Deadliest catch

One family's struggle against deadly Alaskan seas and freezing conditions to achieve the American dream

Captain's Sig Hansen's story about his family's struggle to earn a living from deadly Alaskan seas as crab fishermen echoes Sebastian Junger's Perfect Storm. In this extract from his book, North by Northwestern, Hansen explains how his trade was passed down the generations to him, and tells the gripping tale of a fire aboard his father's ship, The Foremost.

Losing power

When it started, the captain was in his bunk. It was eight in the morning, in early December. The grey dawn seeped through the black Alaskan night. Fuelled by cigarettes and coffee, the captain was a light sleeper. But this night had been worse than usual. The vessel was bucking in 20-foot seas, the arctic wind howling at 60 knots. He had been lying half-awake for four hours, the heaves of the boat knocking him against the wall. The captain and his three-man crew were jogging into the seas northeast of Dutch Harbor, in the Bering Sea, on the way to pull the crab pots they had set days before. The captain had manned the wheel the previous night, and finally at three in the morning he’d let the deckhands take turns on watch while he tried to catch some sleep in his stateroom. No luck. Now it was almost a relief to hear the footsteps clomping in from the wheel house. It meant something was wrong, but at least it was an excuse to get up. The door swung open.

“I’m losing power,” said Krist. “The steering, the radios, the whole works.”

The captain threw his feet off his narrow bunk. He had grown up in Norway during the war, and when his village was occupied by Nazis he admired the tough British who vowed never to surrender. One of his life heroes was the steely prime minister, Winston Churchill. The captain pulled on his slippers and stood. He wore heavy trousers and a sweater. The captain always slept fully clothed. He followed Krist out the door.

Of course the captain wasn’t happy that the power was failing, but he was relieved to be getting out of bed. He got bored and restless when he wasn’t working. He liked to work. He liked to work long hours, twenty hours a day, or sometimes when the fishing was good, he didn’t bother sleeping at all. That’s the Lutheran ethic his father had drilled into him. Laziness was what ailed the weak and the cowardly. Work was good for you, the harder the better. That’s what he was here for.

As Krist returned to the captain’s chair and lay a hand on the throttle, the captain steadied himself in the doorway and lit a Pall Mall. The boat rose in the waves and collided with the crests, then dropped weightlessly into the trough. The seas were rough, but the captain had seen much worse. The fact that he could walk around the wheel house without holding on to anything, without being knocked off his feet, told him the seas were nothing to worry about.

He stood beside Krist at the console. The other two deckhands were asleep downstairs. Off to the west the sky was silky black. It was hours before sunrise, nothing to see out there anyway, just hundreds of miles of cold ocean between here and Russia. To the southeast, the jagged silhouette of sea cliffs came into focus on the horizon. The boat was only a few miles from Akun Island. If worse came to worst they could steam toward land and find a sheltered cove and make what ever repairs were required. Among the captain and the crew, there were mechanics, welders, painters, carpenters, and even firefighters. They could fix just about anything.

There were all sorts of reasons a boat could lose her steering out at sea. A hydraulic hose could have ruptured and drained the fluids that build pressure to move the rudder. A cable could have snapped. A line could be wrapped around the propeller— maybe they’d run over the buoy of some other crabber’s derelict pot—although this didn’t seem likely because the hum of the engine down below sounded normal.

That was a good sign, but losing all power was another problem altogether. Maybe it was something simple, like a short in the electrical system, or a breaker that flipped. The captain was not alarmed. “I’ll go take a look,” he told Krist. The captain took a drag on his cigarette and pushed through the door of the wheel house to the upper deck. He was met by a blast of arctic cold as he emerged into a frozen nightmare. Icicles clung to the eaves of the wheel house, and a crust of ice was caked on the rails. The boat rocked and pitched. He placed his foot carefully now, the iced deck cold beneath his thin soles. Out in the dark grey morning he saw dim flashes of whitecaps, but mostly the monstrous waves were invisible, they were ghosts. The captain braced against the mast and looked down to survey the deck. They had already dropped all the crab pots, and yesterday he had ordered the men to scrub the planks, so the deck was clear except for a white blanket of snow from amidship to stern.

Norway

Spools of line were coiled neatly, encased in thick frost. The crane creaked overhead like a gallows. Life rings hung on their hooks, frozen solid to the wall behind them so that not even the arctic gales disturbed them. As soon as he solved this power problem the captain would wake the crew and get them out here chopping ice. The ice weighed tons and rendered the boat so top-heavy it might capsize. The wind howled in the captain’s ears and he took a cold lungful of the sea air along with the hot tobacco smoke. The wind pierced his sweater. He shivered. The captain had started fishing at age fourteen, with his father, who had started fishing as a boy with his own father. Like the rest of his crew, the captain came from the island of Karmoy, a fishing port on Norway’s western shore. Back then, young men did not have a lot of options. If you couldn’t get into school, and your family didn’t own farming land, you went to sea.

