In high gear on treacherous seas

ABOARD THE F/V EXITO ON THE BERING SEA -- The wind had just shifted into a higher gear, blowing hail sideways across the deck already slick with seawater, ground herring and oil when the intercom cut through the howl.

PDF:
- Learn more about record seasons, crabber deaths and more

Previously:
- Crabbing industry faces a sea change

Weblog:
Mike Lewis filed daily reports from Bristol Bay during the crab season.

Gallery:
Karen Ducey captured the experience in pictures.

Part 3:
Find out how the season went for the Exito's crew, and how Dutch Harbor's bar scene has changed in recent years. Also read reports from Washington, D.C., about the battle over a controversial plan to divide up Alaska's crab harvest.

Complete coverage:
See more in this series.

"Watch the rail!" captain Quinn Ferguson barked, seeing what the crew couldn't -- a 19-foot curl charging at the F/V Exito's right flank. The five-man crew grabbed whatever they could and turned with their backs to the starboard side at the instant the wave smacked.

The men disappeared from Ferguson's view for an instant, as the windshield of his warm wheelhouse took part of the blast. The boat pitched violently. Then just as quickly, the window cleared and the crew resumed baiting the crab pot perched on deck.

"Big one," Ferguson muttered to himself.

In fact, it had been hours of big ones -- nearly non-stop big ones since the 2003 Bristol Bay red king crab season began Oct. 15. The weather, which had seemed so promising when the Exito first left Dutch Harbor for the fishing grounds, turned relentlessly awful with 15- to 20-foot swells.

Three days into the king crab season, things are not looking good on the Seattle-based Exito. The weather isn't the only problem -- in fact, the weather is affecting all 252 boats crabbing on the Bering Sea.

No, it's the catch. Or lack thereof.

The free-for-all derby that has made this fishery infamous is racing on, and it appears to be leaving the Exito behind. Daily radio updates indicate someone is striking it big, but it isn't happening here.

The first two pots pulled showed dismal results. Five legal kings in the first, two in the second and a handful of unlucky, misguided cod. This in pots and in an area that produced 40 and 50 kings last year. A pot isn't considered to break even with fewer than 15, and even that wouldn't be reason to celebrate.

"This is when you start telling yourself, 'Next time I'm going to save more money,' " said Jeff Madigan, the Exito's chief engineer and deckhand, during a brief break in the action. "You start making yourself all kinds of promises about your spending habits.

"Then when the first loaded pot comes up, you forget all of them," he said, laughing.

The boat's captains and co-owners, Steve Toomey and Ferguson, are not finding the big kings they normally do on the muddy bottom 300 feet below. Every year until now they've beaten the fleet average. This year, it's going to take a miracle with the season ticking away.

Both men, as a result, are tense. All morning, Ferguson has been needling the crew when they don't get the pots set as fast as he would like. Finally Toomey snaps.

"Mellow out," he says to his business partner of 25 years, making it quite clear that he is feeling nothing like that at all.

Truth is, they would rather not be fishing right now. They would like to anchor up and wait for better weather. In most fisheries, this is what a captain would do. But for the past 15 years, Alaska's king crab fishery has been managed like legal looting or the world's most dangerous game show contest, with every boat grabbing what it can as fast as it can -- regardless of weather or sleep -- from the opening bell until the whistle blows three to five days later.


		Karen Ducey / P-I
	A pot of red king crab is dumped onto the sorting table of the F/V Exito, where the crew will begin sorting out the legal-size males. Those crabs are kept alive in one of three large tanks below deck filled with seawater until the boat returns to Dutch Harbor, Alaska, where they will be processed. The females and small males will be returned to sea. See more photos in the gallery.

Crabbing was the original extreme sport before the term existed. Its reputation as one of the nation's most dangerous professions has earned it the attention of authors, documentarians and, currently, Congress. Legislation pushed in Washington, D.C., by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, could make this year's derby the last.

