There are three species of crab caught in this general fishery: king crab, tanner (or snow crab), and Dungeness crab. All three varieties are harvested in a circular or rectangular trap called a crab pot. This mesh-covered pot has a funnel opening the size of which depends on the type of crab desired. The crab can enter the baited pot but cannot escape. Crab pots are set on the sea bottom and marked by a buoy secured to the trap by a sturdy line also used to bring the pot to the surface.
The pots are tended regularly. After the fisherman hauls up a pot with a specially designed winch, he empties it and sorts the crabs. The pot is then rebaited with chopped clams or fish heads placed in a plastic container with holes in it.
As with most fisheries the hours are long and strenuous. A fisherman on a crabbing vessel will often put in sixteen-hour days and on occasion up to twenty hours. There are usually four crew members including the skipper, although some of the smaller boats will have only three. A trip lasts anywhere from five to seven days. Because crab spoil rapidly they are kept alive in seawater circulating holds; they must reach the cannery alive or else they are worthless.
Crab boats are easily distinguished by the usual neat stacks of crab pots on deck and the brightly colored and marked buoys placed inside the vacant pots or strung about the cabin. Boats in the king crab fishery are usually quite large (60 to 150 feet), since they must weather seas masthead high or higher. Here are some further details:
The Dungeness crab is the only one fished from California to Alaska. No predominant center exists for the Dungeness fishery. Kodiak and Homer, Alaska; the Puget Sound area of Washington; and in Oregon, Astoria and Newport-all see boats operating in this fishery. In extreme northern California, Oregon, and Washington, Dungeness are fished in the winter months, whereas it is a summer fishery in Alaska.
Tanner crabs are fished primarily in Alaskan waters. From Ketchikan in the southernmost tip of Alaska to the distant islands of the Aleutian, cahin pots for tanner crab are set. Primary ports are Kodiak, Homer, and Dutch Harbor. Tanner crab is landed in greatest quantities between March and June.
King crabs are the largest of the three varieties. They can weigh up to 24 pounds and span 5, even 6, feet from tip to tip of outstretched legs. King crab pots are massive rectangular steel frames covered with wire mesh. The pots weigh up to 400 pounds, empty! The focus of the king crab fishery is Kodiak and Dutch Harbor (on Unalaska Island of the Aleutians). There are minor fleets of king crabbers in Cordova, Kenai, and Homer, Alaska. The king crab season gets underway in September or late August and thrives until January.
The winter months happen to be the peak months of this fishery, so both boats and men face incredible hazards. Winds, especially in the Bering Sea, often top 100 knots. Seas can be mountainous. Temperatures of twenty-five degrees below (not to mention the chill factor) cause dangerous icing of decks. All of these factors combine to make king crabbing one of the most dangerous occupations in the world. Imagine the exquisite skill and timing required to take a 400-pound pot with perhaps 1,000 pounds of crab in it aboard a pitching rolling boat. Injuries and damage to equipment are far more frequent on these boats.
But it is a rich fishery (king crabbers can earn upwards of $30,000 during the brief but harrowing season). No recruitment difficulty despite the inevitable loss of boats and men. Few greenhorns get on king crabbers, because the skipper must be sure of his crew. But if you're in the right place at the right time, if you know the right people, you may get on.
May the Bering Sea have mercy on your boat. . . .
Tuna
Most of the tuna canned in the United States is landed in purse seines. The seines used in tuna fishing are much larger than those for catching salmon. Tuna seines can be as long as 600 fathoms in length and 45 fathoms in depth. Tuna are normally fished 100 or more miles off shore. They travel in schools which in turn stalk schools of feed fish such as herring and anchovy. Because tuna are a diving fish the skiff brings around its end of the seine rapidly and the net is pursed as quickly as possible.
The crew consists of 12 to 20 men each hired to perform specific tasks. There is a cook aboard, a full-time engineer, and a navigator. These seiners are very large fishing boats with capacities of 350 tons of tuna. They range in length from 100 to 130 feet. As with salmon seiners they are discernible by the power block hanging from the boom, the seine laid out on the stern, and the power skiff in tow or sitting on the seine. Most tuna seiners have enclosed crow's nests from which a spotter watches for schools of tuna and directs the operation by radio. A trip normally lasts two months. The fishing grounds off the coast of Central America are sometimes two weeks' cruising away from southern California. Quarters and provisions are rather lavish compared to fishing vessels in most other fisheries.
Where? Primary centers for tuna seining fleets are San Pedro, San Diego, Monterey, and San Francisco, all in California. Some tuna boats are based in Newport and Astoria, Oregon.
When? While tuna are fished year round, the most productive period is from July to August.
Specifics: In bad weather there is tremendous pressure on the steel cables used as purseline. They sometimes snap and could easily result in fatal injury. Jellyfish are not much of a problem, although sharks are frequently captured. The shark must be heaved overboard by two crew members who know what they are doing.
You'll want to know about the possible earnings. A beginner usually starts out with a quarter-share for his first trip. On each successive trip he earns one-fourth share more until he is making a full share. A fully fledged crew member might earn as much as $4,000 per trip in summer on a good boat. The above sums are after taxes, and you must deduct shared food and fuel costs. It is said that the tuna fishery in Southern California is dominated by Italian fishermen. Apparently, it will be very difficult to get hired if you're inexperienced, without contacts, and lack an Italian background. Too, because California is a heavily populated state the docks are worn thin by greenhorns dragging their feet from one boat to the next. But on occasion fate smiles as sweetly as does the sun in Southern California.
