Bering Sea Blues

Bering Sea Blues

A Crabber’s Tale of FEAR in the Icy North

Joe Upton

Other books by Joe Upton

Alaska Blues: A Fisherman’s Journal (1977)

Amaretto (1986)

Journeys Through the Inside Passage: Seafaring Adventures Along the Coast of British Columbia and Alaska (1992)

The Coastal Companion (1994)

The Alaska Cruise Companion (1997)

Runaways on the Inside Passage (2002)

The Alaska Cruise Handbook (2005)

Published by Epicenter Press

For Dave Kennedy, Rick Nelson, Jim Odegaard, friends lost at sea

Epicenter Press is a regional press publishing nonfiction books about the arts, history, environment, and diverse cultures and lifestyles of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.

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Copyright © 2011 Joe Upton

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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Front cover, crabbing in the Bering Sea, copyright © 1999, Daryl Binney

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010943443

ISBN: 978-1-935347-11-8

e-ISBN: ISBN 978-1-935347-23-1

Acknowledgments

So many times, in big boats and small, when the wind blew, we’d anchor up, and the rum and the stories would flow. Part of the Northwest fishing lore that I have shared here came from such evenings. Additionally, many Northwest fishermen have been kind enough to share their stories with me: John Enge, my old superintendent at Whitney Fidalgo Seafoods, Petersburg, Alaska, and my old boss at Marco, canneryman Eldon Grimes, both had wonderful tales, as did Bob and Ann Holmstrand of the tender Frigidland. Bob Thorstensen of Icicle Seafoods, Peter Schmidt, president of Marco, Richard Phillips of Commercial Fisherman’s News, John van Amerongen of Alaska Fishermen’s Journal and Jerry Fraser of National Fisherman magazine were all excellent sources of historical material. My first Alaska skipper, Lloyd Whaley, shared some great old photos, and Bruce Whittemore, designer of the Flood Tide and the long line of fine Marco crabbers that came before and after her, was very instrumental in giving me a clearer sense of stability issues. My friends Chuck and Diane Bundrant at Trident Seafoods were generous in allowing me to access their company’s fine photos. Kaare Ness, another legendary crab fisherman, shared his history with me, as did crabber Bart Eaton, whose fine pictures also grace these pages. George and Russell Fulton both taught me the intricacies of crabbing as well as sharing their colorful pasts. Shipmates Johnny Nott and Bob Mason: if you’re still out there, I hope I got it right. Walter Kuhr, now deceased, was a treasure trove of great stories. Crabber Mike Jackson, who went overboard twice in the Bering Sea before starting Stormy Seas to make inflatable vests just for such accidents, shared his years in the crab fishery. Special thanks to my wise and patient wife, Mary Lou, for putting up with another long project. But most of all, thanks to my first Alaska deck boss, Mickey Hansen, of the old salmon tender Sidney, for taking a green teenager under his wing forty-five years ago and showing him the ways of the North.

Contents

Prologue

1. Beginnings

2. Trouble on the Inside Passage

3. The Struggle at Cape St. Elias

4. Come Into My Icy Chamber, said the Sea God

5. A Bering Sea Welcome

6. The Boys Get Ready

7. Tales from the Elbow Room

8. The Ring of Fire

9. We Become Crabbers

10. Into the Ice

11. In Dutch

12. A Bering Sea Breeze

13. The Siberian High

14. Spring in the North

15. The Long Days

16. The Job Hunters Come

17. Southern Waters

18. Back in the Saddle Again

19. Triple Stacked

20. The Hidden Canyons

21. Putting Your Winter Money in Your Ass Pocket

22. The John and Olaf

Epilogue

About the Author

Crabber Alma at Seattle Fishermen’s Terminal, around 1960. Before steel boats took over, many older wooden boats entered the crab fishery. Fishermen simply took the boat they had, put in a steel crab tank, and headed north with a load of pots into the winter conditions of the Bering Sea. It wouldn’t take much of a sea to knock the pilothouse windows out of this boat. LLOYD WHALEY PHOTO

Prologue

The weather in the Bering Sea is generally bad and very changeable. Good weather is the exception and it does not last long when it does occur. Wind shifts are both frequent and rapid. Late fall and early winter is the time of almost continuous storminess.

