Captain Phil Harris Read online

  And even though he grew up in Seattle, a coastal city surrounded by water and home to a large fishing industry, Grant himself didn’t leave dry land for a paycheck until he was twenty-seven. Before then, he had been an auto mechanic and worked in construction. He had always liked boats, but his interest was limited to canoes and rowboats.

  Nonetheless, in 1961 Grant went to sea, going to work on the Reefer II, a boat that hauled frozen fish to processing plants up in Alaska. His five-year-old son, Phil, watched Grant leave on what must have seemed like a great adventure to the youngster.

  “It was hard work,” said Grant, “but when you’re young, hard work doesn’t mean too much. To me, the harder it was, the more challenging it became.”

  Perhaps the hardest thing of all, though, was his painful absence from his wife and young son. On that first trip, Grant was gone for six months.

  There were many more such trips over the next four years. But over that period, the family adapted to the cycle and Grant learned to love the feel of the ocean and the essence of being a fisherman. He had found his life’s work.

  Only to lose the love of his life.

  In 1964, his wife, Phyllis, just twenty-seven at the time, died of skin cancer. Her eight-year-old son, Phil, was devastated, left with a void that seemed impossible to fill. With his father out to sea for half of each year, Phil had forged a bond with his mother that he thought was unbreakable.

  Both of his grandmothers tried to fill that black hole, serving as surrogate mothers, trying to make a trip to Grandma’s house as special as they could. Whether it was showering Phil with gifts, making sure he did his homework, or nursing him through a cold, they were there, especially when Grant was working.

  Grant, anxious to at least give his son the stability of familiar surroundings, didn’t move from the family home in Bothell, Washington, even though, after Phyllis’s death, every room in the house reminded him of her absence. Bothell was the only town Phil had ever known. A town of 2,200 back when Phil was growing up, Bothell, located twelve miles northeast of Seattle, has around 30,000 residents today. It’s a quiet middle-class community where manufacturing and high-tech research and development are the leading industries.

  Staying in Bothell gave Phil the benefit of attending the same school and keeping the same friends. But Grant knew that without Phyllis, he was going to have to do more. His own life was going to have to change: as a single parent, he couldn’t spend months away in Alaska anymore.

  “I wasn’t just going to pawn Phil off on somebody else,” Grant said.

  But he wasn’t willing to completely give up his life at sea, so he settled on a compromise. Rather than working for someone else, he would get a boat of his own, allowing him to fish when he pleased.

  Along with a partner named Ralph Shumley, Grant leased a boat for the summer for salmon fishing in Bristol Bay, southwest of Anchorage. With the season starting in June, Grant took Phil out of school a little early so he could accompany his father up north.

  The venture was so successful that, after two summers, Grant was ready to take the next step and buy a boat.

  That seemed like a good idea until he went shopping. What he found on the market was too little in the way of quality and too much in the way of cost.

  So Grant came up with a better idea: he would build his own boat. A marine architect designed the plans for the vessel, to be made of Alaskan yellow cedar.

  During the daytime, Grant worked as a carpenter and handyman in the Seattle area. Every night and on weekends, he would go to nearby Lake Union to work on the boat, focusing his carpentry skills on the project that had become his passion.

  On many days, he had a young helper. After school and on Saturdays and Sundays, Phil, ten by then, would go down to the lake with his dad as the ship took shape.

  It was much-needed therapy for Phil, who was still getting over the loss of his mother. Ultimately, it was the lure of the sea that pulled Phil out of his grief and loneliness.

  “While I was building the boat, I had Phil do a little bit of painting or a few other simple things he could handle as a youngster,” Grant said. “The main thing was, I wanted him with me. At that age, you can’t turn a kid loose. With his mother no longer around, I needed to know what he was up to.”

  Phil soon became a familiar sight around Lake Union. As he hopped from boat to boat, the stories of life at sea, the smell of the water, and the creaking of the ships all made a huge impression on his young mind.

