, the last engine I rebuilt blew up just like that too!”
With the last of my money, I threw in a smaller used engine that would barely push the boat along at 5 knots. (A knot is 1.1 mph.)Never even made it out of Washington state waters, ended up fishing up by the Canada-Washington border, on Fraser River salmon that would sometimes drift down into Washington waters. And when it was dark and foggy, sometimes we’d cross the border and get a few more.
At the end of the season, I was broke. But, by a stroke of luck, the king crab fishery that in later years would be featured in the Discovery Channel TV series, “Deadliest Catch,” was just starting.. and I got a job on a big new steel boat.
On the way up to the Bering Sea we iced up so badly we had to put most of our crab pots into our big holds to lower our center of gravity.
We left Seattle in late February. Four nights later off the Alaska coast we iced up so badly we were worried we’d capsize, went out on deck in the middle of the night to break the ice off with baseball bats and hammers and shovel it over the side. It was a frightening and sobering time.
When we got to the Bering Sea we fished on the edge of the ice pack, with the great smoking volcanoes of the the Alaska Peninsula on the horizon.
We’d be on deck 14-16 hours straight. Our skipper had a toothpick on a string hung from the top of the wheelhouse. When the coffee and the pills couldn;t keep him awake any longer, he’d put that toothpick in his mouth. And if he nodded off, the string would come tight and the toothpick would stab his cheek. In the beginning crabbing was long hours for not too many crab.
In those years - the 1970s, the winter pack ice would almost fill the whole Bering Sea, all the way down to the Alaska Peninsula, seen here. Today the ice rarely come south of the Pribs (Pribilof Islands)
Crabbing was a tough, tough game. We learned early never to turn your back on the Bering Sea, as on occasion, waves would sweep across the entire deck without warning. If it caught one of us unprepared, it could easily sweep us overboard, unlikely to be rescued before hypothermia killed us. But ice was the biggest vessel killer. Not ice that you hit - the pack was relatively soft and our boats were steel. But rather it was ice that built up in the bitter storms, wrapping entire vessels with a thick heavy coat, that had to be chipped off and shoveled overboard. Vessels caught by surprise in the middle of the night often disappeared, without even a distress call on the radio, that’s how quickly you could ice up and capsize.
Summer fishing: a nice day. At least we weren’t iced up!
The crab were scarce, at least for us that summer of 1971. But then in the fall, fishing in water a thousand feet deep, south of the Aleutian Islands, we found the mother load. Our skipper would find his position by lining up a volcano with a point of land, make little sketch maps. For the crab in these narrow canyons, not on the chart, too far off one way and you’d get all females, illegal to keep. Too far off the other way and it would be small, sublegal males that the pots would come up with. But if you could keep your gear right in that canyon, they would come up, jammed to the top with legal males, 2000 pounds to a pot: incredible, legendary fishing. We had our 75 pots as close together as we could get them without tangling, and still, they came up full, pot after pot. We’d look down into that dark water and wonder how many feet thick was the herd of crab on the bottom and how many we were killing with the 700 pound steel pots smashed down on to them.
Walter Kuhr, a deckhand on our crab boat, the Flood Tide, went on to own numerous boats and be a major player in Alaska fishing.
When the holds (also called crab tanks) were full, we’d keep fishing, just piling the crab on deck. I’ve seen a lot of science fiction movies, but nothing as weird as fishing at night with 30,000 pounds of active crab sliding back and forth on deck, trying to pinch you as they slid past you!
And, so in four or five weeks of incredible fishing, loading our boat trip after trip, we finally, as the Alaska expression goes, “put our winter money in our ass pockets” and actually a lot more.
Our skipper asked me to come back, said I could be relief skipper the next season. Maybe if I did well, they’d help me get my own boat. But I told him I was done with the Bering Sea. I wanted to go back and fish salmon in the calmer waters of Southeast Alaska. If I’d stayed, I’d either be rich now, or dead. I preferred the less dangerous fishing grounds of southern Alaska, even if the financial rewards were smaller.
So I Took My King Crab Money And Bought A Salmon Boat.