Pie in the Galley Phil spins more yarns

Radio traffic increased as guys up and down the line shared reports of local conditions and their status in the gale.

  As far as we could tell the two of us were fairly isolated in our neck of the woods, but we could hear guys further along down the coast, and we were especially listening as far ahead as possible in the hope that the storm may be moderating.  One guy in a tug towing a couple barges was only a few miles above Cross Sound, and I remember feeling a bit of envy that they were only a short jump to the inside and comparative comfort and safety.

  The line from Gordon Lightfoot’s ode to the Edmond Fitzgerald always goes through my mind when thinking about an evening like this, I don’t know anything about the love of God, but as we jogged along three hundred miles more or less from Cape Spencer, fifty or so miles in the other direction, downwind to the closest protection, the minutes were quickly turning to hours.  Except to make the usual hourly check of the engine room and decks to make sure everything was staying in place, we did not leave the wheelhouse at the end of our watch.  Where would we go?  There was no comfort in the bunk on a night like this, who wanted to sit at the table with the lazy-Susan fountain spraying in every direction?  Best to stay in the wheelhouse with Phil and Jon, at least we were warm and dry.

      In the chart room, Phil laid in a plot from our position to the tip of Kayak Island, a narrow twenty-mile long forested ridge that juts out from the mainland at a right angle just south of the Copper River. With the wind sweeping up the coast from the southeast, we could turn tail and idle our way back toward the island with the sea at our stern in comfort if not safety.   He knew of a small protected hidey hole in behind the island somewhere but didn’t want to backtrack so far unless there was no reasonable alternative.  Sometime later the decision came through in the form of a brief crackle over the big set, the tugboat skipper down off Cross Sound,  “It’s blowing a hundred miles an hour here now.”

    Our anemometer held steady in the sixty-knot range, with occasional gusts to eighty.  The old boat seemed to be holding her own now, but the prospect of jogging into the teeth of the storm for the rest of the night, wind and sea continuing to build into something that sounded really nasty didn't present a pleasing picture.  Timing our turn around became the topic of discussion.
   Sea condition does not translate well into photographs. The only time I heard my Dad call bull on one of Uncle Simon's stories, observing on the way home from a family party where the old man showed slides from the UW charter days out at Adak, "if there are really waves as high as telephone poles, why don't we ever see the pictures?"    Even these days when we all have seen the view out a fish boat wheelhouse windows in tough weather, the visual effect isn't nearly as dramatic as being there.  Something in the perspective of the camera tends to flatten the sea. Even more difficult to describe in words.  Suffice to say that the sea had been building all afternoon, and by the time the decision to turn around became our only reasonable option, the waves were huge.  Coming at us at varying intervals, long sloping hills of water with sharper angles at the crest, often torn by the wind, flash of white foaming spray thundering off the fore parts of the boat in great sheets that we heard and felt all around our tiny bubble.  Lines of smaller seas, equivalent to any normal stormy day,  marched along the flanks of these huge combers, tossing the boat in every possible direction, but for the sake of timing, the moment to begin the turn around the huge monster seas were the concern.  Many of the crests loomed up very closely spaced, and if she were to be caught sideways in one of these combination punches, she may well tumble down the back side of the first, and be overwhelmed by a second sharp breaker hitting at the vulnerable moment before she could right herself.
      For several minutes we continued into the wind, looking for a pattern in the interval between sea crests.  Someone suggested that the seventh wave should be the biggest. Counting crests didn't seem to hold with that pattern, but the lets of huge seas did tend to be followed by significantly longer spaces in which two or three manageable crests scooted under the keel.  As soon as she came up for air on the back side of an especially nasty set of combers, Phil gave the word to make our move.

     Jon was on the wheel, Tom at the throttle and I was wedged in the corner nearest the companionway, dry mouth, hanging on as best I could.  At Phil's word the wheel spun hard to port,  Tom's steady hand cupped over the golf ball sized plastic end on the chrome engine speed lever, carefully pushed it all the way forward into what we called the smoke hole.  Giving the twelve cylinders Dutz, roaring along in its brightly lit engine room two decks below, all the diesel it could burn and then some, sending any excess fuel up the stack in the form of white smoke belching from the stack, ripped straight downwind unseen twenty feet behind our heads.  Top speed was determined with a pyrometer that measured the stack temperature.  At optimum running speed, a certain temperature was maintained in the stack, too much fuel raised the temperature, so one eye was kept on that gauge, another on the tachometer, and a third eye watched the rudder angle indicator as it edged toward hard over to port.  The idea being to put full power to the rudder to kick us around as fast as possible, minimizing the time we were side on to the gale.  Now the minutes were hours for sure.