Tourist Fishery
Scattered all along the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle are charter boat outfits that rent out to sport fishermen. In the trade these "deep-sea fishing" boats are known as "pukers." Such vessels are usually manned by the skipper and a bait boy. The duties of the bait boy include preparing the rods and fishing gear for tourists unfamiliar with it, keeping hot coffee and Dramamine ready, keeping the boat washed down, cleaning fish, and so forth. Most of these operations have shore offices where the prospective "puker" signs up for a trip. (When I laughed at the nickname a bearded skipper advised me that it might well be I who would reinforce the name.) During the best summer months these boats make three trips per day. A wide range of fish are landed from albacore to salmon, sea bass to shark.
Best time to look for work as a bait boy is in May before the tourist rush when most of the vessels already have their steady bait boys (usually high school kids from the neighborhood). Working for a month or so will teach the raw landlubber some basic seamanship skills (such as tying up a boat, coiling lines, etc.). Though you probably won't earn more than $30 or $40 per day, you will be able to assess the fisherman's life without breaking your back. Scenic spots such as Depoe Bay, Oregon, will appeal to the greenhorn's romanticized visions of being a fisherman.
Gulf Coast and East Coast Fisheries
Texas and Louisiana are first and second in the value of their commercial catch on the Gulf of Mexico. Over 25,000 fishermen find employment in the Gulf area. In the Chesapeake Bay area alone, some 20,000 commercial anglers work on boats.
Southern Shrimp Fishery
As in Alaska, most of the shrimp catch is harvested by otter trawls. The mechanics are basically the same. Crews may be somewhat smaller. In the Gulf region two-man crews are quite common, although three-man crews are more normal in operations farther away from shore. Many of the larger boats fish far from home ports and land their catches in South American ports. (See "The Northern Shrimp Fishery," earlier in this chapter, on recognizing a shrimp boat.)
The southern shrimp fishery extends from Beaufort, North Carolina, to Brownsville, Texas. The most productive states are Texas, Louisiana, and Florida in that order. Here are some centers of this fishery: Port Lavaca, Brownsville-Port Isabel, Corpus Christi, Freeport, Galveston, Arkansas Pass-Rockport, Port Arthur, Texas; Morgan City, Empire, Dulac-Chauvin, New Orleans, Houma, Louisiana; Biloxi, Pascagoula-Moss Point, Mississippi; Tampa, Ft. Myers, Key West, St. Petersburg, Panama City, Florida; Mobile, Alabama; and Brunswick, Georgia.
Southern shrimp are fished the year round. The largest catches occur in June and July and are sizable until November, when they slack off.
Cannery Work
Your hands are raw and stiff; your wrists ache. Working in a vast iron ship of a cannery you become aware of its own self-contained weather patterns. Fogs rise and fall; periodic floods from high-pressure hoses wash shrimp peelings into drains; banks of white cloud hover above frothing cauldrons; you hear thunder in chambers full of coughing, screaming engines and whirring machines.
As a shrimp unloader you clamber down steep ladders to disembowel fishing boats. Big pitchfork in hand, you fill a large rectangular bucket with clumps of ice-cooled shrimp. The indifferent trawls of shrimp fishermen yield an endless assortment of sea creatures. Tiny Alaskan king crab larger than a quarter, bullheads with hideous knobs and horns in broad faces, eels of a bright orange complexion, others with ears like dogs, flounder with cheerfully striped fins and one-sided countenances, grotesque sea cucumbers and spiny sea urchins, flowery algae, strong-smelling kelp, scallops and mussels, baby halibut with see-through bodies, jeweler's herring like lapis lazuli in silver settings amid mounds of coral shrimp.
A seafood cannery is a whole new world for someone from Denver or Dallas. In Alaskan canneries the company often provides accommodations for its workers and employees are free to enjoy as much of the product they can. You may be eating mountains of king crab legs for dinner for a whole week before the novelty wore off*. Most jobs in these plants require little or no experience. Because the work is seasonal there is a high turnover rate. Abundant opportunity exists for women in cannery work. It pays to work in shrimp and menhaden plants where the catch is processed. Consider cannery work one of the stepping stones to get on a boat.
The work can be extremely tedious. After all, most of it is done on an assembly line basis. (Labor laws require fifteen-minute breaks every two or three hours which help to break the monotony.) One of the main reasons why canneries have little trouble recruiting workers is because overtime is plentiful. The pay for cannery work ranges from the hourly minimum to $6 per hour, which can be an excellent way to earn money in a short period. Working ten hours per day, six days a week, for a month could net the worker more than $1,000.
A few words about getting hired. Should you write a cannery? Consider it an exercise in futility. A plant director once put it this way: "It could be an intelligent baboon writing! I want to see the people before I'd consider hiring them." Nevertheless, you may be able to obtain information as to the most likely month when canneries need workers. Obviously, many plants which process only salmon or other seasonal seafood operate only during the season. But at that time they will operate around the clock and a worker can accumulate much overtime (paid by time and a half).