-- United States Coast Pilot, Vol. 9. Pacific and Arctic Coasts of Alaska from Cape Spencer to the Beaufort Sea

The Bering Sea is a bad place, the meanest sea that washes any shore. To the west is Siberia, to the north the Arctic, to the south the North Pacific, and to the east the vast tundra coast of Alaska. All are weather breeders. Calm days are rare. The boundary between the Bering Sea and the North Pacific is the Aleutian Islands, nicknamed the Birthplace of the Winds. Every six hours, hundreds of cubic miles of water force their way through the narrow passes between the islands, resulting in currents that when opposed by the frequent strong winds, create seas big enough to wash forty-foot containers off the decks of 700-foot freighters.

In the winter, much of the Bering Sea freezes, the ice pack often reaching south of the Pribilof Islands. The action of the ice scours the shore along the shallow Alaska coast, making the construction of permanent harbor facilities difficult. Humans are scarce on the coast, their settlements even scarcer. Except for Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, Nome near the Arctic Circle, and a few scattered Native villages, the land is empty and treeless, bleak and daunting.

The mountains that border the coast to the south are the meeting place of two of the gigantic plates that make up the earth’s crust. Many of these peaks are active volcanoes, some regularly burping ash, steam, and lava in places so remote the eruptions are seldom noticed, except perhaps by crewmen on a trawler or crabber, nudging each other as a thousand tons of glowing ash and steam lights up the night sky with a spectacular show so far away no sound reaches them.

On the south side of the Bering Sea, along the Alaska Peninsula, a particular weather phenomenon occurs that has caused the loss of numerous vessels and crews. In the bitter depths of Alaskan winters, the air in the Interior valleys becomes unusually cold and dense. When circumstances are right, it roars down into the bays, picking up water and creating an ice fog that freezes instantly to any part of a boat it touches, forming ice so heavy that vessels at anchor can capsize before their crews know what’s happening. Once a helicopter trying to locate a sinking vessel in one of these bays found itself icing up so badly with saltwater ice a thousand feet up, it had to abandon the search.

Yet, like the shallow banks of the western Atlantic that have proved so rich for generations of East Coast fishermen, the Bering Sea is also unusually productive. Upwelling currents sweep nutrients in from the depths of the Aleutian Trench to the south and from the mile-deep basin to the west, resulting in an immense fishery resource.

But because of its remoteness and the severity of the weather, even by Alaskan standards, it has long been a Last Frontier for commercial fishing, attracting only the hardiest, most entrepreneurial of fishermen. The first non-Native fishermen to come were the American whaling fleet, beginning in the 1850s and 1860s. Within a few decades, over a hundred big sail and steam whalers traveled the Bering Sea, seeking bowhead and right whales.

And the ice was always waiting for the careless, the unwary, or simply the unlucky. Many whaling ships were crushed when the ice trapped them. But what they did—travel for years at a time, half a world away from home, braving the cold and the ice in wooden boats—makes even the battles of the hardiest king crabbers today seem modest.

The crabber Key West sinking, Bering Sea, 1978. The Bering Sea is always probing, trying to find a vessel’s weakness. The Key West was brand new, and jogging into a strong Bering Sea gale. A pot broke loose on the back deck and started slamming around, but it was so rough no one was able to go out and tie it down. Eventually it found the weak spot in the design: a 12-inch-diameter vent pipe for the lazarette. Unbeknownst to the crew, the pot broke the vent pipe off at the deck, and the water rolling across the deck in the heavy seas filled the lazarette, sinking the boat. Fortunately there were other crabbers nearby and all hands were rescued safely. BART EATON PHOTO

Next was the salmon boom starting in the late 1890s, when entrepreneurs from California and the Columbia River sent square-rigged ships filled with cannery building materials, fishing boats and gear, plus carpenters, cannery workers, and fishermen up to remote Bristol Bay in the eastern Bering Sea. The ships would anchor and all hands would turn to unloading, driving piling for docks, building canneries, and installing machinery before the fish run began.

