IN 1983, two high-tech and reputedly safe crab boats disappeared in the Bering Sea just outside of Dutch Harbor. Like so many others, they were dangerously overloaded and flipped over.
It was a deadly year in an industry familiar with death. Crabbing kills more workers than any other industry on a per capita basis. Mining is considered very safe by comparison.
Patrick Dillon wrote a good book about the sinkings and subsequent investigation that led to major reform of industry safety standards. The book, “Lost at Sea” takes you to the fishing grounds and the miserable weather that crabbers work in. In order to get his facts straight, and to fully understand the life, Dillon signed on to a crab boat for a season. The following is part of his experience.
“On the morning of the eighteenth, Doug swung the Provider back into the wind and we began baiting and dumping crab pots over a spot that he conceded was far from ideal. We had already lost too much time, he said; we had to get our pots into the water.
“The temperature was approximately twenty-five degrees below zero. The wind whipped our faces, tearing into our foul-weather gear. We used duct tape to strengthen the seal around our necks, ankles, and hands. We used the high-pressure hose to clear the deck of frozen fish slime after every pot was dumped to prevent more ice from building up.
“We’d pull off our rubber work gloves and hold our hands, still in their soggy wool liners, up to a butane heater to try to thaw them. We devoured candy bars and swilled half-frozen cans of soda. We leaned against heavy chains or immovable pieces of equipment and grabbed thirty second naps, falling asleep before Doug sounded the Provider’s horn to signal us to prepare to dump another pot. Each blast of the horn would summon a curse from one of us, and then we’d be back on deck ready to launch.
“I felt vaguely inhuman, not part of anything except the routine and conscious only of the cold stabbing my face and gripping my hands and feet. As we worked, grim silence prevailed among all six of us, unless something went wrong.
“We had been working eighteen straight days and were midway into what would be a twenty-four hour shift when someone screamed, ‘Watch the hook!’
“I looked up to see the two-foot long, fifteen-pound, stainless steel snare for lifting crab swinging wildly across the deck. I saw George Johnson, the greenhorn, react as if he had just been awakened from a stupor. Slowly, listlessly, he turned and stepped into the path of the big steel claw as it swung from the crane. The moment of impact is frozen in my memory.
“The snare grazed George right between the eyes at what had to have been the precise millisecond it had reached the end of its arc and started to swing away. Still, the force of the blow knocked him on his back. Work stopped. Someone captured the runaway hook and lashed it down.
“George climbed to his feet, looking dazed, but no more so than the rest of us had looked for the past forty-eight hours. Ryan, the deck boss, cursed once at him and work resumed. There wasn’t time to dwell on how close he’d come to having his skull split because of greenhorn inattention. It could have happened to anyone, though no one else on board would admit it.”
That is a life most of us would not choose. But the money is good so they keep going out, providing dinner fare for restaurants all over the world. Think of Dillon the next time you crack open a leg from a snow crab.
Dr. BC Cook taught history for 30 years and is a director and Pacific historian at Sealark Exploration (sealarkexploration.org). He currently lives in Hawaii.
