Deadliest Sea (2 page)

Most of the jobs on the head-and-gut boats weren’t really about fishing. Jeremy Freitag found that out when he was hired for his first Alaska job, three years earlier. They were factory
jobs—assembly-line work in the cold, wet belly of a boat lurching on the Bering Sea. It was a whole lot more like standing on the line in a meat-processing plant than a day of deep-sea fishing. Still, it wasn’t a bad gig. Jeremy was twenty-two. He had seen the nickel ad about fishing in Alaska when he was nineteen, soon after graduating from high school in the small eastern Oregon town of Lebanon. He drove six hours up to Seattle to fill out an application. It was the first time in his life he’d left his home state. He got the job and landed in Dutch Harbor in the summer of 2005. The FCA was his third company. He had learned that once you’ve had a job on a boat, it’s not too hard to find another one. He had spent the late summer and early fall of 2007 on the
Ranger
. The work was hard and the hours were long. But it was fast money. The starting pay was $50 a day, plus a bonus of four or five cents a case per processor. On a ten-day trip, the
Ranger
might get back to port with thirty thousand cases of fish. It could add up to a $1,500 bonus for an entry-level factory worker like Jeremy.

Only a couple of the guys on the boat were full-time deckhands. Everyone else worked in the factory: twelve-hour shifts, with six hours off in between. The factory crew was broken into three groups, with two of the three on at all times. In a couple weeks at sea, the men almost never got more than five hours of sleep in a row.

Jeremy had pretty much always been tired, but he didn’t mind the work. The money was a lot better than at the mill job he had right out of high school. He figured that in just a few years he could save enough money to buy a house. He guessed that he’d need about $100,000—enough to get him something decent in the farm country of central Oregon. Nothing fancy, just a middle-class home. He didn’t spend much money in Alaska—he
slept and ate on the boat. And when he came home, he could crash at his parents’ house. He had a good job and a goal.

In January 2008 Jeremy had planned to go back to Dutch Harbor to a spot on the
Seafreeze,
a three-hundred-foot processing ship he’d worked on back in 2006. He liked the larger boat better. The pay was a little more, the hours a little shorter. But when the time came, the
Seafreeze
didn’t need him. He called the FCA. They had openings. In early January, he flew back up to Dutch, back to the
Ranger
. Jeremy had been thinking he’d work in the factory again, but the
Ranger
’s steward still hadn’t shown up the day the boat was set to leave for the season’s first fishing trip. The
Ranger
’s cook, Eric Haynes, asked Jeremy if he wanted the job. It paid $110 a day, a huge raise from his salary as a processor. Best of all, unlike a processor’s twelve-hours-on, six-hours-off schedule, the steward worked days: 7:00
A.M
. to 7:00
P.M
. By FCA standards, twelve hours a day was the short shift.

Jeremy liked the work. He helped out in the galley, prepping meals and washing dishes for Eric. The ship’s cook had been working on the boat for years, and he was good company. He’d been on the
Ranger
longer than the captain, longer than the mate, and longer than any of the engineers. Though he’d had offers from other companies, Eric liked the
Ranger
. He made eight or ten grand a month—only the ship’s officers made more—and shared a room with just one other guy, assistant cook Mark Hagerman, with whom he traded off shifts in the kitchen. Eric kept a punching bag in his bunk room, and would work out in his off time. If the weather was good enough, he’d run wind sprints or jump rope up on deck. Back home in Las Vegas, Eric competed in amateur kickboxing competitions. He worked as a cook there, too (he’d once had a stint at the rotat
ing rooftop restaurant in the Stratosphere). But after a while, he always wanted to return to Alaska.

The
Ranger
’s galley was about as basic as you could get, but Eric put effort into the cooking. Each season, he studied different cookbooks to perfect a new set of recipes. He knew how hard the guys were working; he’d started out in the factory himself. His food was their one pleasure—their reward. It made him happy to see them eat, and his effort didn’t go unnoticed. The
Ranger
was widely regarded as having the best food of any boat on the FCA fleet. Most guys would say they ate a whole lot better at sea than they did at home. There were meals every six hours to coincide with the changing shifts, and the food was designed to please a crew made up of people from all over the world: tacos, stir-fries, sushi, steaks.

