Lost at Sea Part II

by John S. Mickman

Last week in Part I of ' Lost at Sea’, we set out to start our season, but the weather was giving us trouble.

In weather like this there are ripples on the chop, chop on the waves, and waves on the seas. But the big problem was that now we had big seas on the huge ground swells, with intermittent smoke on the water. When traveling into such swells, the Marcy J would actually skim down into the trough and bury her bow into the rise of the next wall of water. Then she would power her way up the hill to the summit of the next swell. If the conditions were just right, the Marcy J wouldn’t clear the top and she would go right through the smoking white crest of the swell sending torrents of water crashing into the wheelhouse.

Each season would see mighty crab boats limping back to the harbor with their wheelhouse windows smashed out. Many a skipper and crewman have been impaled with shards of glass from such storms. You could also count on loosing tens of thousands of dollars worth of electronic gear.

The smoke from my cigarette was sucked up by the wind so fast I could barely see it. The entryway is my favorite place on the boat. No matter what the weather, I can stand in the protection of the entryway and watch the boundless energy of the sea as the spray whistles  past me.

I think storms like this are exhilarating to the Fulmars too. In every storm off of Alaska’s Southwestern coast, these graceful birds seemly fly into the bad weather just for the fun of it. With their long, straight rectangular wings, they glide down the back side of the huge swells just inches off the water. Their wing tips don’t ever actually just touch the surface, but they come so close the water wiggles. The force of the wind coming off the water propels them to a dizzying speed as they reach the bottom of the trough, and then shoot up the next swell, always against the direction of the wind and water. Then, when they reach the crest of the swell, the terrific energy of the gale force wind, picks them up and throws them into the air as if they were coming out of a catapult. Each time after a fulmar performs his dance, he gets into position and does it all over again, And again. The fulmars are always in small flocks and it seems like each one is showing off to the rest of his buddies, and to me. My own private performance. I’d give almost anything to be able fly like that.

Although it had not gotten any worse when we finally arrived at our first string of crab pots, it surely wasn’t any better. Tony, Chris and I were in our oilskins chopping bait, lashing the grappling hook to the rail, and getting the deck ready as Harold guided the Marcy J to the first pot in our nine pot sting of gear.

The three of us always wore the same dark green Healy Hanson rain gear, which we call oilskins, as did the rest of the fishermen in the fleet. This was as opposed to the cannery workers who always wore florescent yellow oil skins. None of the fishermen wanted to be identified as a cannery worker and for this reason, I guess, we never wore yellow. This trip however, Tony wore a yellow jacket over his green overall pants and high brown fishing boots. 

“Hey Tony, I bet you could get a job at the cannery when we get back now that you have that nice yellow jacket”, I ribbed him as we chopped bait together. “I don’t know what happened to my regular jacket”, Tony said as he chopped the frozen block of herring with the long handled chopper. “I almost didn’t have a jacket at all. I couldn’t find mine when we were leaving the dock, so I ran into the cannery and asked one of my buddies if I could borrow one of theirs. It looks kind of hokey, but it’s better than nothing.”

“Well, at least we won’t lose sight of you,” I laughed as I tossed a frozen herring at Tony. “You make a great target.” No one likes to get the bait ready, and Tony and I had a running argument regarding which one of us had to chop the bait each day because, by far, chopping bait the worst job on the deck of any crap boat.

As we finished preparing the bait, Harold pulled the boat as close as he could to the first buoy set-up. Most of the time when the boat pulls up to a buoy in a storm, the terrific force of the bow wave usually throws the buoys far away from the hull. This makes it hard for the man throwing the grapple to snag the trailing buoy.

“OK, here comes the first one,” yelled Harold through the intercom over the din of the wind, water, engine and hydraulic noise. I was standing alongside the deck house, ready with the grapple. “I’ve got it”, I yelled and threw the three pronged stainless steel grapple at the yellow, twenty inch trailing buoy.

The buoy was swirling madly through the breaking waves as the grapple, with the gleaming trail of yellow poly line, streamed through the air. The trick was to have the grapple land as close to the buoy as possible so it will drop on top of the attaching line rapidly. This was one of my favorite jobs. I took a lot of pride in my buoy grappling ability. Splash. The grapple landed just inches away from the buoy, about forty feet from the boat. After waiting a short second for the grapple to drop over the submerged line, I began pulling the yellow poly grapple line, hand over hand, back toward the boat as fast as I could. If I was too slow, the boat would sail right past the buoy, losing the grapple, and we have to start all over again with the approach. This could take up to ten minutes in this kind of weather, and Harold would let me know in no uncertain terms not let to it happen again. Fortunately, that rarely happened.

After I got the grapple and buoy back onboard, I put the buoy line into the hydraulic crab block and Chris turned on the pump. This lifted the 500 pound crab pot off the bottom of the ocean and up to the surface. Hopefully, it would have another 500 hundred pounds of crab in it too. As Chris operated the block, I coiled the three quarter inch diameter line into a neat concentric coil. Since we were fishing in about 55 fathoms of water, there was 75 fathoms, or 450 feet of line to coil.

While I was coiling, I hoped with all my heart that we had found one of the fabled ‘crab hot spots’, with 150 to 200 crabs per pot. “Let’s see,” I thought to myself. “150 crabs per pot, at 6 pounds each is 900 pounds. With a price of $1.25 per pound that’s over $1,100 worth of crab. With our 7 percent crewman’s share, the pot is worth $78 to each of us. If we had that kind of fishing all day, I would earn almost $4,000 today!” This kind of fishing is the dream of every crab fisherman in the fleet. “Come on, come on, come on...,” I said to myself as I coiled.