When the salmon run started, the small fishing boats would be rigged with masts, sails, and gill nets, and then launched. For the fishermen, the challenges were immense: the tidal and river currents were strong, the wind gusty. But when the salmon arrived, they came by the tens of millions, the largest run on the entire coast, so the rewards for fishermen and cannery owners were great.

Then, starting in the 1940s, the foreign fleets came—200- to 300-foot processors and factory trawlers from Japan, Korea, Poland, Russia, and other countries—to harvest the immense resource of so-called bottom-fish, primarily pollock, haddock, and cod.

For the Americans, it was mostly the hardiest of the hardy—a few fishermen in halibut boats that were renowned up and down the coast for their seaworthiness—seeking their catch in the remote Bering Sea. And the tales they brought back with them, of below-zero temperatures and hurricane winds springing up without notice, of icing up so fast the crew couldn’t keep up with it, didn’t make other fishermen eager to go.

The king crab, a large, slow-moving, spider-like creature with thick legs loaded with tasty meat, was largely ignored by foreigners and Americans alike until second-generation Alaska seafood processor Lowell Wakefield developed a mechanical process to extract the leg meat from king crab in the mid-1950s. With this breakthrough, Wakefield began widely marketing frozen crab.

Wakefield’s first big crab catcher-processor was the 140-foot Deep Sea, a trawler that towed a funnel-shaped net along the bottom, scraping up crab and depositing them in the tail of the net, called a cod end. The Deep Sea’s net caught a lot of crabs, but many were crushed by being jammed together when dragged and then hoisted aboard the Deep Sea. Because of this waste, trawling for king crab was banned in 1961.

Today, crab fishermen use large pots, which look like cages and are sometimes eight feet by eight feet by three feet and weigh 600 to 700 pounds empty. These king crab pots evolved from Dungeness crab traps, which were round with steel frames and nylon or stainless steel netting. The design was first expanded to a six-foot-diameter round trap about thirty inches high, but the rectangular pot was quickly adopted since it could be stacked with less wasted space on deck and it had more volume; fishermen were discovering that there were a lot of king crab on the bottom.

King crab piled up near the big trawl winches of the trawler, The Deep Sea, around 1955. The Deep Sea caught an impressive amount of crab, but as the funnel, shaped trawl net was pulled to the surface, many crab were crushed, and eventually this style of harvesting king crab was banned by the state of Alaska. COURTESY FISHERMEN’S NEWS

Early on, crab fishermen discovered that king crab exhibited a behavior unlike any other crab they had known: they often traveled in immense groups of hundreds of thousands of individual crabs. And it appeared that at certain times, the pods or herds would segregate themselves by size and gender. This habit allowed crab fishermen to prospect with their crab gear, by setting pots over a wide area to discover the composition of herds. For instance, a big herd might cover several acres, and one part might be females, another part might be small males, and another part of the herd might be mostly large males. The females are illegal and the smaller males are sublegal. By targeting the large-male part of the herd and trying to stay on it (the herds also move), a savvy crab fisherman could spare his crew much of the tedious job of sorting out the mature males, or keepers, with big meaty legs from the others.

By the late 1950s, salmon fishermen in the Kodiak Island area looking for a good winter fishery for their boats were beginning to fish king crab in the bays around that big island. Today’s crab boats keep their crab alive by putting them in tanks of circulating seawater. But in the early 1960s when the crab fishery was getting under way, most of the fleet in Kodiak were salmon seiners and other wooden boats, usually smaller than seventy feet, and were generally unsuited for installing the watertight tanks needed to keep king crab alive.

But Kodiak was an island with dozens of sheltered bays that were close enough to town for the smaller boats to fish without a tank and deliver every day. Fishing the bays close to Kodiak and returning to town to deliver each night was fine when the crab were close, but it became quickly apparent that with the fishery rapidly growing, crab fishermen would have to travel farther with larger boats equipped with flooded crab tanks. With a very large salmon fleet and a population of talented and aggressive fishermen, Kodiak was an ideal place for king crabbing to first take off. The fleet grew rapidly: 183 boats participated in 1965, leaping to 258 just a year later.