There was usually a pile of dirty dishes for Jeremy to deal with in the morning. After he took care of stuff in the kitchen, he would scrub the toilets, mop the floors, or maybe clean up the shower area a little. A couple of the showers had to be turned on and off with a pair of pliers or a crescent wrench. It was a pain how stuff like that never got fixed, Jeremy thought. The ship had two washing machines and two dryers, but one of each was broken, too. Keeping up with the laundry—mostly clothing stinking of sweat and fish guts—was a twenty-four-hour job. The crew joked that you didn’t want to piss off the steward, or he’d wash your things without detergent. Jeremy was in charge of collecting and disposing of the ship’s trash—pretty much everything was burned and dumped into the ocean. He would go around to the crew’s rooms and collect their garbage. Sometimes he noticed beer cans or liquor bottles in the trash. Like everyone else, Jeremy had signed the company’s no-tolerance drug and alcohol policy. “No illegal drugs, controlled substances,
alcohol, paraphernalia, or firearms will be allowed aboard an FCA vessel at any time,” his employee handbook read. “THIS MEANS NOT ONE SHRED, GRAIN, PILL, OR TRACE.”

He knew booze wasn’t allowed on board. But who was he going to tell? The bottles were in the rooms of some of the most senior crew. Jeremy had to go down to the engine room to get fuel for the garbage. On his way, he’d pass by the rudder room, where big, white absorbent pads the crew called diapers were laid out on the floor to sop up seawater and oil. The engineers would change the pads regularly, and Jeremy would have to haul big black trash bags stuffed with the sopping, oily diapers up to deck to be burned with the rest of the garbage. He’d go up to the wheelhouse to do odd chores for the captain, Steve Slotvig.

Slotvig was a competent captain and kept the boat running relatively efficiently, but there wasn’t a lot of chitchat with the man. Small things could set him off, and his spirit was anything but generous. On Jeremy’s first trip on the
Ranger,
one of the other processors got a nasty gash and needed stitches—a job that would normally fall to the captain of the boat. Slotvig was in no rush to deal with it. He wanted to finish his breakfast and coffee first. He told the man he could take one shift off—six hours. After that, he’d better be back on the factory line, or he was out of a job. Jeremy quickly figured out that he should go out of his way not to get on Slotvig’s bad side. He brought the captain his meals and coffee—whatever he wanted. He washed the windows of the wheelhouse, scrubbing off the hardened bird shit with Windex and an ice scraper. It was hard work in the winter, when the temperature outside was regularly below freezing. Bird shit was bad. Frozen bird shit was worse. But the job still beat the factory. Jeremy considered himself lucky.

This was the first year Jeremy had been in Alaska for the
start of the winter A season, which stretches from early January through late March, sometimes into April. It was much colder than he’d experienced before. The waves were bigger. There was lots of ice in the water. He’d noticed back in the summer that the
Ranger
rode rougher than his previous boats. One of the ship’s engineers had told him it was because of the
Ranger
’s flat bottom. It was built as an oil supply rig for the Gulf of Mexico back in the early 1970s—a “Mississippi mud boat,” they called it—and converted to a fishing trawler decades later. Jeremy just knew that it felt different than the ships he’d been on before. It seemed like a sloppy ride.

D
UTCH
H
ARBOR’S STAR ROLE
in the American fishing industry is relatively new. Until a few decades ago, Alaskan waters were teeming with foreign vessels. Fishermen from Russia, Poland, Korea, and Japan all had discovered the richness of the North Pacific’s continental shelf. American fishermen, on the other hand, were nowhere to be seen. Then, in 1976, Congress pushed the borders of the United States two hundred miles out into the open ocean. The legislation was known as the Fishery Conservation and Management Act, and was later renamed the Magnuson-Stevens Act, after the senators who championed the cause (Republican Ted Stevens, from Alaska, and Warren Magnuson, Democrat from Washington State). The new “territory” was called the Exclusive Economic Zone (the EEZ), and it limited fishing in the area to American interests. Now, only American-flagged ships with American captains can fish within the EEZ.

But the foreign ships had something the Americans did not have. To fish for weeks or months far from their own shores,
foreign vessels had developed technology to process and freeze their catch right on board. American fishermen had little experience with that type of fishing or with the Asian fish market and its insatiable demand for odd fish and—to the American palate—even odder fish products. And so, in the years after the Magnuson-Stevens Act was passed, U.S. companies hired foreigners—specifically Japanese—to teach them how to fish the Bering and to process fish products with specific Asian markets in mind.

