Time Bandit (23 page)

The Nordins are big men. John’s hands are the size of a grizzly’s paws. He tried fishing when he was younger, but found safety ashore and decided to stay there. He leaves the fishing to the Norwegians, toward whom he shows traditional Swedish disdain. He says, “They like to die.”

“But I’m not Norwegian and I fish for crab,” I told him.

“Anyone crazy enough to go out on that sea in winter must be Norwegian.”

When the INS rounded up his workers last year, Nordin was not flaunting immigration laws. He checks his workers out but does not investigate them. Hiring for his plant in Dutch Harbor, where no labor pool exists to draw from, costs Nordin money that can only be recouped over a full season of labor. Knowingly hiring illegals makes no sense. When he is in Seattle, he scrutinizes potential workers in a typically honest, straightforward manner. He advertises online and in the local newspapers. When recruits show up at his Seattle offices for interviews, he wants to put the fear of God into them by describing his rules
—no
drinking—the weather, and the miserable working conditions on Dutch. He looks at their I.D.s and then swears and yells at them to draw the worst picture of what lies ahead. After a ten-minute break, he calls them back into a conference room. By that time, one in three have cleared out. Nordin says, “I fly them up, house them, give them four meals a day, do their laundry, and then fly them home. I don’t want them there, at my expense, only to want to go home before they have done the work they contracted for, at my expense.” He pays them premium wages, just as he pays us boat owners more than the larger canneries. In return, he insists on hard work and first-quality fish and crabs. His kindnesses are often repaid; five boats deliver to him and no one else. Some boat captains have pledged to sell to Nordin for less money if the big processors try to run him out of business.

What Nordin seems to have found is a niche where quality trumps price. It makes a certain kind of sense. Every time anyone turns around, fewer boats are catching less of everything: crab, cod, octopi, and pollock. The big processors designed their plants in the Derby days to rush through as many as a half million pounds of fish or crabs a day, but now that capacity is wasted. Nordin arrived in Dutch with a stronger sales department and fish that he swears could have been caught, for their quality, on a hook and line. His company does not have to convince buyers. They need what he is selling.

But that is now. When he started his cannery on Dutch with his partner Ken Dorris, the conventional wisdom held that he
was
crazy. The big processors, like Unisea and Trident and the Japanese-owned Alyeska and Westward Seafoods, could snuff him out of business. But he is too small for them to bother with. They are the
Bismarck
compared to his
Little Toot.
And John intends to keep a low profile; wisely, he wants to grow in his niche, not compete in theirs.

T
he state set the quotas for opies last year at 36.6 million pounds and 3 million for their larger cousins, the elusive baradai crab, which are fished in the same season.
Time Bandit
’s quotas were 10,000 for baradai and 250,000 for opies. That, by contrast, was against 92,000 of king crabs we caught in the fall. To catch the opies and baradai,
Time Bandit
was carrying 137 pots, weighing 110,000 pounds, when we set out from Dutch on January 15.

Andy was pumped to get our quotas quickly and get back home. He had shit to shovel. He told me, “Let’s bet everything on black
—Time Bandit
black.” He was in charge of the boat and the planning. He looked over the results of opie fishing from the previous year. He thought he knew where they could be found. We trusted his judgment, and his enthusiasm was infectious. He planned to take us about 240 miles northwest of Dutch to St. Paul Island and a secret opie ground he knew about just east of the island.

As we were leaving Dutch Harbor, the hulk of the SeaLand, a container carrier that had foundered in murderous Bering Sea waters and had been towed into the harbor, lay like a dead leviathan half on its side in shallow water. Andy sat in the captain’s chair with me beside him. I was going along for the ride and to be with my brother. I thought that I might work the deck, but at my age, I am used to the comforts and warmth of the wheelhouse when the sun comes through the windows. I could stay home. But with the sea in my blood I would not miss going out one more time every time.

The one time I did sit out a whole crab season on land—two years ago, because
Time Bandit
was in dry dock for repairs—I felt dead. My soul left me. Sitting in town, knowing Andy and my friends (and the crabs) were out at sea on other boats, I was like a salmon that does not make it up the river. That winter, I missed the fishing like a kid misses Christmas. Each year when that first pot comes up, I
am
like a little boy who cannot sleep with excitement. I feel like Santa gave me my first banana-seat bike when that first pot is full.