     In flat water when the wheel is put hard over and full power applied the boat rolls to the outside of the turn on the torque of the wheel in the water, so our first movement was to roll into the gale as the compass card began its one eighty degree spin. The next huge sea quickly countered this starboard angle, standing her on beams end in a port roll.  Cresting that sea the boat fell over into the trough rolling hard to starboard without an instant's hesitation, tons of concrete ballast and the heavy trawl net deep in the hold jerked from one extreme to the other as if it were nothing but a bag of peanut shells countering the wild angles of the sea.  On the next deep roll, we felt the comforting sensation of the stern rising as she began to present her backside to the storm.  Tensions released, Tom edged the throttle back to a speed just above harbor speed, where she could easily slide her way along with the sea, enough propeller wash to maintain steerage, but not enough excess power to push her deeper into the prodigiously long deep rolls that set in as the monster waves scooted under the keel from behind.

     A few years later, I saw a report about a research project that indicated we may not have been as safe as it seemed.  Investigating a series of unexplained losses in a newer class of vessels of similar tonnage to the Commander, a marine architect did tests in a wave generating tank, running the boats under different load conditions and speed in a variety of sea conditions.  To everyone’s surprise, it was shown that in a moderate following sea these boats could become unstable and be driven over with little or no warning.  My impression from seeing a video of the test was that the hull had to be driven along under full power for this to happen, which of course would not be unexpected except under the kind of extreme conditions we were in that night.  Slow speed felt good, and we were in no hurry to get off the ocean, albeit certainly relieved to be inching our way toward shelter.

     The tension of the turn around quickly melted as the old boat settled into a completely new set of movements, with the storm rising over her wide, fat stern.  At times like these, I liked to think of how the boat was built, paying respectful homage to the three thousand year evolution of the boat hull.  In this case, with an eighty mile an hour gale lashing us from behind I focused my thoughts on the way the stern was constructed in this particular boat.  The plank on frame structure that I mentioned before has to be modified at the stern of the boat, unless it is a style common in smaller hulls that have a sharp stern that almost mirrors the bow, coming together in a stout vertical timber called the sternpost.  In vessels whose intended occupation centers around handling heavy nets over the stern, and as was the case in the Commander, also dragging those bulky sein skiffs in and out of the water over the same area, the sharp stern does not work.  A transom stern, where the hull tapers back to a point, then is planked straight across also is not durable enough for heavy work.  The builder’s solution was the sawn timber stern.  At a point just below the loaded waterline, several feet of the hull is built up with a stack of heavy fir timbers, the outside of which are sawn in the shape the designers want the stern to have when finished, jointed with very strong overlapping joints.  The individual timbers are cut from planks four or five inches thick and fifteen or so inches wide.  The curved shape of the outside of that part of the boat is scribed on one side of the timber, then run through a large boat builders band saw.  Then the exact shape of the previous pieces of the puzzle is scribed and cut for the lap joints at each end. These timbers are thus built up to the deck level, bolted together with heavy iron drifts driven through holes bored down through the layers of wood.  The end result is a stern that can have very beautiful lines that is also very strong and functional, never squared off across the back, but still presenting a wide space over which the net and skiff can be easily handled.  A later addition that added extra strength was galvanized steel plating cut and bolted into the stout timbers, all of which combined to give a comforting bulwark against the raging storm.