"It's crazy and it's dangerous," said Toomey, who has seen his share of both on the Bering Sea. "There is no reason it has to be like this."

The plan to better manage the crab harvest, called rationalization, is hotly contested. Generally, rationalization seeks to award guaranteed shares of crab to the boats that catch them and the processors that butcher and package the crab into expensive restaurant fare. The thinking is that if every boat or processor had a right to a specific amount, there would be no need for a frenzied, winner-catch-all derby.

But sticky issues remain: Who gets awarded those quotas? The boats or the processors? If the boat owners get quotas, should veteran captains or deckhands get any?

The one thing all sides agree on: Alaska's crab fisheries must change.

Just ask the crew of the F/V Raven. Two hours before the season even began, the Oregon-based vessel capsized, rolling under its heavy load of crab pots.

The U.S. Coast Guard dispatched a helicopter and airlifted the five-man crew perched on the boat's side.

It was a sobering moment for the fleet and the crew of the Exito. The forecast for the season set the catch limit for the entire fleet at 14.5 million pounds -- the highest quota in 12 years. On the boat talk had centered on crew shares.

With a good haul, a deckhand stood to make $15,000 for the five-day season.

"Sure, (the Raven capsizing) makes you think," said veteran deckhand Bob Cordova of Mill Creek. "But you can't think about that stuff while you work. You have a job to do."

In that, the crew agrees. Cordova, 46, has been crabbing since 1981. Genial even when conditions are foul, Cordova works with an economy of motion that reveals how long he has been crabbing, with his preternatural balance on the heaving deck and ability to clamber across the stacked pots like a gymnast.

Madigan, 35, from Skykomish, is the boat's second-in-command. He's not only responsible for deck work but the Exito's mechanical systems as well. He hopes someday to own his own boat.

Lee Fleury, 31, also from Skykomish, has worked on crab boats for six years and the Exito for the past three. He said he fishes nearly every day of the year. "It's my passion."


		Karen Ducey / P-I
	Crewman Lyndon Yockey, 36, mans the king coiler while water and jellyfish spray off the line into his face. The Edmonds resident has been crabbing for 13 years, working on just three vessels in that time. "I like to get to know the boat." Many deckhands have a tendency to switch boats often. See more photos in the gallery.

Lyndon Yockey, 36, has been crabbing for 13 years. Unlike many deckhands, the Edmonds resident is not prone to switching boats, having only worked on three different vessels over that time. "I like to get to know the boat," he said.

And then there's Erik Snyder, 29. The Seattle native never has been crabbing before, and for that reason he's called "horn" for greenhorn. This seems to mildly irritate him but he doesn't say much about it.

As the horn, his job is to grind herring for bait jars, clean and cook in the galley when he has extra time and generally follow orders from the rest of the deckhands. He takes it all in stride, not complaining. An expert skier, he's here to fund a winter on the slopes.

"I had no idea what I was getting into," he said after a day on the boat. "That (herring) sprays everywhere when I'm grinding it. Do you want to know what it tastes like? Not good."

A frantic pace

The first pot splashed in five minutes after the season officially began and plunged to the bottom of Bristol Bay, leaving two buoys as evidence of where it sank.

Like a roach motel, the pots are designed to let crabs in but not out -- except the juveniles.

Roughly 24 hours into the trip, Yockey is running the crane. With Cordova perched on a stack of pots to set the crane's hook, he plucks a 650-pound pot from the stack. He swings it across the deck and lowers it into the pot launcher, a 6-by-6-foot hydraulic steel platform that holds the pot while it is being baited or emptied.

At the launcher, Madigan and Fleury guide the pot into place. When it settles in, they immediately unlatch the door and swing it upward. Snyder slides inside, his legs sticking out of the pot. He carries with him a bait bag and plastic jar full of oily ground herring, as well as an eviscerated chum salmon.

