Commercial Fishing

We made boat shopping a family affair. Because I had already visited Homer's docks we drove there first. While there we visited the closed campground where a sixty-something woman - Jane something I think - was famous for feeding bald eagles through the winter. There had been a spread in National Geographic about her and her eagles as well as a documentary. The winter bald eagles at her campground were reputed to be the largest gathering of bald eagles in the world. Having witnessed this first hand on numerous occasions I don't doubt it. The first time I met Jane I attempted to get out of my car to take photos of the hundreds of bald eagles gathered on her grounds. Before my foot hit the ground she was standing before me with a shot gun. She said, "Can't you read." Not one to argue with a woman with a shot gun I said, "Usually." She pointed at a sign that faced me. The sign was covered in snow to such a degree that I couldn't see the words. When I pointed this out she hit the sign with her hand. It instructed people like myself that it was okay to take pictures from our cars, but not to get out of the car under any circumstances. Jane accepted my apology and left me alone. I stayed in the car. Eagles were as close as ten feet. Jane's discussion with me caused them to move back another five feet, but none flew off.

We walked the docks of Homer but didn't see any boats for sale. I asked a boat skipper and was directed to a large dry dock in Homer. The dry dock was huge with many fishing boats for sale. Most were out of my price range. One that I would be able to afford with a little owner financing belonged to the Russian widow of the fisherman who had died on it. No thanks. A few days later we followed a lead to Seward and there I found my boat. At thirty-eight foot, the North Wind was small by Alaska standards. The seas were big so the boats needed to be big as well. However the North Wind had few design differences that my seasoned sailor's eye liked. It's hull design was a double-ender, a Norwegian design with a stern built much like the bow. This allowed a small boat to survive what's known as a following sea. Meaning, waves that hit the boat from behind. I'd not actually seen a double-ender before, but had read about them and understood their value in heavy seas. The Russian boat we had looked at in Homer had a standard squared stern. The crew of that boat died because a wave overtook them from behind. A following sea. Though the North Wind was smaller than the square backed Russian boat, the North Wind's crew would have survived the seas that killed the Russians because of it's unique design.

The other thing I liked about the North Wind was it's five foot draft. Meaning, five foot of the boat was below the water line. A deep draft for a thirty-eight foot boat. I'd already seen Alaskan commercial fishing boats twice the North Wind's size with less draft. The North Wind would be slow because of so much bulk below the waterline, but safer in heavy seas. The down side to the North Wind was that it was made of wood, it's motor ruined, and it's fishing gear mostly gone. But the price was right so I could repair boat and gear and have a boat I would feel safe in.

I was ready to buy the North Wind where it sat in the water at the Seward public dock until my wife slowed me down. "Are you sure this is what you want to do," she asked. "Absolutely," I said, but she was used to my enthusiasm so not impressed. "You can't know its what you want to do because you've never actually been on the water in Alaska." True I admitted. My wife wisely suggested I hire on to a commercial fishing boat as a crew member to see if I liked it and to gain experience before sinking all our money into a boat. She was right. Of course she was. Mary rarely tried to slow me down, but when she did she was always right.

Finding a job on a commercial fishing boat proved to be difficult. but when I did I barely had time to call Mary to tell her I was going to sea. We sailed east from Seward. (Sail is a nautical term. There are no fishing boats under sail in Alaska).  A 100 miles off the coast of Alaska when we "wet our gear." A long-liner's fishing gear type is a mile long line full of baited hooks. This line is then anchored to the bottom of the ocean to catch fish that feed on the ocean floor. In Alaska this means halibut, black cod, gray cod, ling cod, and red snapper. All commercial fishing is hard work, but long-line fishing is the most demanding. Every eighteen inches of the mile long line has a baited hook. Each of those hooks has to be baited by hand. All of that bait has to be cut and prepared by hand and every fish caught has to have its head cut off and its guts removed. When that is done, the hooks have to be baited again. It is a grueling and unending task. At the beginning of this trip I didn't know any of this so Mary was right, I had a lot to learn.

The work was brutal and grueling with only four hours of sleep a day. Add in the constant pounding of heavy Gulf of Alaska seas and the strain on your body is nearly unbearable. Other than the normal brutal and dangerous work, it was an uneventful trip until the fifth day when it became interesting. Our work was interrupted by the abrasive blare of an alarm. What I didn't know until this happened was that our skipper leased this boat and he'd only had one other trip so he didn't understand all of the boat's systems. For example, he was clueless about the alarm. As soon as the alarm sounded he'd pulled back on the power and stopped the boat's forward motion. This caused the boat to wallow in the seas, but not alarmingly so. My alarm was when he stuck his head out of the pilot house to us asking if we knew what the alarm was for. Not a question you want to hear from your skipper 100 miles off the coast of Alaska.

No one knew what caused the alarm, but with the boat stopped I noticed it seemed unusually heavy in the water. I looked over the side and realized we were sitting deeper in the water than normal. "We're taking on water," I screamed. The skipper bolted for the engine room and I followed. The engine room was two levels below deck and accessed through the crew quarters which was one level below deck. When I reached the crew quarters the skipper opened the engine room door  but had stopped. When I looked down into the engine room I saw that the big diesel engine was half covered with water. The skipper had frozen there, watching mini waves roll back and forth in the engine room as the stationary boat was tossed by the rough seas.

My Coast Guard training kicked in. "Shut off the engine," I shouted. The skipper looked at me like I'd woke him up, then leaned into the engine room and hit an emergency shut-off switch. The deafening sound of the big diesel engine ceased, which made it easier to think. "The hull is breached," I said. "There's either a hole or a thru-hull connection broke. We didn't hit anything so it has to be a thru-hull connector. Where is it?" The poor excuse for a boat skipper didn't know.