     From where we turned around the course back toward the western tip of Kayak island wasn’t exactly downwind, we had to stem it just a bit, taking the brunt of the storm just a point or two off the starboard quarter.  The result was that on the port side of the wheelhouse there was a very small area in the lea of the gale, making it possible to drop the side window down into its socket, allowing a bit of fresh air to circulate.  I remember putting my head out into the night, hearing the steady hum of the engine out the stack, seeing sheets of rain in the glare of the deck lights aft, and feeling the bulk of the boat under me as she wallowed in the sea, taking long, deep rolls on her rounded belly.  By contrast with the crashing and jogging over the previous several hours, the steady rolling was such a relief as to seem almost heavenly.  Anyone from ordinary life, with no experience in the boats, would probably be alarmed and uncomfortable to be in that boat, standing on one side then the other at peccaries angles.  At one point that night I went down to the galley for coffee when she decided to take an especially long roll.  As I hung on for a moment I saw a little puddle of water that was in the bottom of the deep double sink come up the side and pour out into the stove fan, which for the moment was almost directly below the sink at the apex of the roll.

     Once we got settled into our new course Tom and Phil went below, and I hung out in the wheelhouse with Jon for a while.  When the watch changed we were still fighting into the storm and there was no desire to go below.  Dinner would have been impossible, and rest out of the question.  Once the boat settled into our new course downwind things relaxed quite a bit.  Sometime later, timing my descent into the galley to catch the starboard roll so that the wall on which ladder was attached would be below me, minimizing the possibility of falling off the ladder and across the room.  Turning toward the table, the sight that greeted my eyes has to rank with the most vivid and pleasant memories of my life. The picture that came out of the cold lead weight a quarter century later when I found it in the Old man’s tool room, that in the end prompted me to share these stories.  Pie!

       Two bare forty watt, low voltage light bulbs cast a pool of yellow light over the lower end of the table.  Phil was slouched in his usual spot, warming himself against the well-worn tongue and groove backrest of the bench, heated by engine room ventilation.  Tommy was just coming around the corner from the galley with a freshly baked pie in each hand, three other pies already on the table.  With his trademark Oklahoma wheat field laugh, he announced to me that a night like this called for a sliver of pie AL-a-mode.  One wonders if this scene wasn’t reminiscent of a fire lit mead hall in a deep in a fjord in days of the sagas, hunkered down in the circle of family and friend, listening and contributing to the history of our people.  Pie and ice cream, heavy crockery coffee cups standing in for the shared mead cup of which songs are sung, even in musty old halls today, the line of tradition unbroken.

     A chilled strawberry pie with a can of whipped cream squirted high started the lineup, closely followed by banana cream, similarly topped with the rich sweet cream mix.  Somehow in the midst of the heavy rolling and yawing we had been doing for three hours by now, the oven in the ever sizzling “radar” range had managed to hatch out a cherry, peach, and apple pies without burning the top crust or as would no doubt have happened to me, being tossed across the deck when the oven door was opened just as the old boat decided to lay on her side in response to some black monster hissing under at that moment.  Mugs of black coffee were poured all around, as plates were piled high with the fresh hot slices of pie and vanilla ice cream scooped on lavishly.  I took the first and catching a roll to starboard that turned the wall into a floor for a moment, passed it up to Jon at the wheel above, then turned toward the other side of the room and used the roll to port to propel me to the back side of the table, past  the two stateroom doorways to the corner position on the built-in bench, where I was wedged between wall and table like the restraint on a roller coaster, able to enjoy the repast without having to consciously hang on quite so much as we rolled along through the night.

     Imagine the contrast.  Clawing our way upwind into the teeth of a growing gale.  Every moment was a struggle, hanging on tight with each jarring crash up and over mountainous seas hour after hour, making little or no progress toward home and family that seemed so far off over the black horizon.  Then to come down into the tiny pool of yellow light over the green matted table and finding Phil and Tom relaxing with freshly made pies, beautiful and fragrant.  In ordinary circumstances, it would have been a delight, under the conditions of that night it was beyond one's wildest dreams of paradise.

     Not satisfied with the portion of ice cream I had put on my plate, Phil scooped a huge spoon full out of the carton for me, observing that his mother had died from stomach cancer because she had not eaten enough ice cream, and we had better make sure that fate did not befall us.  Phil’s mother, one of my father’s older sisters had passed away a year or two before I was born, which made the event seem somewhere in the mists of nearly forgotten past, but of course was a vivid recent memory for Phil who must have been around ten at the time.  Certain details of the circumstances had never been discussed much around the family, so the part about it having been brought on by a failure to eat enough ice cream was new information to me.  I certainly wanted to do all I could to preserve my own health, and have made a special effort to eat sufficient quantities of the preventive medicine ever since.

