Nights of Ice: True Stories of Disaster and Survival on Alaska's High Seas
224
Nights of Ice: True Stories of Disaster and Survival on Alaska's High Seas
224eBookFirst Edition (First Edition)
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Overview
Nights of Ice is a critically acclaimed account of the dangerous and harrowing job of fishing off of the treacherous, subzero Alaskan coastline.
Spike Walker has spent more than a decade fishing in the subzero hell of Alaska's coastal waters. This collection--coming on the heels of his classic memoir Working on the Edge--is a testament to the courage of those who brave nature's wrath each fishing season, and to the uncontrolled power of nature herself.. The crewmen in Nights of Ice face a constant onslaught of roaring waves, stories-high swells, and life-stealing ice. Tested by the elements, these seamen battle for their vessels and their lives, on every page evincing a level of courage and a will to live seldom found elsewhere in modern society.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466805385 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/15/1999 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Sales rank: | 618,624 |
| File size: | 192 KB |
About the Author
Spike Walker spent nine seasons as a crewman aboard some of the most successful crab boats in the Alaskan fleet. While "working on the edge," the crewmen's term for laboring in the brutal outer reaches of the Bering Sea, Spike encountered 110-mph winds, rode out one of the worst storms in Alaska's history, worked nonstop for seventy-four hours without sleep, participated in record catches of king crab, saw ships sink, helped rescue their crews, and had close friends die at sea. In addition to his crab-fishing experience, Spike Walker has worked in the offshore oilfields of Louisiana and Texas; along the Mississippi River as a certified, commercial deep-sea diver; and in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska as a logger. He is the author of several works of nonfiction, including Working on the Edge, Nights of Ice, and Coming Back Alive.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
NIGHTS OF ICE
For Joe Harlan, captain of the fifty-three-foot crab boat Tidings, and his crew, the 1989 Kodiak Island tanner crab season had been an exceptionally tough one.
From the opening gun, they'd ignored the weather, fishing hard through the merciless cold of an arctic storm. They were working the waters down in the Sitkalidak Island area on the southeast side of Kodiak Island, some eighty nautical miles from the fishing port of Kodiak. But Harlan and his men had been pleased at their luck.
They'd been pulling gear in the biting cold of the short winter hours of light, grinding through a total of some one hundred crab pots. Harlan had agreed to pay his men a 10 percent per-man crew share that season. In just two weeks they'd boated more than forty thousand pounds of tanner crab. Crew shares had already topped ten thousand dollars — per man.
But they had been pounded night and day by wild north-west winds packing chill-factor temperatures of minus fifty degrees and williwaw gusts that made fishing that 1989 season one of the most perilous ever. One crab boat had gone down not far from Harlan and his men, near Chirikof Island. All four of the crewmen had died. So far, only one body had been recovered.
On another crab boat, one deckhand had lost three toes to frostbite when he ignored the water sloshing about in his boots while working on deck. As a fellow crewmate recalls it, "Before he knew it was happening, it had already happened."
On the very first day of the season, Joe Harlan had lost one of his own men to frostbite. He had rushed the man into the ancient Aleut village of Old Harbor on the south end of Kodiak Island and hired a bush plane to fly the man to the hospital in Kodiak for treatment. The man had broken no hard-and-fast rules of the sea; he had merely tried to sort crab wearing only cotton glove liners. And he had developed large blisters on the fingertips of both hands, which would keep him out of commission for the rest of the month-long season.
Less than two weeks of fishing later, the tanner crab catch fell off dramatically. And skipper Joe Harlan turned to his crew, hoping to cut his losses and call it a season. "Well, you know what you've made so far," he began. "And the way the crabbing has been going these last few days, you know what you can expect to make. The way I see it, we have two choices. We can stay out here and scratch away on a five-or-ten-crab-per-pot average until the Alaska Fish and Wildlife Department tells us to quit. Or we can quit burning up our fuel, store our gear away back in Kodiak, and get out of this cold son-of-a-bitchin' weather."
After weeks spent working in the single-worst extended cold spell ever recorded in the Kodiak weather books, the crew of the Tidings did not hesitate. They'd been "successful enough" for one season.
