Captain Phil Harris Read online

  He fell asleep on Joe Wabey that one time, but never again. Wabey’s anger awakened Phil to the demands of the job, but what really inspired him was Joe’s work ethic.

  Joe never asked his crew to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. While fishing, Joe would average only one hour of sleep a night. He once went seven days without shutting his eyes.

  “You learn to function,” Joe said. “I enjoyed fishing. I liked the thrill of it. And when you’re running a three-man crew, who is going to take your place? I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to fill the boat up with crab and get back.

  “Normally, we’d work anywhere from twenty-four to seventy-two hours and then take a break.”

  A break meant getting a few hours’ sleep, and then it was back to fishing.

  “That’s not a normal schedule,” Joe conceded. “I was kind of the extreme when it came to captains. At least I was told that. A lot of the people who worked for me over the years said I was the hardest skipper they ever had. Most of the time, they didn’t say that in such nice terms.”

  Phil wasn’t intimidated by Joe’s demanding schedule. He was challenged.

  “I think Phil tried to compete with me, outwork me,” said Joe. “He couldn’t keep up, but he put in some long hours. I think he got his work ethic from me.

  “He was a good fisherman. I really came to respect him for that.”

  That respect was especially meaningful for Phil coming from someone like Joe who knew as well as anyone how difficult it is to master crab fishing.

  The success of any hunter depends on the depth of his or her knowledge of the history, location, tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses of the quarry being sought.

  So it is with crab fishermen. Beneath the bravado and tough exterior, these are calculating professionals with a deep understanding of the creatures they pursue below the surface of the sea.

  “There is a lot to learn and you can’t get it from a book, a video, or even by watching Deadliest Catch,” said Josh. “Like our dad before us, Jake and I have soaked up the knowledge we need to do the job—everything from the nature of crabs to the operation of the boat—in the middle of the Bering Sea.”

  There are five primary types of crab caught in the Bering Sea—red king, blue king, golden king, bairdi, and opilio snow crab. Although the seasons have varied somewhat over the decades based on weather and migration patterns, the year generally begins with the hunt for opilio in January, and bairdi in winter and spring, shifting to golden king in late summer, then red and blue in fall.

  Crabs have five pairs of limbs. Four pairs serve as legs, allowing the crab to walk along the ocean floor, while the front pair, called chelipeds, are claws that function like arms. The crab uses them for holding or carrying food, cracking shells, digging, or attempting to ward off obstacles and potentially hostile life forms. If a crab loses a leg, it has the ability to regrow it.

  A red king crab can travel up to one mile per day on those legs and up to one hundred miles a year in order to migrate.

  A crab’s outer shell, called the carapace or exoskeleton, does not grow along with the crab. Therefore, as it increases in size, the crab must shed the shell, a process called molting. In preparation, it reabsorbs calcium carbonate from the old shell, secreting enzymes and absorbing seawater to aid the process. The crab backs out of its shell, also leaving behind its esophagus, stomach lining, and part of its intestine. It secretes calcium to create a new shell that hardens over a few weeks. Crabs molt fifteen to twenty times during their lives.

  Some crabs live ten to twenty years and weigh an average of six to ten pounds, but some grow in excess of twenty pounds. The world record belongs to a red king crab caught in the northern Pacific Ocean that weighed 33.1 pounds.

  • • •

  In his early years aboard the American Eagle, Phil learned many lessons, some harder than others. One of the toughest came in his first year on the boat. He was being taught how to operate the crane that lifts the eight-hundred-pound cages—or pots as they are commonly called—used to catch crabs.

  “It takes a little bit of finesse to work that crane,” Joe said.

  On deck, the pots are stacked and tied tightly together until they are needed. On that particular day, they were piled high in the stern.

  Phil was being instructed on how to lift one of those pots in the grasp of the crane, but he could only get it to rise a couple of feet before the crane stalled. Phil soon discovered the problem: there was one line still keeping that pot tethered to the stack.

