© Karen Ducey 2001 |
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Typical 25-foot seas and ice everywhere. Inch by inch, the ice gets thicker. But the fishng is good. When do you stop fishing and tend to the ice that can send you to the bottom?
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The Ice
The frozen sea spray burns like tiny daggers stabbing any exposed skin. Squalls can cake ice inches thick on anything on deck, causing a vessel to flip from the top-heavy weight. The answer is simple. You just have to pound it off with sledge hammers or baseball bats. And all this from decks like skating rinks and a boat swaying in towering seas.
Keep Going
When the fishing’s good, you keep going. Extreme fatigue, exhaustion and pain are prices to be paid. But you are a member of a team. Letting the captain down, the crew down, is not an option.
© Karen Ducey 2001 |
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No easy way. When the ice starts to build up, you just have to pound it off with brute force.
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The “Aleutian Stare”
By the time you get a break, lifting a fork may take two hands. Your ghostly, gaunt face and focusless eyes say everything. That’s crabbing in the Bering Sea.
Resourceful Fishermen
When salmon runs declined during the 1950s and 1960s, local fishermen rebuilt and refitted their boats to capitalize on the lucrative crab fishery near Kodiak.
Later, mariners built 100-foot steel vessels to fish unprotected waters offshore during the fall and winter. The fishery thrived in the 1960s and 1970s until stocks crashed in 1983. The fishery was closed.
© Karen Ducey 2001 |
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24 hours—no sleep. Extreme mental and physical stress and fatigue can test the most fit mariner.
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Changes in water temperature, an increase in predation, disease, and commercial fishing were likely contributors. Today, Kodiak’s crabbers must travel to the Bering Sea to fish.
Crab fishing in Alaska is statistically the most dangerous job in America.
But every year, Kodiak crabbers are there—out west—wresting crab from the bottom of the sea.
© Karen Ducey 2001 |
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Sea legs. Securing 700-pound crab pots on a ship rocking in 30-foot seas is quite a trick. Add sleet, icy temperatures and slippery decks and your chances of getting hurt become excellent.
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Dungeness Crab (Cancer magister) are oval-shelled, short-legged crab fished from smaller boats in waters surrounding Kodiak Island.
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Tanner Crab (bairdi) (Chionoecetes bairdi) reach an average size of two to four pounds. Males and females live separately during most of the year. Eggs are incubated in the female for a year. She can lay a clutch of more than 400,000 eggs.
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Tanner Crab (opilio) (Chionecetes opilio) known as snow crab, average about two pounds. The most consistently abundant crab in alaska, opilio live up to 14 years, reaching commercial size in 7-11 years.
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King Crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus) are the largest of the crab species. Weighing an average of six pounds, kings sport wicket, powerful, thorny claws. The largest king on record was a 30-year-old, 25-pound monster with a leg span of six feet.
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