Built in 1964 in the shipyards of Seattle, the fishing vessel Tidings had a wheelhouse that was mounted forward on the bow. She was considered one of the nicest boats around at the time because she had a toilet, something that was considered rather extravagant in those earlier, "hang it over the side" days.
Packing the recommended load of some thirteen crab pots on her back deck, the Tidings was closing fast on Chiniak Bay of the port of Kodiak, cruising through moderate seas, paralleling the coast of Kodiak Island about one and a half miles offshore, when, late on that frigid night, "all hell broke loose." Joe Harlan had been looking forward to slipping into the close and comfortable shelter of the Kodiak port, and with the exception of ice forming on the wheelhouse and railings of the Tidings, their journey north along the full length of the island had gone as planned.
But at Narrow Cape, they ran into some bad tide rips. Spray began exploding over the length of the ship, and they began making ice heavily.
Joe Harlan soon rousted his crew from their bunks.
"Guys, we've got to get this ice off of us," he said as he woke the men. With his crew gathered in the wheelhouse, Harlan pointed at the windows surrounding them. They were encased in ice. Only a clear space the size of a quarter in one window remained.
"Knock the windows clear, and then be sure and get the ice that's stuck to our railings," directed the skipper. "But don't let yourself get frostbitten. As soon as you get cold, come on in!" he insisted.
In an amazingly short time, a thick layer of ice had formed on the Tidings. Ice covered the boat — except, that is, for the crab pots themselves. Harlan and his crew had wrapped the commonly ice-drawing forms of steel and webbing in a layer of slick plastic, one that drained quickly before the spray from the ocean had time to harden.
The crew of the Tidings made good work of the ice-breaking task. But they longed to get back inside, out of the murderous cold. There they would flop down on the floor and warm themselves in front of the heater in the galley.
Back inside, skipper Joe Harlan was making a routine check of his engine room when he spotted seawater rising fast in the ship's bilge. Seconds later, the Tidings began to list to the port side.
Either the crab tank's circulation-pump pipe had ruptured inside the engine room or the steel bulkhead separating the engine room from the crab tank had split a seam. Nobody would ever know for sure. But it "put a lot of water in that engine room right now!" The moment Harlan spotted the water, he rushed to the back door and yelled to deck boss Bruce Hinman, "Grab your survival suits! And then start kicking the pots over the side!"
Joe Harlan was standing in the wheelhouse when he felt the Tidings roll. Instinctively, he was certain the ship would not be able to right herself. Yet he "couldn't believe it." He found he was unable to accept what was happening to the Tidings, a vessel he had come to trust and even admire. Then a ridiculous thought shot momentarily through his mind: He had an unspoken impulse to order his crew to "run back there, hop overboard, and push the thirty-ton vessel back upright."
With the Tidings sinking fast, Joe Harlan knew she would finish her roll and sink completely in about the time it would take him to utter a single sentence. Turning to his VHF and CB radios, he made a snap decision.
In the past, he'd listened to many Mayday calls to the U.S. Coast Guard in Kodiak. As glad as he was to have them standing by for his fellow fishermen, Harlan also knew that the Coast Guard usually wanted to know "who your mother's sister was, the color of your boat," your date of birth, your last checkup, proper spelling, and the like. So rather than shoot off a Mayday to the Coast Guard, Harlan decided to take a gamble.
For much of the night, he'd been listening on VHF channel 6 to the friendly chatter of the boats traveling ahead of him up the line. He grabbed the CB mike then and yelled, "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is the Tidings! We're off Cape Chiniak and we're going down!" As he spoke, the Tidings fell completely over on her starboard side. Below him, Harlan could see batteries breaking loose and flying across the engine room. He felt his heart free-fall into his belly. Before he could unkey his mike, he "lost all power. Everything went dead."
Harlan heard a tremendous crash, and it seemed that all at once everything inside the boat — pots, pans, toasters, even rifles — came flying loose. Then the large hulk of the refrigerator came tumbling from its mounts. Harlan was thrown across the width of the wheelhouse. He struggled to regain his footing, but instead he tumbled backward down into the fo'c'sle.
Then, like a whale sounding, in one continuous motion the stern kicked high, and the Tidings sank bow-first, straight for the bottom. She slid toward the ocean floor in one steady motion, burying herself full length in the night sea. And there she paused, floating with only a few feet of her stern showing above the surface, with Joe Harlan still trapped inside.