  A crewman named Bob Mason, armed with a knife on the end of a stick, climbed up on an adjoining stack to cut the line, but it was just out of reach, the stick a little too short. So Mason got on his stomach and stretched his body down in order to sever that final restraint.

  At that instant, Phil eased up on the crane, and the pot came hurtling down. “I don’t know if he had a brain fart or what,” said Joe. The eight-hundred-pound pot came crashing down on Mason’s head, squeezing it between two stacks.

  “Fortunately, he was wearing a leather flier’s cap with earflaps,” said Joe, “but still, that pot almost took his ears off. He was bleeding from both of them.”

  Joe and the other crew members lifted the pot off Mason and gently lowered him to the deck.

  “Phil was beside himself,” Joe said.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” Phil shrieked to no one in particular. “What have I done?”

  Mason had suffered a skull fracture and was taken to a nearby clinic, then flown out to a fully equipped hospital. Although Mason survived, no one on the American Eagle ever saw him again.

  Neither Joe nor the rest of the crew criticized Phil for what had happened. “He felt bad enough already,” said Joe.

  • • •

  Phil stayed on the American Eagle for nearly four years. As he gained experience and confidence, his desire to be more than a deckhand grew.

  He could see, however, that his dream would never be fulfilled on the American Eagle. “I certainly wasn’t going to let go of the throttle and turn the boat over to him,” Joe said. “He had higher aspirations than working for me, and I could certainly understand that.”

  But opportunity beckoned elsewhere. Phil’s father, Grant, an engineer on the Golden Viking at the time, had accepted an offer to buy a piece of that crab boat and become its captain in 1976.

  Grant assured Phil that, if he joined him, he would soon make that coveted climb to the wheelhouse to be the relief skipper.

  So in 1977, Phil said farewell to the only crab boat he’d ever known and joined his father who, a year later, let him live his dream by taking command of a boat.

  Grant didn’t make Phil the relief captain just because he was trying to further his son’s career, although that was certainly on Grant’s mind. He wouldn’t have allowed Phil to become a captain if he didn’t think his son could handle it. Not with the lives of the crew dependent on the competence of the man in charge of the boat.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Grant, “Phil was a much better fisherman than I was.”

  “Phil was ready when he went over to the Golden Viking,” said Joe. “I knew he’d become a captain because he had more drive than Grant. I don’t mean any disrespect for Grant, but he was more of a gentleman fisherman.

  “If Phil had stayed on the American Eagle, he might have wound up like some of the crew members that were there fifteen, twenty years and never advanced.”

  While he advanced quickly, Phil’s quick promotion to relief captain didn’t go over so well with some of the deckhands.

  “He went from bait man to the wheelhouse really quickly,” said Tony Lara, who would later be Phil’s relief skipper on the Cornelia Marie. “But it took him twenty years to earn the respect of the industry. He sat in the wheelhouse chair in his early twenties, but he certainly wasn’t the best back then. He wasn’t the fisherman he later became. He didn’t have the esteem of his peers. That’s because he was the kid whose father was captain and par
t owner of the boat, and so he was given a shortcut to the wheelhouse. That’s two strikes against you right there.”

  Deckhands would walk by, muttering, ‘The only reason he’s sitting in that big chair is because of his old man.’ ”

  Sensitive to the feelings of the crew and realizing that if Grant stuck up for Phil he would lack credibility because of their relationship, Reidar Tynes, one of the major owners of the Golden Viking, stepped in and told the disgruntled deckhands, “We’re giving this kid the boat because we think he can do it. You guys have been with us a lot of years, so please, help him in any way you can.”

  Tynes had sought to give the crew an olive branch. But any goodwill he created was squandered by Phil on his first trip back into Dutch Harbor as captain. Entering the port, a boat must make a sharp right turn to reach the cannery. The young Phil miscalculated and tipped the Golden Viking over on its side.

  He was able to right it without causing any injuries or major damage to the boat, but the same could not be said for his image. Phil later admitted he was terribly embarrassed by not only looking to his crew like an inept greenhorn behind the wheel, but by doing so in full view of all the other captains docked in Dutch.