We were six hours out of Dutch when the state authorities—I do not recall whether it was Fish & Game or the State Wildlife Police—reported over VHF Channel 16 that our delivery vessel,
Stellar Sea,
had reported a fire in its engine room. A Coast Guard cutter was being called out to assist and investigate.

We were fucked. So was any other boat in the crab fishing fleet that was scheduled to deliver to
Stellar Sea.

The Coast Guard towed the crippled processor into St. Paul. Heavy damage required a tug to help
Stellar Sea
from St. Paul into Dutch for repairs. That left us with two weeks and nowhere to deliver our opies. If there was a silver lining, our holds were empty when the
Stellar Sea
fire broke out. Andy asked me what I thought. We did not have many options. We did not want to return to Dutch empty, and we could not fish for opies, which left us with baradai. We had a small quota. We had the time. And we could deliver these crabs to any processor we pleased. I told Andy, “It’s all good; it’s all fishing.”

Andy both agreed and disagreed. Recently no one had fished baradai, which were fished nearly to extinction in the Bering twenty years ago until the state stepped in and protected them for a decade. They rebounded, but baradai are a difficult catch. When they were told, the crew grumbled. They had to reset the pots, which was not as difficult as they made it seem. And when Andy looked at his bottom plotter and found a likely prospecting area, the crew launched eighty pots over eighty miles, one every ten minutes.

While the pots soaked Andy fretted over the weather, with a 960-millibar low closing in from the northwest. He predicted thirty-five-foot seas and seventy-knot gusts. He worried how many pots the deck crew could pull before the worst of the storm reached us. Meanwhile, he kept his eyes on the seas and the deck.
Time Bandit
was traveling in the ditch, jogging into the sea, taking the waves head-on. Every now and then a “viper” or “growler”—a whitewater curler on top of a wave that pops the bow with the speed of a striking snake—would hit the bow. To give the crew warning, Andy, who could see clearly over the bow into the oncoming seas, shouted over the loudhailer, “Move! Watch out! Watch out!” And the crew ducked and held on. Andy is particularly sensitive to vipers. He and Neal once were working on deck when a rogue wave with a viper washed over the bow and the starboard rail; six feet of green water poured onto the deck and only luck saved them from being washed overboard.

Hurriedly, the crew pulled the pots to beat the weather. Their initial excitement turned to gloom when they realized, on closer inspection of the full pots, that out of every 400 crabs, only 15 were keepers. The throw-backs were too small, female, or “dirty”—crabs with shells darkened by barnacles. This kind of fishing was not worth the effort, but a crab fisherman does not expect to find a sweet spot the first time every time.

The sea was starting to worry the crew. Their footing on the deck was getting slippery. Each pot that came out was rebaited and sent back down. Work that was fast and demanding pushed them to their limits. At one point, Richard, standing by the launcher, was poised to send the buoys overboard after a pot was launched. A wave slapped the bow and sped down the rail just as the buoy line skittered across the deck and around Richard’s ankle. All 750 pounds of the pot plummeted to the bottom. Richard, seeing the immediate danger, had only a couple of seconds to untangle the line; he jumped and danced to free his ankle. He bent over and slapped the buoy, which flew up and wrapped around his other ankle. He was a second or two away from going over and down when the line flew off his legs and slipped over the side with the buoy.

Richard stood in one place, a look of shock on his face. He stared down at his ankles, half expecting to see himself jerked and dragged down. With a nervous laugh, he told Russell, “I got away with one on that.”

From the bridge, Andy told the crew, “That got serious real fast. I hope you guys are carrying your knives.”

He felt responsible for the poor showing. “This is the worst season so far for me ever,” he told me. “Somebody should go to jail for this.” He clapped his white cowboy hat on his head and stared out the forward windows. “This is just a huge clusterfuck with fuel money going down the drain.” He reached for the loudhailer and called the crew off the deck, deciding to let the remaining sixty pots soak until the storm blew through. Moments after the crew came inside, a thirty-to thirty-five-foot rogue hit the
Time Bandit
over the starboard rail. The boat shuddered. Green water poured over the deck. The powerful wave ripped the 200-pound Marco King coiler off its bolts and laid it on its side. Andy said, “I’ll fish through almost anything, but this weather worries me.”