     As far as I remember that was the only time I heard Phil mention his mother.  Phil’s finely crafted stories were woven together to bring out the humor that often lays in seeing things from a slightly different angle.  It was rare for Phil to tell any kind of story that did not end with everyone laughing.  Naturally, the events of his childhood, culminating in his mother passing away at a very young age did not lend itself to this mode of communication, so the ice cream comment was about as close to the topic he could bring himself to venture.  On any number of other incidents and situations, he was not at a shortage of words by any means.  Phil was the consummate storyteller.  The old man, patriarch of the family well into his ninety-fifth year was good, but the son in many ways was better.

     First of all, it should be mentioned that Phil was the only person I ever heard who referred to Simon, oldest and most respected member of the extended family as “the Old man.”  Jon, the youngest and second son may have done so as well, but my recollection from growing up with Jon was that he referred to his father as “Dad” as was the custom in my family as well.  I also am sure I never heard Phil call Simon “Old man” before this trip in the Commander, but that may well have just been due to the kind s of situations in which I had been around him.  Not that Phil used the term exclusively during the wee hour pie party, but for some reason this particular moment is tied together with the ice cream comment, spinning yarns about the “old man” and a good deal of hardy laughter all around.

     Extolling the prowess of Phil’s innate skill as a raconteur, it should not be overlooked that Tommy was not far behind in skill of composition and delivery of the oral history.  Like Phil, Tom's style always trended toward the humorous aspects of situations and events.  A big man blessed with an expressive face that lit up the room when he got going on a story, it was always a treat for me to listen to his contributions.  They lived halfway across the country most of the time we were growing up and our families didn’t visit very often, but when we did, it was always better than a stopover at Disneyland.  Full of mischief and energy, never any kind of serious trouble, that any of us ever heard of at any rate, and while there were a few funny incidents such as attending the wrong college class all quarter, only discovering the mistake at mid-term testing time, he made it through school, and a tour in the Army before landing in Seattle to work on the boats.

     The first story Phil told was from the days when his grandfather and uncles worked in the halibut trade, he didn’t say so at the time but it must have been in the days when Captain Weiding, Phil’s great uncle had a large steam-powered boat called the Weiding Brothers.  Many years later Simon and Norma had a framed photograph showing the crew posed on deck, two levels with great pictures of a couple of the older Edwards brothers and their old man, must have been before they got their own little boat to go trolling.  Captain Weiding was on the top deck, bowler hat, and three piece suite, looking quite dapper.  Simon told me that Weiding was early into the business of delivering his catch as fresh as possible into iced boxcars and shipping them by rail to Chicago where the market was stronger.  The Captain must have been quite a character by the sketchy accounts that filtered down over the near century since his passing.  As I remember the story when automobiles were a rare sight on the downtown streets of Seattle, Weiding used to wait at the curb until one of the old flivvers came close, he would hook his arm over something and swing up into the seat.  On one occasion something went horribly wrong, and he went under the wheels and was killed.  A lifetime facing the perils of the sea, then to be done in by one of those silly automobiles in the heart of the city.

The story Phil told, between bites of pie washed down with coffee was of the days traveling out over the stretch of ocean where we happened to be at the moment.  When they stood out to the westward from Cape Spencer they began towing a patent log, a device that when pulled in the water behind the boat rotates at a measured rate and counts miles traveled.  When they had traveled five hundred miles they began throwing a lead line over, and when it came up with sand in the lard packed into the recess in the underside of the lead, they knew they were over the Marmot Island banks, teaming with halibut.

     A quarter century or more after finishing my pie that night, imagine the sudden rush of memory that flooded over me when I reached behind that old paint can in the Old man’s tool locket and came out with a lead line weight that may well have been on one of those trips.