After four minutes the pot came to the surface. I dropped the line I was coiling and grabbed for the lever that operated the hydraulic winch for the picking boom. Chris turned off the crab block pump and hooked the picking boom hook through the crab pot’s bridle. “OK, go ahead” Chris yelled when he was ready, and I raised the pot out of the water. It was tricky work in this kind of weather, timing was everything. There was a lot of gray, stinky mud stuck to the bottom of the pot, and the wind carried the pungent, musky odor of the mud, crabs and sea water with it.

With Tony on the opposite side of the pot from Chris, they caught the pot and held onto it as I raised it over the rail, then lowered it onto the pot launcher. “Bummer” Tony yelled as we all saw only about 25 King Crabs in the pot. Chris walked over to the intercom. “We’ve only got about 25 crabs in here Dad”, Chris said.  “What do you want to do. Stack it?” Without any hesitation Harold replied, “Yeah, stack it. Maybe one of the other strings will be better”. We were all disappointed, but it was only the first pot of the day, and things would get better. Maybe. That is one of the great things about fishing crab. Each pot could be the one...

We removed all the crabs, then put the coil of line and buoys inside the pot. With the hydraulic winch off of the main boom, I lifted the pot off of the launcher and moved it toward the port stern quarter of the deck. Tony muscled the heavy pot snugly into place, and after grabbing a tie down line from the cord he had knotted around his waist, lashed it securely to the rail. By that time the second pot of the string was alongside the boat, and the operation was repeated.

Unfortunately, the entire nine pot string of pots was disappointing and we had to stack all the pots on deck. It is slow going in the bad weather and it took the better part of an hour until all the pots were secured. There were six pots in the back row across the stern, and three pots in the next row closer to the deckhouse. As the Marcy J dipped and thrashed wildly through the dark green swells, we again secured the deck for the ten minute run to the next string of pots. With nothing left to do on deck, we went into the galley and got a cup of coffee.

All crab fishermen are used to these short breaks, and we kept our oilskins on while we were in the galley. As long as we didn’t have any ocean bottom mud on them, Harold didn’t mind. We were dressed in thick wool clothes under our ‘skins’. The Oilskins themselves were made of heavy rubber suspended pants under a long hooded jacket. The thick insulated gloves we wore were put on the floor just inside the galley passageway, ready to be picked up again on our way back out to the deck.

The wind and seas had picked up, and the Marcy J was constantly thrashing and reeling through the water. Only an experienced seaman could negotiate a walk down the narrow passageways without bouncing back and forth between the bulkheads.  But to the three of us, this was just as natural as a walk in the park. No problem.

I got a couple of cups of coffee, ladled 3 teaspoons of sugar into mine, and went up to the wheelhouse. “Bummer Harold,” I said as I gave him a cup of coffee. “No crabs!” “Yeah, I know” Harold said. “But this next string is in the same depth as Captain Oscar’s pots, and I think they will be a lot better.” Harold and I spent a lot of time in the wheelhouse together talking. Although he was as old as my father and commanded the respect due the captain, I thought of Harold as one of my best friends. We were both comfortable discussing anything at anytime. Many times, more than once. Harold was a great skipper/owner to work for. Even in the toughest of times, he never hesitated to invest in new equipment that would make our jobs safer or work more efficient.

After a few minutes, Oscar called Harold on the radio and they discussed the days fishing. Since Oscar had found some good areas to fish, he began to give his coordinates to Harold in case we needed to move our gear near the area he was fishing. I knew this discussion over the radio would last a long time, so I went back down to the galley to get another cup of coffee. It was sometimes hard to even hear yourself think over the static-y blast of the 2-way VHF radio.

Just as I got to the bottom of the latterway, Chris, Tony and I heard a terrific, smashing noise on deck. Something had broken loose and was crashing back and forth on deck between the rails! “Jeez, what the hell is that?” I cried as the three of us raced down the passageway putting and grabbed our gloves. Tony went first, then me. Chris was right on my heels.

When Tony threw open the entryway door, we saw what had happened. As the Marcy J pitched wildly from side to side, the force of the pots straining against the tie downs had broken some of them, and 3 of the 500 pound pots were crashing from rail to rail. On each roll, the pots would skid across the deck and smash into the opposite rail with such force that they were starting to buckle.

When we burst onto the deck the 3 pots were sliding toward the starboard rail, with the regularity of the racing swells. Without an instant’s hesitation, Tony raced along the port rail toward the afterdeck with a couple of tie downs in his fist. He was going to get behind the pots, then when they slid back to the port rail, he would lash them to the back of the stack of pots, while I lashed the front, and Chris lashed a third corner.

Just when Tony was in the most vulnerable position, a huge, rogue wave crashed into the starboard side of the Marcy J and lifted her up over 30 feet in just the blink of an eye. The pots which had been sliding toward the starboard side, stopped in mid skid, and fell crashing back toward the portside in what seemed like a vertical free fall.

The force of this unusual thrust threw Tony to the port rail hard, and as he looked up toward the pots, he saw them falling on him - RIGHT NOW! He knew he would be smashed to a pulp if they crashed into him. Making a split second decision, he jumped up as high as he could, above the supporting rail, bent his knees and hung in mid air as the boat, the pots, and the huge sea came crashing toward him. The top rail of the pots is 6 feet tall, and he was able to grasp onto it when it came upon him. Tony grabbed on to this steel bar so tight he thought he would squeeze the juice out of it. He knew what was coming.

Next week in ‘Lost at Sea’ Part III, find out if Tony made the right decision…

John Mickman