The FCA was one of the first American companies to start processing on board their ships, and from the start they sailed with senior-level Japanese crew. At the time, it wasn’t an uncommon practice. What was unusual was the company’s Japanese family history. FCA is owned by Karena Adler. Now in her late fifties, Adler founded the company in the mid-1980s, soon after divorcing from Masashi Yamada, a Japanese businessman twenty-nine years her senior. Yamada, who is now in his eighties, remains a powerful businessman in Japan. He’s involved in real estate, manufacturing—and fishing. Among his many holdings is controlling ownership of Anyo, a fishing company that operates five of its own factory ships, and is the exclusive buyer of all of FCA’s catch. Anyo calls the Fishing Company of Alaska its “partner” company. The FCA doesn’t have its own Web site. Until recently, though, its boats and their whereabouts were detailed on Anyo’s home page.

J
EREMY NOTICED THE DIFFERENCE
that the Japanese made right away. On his other boats, the captains relied on sonar fishfinders and their own expertise to identify the best fishing grounds. On the
Ranger,
it was up to the head Japanese crew member.
Everyone called him “the fish master.” Jeremy didn’t know the fish master’s real name, but he knew he was an important person on the boat. He often saw him alone in the wheelhouse, driving the ship. On Jeremy’s other boats, only the captain or first mate did that.

The fish master had his own crew of technicians: There was a Japanese boatswain (or deck boss), a Japanese factory manager, and a few Japanese engineers. It seemed to Jeremy that the Japanese were running the show, and he was told by guys who’d been working for the company much longer that it was the same way on all the FCA boats. Like the captain and first mate, fish master Satoshi Konno had a private stateroom. The other Japanese technicians shared a bunk room, and they all usually sat together at meals, apart from the rest of the crew. Jeremy would help Eric Haynes prepare a separate meal for them, often fish, and always rice. Konno would frequently come down to the galley to request a particular dish. It often seemed like he’d been drinking; one time Konno even showed up in the galley with his pants on backward. Jeremy had heard that the Japanese didn’t work directly for the Fishing Company of Alaska. In fact, they got their checks from North Pacific Resources, a subsidiary of Anyo, the Japanese company that bought the fish. None of them spoke much English. They spoke Japanese to one another, and when the fish master was communicating with the captain, there was more yelling than talking.

The captain was a screamer, and Konno got on his nerves more than anyone. They argued constantly. Jeremy saw it in the summer, during his first FCA trip, but recently the arguments had taken a more serious turn. The Arctic ice edge that normally pushes into the Bering a few hundred miles north of Dutch Harbor had crept unusually far south this winter. The seasonal ice is often broken into pancakelike chunks that can
be two or three feet thick and, in certain wind conditions, migrate a mile in an hour. As January turned to February, the crew watched the captain and fish master butt heads about how fast the ship should be operated in ice.

Ice is everywhere during the winter in the northern Bering Sea. It’s not uncommon for Alaska’s northernmost harbors to become iced in during the winter months. The Arctic ice edge is moving all the time—a fishing ground that one week is beneath clear ocean may be iced over a few days later. Few fishing boats out of Dutch Harbor are icebreakers. The
Ranger
certainly wasn’t. Still, most boats will occasionally find themselves fishing near ice, or trying to outrun the thickening pack. How deep they go and how hard they push is a judgment call on the part of the captain.

Anyone who’d been on the
Ranger
for a while had seen plenty of ice. Sometimes there would be barely any open water visible at all, just big, flat slabs of sea ice with cracks dividing them. The ship would usually just nose into it at a knot or two. The goal was to keep the speed slow, not get stuck, and avoid backing down, which could damage the ship’s rudders or propellers.

This season seemed different, though. The ice was dense, and there was a lot of scraping and banging. It seemed to several of the crew like they were pushing through the ice faster than they had in the past, on this or on other boats. The
Ranger
had a walk-in freezer in the bow of the ship, on the same deck as the galley. Eric would send Jeremy up there all the time to grab stuff for the kitchen. From inside the freezer, it felt like the 184-foot steel-hulled boat was a pinball, banging fast and hard against one chunk of ice after another. They were definitely going slower than they would at full speed, Jeremy thought, but the pounding and vibrations were still startling.