As Bruce Hinman recalls it, shortly before the Tidings foundered and rolled over, his skipper had slowed the vessel to allow all six-foot-three and 290 pounds of Hinman's huge frame, as well as his fellow crewmates Chris Rosenthal and George Timpke, time to get dressed and make their way outside. A ten-inch-thick layer of sea ice had already formed on the Tidings' superstructure, and was growing fast. Clad only in their work clothes, they hurried outside to do battle.
Hinman, Rosenthal, and Timpke attacked the ice with baseball bats. They broke ice and tossed the chunks overboard as fast as they could move. And as they did, they squinted against the sharp, eye-watering gusts of arctic wind, and winced at the biting cold. They worked in drenching conditions in a chill-factor reading of some -55°F., the coldest ever recorded in the area. And they swung at the growing layers of ice now encasing the bow railings and bulwarks surrounding the wheelhouse, certain in the knowledge that their very lives hung in the balance.
Suddenly, the crab boat began to list sharply. The growing list soon tilted past forty-five degrees. Seawater rose over the port-side railing. Hinman was removing his survival suit from its bag when a tall wave broke over the twisting slope of the deck. And just as suddenly, he and the others found themselves dodging a deadly shuffle of 15,000 pounds of crab pots sliding forward toward them down the steep slope of the deck. As the bow of the Tidings nosed farther forward into the icy sea, the seven-ton stack of crab pots accelerated its slide, further distorting the already-untenable balance of the sinking ship.
Accelerating as it came, the tall and deadly stack of sliding crab pots closed on the terrified crewmen like a moving mountain. The square-fronted stack of steel and webbing plowed into the back door of the ship's wheelhouse like a runaway freight car. It slammed against the rear of the wheelhouse with the effect of a door closing on a bank vault, leaving their skipper trapped inside.
With the shifting weight accelerating the angle of the plunging bow, the Tidings rolled with an astonishing velocity, pitching the four crewmen scrambling across her back deck bodily through the air and overboard.
The suddeness of the port-side motion caught everyone off guard. It was as if an all-powerful force had suddenly gripped the Tidings and flipped her — as if her fifty-three feet and forty tons were no more substantial than a bathtub toy in a child's hands.
Bruce Hinman felt the sudden shift, and he found himself hurtling through space; several of the crab pots followed. His right arm became entangled in the webbing of one of the pots — and just as suddenly, the six-hundred-pound crab pot began to "sink like a rock" toward the bottom, dragging Hinman, kicking and struggling, along with it.
It all happened so quickly. Hinman had been knocked senseless by the sudden shock of the Kodiak waters, ensnared by one of his own crab pots, and was now being dragged along on an unforseen journey into deepest darkness toward an ocean floor more than a thousand feet below.
He knew instinctively that if he allowed panic to rule him, he would be lost. And he fought to choke back the rising tide of unreasoning fear within himself.
As he descended through the darkness, Hinman gained a measure of composure. He would fight against the building fear by taking action. He was perhaps seventy feet beneath the ocean surface when he managed to jerk his ensnared right arm free. Then he placed both of his stocking feet against the webbing of the crab pot and pushed away violently. The fast-sinking crab pot disappeared quickly, tumbling off into the black body of sea below him.
When Hinman looked up, he was awestruck by what he saw. For a blinding orb of radiant light hovered above him. There was something beautiful, even angelic about the vision before him. Brilliant in splendor, it bathed him in spirit-lifting columns of golden light that seemed to beckon him home.
He ascended feverishly then, stroking overhead toward the comforting swath of inexplicable light like a man with a building hope, a hope tempered by the fear that at any moment another toppling crab pot might very well descend upon him and carry him back down again.
And at that moment, Bruce Hinman's past life flashed before his very eyes. Launched instantaneously through time, he watched the events of his life play out before him with "the speed of thought." The prevailing feeling was of being cast adrift on a wondrous journey, unhindered by earthly impediments of time, matter, or communication.
Hinman felt "lost in time without an anchor." And the look and feel of special moments long past came back to him now with complete clarity. They flashed and froze there in his consciousness, in a kind of nostalgic collage of all that had once mattered in his life.
