Time Bandit by Andy Hillstrand Read Free Book Online

could see him down on the deck doing the work of five men—he ran the crane, pulled and stacked the pots, and sorted the crab. Andy has never been afraid of hard work, and neither have I. He will not tolerate a crewman who is not a team player but is an All That loudmouth. He hands them their asses tied with a bow. Andy, who is a better judge of people than I am, always says, “You have to assume that a new crewman is no good; otherwise, any form of trust might get you killed.”
    After working thirty-six hours straight, tempers can flare even among good crews. One time I was working on the deck with Andy when another crewman split Andy’s head open with a picking hook. Actually, he had thrown the hook at Andy’s face. He was screaming mad about something real or perceived; we never found out. The steel hook flew right past Andy’s face and swung out and back and hit him in the head. Another time a crewman wanted to stab another crewman with a knife over smoking cigarettes on the boat. They had been working on deck for a couple of days without sleep and were at their limit of exhaustion. He bloodied the other guy’s nose with his palm and told him, “Outside right now. I’m going to beat your ass.” He pulled a knife. Andy and I were going to let them go at it. Andy did not see the knife until they were on deck, and he told them, “Knock it off. Put the knife down.” They did as they were told, but they could not work out their differences. We threw one off the boat soon after that and replaced him with a crewman named Clark Sparks, who stayed with us for eight years.
    Clark and I fished off the East Coast together back in the 1980s. One day in summer, I was aboard my boat F/V Canyon Enterprise out of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Clark was in charge of another boat. We got our gear out; he hauled his trawl and I hauled mine. He was fishing out of sight of me about eighteen miles away. His crew called me on the single sideband. “Clark’s gone! Clark’s gone,” they said. I thought they were kidding me. There was no way he could be gone. The sea was flat calm. I cut my line and charged over there, two hours away. The accident must have happened while he was working near the trawl, which pulled him overboard and down. When the crew pulled up the trawl they probably pulled his body apart. He had to have been busted up too bad to swim. That same day we had our memorial for him. We cooked a big dinner. We threw his plate overboard, and we took swigs off a bottle and threw it over. We said good-bye in our own way.
    The Coast Guard searched for his body for two days and found nothing in the Gulf Stream. The water was 81 degrees. I looked for twelve hours after everybody else gave up. I would not accept that he was gone. If that happened to me, I would not want my friends to stop looking. I would want them to give me every benefit of the doubt. I found cardboard from his bait boxes floating on the sea. I knew he was near there. I felt his spirit when I reached a spot 200 miles out of Gloucester off George’s Bank. Dolphins were swimming there. I felt him. I could not believe he was gone. He was like losing a brother. He had become family. I miss Clark.
             
    W hen we are crab fishing, either for king or opilio, we are rarely out for more than two weeks at a time, and that is plenty for the crew. After grinding hard, they start to deflate in that time. Their bodies weaken and they need more sleep. They start to get weird. Their behavior alters for the worse. They get argumentative and flinty. Even the best of them change. It happens on every boat on every trip. I imagine that it happened with Christopher Columbus. As captain, I have to understand basic psychology; it’s not that the weather is too bad or the temperature on deck is too cold. It’s that psychologically the crew gets beaten down. And that is when mistakes are made and accidents happen.
    As time goes along, crewmen can choose either to work