The Toothpick
Our Crabber, the 104’ Flood Tide, at Akutan, 1971. Part of the land in the distance was used as a sheep ranch…
Crab were much bigger back in the 1970s than today.. we had a 14 pound average on this trip. Not much time to fall asleep in this kind of fishing.
The king crab fishery is all about long hours and hard work. On our boat, the Flood Tide, in 1971 (way way before the Deadliest Catch TV show…) here’s how it went. In the morning, while we were eating breakfast the cook, who also worked on deck with us, would bake up a chocolate iced cake or a nice big plate of brownies, and set it on the non skid mat by the porthole on the back counter.
Then during the day, when there was a break in the action, like when we had to run for the next string of pots, or the skipper had a call on the radio, we might go over to the back of the deckhouse, push open the porthole and help ourself to a big slice of cake, etc, sometimes even without taking our gloves off!
For us on deck, staying awake wasn’t really a problem - between unstacking and stacking the pots, measuring crab, chopping bait, filling bait jars, etc. You were really busy. And if it was a 20 minute run, say, to the next string of pots, and the skipper told us, the cook might run into the galley, the engineer would go down to the engine room, and the mate and I would straighten things out on deck. If we’d already done those jobs, we might just duck into the galley, sit and just slump, head on chest, raingear and gloves on, until the skipper blew the horn to let us know it was time to be out on deck again.
For us, on deck, it was usually so rough, wet and cold that staying awake was never a problem.
For our skipper, George Fulton, it was a little harder. He had a mahogany holder for his Marlboro cigarettes, right there by the jog stick by the steering station. Four or five packs were stacked in there and when he pulled one pack out, the next one would drop down, ready for action. Then there were the pills, some kind of stimulant that was pretty common for crab skippers to use. Then of course there was coffee. The maker was in the galley, so to refill his cup was a trip up and down the galley stairs, itself enough to get him awake again.
But then the coffee and the pills and the cigarettes didn’t work, there was always the toothpick. A wooden one, tied in the middle to a string that went up to an brass eye screwed into the ceiling of the pilothouse. It was hung right over the swivel chair where George sat on the starboard side of the bridge so he could look back out and see what was going on on the deck.
Then when he nodded off, the toothpick would stab him in the cheek and wake him up!