The captain had gone to sea. He fished for herring and cod, up and down the Norway coast, as far away as Iceland. There were a few good years of herring, but then it was overfished. The boats lay in port. Times were hard. When he was twenty, the captain lit out for America. He fetched port in Seattle, in the old Norwegian waterfront neighborhood of Ballard. He was young and strong and could work hard and he spoke a few words of English. He did what fishermen have done for hundreds of years: walked the docks for work. He was hired on a trawler, the Western Flyer, dragging for bottom fish. He never looked back.

Those days were far behind him now. The fishing around Seattle had declined, and the captain joined an intrepid band of fishermen to explore the northern waters of Alaska. What they found was a gold rush— the red spiny kind that walked on eight legs. King crab. There was a fortune to be made in the Bering Sea, but the risks were high: brutal storms with 60-foot waves, hurricane winds of 130 knots, freezing spray, and treacherous ice caked on every surface. Older fishermen thought it was suicidal.

In those days Dutch Harbor—which would eventually surpass San Diego as the richest commercial fishing port in the United States—was just a weather-beaten outpost with a handful of natives and soldiers, and a very rough bar to drink in. Japanese vessels had trawled for crab for decades, but it wasn’t until the daring Americans and Norwegians began tinkering with boxlike steel traps that crab fishing reaped huge profits. The captain and his ilk were pioneering crab fishing on the fly.

It was damn hard work, and dangerous. Men heaved the 700-pound pots around the deck with their hands, at the mercy of waves that could sweep them right off deck, or even knock a boat upside down. The Bering Sea was a place of hideous extremes. There were a dozen ways to die out here, and the captain knew men who had succumbed to all of them. His own uncle had been knocked overboard when a steel cable snapped and slapped him like a bullwhip on the head. They never found his body.

The captain had seen men washed overboard. Some brought it upon themselves by reaching too far over the rail to haul in a line, by scaling the stack of pots and losing a grip with their frozen fingers, or by stepping on the wrong side of a pot as it swung from a crane and getting clubbed into the froth. Then there were the men who did everything right, and were still washed overboard by 50-foot rogue waves that swept across the deck and uprooted steel machinery by the bolts and tossed 7-foot crab pots like toy blocks. It was just luck, or fate. Some of the bravest and most cautious men died, while some of the lazy men, and the cowards, were given another chance.

The Bering Sea

Once submerged in the Bering Sea, a person has about four minutes before he dies. The 36-degree water triggers a gulp reflex: Some men inhale water instantly and sink to the bottom. The panicking human heart pounds like a jackhammer— some men succumb to heart attacks. Those strong enough to last four minutes lose the ability to kick their legs and tread water, and then, with what survivors fished out in the nick of time describe as a peaceful feeling of acceptance, they stop struggling and let the sea pull them below.

There was a chance that in those four minutes a man overboard could be rescued, but it wasn’t likely. It could take two minutes just to turn the boat around. If the currents worked in the man’s favour, he might drift alongside the boat, and a deckhand with steady nerves and a good arm could throw him a life ring. The drowning man— if his palsied fingers could make a fist— might grab hold, and be hauled to safety. More often the crew couldn’t even see the lost man, his head a floating speck among monster waves, frothing whitecaps, and blinding wind.

Then there were all the ways a boat could sink. A hatch could be left unsecured and the sea would pour into the storage chamber in the stern— the lazarette. A seal might blow and the engine room would flood. In rough seas the captain might not notice until the stern was submerged. Maybe the bilge pumps would work, or maybe they wouldn’t. The boat might list to one side and finally lie down, or she might bob vertically while the crew clung desperately to her exposed snout. Sometimes, a fire might start belowdecks, usually caused by an electrical short, and within minutes the engine would be disabled and the power would go. Without bilge pumps and a motor, a swamped boat would quickly sink. Without a functioning radio the crew wouldn’t get off a mayday. Some boats had no mechanical failures, but were simply caught off guard by a rogue wave as tall as a ten-story building that would smash through the windows, flood the cabin, and capsize the boat. If the men were belowdecks they would never see daylight again, dropping to the ocean floor in a steel coffin.

Then there were the boats that simply disappeared— no maydays, no witnesses, no flotsam, no survivors. One day they were there, the next they were gone. Sometimes the crew could escape a sinking ship to a rubber life raft, but this was not the end of the emergency— it was the beginning of another ordeal with a variety of likely bad endings. Momentarily safe from doom, the men might simply freeze to death, as they drifted for days with no rescuers in sight. There were no radios on life rafts.

They might fire a flare into the night sky, but who was out here to see it? A wave might capsize the raft, and the men who got separated had just those dire four minutes. Some rafts might drift toward land, and as the men optimistically leapt in the water and swam for shore, they were smashed up in the twenty-foot breakers. Their lifeless bodies would wash up on the cliffs with the kelp. Others might land safely, only to find themselves stranded in the bitter Alaskan wilderness, starving, unable to build a fire, and hunted by grizzly bears.