He saw his two little boys; his former wife, Carol; his two adopted foster daughters; and both of his parents, as well. Then Hinman was back under fire in Vietnam, just as it had all happened with soldier buddies dropping all around him. A millisecond later, he was a boy again, scrambling along the banks of Lake Shasta in northern California. And he was swept back into the very moment when he had come so close, as a child, to drowning. It all scrolled past him now, and each memory carried with it the exact same heart-tugging emotion he had felt at that time.
Bruce Hinman exploded through the surface, leaving the visions behind. He rose bodily into the bitter night, then wrenched hard and began inhaling deep lungfuls of the precious air.
When he regained himself, he spotted the stern of the Tidings drifting nearby. She was hanging straight down in the water.
Adrift now, without a survival suit, lost in a whiteout of silvery gray ice fog, Hinman knew the odds of outliving his predicament were slim. He dog-paddled and fought to catch his breath.
When he could, he yelled for his crewmates. "Hey, Chris! Where is everybody?" A voice sounded out of the darkness perhaps fifty feet away. "Hinman!" He recognized the voice of his good friend and crewmate Chris Rosenthal.
"Harlan's in the boat! He's down inside the boat!" Chris shouted.
George Timpke, their third crewmate, soon acknowledged him, as well. He was clinging to a piece of flotsam off in the darkness approximately one hundred feet away.
Short of diving equipment, Hinman knew he had no way of reaching his trapped skipper. Swearing aloud, he soberly acknowledged to himself that his good friend Joe Harlan was a goner. And a single thought shot across his mind. What am I going to say to his wife, Mary Ellen?
Now Hinman felt the almost caustic effects of the bitter wind and numbing ocean against the flesh of his face. He also knew there would be no way to climb back aboard the sinking vessel, no way for him or his other shipmates to climb clear of the life-sucking cold of the Gulf of Alaska water, and he felt at once helpless and angry.
"Now what?" he shouted into the arctic night.
Harlan had been roughed up considerably when the Tidings had rolled over. In fact, he had come close to breaking his right arm. He scrambled to gather himself and climb out. Ordinarily, the ladder leading from the engine room to the sleeping quarters stood upright and led down into the engine room. But now the vertical leg of the ladder posed a serious obstacle. With the Tidings tilted straight down as she was, the ladder now lay unevenly across the inverted space before him, sloping as it stretched between cabins. Scaling it would be a little like trying to climb the underside of a stairway. With his battered right arm, it would be a difficult gymnastic feat.
Now the startled skipper found himself "all the way forward" in the darkest inner reaches of the ship's bow, some fifty feet below the surface of the sea. As the boat continued to leap and roll, he could hear the ongoing crash and clutter of stored parts falling and scattering overhead.
Suddenly, in the gray-black light, a roaring blast of seawater broke through the door to the engine room. The tumultuous white water broke heavily over Harlan, lifting him bodily and washing him out of the fo'c'sle. He gasped for air as the icy flood cascaded over him. As he was carried along through the inverted space of the ship's galley, Harlan reached out and snagged the handle to the wheelhouse door. He tugged frantically, but with the water pressure sealing it shut, he found it immovable.
As the small galley continued to flood, Harlan found himself struggling to remain afloat in the narrowing confines. The galley sink and faucet were now suspended on end below him while beside him, in the claustrophobic space, floated the gyrating hulk of their refrigerator.
Harlan gulped air and dived. He knew he had to think of a way out. He swam down through the watery cubicle of the galley to the sink, grabbed the faucet with both hands, and kicked viciously at the starboard side window behind it. But the leaden cold of the water seemed to drain the power from his blows. This is hopeless! he thought, as he swam numbly back toward the pocket of air above.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Nights Of Ice"
by .
Copyright © 1997 Spike Walker.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Introduction,
NIGHTS OF ICE,
CHOPPER RESCUE: MEN IN PERIL,
JOURNEY OF NO RETURN,
IN THE PATH OF A MIRACLE,
LOST AND ADRIFT,
OVER AND OUT,
ON THE ROCKS,
THE FACE OF AN ANGEL,
Acknowledgments,
Also by Spike Walker,
Copyright Page,
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