Time Bandit by Andy Hillstrand

Author:Andy Hillstrand
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345507273
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

Last year, once we returned from Latitudes, we had plenty of work still left to do before the king crab season started. We loaded up our freezers in the forepeak with boxes of pinks and chum salmon for king crab bait. For opilios later in the season, we rely on cod and chopped herring for bait. But for king crab, we snap in two salmon per pot, and in opilio season we will load four cod per pot. The king season is open for thirty days but we plan to catch our quota in seven. We estimated that we would pull 120 pots a day, or 840 pots total. That meant we needed ten pounds of salmon for each pot, or 8,400 pounds of bait. We try to use all the bait in one season. Otherwise, we need to either throw it out the scuppers at a loss or save it in the freezers for next season.

We still had the Coast Guard to contend with, and our own issues of safety. We see enough of the Coasties at the bars in Dutch to know them, and we consider them allies and, some of them, friends. We respect who they are and what they do. Our lives may depend on them.

Last year, in a bar in Kodiak town, I ran into Matthew Thiessen, a rescue swimmer for the Coast Guard, based at Air Station Kodiak. For recreation, Matt surfs in freezing Alaskan waters, to give you an idea of his toughness. He hit the water last year to rescue four crewmen on the F/V Hunter, a fishing boat that sank in the Shelikof Strait in winter. His story is only one of probably hundreds the Coast Guard could tell about rescuing fishermen on the Bering Sea, but the Hunter tale illustrates for me what these guys go through for our safety.

Matt never saw the boat. Hunter sank quickly. An EPIRB in the water alerted the Coast Guard’s Alaska headquarters in Juneau, which diverted a CG C-130 Hercules already in flight to take a look around for survivors from about 2,000 feet. They spied a life raft in the water, and Matt and his helicopter crew were called out. From their ready room in Kodiak they ran across a concrete apron to an H-60 Jayhawk military helicopter parked in a hangar. Matt sat in the back of the chopper, running the radios. He was wearing a dry suit with fleece long johns, boots, and a flight helmet. When the helo reached the raft and hovered, ice warning lights lit up in the Jayhawk’s cockpit. Ice was forming on the rotor blades in temperatures of 10 degrees below zero. The Hunter’s crew had been in the raft for more than an hour. Matt took off his flight helmet and put on his flippers and neoprene headgear for warmth. He snapped the hoist cable to a rock-climbing harness he wears, and with a Triton harness carrying his gear, like flares and a radio and such, he headed down.

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