Harvests jumped from 11 million pounds in 1958 to a huge 158 million pounds in 1966. At an average price of ten cents a pound, it averaged out to something like $60,000 per boat, and a highliner, or top fisherman, might double or triple that. Dollars were worth way more back then: the average crab boat working in the winter would make what an average summer salmon season brought in, doubling the income for the year, a very exciting prospect.

It was immediately apparent to Kodiak’s crab fishermen that this was a very strong resource: some boats were catching as much as 3,000 ten- to twelve-pound crabs a day—huge numbers. So those with the money sought larger boats that could be equipped with steel crab tanks. At the time, there were few suitable steel boats available on the West Coast, so many wooden boats were purchased and refitted with steel crab tanks. These crab conversions were not a marriage made in heaven: rigid water-filled steel tanks and limber old wooden boats are not a great combination. But fishermen go with what is available and what they can afford, so the nasty waters around Kodiak Island saw the loss of numerous boats and crews.

Crabbing, unlike salmon fishing, was in the winter. And winter around Kodiak meant snow and ice. The smaller boats used in the early Kodiak fishery weren’t built for the rigors of crabbing, with 700-pound pots slamming around on deck. Furthermore, when the bitter winds of winter blew, the flying spray would quickly freeze to any exposed surfaces, building up weight and putting vessels in danger of capsizing. Icing, and the decreasing stability that comes with it, is a continuing challenge for crab fishermen.

It didn’t take long for crabbers to think steel, and by 1966, Northwest shipbuilders’ books began to fill with orders for what were essentially the first modern steel crabbers. Some were conversions, steel vessels built for other uses and converted to crabbers. Particularly popular and available were U.S. Navy surplus YOs and YFs, big 150-foot yard oilers and yard freighters.

One of the first crabbers to be designed and built from the ground up as a crabber, and which essentially served as a model for the hundreds of house-forward (with the pilothouse in the front of the boat) crabbers that followed, was the Peggy Jo, built for Oscar Dyson, a well-known Kodiak fisherman. Built by the Martinolich yard in Tacoma, Washington, she was a hundred feet long by twenty-eight feet wide by twelve feet deep, and could carry 10,000 king crab alive for a week or more in her two big crab tanks. Delivered in the spring of 1966, she was an eye opener for Kodiak fishermen. Compared to the smaller boats that often had dry holds, which were the mainstay of the crab fleet then, the Peggy Jo was truly a vision of what the future looked like, and fishermen liked what they saw.

The forward quarter, or third, of the boat was accommodations—galley and crew quarters—on the same level as the main deck, with the pilothouse and the skipper’s cabin behind it on the upper deck. On the smaller wooden boats that had been the core of the fleet, the deckhouse, holding the galley aft and the steering area forward with crew’s bunks usually below decks, was narrow with room on either side to walk up to the bow. In heavy weather, waves would come over the bow and wash along the side decks and often back into the deck area where the crew worked, but the Peggy Jo’s design with a deckhouse that stretched the full width of the boat (access to the bow was through the pilothouse on the upper deck) created a more sheltered and therefore safer crew area. Plus, the working deck seemed almost the size of a football field compared to the cramped and cluttered back deck of the typical Kodiak crabber then.

Another critical feature was flush decks. Most other fishing boats of that era had large raised hatches, perhaps as large as eight by ten feet, which provided access to the fish holds as well as keeping water out of the holds when the boat was heavily loaded in rough conditions. On a fifty-foot boat with the forward third taken up by the deckhouse and bow, a big hatch was in the way, especially when manipulating heavy, awkward crab pots. On the Peggy Jo and essentially all crabbers that followed her, hatches were set flush to the deck, with sliding doors for loading crab. And for unloading, the huge steel hatch cover, maybe fifteen feet by fifteen feet on a big crabber, could be unbolted, lifted up, and placed out of the way. Sometimes a portable steel or aluminum chute, perhaps two feet high, was inserted into whichever sliding door was being used, to load crab into the tank and prevent female or sublegal male crabs from accidentally getting into the tank. And since the Peggy Jo and other new crabbers were built with crab tanks designed to be filled with seawater, there was no longer a need for a hatch to keep the sea out.

