The Last Run (8 page)

In 1987, a tugboat broadsided her at the mouth of Wrangell Harbor, and the
La Conte
sank faster than a packed crab pot. She was raised, beached and put up on the gridiron. It didn’t look good. The schooner had lost thirteen hull planks, seven frames, eight beams, six deck planks, and there was extensive damage to the structure that fastened the galley to the deck.

After eighteen months of litigation, the boat went on the market and sold, as was, for twenty thousand dollars. The buyers were the only people who made an offer, Jeff and Shannon Berg, a young Petersburg couple with fishing experience and romantic notions about aging vessels. They restored the hull and deck with the same, aged Washington fir the boat’s builders had used, gave the
La Conte
a top-to-bottom painting and put her to work. For ten years they tendered together up and down southeastern Alaska, as far north as Prince Rupert Sound, sometimes even fishing halibut, black cod and salmon.

As it turned out, the boat lasted longer than their marriage. In the spring of 1997, as they waded through a divorce, the Bergs put the boat up for sale. Within a month, a buyer came along.

Unlike the Bergs, the
La Conte’s
new owner was no fisherman, and no more Alaskan than a keg of nails. His name was Scott Echols, a plump, smooth-tongued salesman from Empire, Georgia, who had made a small fortune in suckling pigs and goats.

Echols specialized in slaughtering his goats halal—in such a way as to be ritually fit, according to Muslim law. It was a niche market and Echols had it locked. At the top of his game his company slaughtered three hundred goats a day. To a friend he once joked that he must have killed every goat within a hundred-mile radius of the Georgia line. Echols never did figure out why Muslims made such a fuss about getting their goats halal. But it mattered little to him. He was no Muslim. He was a businessman. The goat king of Georgia. And he had the bank account to prove it.

How he made the jump from halal goats to Alaska seafood was, like all of his ventures, something of an accident. Out of college he went to Hawaii to get a master’s in robotics, then was hired by Arco to be an analyst in Anchorage. He quit his job and started his own robot company, WARP Industries. The company received a lot of state grants, was written up in a lot of magazines and in two years barely broke even. Alaska, he had learned the hard way, wasn’t ready for robots.

So Echols took a job as a systems analyst for a Japanese fishing conglomerate. Day after day the company’s accounting figures passed across his computer screen, and each day the numbers left him speechless: his employer had been buying Coho salmon at $15 a pound and selling it for $250 a pound. He was so excited by the balance sheets he quit his job and tried his hand at fishing. That was not a good idea. He got seasick and couldn’t give away the bait at the end of his line. In 1992 he took his master’s degree in digital communications engineering and flew back to Empire.

After three years of dealing in pigs and goats, Echols returned to Alaska in the fall of 1996 to start his own company, World Seafood Producers. He had since married his childhood sweetheart, Cherie, whom he had met when she was four and he eleven, and had picked up front money from some Japanese and Korean investors he’d met during his robotics days. His latest idea: to sell to Japanese and South Korean buyers the part of salmon everyone else in Alaska tossed in the garbage —salmon roe.

He set himself up in Juneau in a lakeside duplex and shopped around for a cheap tender to move his product to cold storages in Bellingham. He drew his share of looks. At the University of Georgia he had been a second-string cornerback, but now Echols was somewhat beyond athletic weight, with the shoulders and dignified gait of a grizzly. He had a small, round head, eyes the color of blueberries, a pug nose and a quick grin. He wore European colognes, crewneck sweatshirts under ski jackets, Levi’s 505s, designer hiking boots and a blue beanie.

The first thing he heard about the
La Conte
came from a cod fisherman in Juneau, Fred Damer. Damer had a friend, Jeff Berg, who wanted to unload an old tender to pay for a divorce. “You won’t find another boat that big for that cheap,” Damer told Echols. In the end, a final price of $109,000 was agreed upon. Echols turned up at the closing $4,000 short, however, so Berg kept the boat’s sideband radio and Uniroyal life raft-items Echols never bothered to replace.

Echols put Damer in charge of making the
La Conte
seaworthy; a month later he fired him. Damer sued for severance pay. When Echols didn’t show up for the proceeding, a judge ordered him to compensate his former employee to the tune of $8,578.77, mustering-out pay, as it were.