  It took Grant just seven months to complete his dream boat. He named it The Provider with the hope that it would be just that for his family.

  Grant had the boat put on a freighter and shipped north to Bristol Bay, having adhered to that area’s limit by making his boat thirty-two feet in length with a twelve-foot beam.

  He got a job working for a fish processing plant and put the finishing touches on his craft at night. In June, when the fishing season opened, The Provider left Nushagak in search of king salmon, with co-owners Grant and Shumley on board along with the boat’s junior crew member, Phil.

  It was the beginning of a lifetime of fishing trips for Phil, though he could never have dreamed of that fate after that first outing—he absolutely hated it.

  The summer fishing season coincided with baseball season. Phil loved the sport and wanted to be back home in Bothell playing with his friends.

  Adding to his misery was the seasickness. The waves around Bristol Bay were nothing like the monsters Phil would later encounter in the midst of the Bering Sea. But at that age, it was more than he could handle. His solution was to try to sleep as much as possible on that trip, a luxury that would be unthinkable to Phil as an adult fisherman.

  Grant, however, wouldn’t allow his son to act like a passenger on a cruise, so he had Phil doing everything from handling the bait to helping unload the product of their labor.

  “My grandpa didn’t know how to raise a kid,” Jake would later say, “so he raised a worker.”

  Grant didn’t limit his fishing to salmon. He went up to Togiak, north of Bristol Bay, to catch herring, sold salmon eggs to a buyer in Hawaii, hauled fish, including silver salmon, to market, and captained charter boats.

  In his many years at sea, Grant earned respect for his calmness in the face of danger, his determination to succeed no matter how daunting the task, and his carpentry skill.

  Proof of that skill is The Provider. Grant sold it years ago, but it remains seaworthy to this day, moored in Seattle forty-five years after he built it by himself as a moonlighting project.

  Grant doesn’t brag about that, or anything else. He is a humble man who shuns the spotlight. Serene as a ripple-free pond, his emotions held in check, he is a man who speaks as if he has a limited supply of words. Yet he never fails to get his point across.

  That’s a stark contrast to his famous son, who relished his time in the eye of the camera. A type-A extrovert, Phil could be as explosive as the seas he sailed on, loud and nervous, sweeping through life as though driven by a swift current.

  “They were such opposites,” said Sig Hansen, captain of the Northwestern, “that when I met Grant and saw how quiet he was, I couldn’t believe he was Phil’s father.”

  Grant’s judicious use of language was illustrated when he asked his grandson Jake, fifteen at the time, to pull down a fence in his pasture. Enjoying a bottle of soda out in the field before getting to work, Jake spotted an old coffee can and kicked it. To his surprise, a swarm of bees flew out and attacked him, stinging him five or six times.

  In a panic, Jake decided on a drastic course of action to chase them away: setting the field on fire. The flames quickly spread, consuming about fifty square feet of grass.

  Grant, working in a nearby shed, didn’t know what had happened until he heard fire trucks, called by a neighbor, approaching with their sirens blaring.

  “What in the hell are you doing?” Grant asked his grandson as the firemen extinguished the flames, avoiding further damage.r />
  “Trying to chase those bees away,” said Jake.

  In typical Grant fashion, he succinctly replied, “I think you got them.”

  Grant’s calmness served him well on the most dangerous trip of his life. It occurred in late October of 1978 aboard the Golden Viking. Grant was the captain of the eighty-five-foot crab boat as well as a minority owner. With a crew of six, including Phil, Grant had left port in late August.

  About two months into the trip, Phil got his hand caught between a line and the hydraulic power block that lifts and lowers crab pots. The machinery cut off a chunk of his finger, right at the tip, leaving the top of a bone exposed and his nail bent back.

  When the injury was stabilized, the Golden Viking steamed back to Dutch Harbor, the fishing hub in the Aleutian Islands eight hundred miles southwest of Anchorage, to get Phil proper medical treatment.