The large engine sat in the middle of a compartment the size of the boat's port to starboard hull. It was accessed by either a port or starboard ladder on each side of the engine. Once you were in the engine room you couldn't go around the engine, so you had to choose which ladder to go down based on where in the engine room you wanted to go. The skipper didn't know where the thru-hull connector was so I went down the ladder closest to me. By the time I was in the water the skipper had entered on the opposite starboard side.

A thru-hull connection is a hole in the hull below the water line to allow sea water to enter through a hose to cool the engine. The constant flow of cold sea water worked on a large marine engine like a radiator on a car. There was usually a solid mount on the deck with a shutoff valve with a replaceable hose that ran between the deck mount and the engine. For this reason I started my search at the front of the engine. It was winter, so the Gulf of Alaska water was frigid cold. When I first entered the engine room the water was halfway between my knee and waist. I made note of this because I was trained to do so. To search for the source of the in-rushing water I had to dive into the water and use my hands.

If I thought the water was cold at first, that was nothing compared to what I felt when completely submerged. After searching the forward area and not finding the problem I stood back up. When I did the skipper was looking at me from the other side of the engine. "What are you doing," he asked. When I told him he nodded, but didn't go under water on his side searching. At the same time two of the five crew members stuck their heads into the engine room. Both had survival suits in their hands. The skipper shouted for them to help us, but both ran back to the deck. At this point the water was above my waist. It had risen nearly two foot in a minute. Even in that brief time I could tell that the boat was sitting deeper in the water by how sluggish it rolled in the heavy sea.

I dove back into the water, sweeping my hands from side to side I worked my way from the middle part of the engine to the rear. In the far left hand corner of the engine room I found the gush of water. I came up for air then went back down to find the shut off valve, but there wasn't one. I could feel the heavy material of the thru-hull joint and feel the water rushing thru it, but there was no shutoff valve.

When I surfaced for air the water was up to my neck and the skipper standing in the crew quarters. It was apparent he was ready to abandon his boat. I said I'd found the hole and needed something to stuff it. He grabbed a shirt off one of the beds but I said it wasn't big enough. I knew there were sleeping bags on every bunk so that's what I asked for. Sleeping bag in hand I dove towards the hole. The boat had taken on enough water that the incoming water pressure was less than when I first felt it, making it easier to stuff a corner of the sleeping bag into the hole. After I'd pushed it in as far as I could I felt around on a wall mounted work bench until I found a crow bar I'd seen there when I first entered the engine room. Using this I shoved the sleeping bag securely into the hole.

When I surfaced the water was nearly over my head. Fortunately the engine room was eight foot high so I was able to stand on the work bench to breath. The boat was clearly in danger of floundering unless we got the water out in time.

Still standing in the crew quarter's door the skipper was shouting something at me and pointing. It took me a minute to realize what he was trying to tell me. Mounted near the ceiling was a large 110 volt high-volume bilge pump. Rather than a switch to turn it on there was a standard 110 volt plug wrapped around it and an outlet next to it. Without even thinking I looked to the starboard side to see the boat's Gen-Set (what we call a generator on a boat). It was mounted higher than the engine, but it was almost completely submerged but it was still running. So we still had 110 volts.

"What about the regular bilge pumps," I asked the skipper. "Too slow," he said. This I knew, but had to ask. Every boat had bilge pumps that automatically engaged to pump water out. But they pulled power off 12 volt batteries so were low powered and slow. Had time not been an issue they would eventually empty the boat of water, but as the boat nearly failed to recover from a roll I knew time was a pressing issue.

I won't repeat the explicit I used when I grabbed the 110 volt plug. Even standing on the bench more than half my body was in the water. Sea water, which is salt and more conductive to electricity. With the plug several inches from the wall socket, it arced. I willed myself to ignore it. Still not sure how I managed to get that plug in the wall, but I did. The jolt knocked me unconscious, but only for a moment. When I came to the skipper was still standing in the door way, out of the water, but trying to reach me. Given the electrical arc I didn't fault him for not jumping in the water to pull me out.

The large pump made an immediate difference. Water still slogged around the engine room, but with the hole stopped up the large pump immediately began to make the water recede. When the skipper and I walked back on deck the remaining five crew members wore their bulky Mark IV survival suits and had inflated the survival raft. Two guys were in the raft with three still on deck, holding the raft in place but ready to jump on. They had called in a Mayday to the Coast Guard Cutter Mustang stationed at Seward. Fortunately, we were able to counter the Mayday call before the Mustang got under way. I'd like to think the crew was waiting for the skipper and I but I don't think they'd given our lives a thought. To say that the skipper was upset with them would be a great understatement. I wasn't upset with the crew though. Every year forty or more commercial fisherman lose their lives in Alaskan waters. The fishing community was a small group, so most of us knew some of those men. It was rational to be scared and to react to that fear.

After the engine room drained I learned that the thru-hull connection that had broke loose was part of the fishing hold's refrigerated sea-water system. It should have had a shutoff valve. We cut the top part of the sleeping bag off and left the rest in place, then reattached the hose. This made the boat safe but disabled the refrigerated sea water system that kept the catch fresh. For this reason we had to cut the trip short and head in. After the close call we'd just experienced we were all ready to end the trip. Six days after we left Seward we returned with a short load of fish. My crew share was $1,200. Not a bad hall for six days work, but I'd learned what I needed to know so I quit the boat.

Mary asked me to work a trip to see if I liked it. I didn't like it, I loved it. I'd never felt so alive. Diving under the water in an engine room to plug a hole to keep the boat from sinking did it for me. I felt like I'd been built for this life.