And he soon realized there were more bills coming. A Petersburg shipwright told Echols it would cost eighty thousand dollars to fully repair all of the vessel’s hatches, cracked frames, decking and hull. Echols nodded and told him to lead-patch the loose, worm-eaten planks on the stern. Then he told him to caulk the grid and add an aluminum bait shed on the aft deck. There went thirty thousand dollars.

Everything else would have to wait.

By that time it was nearly summer and Scott Echols wanted his boat to start making money. He turned to a man he’d met the previous winter in Seattle, Rob Carrs, to skipper the first boat of his dream fleet.

Carrs was college-educated, a New York native with big-city savvy who had moved to Seattle in the eighties to live the Alaska adventure —part-time, summer adventures. Carrs was good. He knew boats, he had sea smarts, and he had the right palaver with fishermen and Alaska natives. He had never seen the
La Conte,
but told Echols he’d accept the job for $30 an hour. Echols offered $26.25—all in cash, all off the books. Carrs muttered and took it.

Later, he almost wished he hadn’t. Figuring out how the boat worked and overhauling the engine took three months. The
La Conte
did not go out again until September, when Carrs took her tendering between Sitka and Juneau. There were no worries —until the day in October that Carrs filled all three of her holds with chum salmon.

Halfway across the Chatham Strait, Carrs noticed the sluggishness: the engine room was filling up fast with water. Hurriedly, he connected a hose to the powerful Maxi-Flow that circulated refrigerated seawater through the holds and began pumping water in a six-inch-wide stream over the side. It took him more than an hour to get things under control.

In port, he traced the leak to several loose planks around the fantail.

A week later, after one final longlining trip near Petersburg, Carrs returned the
La Conte
to Sitka and told Echols he was quitting. The boat was an icebox, he said, he was sick of repairing everything, and there wasn’t a single dry bunk on board. The two men settled money matters, shook hands and wished each other luck.

Nothing was said about the water problem Carrs had eight days earlier.

In mid-November, Scott Echols got a call from Mark Morley. Rob Carrs had introduced them eleven months earlier in Juneau, before taking Morley along as a deckhand on a black cod trip. Morley told him straight off that he wanted to take the
La Conte
out rockfishing.

“Rockfish?”

“It’s the only fishing this time of year,” Morley told him.

Echols hesitated.

“Listen,” Morley said. “There’s a bunch of two-day openings in December all around Baranof Island and a big opening on New Year’s Day.”

Echols was listening now.

“Yellow eye is getting a good price,” Morley continued. “It’s close to two bucks a pound now. That’s better than black cod.”

“Is that right?”

“Check around.”

Echols told him he’d think it over, and he did. He remembered that Mark Morley had tidied up the pilothouse, rewiring the electronics, installing a new dashboard, stripping layers of ancient paint off the cedar woodwork. And he hadn’t demanded a penny.

That night Echols called Rob Carrs at his Seattle apartment.

“What do you think about Mark?” Echols asked. “He wants to take the boat out rockfishing. Give it to me straight. You think he’s up to it?”

“No,” Carrs said.

“No?”

“No,” Carrs said. “I wouldn’t hire him. Not for this boat.”

“But he’s your buddy.”

“You wanted it straight,” Carrs said. He paused. “I like Mark. He’s not a mandy-pandy guy. He’s gung ho. He wants to be a skipper. But I don’t think he could park the thing, let alone drive it.”

The following night Echols and Morley sailed out to the Icy Strait. The chop kicked up. Echols told Morley to cut the motors and to pull in the skiff, which they were towing.

“Relax,” Morley told him. “It’ll be all right.”

Not five minutes later the retainer broke. The boat skipped away in the darkness. A day later, Echols saw the skiff sitting in his neighbor’s driveway in Juneau. He phoned Carrs again. Raving.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Carrs interrupted, “I don’t need to hear this.”

Echols sighed. “Look. I need to do something with this boat. I need it to start making some money, only I don’t have many options.”

“Well,” Carrs said, “if you don’t have many options, I guess you gotta hire him, right?”

“I guess so,” said Echols.

T
hey were standing on the dock, looking at the hull of the boat shadowed against the dark. Gig Mork had already gone back to stowing ice in the holds.

“So,” Mike DeCapua said, “when are you planning on heading out?”

“Midnight tomorrow,” Mark Morley said. “But I’ll need help getting her ready before then.”