  Unfortunately, in Dutch Harbor back then, there was no hospital or clinic. An EMT treated Phil’s wound preliminarily, but there was only so much he could do without the proper facilities. He put Phil on a flight to Seattle, nearly two thousand miles away, along with a dark prognosis: Phil’s finger would likely need to be amputated upon arrival at the hospital there.

  Grant was spared the bleak news because, after Phil was dropped off, it was back to the Bering Sea for the Golden Viking. That’s the hard part of being a captain with a son in the crew. As a father, Grant would have loved to stay behind to be there for Phil. But as a captain, his first obligation was to the ship and its remaining crew.

  The Golden Viking unloaded its catch at Akutan, a town in the Aleutians East Borough about five hours east of Dutch Harbor, then headed north in search of more crab.

  But about a day and a half out of Dutch Harbor, the boat was hit by the tail end of a typhoon.

  “The weather conditions were so bad,” recalled Grant, “that we stopped for the night because we couldn’t see what the sea was doing.”

  They soon found out in one terrifying instant. The vessel was hit by a gigantic rogue wave that struck with such force that it knocked out windows and filled the wheelhouse with water. The antennas, attached fifty feet above the deck, were knocked off, all the electronic systems fizzled out, and even the compass was torn loose from the wall.

  “That wave took everything with it,” Grant said.

  Such mountains of water are also known as freak waves, monster waves, killer waves, extreme waves, and abnormal waves. Whatever they are called, those large bursts of water, caused by a combination of high winds and strong currents, are the most frightening sight in the sea.

  When Grant looked around, he realized the tempered glass in the windows, half an inch or more thick, had not just broken but shattered. The pieces had smashed through the wall behind him, leaving Grant with cuts all over both ears.

  The entire chart table, including all the drawers on the bottom, had been blown out into the sea. There was no radio, no radar, no way to determine the ship’s immediate surroundings or location, and certainly no way to communicate with the outside world.

  “We might as well have been in a canoe out there,” Grant said.

  As if all that wasn’t bad enough, a fire had ignited inside the wall of one of the staterooms, caused when the salt from the seawater shorted some wiring.

  The boat’s engineer tried to race downstairs to the engine room to pull the breakers on the electrical panel. But with paper and charts from the wheelhouse strewn all over the stairs, he slipped, bounced off a wall, and went tumbling down, step after step, injuring his hip.

  The crew managed to extinguish the fire, and Grant and several crew members were able to board up the blasted-out windows by cutting the plywood out of several of the bunks and securing the wood with bolts. With a passable defense against the elements, the boat was in decent shape. It still had power, an adequate supply of food and liquids, and, most important of all, it had Grant, a captain so familiar with that area of the Bering Sea that, to his trained eyes, it was as if there were a highway in front of him with markings as clear as signs leading back to land.

  Still, in such uncertain conditions, there is always the danger that the ship will be tossed around so much that even a captain as knowledgeable as Grant could become disoriented.

  So he picked up the fallen compass and bolted it to a shelf in the wheelhouse.

  “Whether it was right or not, I didn’t know,” Grant said, “but at least I would know we weren’t going around in a circle.”

  Navigating by the stars wasn’t a practical solution because the skies remained overcast much of the time while the storm continued.

  “I knew that, as long as I could stay in the direction I was headed,” Grant said, “I was eventually going to get to an island, because the Aleutians stretch out over a thousand miles.”

  While he had a pretty good idea where he was, he had lost all lines of communication to the shore. Back on dry land word soon spread that the Golden Viking was missing at sea.

  The bad news traveled quickly back to Seattle, where Phil was recovering. Arriving at a Seattle hospital the day after his emergency treatment in Dutch Harbor, he had been assured that amputation was totally unnecessary. The EMT had done such a good job—stitching up Phil’s finger and grafting on a piece of skin from his forearm—that the new skin was successfully melding with the old, keeping his finger intact.

  Phil was overwhelmed with relief, but the good news was quickly overshadowed when he learned that contact had been lost with the Golden Viking. Among the crew of five were not only his dad, but also several others to whom Phil had grown close.