The Crabber Shishaldin, converted from a U.S. navy ship, around 1960. Before shipyards like Marco started building new crabbers in the late 1960s, fishermen often purchased old military hulls and converted them by putting in crab tanks and pot handling gear. Note her smoking engines, probably surplus as well, but never a good sign, and barrels of lube oil lashed to the upper deck. COURTESY MARCO

At the same time that the Peggy Jo and other house-forward steel crabbers were being built, the Pacific Fishermen Shipyard in Seattle launched an unusual boat for Seattle crabber Axel Buholm. Designed by Seattle naval architect Bill Jensen as a house-aft crabber, Buholm’s Sea Ern became the first of many boats of essentially the same design, eighty-eight by twenty-six by ten feet, with a raised bow (bait freezer and storage underneath) that provided some protection to the crew, and a two-story pilothouse that was aft, or at the back of the vessel. This configuration allowed the skipper to closely observe the crew without having to turn around all the time like on a conventional house-forward vessel.

The new fleet of steel crab boats electrified the Northwest fishing community. Previously, almost all fishing boats were wooden. Not only did these new boats provide a bigger working platform than other crabbers, but they offered amazing luxury as well: electric kitchens, electric heat, showers, flush toilets, multiple crew cabins, and, most amazing of all, a washer and dryer so you could have nice toasty rubber gloves whenever you wanted.

The late 1960s were truly heady days for crabbers and Northwest shipyards. Each month, the cover of Fishermen’s News, the Northwest’s fishing trade magazine, featured a big photo of yet another large crabber getting launched and headed north. Anxious crabbers were ordering boats from as far away as Alabama in order to get delivery before the next crab season.

Almost all of these new big boats were headed for the Bering Sea, because in the mid-l960s it was clear that the Bering Sea was the place to crab. The crab resource in Kodiak was in decline, and the small Kodiak boats were unable to fish in the more challenging environment of the Bering Sea.

In the 1960s, the Bering Sea was the wild, wild west. While the town of Kodiak had bars, restaurants, hotels, and numerous stores, Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island in the Aleutians was the only real port in the Bering Sea, an area the size of New England. And Dutch had one bar, one store, one church, and two public phones. Transport in and out in the winter, by Reeve Aleutian Airways, was spotty. If your boat broke down and you needed a part flown in, you could be out of business for a week or more.

The little fleet of nine boats that fished the first Bering Sea king crab season in 1966 included Soren Sorenson’s new steel eighty-six footer Denali, Ed Grabowski’s seventy-eight-foot wooden North Sea, Knute Franklin’s wooden Honey B, and six others. They rocked the Northwest fishing community with their tales of huge fishing: 200 to 300 keepers in a single pot. A new gold rush was on.

Before king crabbing, salmon was the major commercial fishery in Alaska. The fleet was large and the harvests and prices were pretty stable. People could do well at salmon fishing. But as early reports trickled in from the Bering Sea king crab fleet, it was clear that this opportunity was something new even for Alaska—a wide-open fishery where, for those with the resources and will to gear up and get out there, the rewards could be huge. The only trouble was that the best crab fishing was in the middle of winter, and as even the most hardened veterans of Alaska fishing were to find out, Bering Sea winter fishing put strains on boats and crews that few had experienced.

This was the exciting environment into which I stepped as deckhand on the new steel 104-foot crabber Flood Tide in the late winter of 1971. I was twenty five.

The crew of De La Patria, Chile, 19565. I (far right) worked as second engineer aboard a tuna seiner in the summer after high school. The bleak desert coast of northern Chile can be seen behind us.

1. Beginnings

The story of my journey to Alaska on the Flood Tide began in the bleak north Chilean town of Iquique in 1965. A few months out of high school and hoping to find an interesting job and make some money for college, through a family friend who had connections with a Chilean fishing company I got work as a fleet mechanic, and struggled with my high school Spanish in a very different world from my East Coast home.