  He was never again responsible for such a glaring accident. And motivated by his early screwups, Phil went on to establish his skill as a fisherman and build a solid reputation as a crab boat captain.

  • • •

  Phil was coming of age at just the right time. The opportunities for success in the crab fishing industry were never better than in the golden era of the mid-1970s.

  In the early twentieth century, the hunt for crab had become popular, but the technology to make it highly lucrative was still decades away. There were no sophisticated computers to chart courses, no eight-hundred-pound pots to catch crab because there was no hydraulic system to lift those pots in and out of the water, and no high-powered lights to make night fishing possible. Fishermen would go out in smaller boats, converted trawlers that didn’t even have holding tanks to keep the crab alive.

  “Those boats weren’t designed to do what our boats do today,” said Sig Hansen, captain of the Northwestern. “They were junk.”

  Without the proper vessels, most of the Bering Sea was off-limits. “Back in the late fifties and sixties, they would just fish along the Aleutian Islands,” said Sig, whose father, Sverre, was a captain in that era. Back then, with radar as the primary locating device, the fishermen would triangulate their fishing spots at sea by using landmarks on the islands that could be seen from their boats.

  “It was a pain in the ass,” said Sig, “like fishing in the blind.”

  They may have lacked the tools of today’s crab fishermen, but the older generation could certainly match the current group when it came to colorful characters. The old-timers could have put on a Deadliest Catch series every bit as entertaining as today’s shows, and Sverre was as colorful as any of them. When he was young, Sig used to hear a story about how his father’s boat sprang a leak while Sverre was cooking steaks. His father looked at the water gathering on the deck but also kept an eye on his steak.

  “I’m not going on an empty stomach,” he proclaimed to his deckhands.

  By the early 1970s, the boats had grown bigger and the technology had improved, allowing the vessels to roam much farther from shore. No longer did they need island landmarks to guide them.

  But the single biggest factor in growing the industry was the addition of sodium lights, generating beams powerful enough to illuminate the search for crab regardless of the time and circumstances.

  In January in the Bering Sea, the sun doesn’t come up until around ten in the morning and is gone by four in the afternoon. Add in the dim daylight hours on sunless or stormy days and the dark waters of the Bering Sea, and the working hours and conditions for crab fishermen were extremely limited.

  “The sodium lights changed everything,” said Sig. “Now fishing at night was possible. You could fish twenty-four hours a day. And you could venture farther out and not worry about getting stuck out there in the dark if you had problems.”

  The result was the heyday of crab fishing, beginning around 1974. By 1978, when Grant allowed Phil to take a turn commanding the Golden Viking, the business was really booming.

  “Phil was part of the generation,” said Sig, “who got in at the peak.”

  CHAPTER 5

  BEAUTY AND THE PIRATE

  I probably knew Phil better than anyone.

  On the plus side, he was confident, gutsy, a thrill seeker, persistent, adventurous, a take-charge type, full of energy, fun, exciting, generous, extravagant, first class, yet casual, kind, a good provider, sympathetic, humorous, good-natured, very forgiving, an animal lover, and almost always upbeat.

  I admired his strength and how hard he worked. I had no idea just how hard until I watched Deadliest Catch. I am sorry for all the times I yelled at him when he’d call from the boat, especially during a bad storm, to say he loved me and the kids. I wonder if it wasn’t because he thought he might not make it back.

  On the downside, he could be loud, bossy, restless, fidgety, reckless, out of control, lawless, a showoff, boastful, disorganized, messy, foulmouthed, arrogant, self-centered, egotistical, stubborn, overly indulgent, an excessive drinker, a five-pack-a-day smoker, a drug user, gambler, and womanizer. He was a very addictive person, someone who just couldn’t do anything in moderation.

  Yet when I think of him now, I see my knight in shining armor.