None of the options were good. There was no safe place on the Bering Sea. The only place the captain wanted to be was on his ship. His wife and children were back in Seattle, expecting his safe return. He needed to be careful. The captain was not a regular churchgoer—spending ten months a year at sea didn’t allow it— but his Lutheran upbringing haunted him, and like fishermen before, he prayed for safe passage. The old saying that there are no atheists in foxholes— same thing goes for Bering Sea crab boats.

The captain gripped the wooden rail. Everything on deck looked normal. Then he caught a whiff of something odd: the oily black smoke seeping from the smokestack and whipping in the wind—it didn’t smell like diesel exhaust. It was hard to explain. Smokier, maybe. The captain rushed back into the wheel house and lowered himself down the ladder to the galley. He approached the door leading belowdecks to the engine room. He laid his hand on the latch. It was hot. Something was wrong.

Smoke seeped from the cowling. The captain pushed open the door and there, in the bowels of this wooden vessel, flames leapt from the machinery and lapped against the walls. A blast of heat and smoke pushed him back, and the captain slammed the door and turned and ran to wake the crew.

“Fire!” he yelled. “All hands on deck!”

The Northwestern

My name is Sig Hansen, crab fisherman, captain of the fishing vessel Northwestern. The captain who awoke that December morning to find the engine room ablaze was my father, Sverre (pronounced Svare-ee) Hansen, and the boat that caught fire was the F/V Foremost. Until my brothers and I sat down to write our family’s history, I had never heard the whole story of the sinking of the Foremost. The story was passed around for years between my father’s friends, whom I have fished with all my life, but it never reached me until now. Of the four men aboard the Foremost that morning, only one is still alive.

I have been a fisherman all my life. I began when I was twelve, and have done it for more than thirty years. It is the only work I know. When my father died, my brothers and I became owners of his ship, the Northwestern, a 125-foot steel crabber built to withstand the Bering Sea in winter. I am the captain, and my brothers Norman and Edgar alternate between engineer and deck boss. This is the life I hoped for—nothing more, nothing less. When I decided as a boy that I’d be a fishermen like my father, the last thing I ever imagined it would bring me was notoriety.

A few years ago, however, my brothers and I decided to allow a film crew aboard the Northwestern. Nobody could ever have predicted what it would lead to. Almost overnight we went from chopping bait in the freezing sleet to signing autographs at Disney World. Through the popularity of Discovery Channel’s Deadliest Catch, Alaska crab fishing has gone from a deliberately secret society to a worldwide phenomenon, with millions of fans and viewers in 150 countries. We’ve been on talk shows. We designed an Xbox video game to enable people to go crab fishing (in their living rooms). Folks can also buy all sorts of things— emblazoned with the Hansen name and the Northwestern logo— from our very own Rogue beer to fish sticks to rain jackets to four types of Crab Louie sauce. To think that complete strangers approach me in airports or malls and want to know what kind of bait I’m using, or how many king crab I’m averaging per pot— it astounds me.

The other day a lady came up to Edgar down at the Seattle docks and said that when she asked her son what he wanted to be for Halloween, the kid said, “Edgar.” I wish Dad were around to see it. However, if all you know about commercial fishing is what you’ve seen on the Deadliest Catch, you’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. The media portrays my brothers and me and the other captains and crew as the ultimate tough guys. To which I say: You ain’t seen nothing. You should have seen my dad. You should have seen my granddad, my Uncle Karl, and all the men who came over with them from Norway or ventured north from Seattle to pioneer the crab industry, long before cable television, GPS, satellite phones, and computer depthfinders and plotters. Hell, they were doing it in wooden boats.

So when I decided to write a book, I knew I wanted to tell about more than myself. I wanted to tell the story of my family and all the men who built this industry. I’m just a speck in the history of fishermen and sailors, which dates back generations and centuries. To understand how I came to sit in the wheel house of the Northwestern, you have to understand the heritage of Norse fishermen, the waves of immigration that brought them to America, and the wild courage of the first men with the nerve to search Alaskan waters for the prized crabs. Most of all, you need to understand my father, Sverre Hansen. For my brothers Norman and Edgar, as well as me, each day at sea is spent trying to prove ourselves worthy of the Hansen name and trying to live up to the example that our father set.

My father was very proud of his roots. When we were small boys he would sit us in his lap and say, “Always be proud of your heritage. You have to keep it going: what you are, who you are, where you come from.” The Hansen family descends from the Vikings who roamed and ruled the northern seas for centuries. In those times, in the cold lands of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland, the ocean was the frontier, and the legends grew from the sea, from the brave sailors who set out for riches and adventure. In Viking lore, those legends— the sagas—were passed from father to son, from generation to generation.

My brothers and I learned to fish from our father when we were boys. He learned from his father, who learned from his father. I am proud that the life I have chosen is to work hard, to face the dangers of the seas, and to pull a living from the ocean, just as my father did, and those before him.

From North by Northwestern by Captain Sig Hansen and Mark Sundeen. Copyright © 2010 by the authors and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. North by Northwestern is available on Amazon