Time Bandit
jogged into the sea, and everyone held on.

Inside in the galley, Richard, a self-confessed sugar junkie, braced his elbows on both sides of a two-gallon container of ice cream. He was staring into the middle distance. He said, “The hardest part of this job is just keeping my balance. That’s what takes it out of you. You have to keep your head about you and feel the movement of the waves. Sometimes you worry if another crewman is doing something stupid, like if by mistake he throws the line around
your
neck, and I’m overboard. Out there just now, I do not know how that happened. It was not a mistake on my part. I know, nobody ever admits to mistakes. But this was not one. It was a real accident that could have been a whole lot worse. Real accidents, not just stupid mistakes, really do happen.” And he plunged a spoon into the ice cream.

Andy, in the wheelhouse, was deep in denial. “I find the crab and I fish the crab. It never happens that you just land on them,” unless, of course, you just land on them. He started talking about one year that stuck in his mind. “That year I could do no wrong. It was my peak. We never pulled bad pots. We brought in a total of 1.7 million pounds of crabs, in two months and a week, and my guys earned $72,000. I was invincible.”

“What about now?” I asked.

“I am vincible. But that year there was ice all over and every other boat in the fleet quit and went in. And that was when I landed on the mother lode.” Andy looked out over the deck. He said, “Maybe this weather will move the crabs onto the pots.”

To sit out the storm, Andy decided to put into St. Paul Island for groceries, which is to say, for a night on the town. St. Paul Island is a bleak low-lying, barren island of wind and more wind that blows across the Bering Sea from Siberia. We tied up at the dock in front of an abandoned cannery at the bow of the
Stimson,
the Alaskan State Wildlife Police’s patrol boat. Small black wild foxes scurried over the snowdrifts hunting for rats at the cannery. The sun was setting. It was colder than cold. The crew, Andy, and I piled into the island’s grocery store looking for fresh bread; we spent more than $1,000. We paused for a drink at the island’s only bar, which was unheated. The floors were bare, but liquor bottles filled the shelves. We ordered drinks and settled into conversations with the native Alaskans who hang out there. One was telling jokes to his friends. “Knock, knock, who’s there? Dishes. Dishes Who? Dishes your girlfriend from Naknek.” We laughed to get along. The local natives keep separate from the fishermen. Some of the crew played pool. On the wall behind the table a sign warned,
NO HITTING PEOPLE WITH POOL STICKS OR THROWING BALLS AT ANYONE.
The St. Paul Island bar is that kind of place.

We threw back a few more drinks to insulate us on the ride in the back of a pickup truck across the island to a small housing development where federal government employees live; they work for the National Weather Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We were going to dinner at the home of the Rex Morgan family, who had invited us over single sideband radio a day ago. Mrs. Morgan served baked chicken and corn on the cob, which was a break from Neal’s cooking, and the crew watched sports on a jumbo screen TV. Outside the wind howled and the black-furred foxes patiently waited in the snowdrifts in the back of the house for scraps. The lives of these dedicated civil servants like Rex are unimaginably hard. Without them, crabbers would be largely ignorant of the local weather patterns and the conditions of the sea.

When we left St. Paul harbor the next morning, the weather stayed bad. Andy ordered the crew out to rig the pots for cod; at least if we were not catching crabs, we could bring up bait, and maybe new, fresh bait would make a difference in what we caught. The cod crowded the pots as the storm blew through. With the fresh bait, the crew set eighty prospecting pots that came up with disappointing numbers. The weather had not pushed the crabs toward us as Andy had hoped. We did not know where to find the baradai. Russell said, “We are catching snails.”

We spent the next two and a half days prospecting for baradai. The morale of the crew sank. Nobody wanted to talk about fishing. The crew went to their rooms as soon as they had eaten. A funk settled on the boat under the weight of our collective failure. Responsibility rested with Andy, who was supposed to see crabs 400 feet under our hull, and his supersight was failing him. The crew was working the deck for nothing.