  —Mary Harris

  The hot-pink neon sign flickered atop the old building in Woodinville, Washington. Jagged cracks snaked across the sign’s glass surface, and some of its letters were only partially illuminated. But that was no problem for the unruly horde of fishermen, loggers, and construction workers descending on Goodtime Charley’s on that April night in 1978. They didn’t need a compass to find their destination. Brazen men such as these were drawn to strip joints like fish to bait.

  At least one police officer suspected that the good times involved more than just stripping. Officers saw fancy cars belonging to suspected pimps regularly drop off and pick up women. Often, officers were required to do more than just watch the scene from a distance. “I remember going to calls there for fights between patrons and employees,” King County police sergeant Rick Krogh told the Seattle Times.

  Inside the topless go-go bar, the cigarette haze was thick, swirling along as though fueled by the loud disco music pulsating throughout the nightspot. A voluptuous dancer named Holly McMillan, stage name Heartbreakin’ Holly, worked the boisterous crowd.

  The fishermen filled every corner of the room, behaving as if they owned the place. Which in effect they did, considering how much of their cash they left there nightly.

  After her set, Holly pulled aside a fellow dancer, Mary Smith, a willowy twenty-three-year-old creature with raven hair down to her knees. The genes from a French father and Chinese/Polynesian mother had combined to give Mary delicate features and an exotic vibe that would have stood out in any club, but especially in this lowbrow establishment.

  Holly pointed out a rough customer to Mary, one whose ruggedness wore well on him.

  “That guy really wants to meet you,” Holly said. “He’s in love with you.” Mary rolled her eyes, but Holly would not let up.

  “I told him you were married,” Holly said. “He said, ‘Oh bummer, is she happily married?’ I said, ‘No, I think she’s getting a divorce.’ He said, ‘Great. Better yet.’ ”

  Mary had been a waitress at Goodtime Charley’s for three and a half years, serving beer and food. Mostly beer. She knew the customers would drink vinegar and chew on newspapers as long as they could ogle beautiful, sexy women. And she knew how big the wads of money were that the clientele tossed onto the stage or stuffed into the skimpy outfits of Goodtime Charley’s fantasy females.

  Still, Mary’s shyness and lack of confidence kept her off the dance floor. “I was scared to death to go out there,�
� she said.

  She finally made the big leap into the spotlight after a particularly traumatic night in her ever rockier marriage. Her husband, who, according to Mary, abused her in the past, had locked her in the bathroom and refused to let her out to go to work.

  It was a busy night at Goodtime Charley’s, wall-to-wall customers packing the joint.

  Where was Mary? When the club’s manager, John Lewis, called her, she explained the problem. No excuse. Lewis sent the club bouncer, a man named Tiny, who was anything but, to Mary’s house. Imposing and distinctive, with a muscular frame, shiny bald head, and one sparkling earring, Tiny didn’t look like a man who would shy away from a confrontation. Mary’s husband wasn’t about to test him as Tiny escorted Mary out the door.

  She knew that night that she couldn’t go on like that. She was going to have to save up enough money to move out. And the only way to do that was to put down her drink tray and put on her dancing shoes.

  Though her confidence grew as she demonstrated her ability on her feet, and she was happy to be free of waiting on drunks, she still hated the obligation to strut and grind night after night. But she stuck to it tenaciously, and, in just three months, Mary saved enough money to carve out an independent life for her and her two kids.

  “He’s got a lot of money!” Holly whispered as Mary strolled over to the mystery man.

  “So what? It’s not like he’s going to give it to me,” Mary yelled back.

  Mary sized the stranger up. A fisherman. Fresh off the boat. He had that Kurt Cobain grunge look about him. His outdated bell-bottom jeans were liberally sprinkled with holes. He wore a dirty down vest, a shabby plaid shirt, and sported stringy, oily, dishwater-blond hair under a knit cap. He was over six feet tall, but skinny as a rail at about 160 pounds.

  Close up, she caught an acrid whiff from this lanky but strangely charismatic bad boy. Phew! Mary recognized the funk of sour seafood that branded working fishermen. She didn’t have to ask where this guy had been.