In the theme of halibut fishing, Tom then chimed in with a story originally told by one of the old farts who had spent much of the previous twenty years or so working in the Commander.  Same guy who almost ran them aground by thinking an island was a tug boat.  Back in the early years of halibut fishing in powerboats, the classic northwest halibut schooner, Barton had been on the crew of a boat that fished along the grounds to the southeast of Kodiak, then making the run across the hundred off miles of open water to deliver in Seward.  On one such trip, with the boat plugged full of fish Barton was standing wheel watch alone while everyone else slept.  They were winding their way through a wild gale when suddenly the entire boat was engulfed in a huge sea, totally submerged.  These boats had the deckhouse located over the after portion of the hull, high enough to see over the bow, relatively narrow to provide deck area on each side for easy access back and forth and to work with the gear.  As Barton clung to the wheel in terror, sea water was spraying in through the keyholes in the doors at each side of the small room with such force that it splattered against the opposite door, like the stream of a high-pressure fire hose.

     Told with vivid detail, mimicking the old boy's voice and questioning the memory, Tom painted a picture of the incident with humor and skill.  The old man had been absolute that the boat was under water for a full ten minutes before she managed to work her way back to the surface and continue on the way.  We tended to question two elements of the story.  While a good portion of the hull had to be engulfed by the sea for the water to come in through both keyholes, the water couldn’t have been over the top of the house or it would have flooded down the ventilators to the engine room below and quickly flooded out the reserve buoyancy areas and plunged to the bottom.  We even questioned that it anything more than frothy surface spray was over the windows, as the weight of water against the glass would certainly have stove them in flooding out the wheelhouse in an instant.  The time was also suspect.  Ten minutes is a long time, and one's sense of time tends to elongate under terror situations.

     Two examples of this come to mind.  One was from a guy who used to fish for tuna out of San Francisco in a stout steel boat called the Banner.  At forth eight feet, she was the ideal troller, great for salmon along the coast, stout enough and with sufficient packing capacity to work the tuna grounds fifty to three hundred miles offshore.  On one trip they had gotten into a jag of tuna and filled the hold, and taken another few tons aboard filling the well deck almost to the rail.  Covered with wet burlap against the California sun, the boys were rolling home with eager anticipation of a big payday in the City.  Loran, the fellow who told me the story some years after it happened was relaxing on the main hatch, when he suddenly saw a huge sea rise over the stern, obviously about to come crashing down on the boat.  He jumped up and grabbed onto the boom six feet overhead, clinging with arms and legs as the entire boat to a point halfway up the walls of the deckhouse was engulfed in frothing, foaming sea water.  He said that he would have sworn that it took a full ten minutes for the boat to shake herself clear of the sea, but he realized that it had in actually only been a matter of a half minute or possibly a bit more.  His perception of time having slowed down in his heightened state of awareness brought on by terror.  When the water finally cleared, every one of the tuna on the deck load had been swept away.  They decided never to take that many fish on again.

     I heard that story a few years after the night of the pies on this trip, but did recount another report of one's perception of time changing in dire circumstances.  Our cousin Jon, Phil’s brother had been out in the mountains hunting with his friends one time during high school years.  They were bombing along a logging road in some kind of old beater when the driver lost control and the car began bouncing along in the ditch.  Jon said “you know how when you get into a car wreck everything seems to slow down?  Well, that was the way it was for us, we could see a huge stump up ahead as if we were still and the stump was moving back and forthcoming toward us.  All in very slow motion as if it took several minutes before it crashed into the front of the car and everything smashed up.”  Somehow the boys escaped injury, as seemed to be the case in a couple other spectacular crashes that Jon experienced in his youthful days.

     The water probably sprayed into the keyholes for several seconds.  The sea probably swept over the lower portion of the well deck in front of the house, sloshing around it up to the level of the doorknobs or so.  In the black of night it seemed much worse than it really was, although if the door leading to the engine room at the back of the house had been left open, as it was much of the time, they would certainly have been sunk.

     For years I questioned that whole story of the water spraying in through the keyholes.  It seemed a bit far fetched, but a google search of halibut schooner stories brought up a story of the same thing happening in the nineteen sixties to someone traveling in a heavy laden halibut schooner.  Then another friend of mine, whose grand father owned one of these classic boats told me that when he asked why they always kept the side doors on the wheelhouse locked he was told that one time when they were running in rough weather with the side doors open a huge wave swept over the boat and washed the man at the wheel away, never to be seen again.  Apparently, a characteristic of this boat design is that the sea will engulf the aft portion of the boat under certain conditions of loading and weather resulting is these kinds of incidents.

Copyright 2012 - Paul Petersen

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