The mesh bait bag and jar allow fish oil to seep out and lure crab without letting the bait be consumed. Snyder hangs them on the cage's ceiling and hauls himself back out.

Madigan and Fleury relatch the door. Simultaneously, Cordova and Yockey have another pot hooked and ready for baiting and launching. The launcher tips the pot overboard while Fleury heaves the 35 pounds of coil line in after.

At the end of the line are two buoys. In a day or so, the Exito will return to this spot.

This procedure will be duplicated 440 times over the five-day season. Actually, it's twice that because every pot must be pulled back and emptied eventually. It's done when the icy rains are blowing sideways across the deck and when the boat is rocking up and down in 15-foot seesaws.

At three days into the season, the crew looks like the walking dead. Because the season is so short they must lower and raise pots almost continually, catching catnaps only between working the 25-pot strings.

It's approaching noon. Wet and battered from three days and nights of storms, the crew stumbles in to grab a quick meal and a luxurious two hours of promised sleep.

They clearly need it.

Sitting in the cramped, lurching galley as gale winds howl outside, Madigan says to no one in particular that he is impressed by the insulating properties of the rumpled silver sheet of foil that kept his dinner warm.

The rest of the deck crew nods, not really hearing him at all.

Madigan, 35, it can be assumed, isn't really a Reynolds Wrap aficionado. In fact, he drops the foil, cuts off midsentence and sinks into the same silence and 1,000-yard stare of his deck mates. In their 72nd hour of crab fishing, the five men passed exhausted hours ago. They might even have a description for this condition if only they could make full sentences.

"I had no idea, I mean ..." said Snyder, as he finished his dinner and stumbled back out into the storm to grind more blocks of frozen herring used for crab pot bait. Days later, he will say this is his last crab season.

While the crew is on deck, either Ferguson, 47, or Toomey, 47, are at the helm. Friends since childhood, the two are a study in opposites. Ferguson is more taciturn and clipped; Toomey more chatty and sensitive.

More often than not it's Ferguson guiding the Exito. He explains that he has more experience than Toomey in the crab fisheries.

Ferguson is given to short, precise bursts of swearing when things aren't going right and right now they are not. This area that had been so good to the Exito last year is crowded with boats. Secrets don't last long within the fleet.

In crabbing, you don't hear the standard fish story. Crabbers always undersell their success during the season. Only afterward do they oversell it. More precisely, they lie.

"Look at these guys," Ferguson grouses, pointing at the F/V Arctic Lady, a 235-foot crab-killing machine about quarter mile off the port bow. "All of the Cadillac boats are up here now. Last year we were here all by ourselves."

When it gets like this, he refers to it as a "combat fishery." This means everyone is a little desperate, maybe a little more willing to break crabbing's unwritten rules, such as setting pots right next to someone else's line.

"If other people are prepared to be assholes," Ferguson said, "I am too."

As he says this, the crew is nearing the end of its nap. The boat is approaching a net of pots to pull. Toomey climbs up into the wheelhouse to relieve Ferguson.

One of the worst jobs on the boat is the one that requires the least physical effort: Waking up an exhausted crew to send them back out on the deck. Toomey and Ferguson whenever possible slough this off on each other.

"You know they are tired but we don't have a choice," Toomey said. "The season is so short."


		Karen Ducey / P-I
	F/V Exito crew members (left to right) Erik Snyder, Lee Fleury, and Jeff Madigan, all from Skykomish, crash on the galley floor during a short break. They had worked almost 24 hours straight, getting only a few breaks for quick meals and naps. See more photos in the gallery.

On day four, the crew has had a total of about 10 hours of sleep, never more than three at a stretch. Toomey has just rousted them from the galley deck to send them outside. They groan and begin to put on their raingear. This is when crabbing gets its most dangerous -- when concentration lapses.

Already this season, after the Raven capsized, a massive wave blew out the wheelhouse windows on another boat. The Ruff & Reddy, a crabber based out of Kodiak, sent out a distress call that it was taking on water. Eventually, the R&R's crew made repairs and resumed crabbing.