“What’s there to do?”

“Got lines to check, hooks, fuel, maybe thaw some bait. And then there’s the motor, too.”

“That’s a full day.”

“Yeah.”

“And where were you thinking of fishing?”

Morley told him he planned to drive north and east up Peril Strait to Chatham, then south along the back side of Baranof Island and straight on down to Coronation Island. He wanted to fish the shoals west of Coronation.

“Then what?” DeCapua asked him.

“That’s a lot you want to know,” Morley said.

“Well,” DeCapua said, “I like to know who my dance partners are.”

“I bet you do,” Morley said. He dug a finger in his ear. “All right. If Coronation doesn’t pan out I figure to try the shelf along the Hazy Islands.”

“The outer shelf?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Say, Mark,” Bob Doyle said. “You don’t mind me asking you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“You been skippering on this boat since November, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.”

“What happened to the rest of the crew?”

There was a hung instant of silence, heavy as thunder.

Morley said tightly: “We had one other hand. But he was a son of a bitch.” The white cornea showed all around the tobacco-colored iris of his eyes. “A real son of a bitch.”

“How so?”

Morley gave Bob Doyle a dark glare.

“The guy sabotaged the wires to the bilge alarm because it was going off all the time. Drove him crazy, he said. Fuck him. You don’t go cutting wires like that. Not without talking to me first.”

“No,” Bob Doyle said.

“So I told him to walk.”

“I see.”

“So,” Morley said, “are you guys in or not?”

“Can we let you know in the morning?” DeCapua asked.

“What time?”

“Nine o’clock. We’re on the clock at eight and we already got a skipper, you know.”

“Well,” Morley said, “call me in the morning, then. I need to know either way.”

“That’s a ten percent share for each of us?”

“Ten percent.”

They went up the pier and under the awning along the entrance ramp and out across the gravel parking lot. They looked back. The schooner looked small now in repose.

“You know,” DeCapua said, “that guy ain’t done a whole lot of cod fishing.”

“How do you know?”

“Let’s just say I’ve fished with guys who ain’t done a whole lot of cod fishing.”

They kept walking.

“I guess we’ll stick with Phil, then,” Bob Doyle said.

“Like hell we will,” said DeCapua.

As it turned out, Coronation was a bust. All they managed was three hundred pounds of gray cod. And gray cod was cheap fish. Their catch limit was six thousand pounds of yellow eye with up to 10 percent bycatch. But they couldn’t find the yellow eye. They couldn’t find anything. Morley started setting gear west of Cape Decision, then off Nation Point, and finally he steamed farther west out to the Hazy Islands. They weren’t much, as islands went. There were just three outcroppings of rock ringed by a fifty-fathom shelf. On the gulf side, the shelf dropped off hundreds of fathoms in a few miles. For two days they dumped and hauled back longline gear off the Hazy Islands. It did no good. The yellow eye were not biting.

It was pretty snotty out, though. Gales blew every day and riled the seas. For three days, they set in twenty-foot breakers. It was unpleasant. The boat kept getting caught between high, pointy crests. She went weightless a few times. Some of their lines snarled. Nobody was happy with the sets. They hauled the gear in twisted, the hooks empty and tangled in the line. The wind was bad even in the lee of the islands. Rain cut at their faces like flying carpet tacks. Their eyes burned from all the spray. On deck it was hard to keep their footing, even with a two-inch layer of no-skid padding. With all the seawater and sleet slopping around, it felt as though they were walking on an iron girder wearing skates.

Then the generator acted up. It was on and off like a lightning bug. They also lost the stove near Coronation. Morley had a roast on when the stack caught fire. He said grease and soot had probably built up in the stack and ignited. Everybody was out on deck hauling and nobody noticed the smoke until the burners were gone. For three days they ate cold ham-and-cheese sandwiches and crackers and bananas. There was no coffee, either. The fire had melted the drip maker. They were able to heat up soup in the microwave. But chicken noodle soup every day, three times a day, drove them nuts.

On the way out they had taken their time, stopping for a hot tub at Baranof Springs. But no one was in the mood for stopping on the way back. It was a bumpy ride. The swells were running at fifteen feet. The
La Conte
rode the swells like a cork in a baby pool, with a lot a babies in it. But nobody got sick.