  The Coast Guard began a wide search, both by sea and air, but as one day turned into two, then three, four, and five, hope began to fade.

  Phil was crushed. The thought of losing his remaining parent was more than he could bear. Still, by then twenty-one years old, he was grudgingly ready to deal with reality. He began to make funeral arrangements for Grant.

  Back on the Golden Viking, there was no talk of not making it home.

  “I wasn’t worried about that,” said Grant, “as long as we were floating. You can go a long way if you stay above the water.”

  He had rigged up a method for getting the throttle and steering working, but he still couldn’t go much faster than one or two knots.

  Slowly, the crippled ship made its way back to Akutan. Not once in that time did Grant see another vessel on the water.

  About 6:00 a.m. on Halloween Eve, five days after contact had been lost with Grant’s boat, a crewman on a processing ship resting in Akutan Harbor was shaving by a porthole when his eye caught a boat approaching in the distance.

  Recognizing it as the Golden Viking, the crewman got so excited, he cut himself.

  In his typical style, Grant, looking back at the moment, shrugged and said, “They were quite surprised to see me.”

  “The whole bow was caved in,” said Phil. “My dad did a million dollars’ worth of damage, but he saved everybody’s life.”

  • • •

  Grant was still saving lives in his seventies when he was supposed to be retired, though he will never be completely retired as long as he can walk onto a boat.

  At age seventy-one, Grant was in his familiar role as a hero on a cod-fishing trip off Unga Island, also in the Aleutians. Joining him on his forty-two-foot fiberglass craft, The Warrior, were Phil and Jake.

  As the boat headed to nearby Sand Point in choppy seas at the end of their outing to unload their haul, a leak was detected in the hose leading to the oil filter.

  While Phil got on the radio to issue a Mayday alert, Grant went down into the engine room with a patch and clamps to cut off the flow of escaping oil. It was the kind of repair job he had been doing for much of his life. Given a little time, he could have done it with his eyes closed.

  But he didn’t have any time. A strong wind and a fifteen-foot swell were pushing the boat on a collision course with a huge pile of rocks dead ahead.

  Because o
f the angle of the leak, Grant was forced to lean against the engine’s exhaust manifold in order to complete his task. The urgency of the moment denied him the opportunity to find a better position.

  Without flinching, he focused on patching up the leak, even though his arm was getting burned by the exhaust pipe.

  “I’m kvetching,” said Jake, recalling the scene, “because I got hot oil sprinkled on my arm while I was holding a flashlight for my grandfather. He had third-degree burns on his arm and he didn’t say a fucking word. Four hours later, when all was said and done, he just calmly and quietly peeled his shirt off his arm. The skin was all gone, leaving this huge, raw burned spot. He didn’t complain or nothing. I felt like a damn wimp.”

  When Jake suggested to his grandfather that he get medical treatment for his arm, Grant just shrugged, went to his first aid kit, got out some balm and a bottle of iodine, and that was the end of the conversation.

  Grant had repaired the hose with no more than fifty feet separating the boat from the rocks, saving three generations of the Harris family.

  To this day, he has a scar down his arm as a reminder of that day, but no regrets about allowing himself to be painfully branded.

  “That was a lot better,” he says, “than drowning or crashing on those boulders.”

  A sea captain requires more than bravery and nautical skills. Sometimes patience and determination are also necessary. On one trip in 1964, Grant, with a load of processed crab aboard the Reefer II, set out from the south end of Alaska’s Kodiak Island bound for Cape Spencer.

  That journey across the Gulf of Alaska would normally take two and a half to three days. But because of violent storms that lasted the entire voyage, the boat’s journey stretched to eighteen days.

  “We weren’t sinking or anything,” Grant said, “but we were taking on water that whole time. We had the pumps going. If we had sprung a leak, I’m sure we would have sunk.”

  Barely able to make any headway, the boat limped along.

  “We were going just as slow as you could possibly go,” Grant said. “It wasn’t a good trip.”