If the Exito's crew is thinking about the season's mishaps, they don't show it. The pots have been a little fuller in the past several hours, with one string bringing in an average of 40 king crab. Everyone's energy has improved.

But one incident remains at the back of everyone's mind. Two years ago, in a king crab season that looked so promising, the lives of the Exito's crew changed forever. With each wave thumping the side of the boat, it's hard to forget.

Said Fleury: "I think about it all of the time. All of the time."

What he thinks about is Scotty.

The worst day

Scott Powell, 37, stood better than 6 feet tall and weighed 240 pounds. On a crab boat, size does matter when pushing heavy crab pots rail to rail on a slick deck or throwing the line into the blocks that hang higher than 6 feet in the air. Sometimes size works as a job-incentive program.

"Scott kept people in line," Toomey said. "He was our right-hand man, an integral part of our organization.

"He was family."

On Oct. 17, 2001, Powell was on deck. It was 5 a.m., hours before fall sunrise in Alaska, and the swells were tossing the Exito around like a cork. The winds howled, blowing jets of icy salt spray horizontally across the deck.

It's the wind more than the rain, the cold, the swift currents or the ponderous crab pots that make Bristol Bay crabbing dangerous, meteorologists say. The difference between a 20-knot wind and a 30-knot wind is huge; instead of raising waves that break into the bow, the waves break over it.

The difference between 20 and 40 knots is the difference between Paris, Texas, and Paris, France. That morning the gales were blowing at 40 knots -- with gusts of 60.

The crew had just pulled 50 pots on board through the night. The pots were loaded, an average of 40 keepers in each. If the three-day season continued like this, everyone was going to make good money.

Scott and the other crew members had just set off 25 fresh, rebaited pots in the giant swells. The crew was finishing a set and getting ready to catch a couple hours of sleep.

"We had about 20 minutes left when it happened," Toomey said. "We were pushing into the swell. I was going to go lay down for half an hour."

Ferguson sat at the helm. He had just looked down at the log sheets where he tracks the catch when it hit -- a 45-foot rogue wave. It arrived so hard and so high it knocked out mast lights that hang 35 feet above the water.

"You hear stories about freak or queer waves," said Toomey, who has been crabbing since the mid-1970s. "I hadn't seen one."

The wave threw two crew members into the pot stacks, injuring them both. Then Ferguson saw Scott was missing. On the Exito, the general alarm -- any boat's most grave emergency warning -- looks like a light switch and sits at arm's length from the captain's chair.

Ferguson flipped it.

Hours later, another boat recovered Powell's body.

In a sense, the wave that led to Powell's death continues to hit the Exito. During this year's season, Ferguson and Toomey on the loudspeaker warned "Watch the rail!" every time a wave of any size loomed on the horizon. They worried about pushing the crew too hard.

Toomey said Powell's death changed him forever. It makes him far more nervous in the foul weather that has come to define the crabbing season.

"No amount of crab is worth a single death," he said.

The season ends soon. Within hours the Exito is going to turn and head back to Dutch Harbor. There the crew will see how they did.

The boat's late good run won't make up for the lousy first three days, Toomey predicted. Rumors already have begun circulating about a few boats that hit the mother lode, netting crew shares of up to $60,000.

Although Toomey doesn't yet know what he or his crew will make, he does know that he wants the crabbing season to change and move away from this derby.

"This hasn't been a good year," he said. "We need to fix this thing."

SEND US YOUR FEEDBACK

Do Alaska's crab fisheries affect your life all the way down here in Seattle? Do you have family and friends who fish for crab in the Bering Sea? Do you always feel a little bit anxious at this time of year? We'd love to hear your stories. Write to mikelewis@seattlepi.com or call 206-448-8140.

P-I reporter Mike Lewis can be reached at 206-448-8140 or mikelewis@seattlepi.com

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