Around the dusty town at the foot of a bluff on the edge of the great Atacama Desert were signs of a prosperous past: the late 1800s and early 1900s when ships from all over the world came to load nitrates—bags of brownish white power from mines in the great desert, used for fertilizer and gunpowder. There were photos of the wide harbor full of square-riggers, waiting their turn, sometimes for months, to load. Then came World War I, the Germans invented artificial nitrate, the ships abruptly stopped coming, and just like that, Iquique was abajo (down).

Then in the early 1960s came another sort of boom: anchovies. Fish meal for animal food and fertilizer was big business worldwide, and the vast anchovy schools eddying close to the coast there were a perfect source. The big fish meal companies from South Africa and the southern United States came to town to built plants and fleets.

Our tuna seiner, anchored off the abandoned town of Caleta Buena, Chile, 1965. Towns like this were totally dependent on the big nitrate clippers, square riggers that came from Germany loaded with food, supplies, even water, to take away the powdered nitrate that came from the mines in the desert behind the coast. When World War I started, the clippers stopped coming and the people in these towns had to leave or starve.

Two new shipyards were building seiners as fast as they could, and already there were 300 plus in the harbor. Seiners set a net in a circle around the fish, then pull in a wire laced through steel rings along the bottom of the net to draw, or purse, the net into a basket shape from which the fish cannot escape. Amazingly enough, in those heady days, the problem wasn’t catching the fish, but rather the opposite: catching too many fish. The anchovy schools were so dense you could wrap so much with your net that the fish would smother and sink, bending your boom or capsizing your boat. The big steel skiffs that aided in the process of setting the net had an engine-driven water pump and a couple of empty fifty-five-gallon drums. As soon as the skiff hooked onto the net—the skiff held part of the net up while the seiner was pumping the fish out—the skiff operator hooked the drums to the skiff’s opposite rail and pumped them full of water to counter the pull of the net.

Some of my ship- and workmates had come from essentially feudal living conditions in the farms of southern Chile, four days by dusty bus with their families to live in oven-hot shacks built of flattened fifty-five-gallon drums. But a job on a good seiner was a step on a path that could lead to better lives, and there was work for the women as well in the fish meal plants. The combination made for new lives with hope.

This was the eye-opening world I entered, green and very wet behind the ears. I got off the plane and found a room in a pension, which once had been a large, elegant home but had fallen on hard times and the many rooms were rented out.

My first job was in the shop of a fishing company. Of course I wanted to get out on the boats where the action was. The graduation test from our little mechanic’s shop was being able to take apart and reassemble the complex workings of the inertia starters used for the small diesel engines in the big metal skiffs that the seiners used in the fishing process. In my first attempts, I always had parts left over when I was done—never a good thing. But eventually I got it right and moved on to be crewman on a seventy-five-foot steel anchovy seiner. Things were pretty crude. One of the cook’s jobs as we sat around the galley table playing cards was to occasionally reach up and swat the pesky flies off the big pieces of meat swaying from hooks over his head; there was neither ice nor refrigeration. I had never even been out on a fishing boat before and so to be part of the process of loading the boat deep in the water with a single set of the net was fascinating.

Our tuna seiner, De La Patria, Iquique, Chile, 1965. We would make one-to two-week trips offshore, fishing for bonita, a small species of tuna.

Eventually, I graduated to assistant engineer on one of our company’s tuna seiners, the largest boats in Iquique then. These were big 140 footers with ten-man crews and real staterooms. Instead of a quick overnight out to the grounds and back that the anchovy boats did, the tuna seiner had refrigerated holds and we’d be out for three or four weeks at a time, often out of sight of land for days or weeks.

As crewmen on a tuna boat, we each got two frozen bonita after each trip. The local men would take them up to the poor sections of town to share with their families and friends—a wonderful treat. For men like myself, a nice ten-pound bonita was worth a night on the town: including dinner, drinks, and company.

The Americans in Iquique hung out at the old Hotel Pratt, on the main plaza. In the hotel lobby hung wonderful old photos of Iquique in the nitrate days. Sometimes I’d nurse a beer in the