The Smoker / for the love of the family

“He is crazy you know!  Scared to get into an air plane, won’t go on the roll a coaster at the fair, but he will come out here any old time!”

In the time it took Phil to wash down a mouth full of cherry pie with a sip of fresh coffee, my mind flashed to the story about a guy getting killed in the Meldon.  Had Phil put just a hint of judgment into the term “diver” suggesting that the death may have been prevented with a bit more prudence.  The fact that the Old man mulled over the incident more and more as time went by indicated that he also had unresolved issues, but when you are standing shoulder to shoulder with a guy who is killed and you are unscathed, these feelings are normal.  In reality it as a freak accident with no blame other than on the ‘yacht’ when she was overwhelmed by a rogue sea.

     Having told the best known family story with seven well chosen words, Phil moved into other stories about working on the Meldon as a teenager.  The night was still very black and wild beyond the tiny pool of warmth and dim light in the boat.  Hanging on to the edge of the table when a particularly big one shook her as it broke against the stern, then lay us over on the side, I realized that without the companionship of loved family members, spinning yarns that threaded us into a tradition, I would have been scared shitless hanging out miles from nowhere in a creaky old boat.  But Phil and Tom both couldn’t go long between laughter, and most of the stories had a punch lime of some kind or another that elicited a chuckle.

     The first one Phil related was how he would start out on a trip with his Dad, and because he was just the dumb kid they always put him on wheel watch coming out of Seattle.  Traveling up the sound past Edmonds, Whidbey island creates a fork in the road, with the right hand channel leading up past Everett and along the back side of the island, miles and miles out of the way.  Phil would casually set his course in this direction, waiting for one of the old timers to come by and see the mistake, and angrily ban him from unsupervised wheel watch, relieving him of the mind numbing boredom for the rest of the trip.

If he had gotten the better of the older fellows with his ruse to get out of wheel watch the table turned out on the grounds, when the boys sent him below to ice fish.  Green kid in more than one way, seasickness that was compounded by the enclosed spaces in the fish hold.  To work in the hold  a guy needs to dig out a place for yourself to stand on the other side of the bins that are being filled, so that as the fish come down the manhole you can reach across with your rake and layer them with ice that you scrape out from each side of your little hole.  Knowing that the kid would probably not think of this on his own, the boys would send him down to do the unpleasant chore without instructions.  He would try to do it by lying on top of the ice that was couple feet below the underside of the deck.  With no good hand holds, and the need to use both hands for the job, he would end up sliding wildly to one side and then the other as the boat rolled.

     As a young boy I remember a story about Phil’s legendary sea sickness on these trips, highlighted by his filling one of the deck hands boot with barf as he stumbled toward the rail while everyone was on deck sorting fish.  There was a bit more to the story, which Phil began filling in after much laughter over the image of him sliding around the ice on his belly, no doubt to the amusement of the older guys up on deck.

One of the crew who was a chain smoker must have been feeling testy one day, and began to push Phil to have a smoke.  Every time he got another Lucky out of the pack he would push it toward Phil,  “Go ahead and have one, your Dad smokes all the time when you are not around.”

     Our particular family tradition frowned on tobacco long before it was known for sure of the health risks associated with its use, and blatantly pushing the smokes on the kid was not at all pleasing to the Old man.   He may well have had the habit himself in younger years, which was all the more reason for him not to want his kid getting started.  Sometime during the afternoon Phil was working on a pile of fish when he heard something, and the Smoker came skidding across the hatch on his ass, landing in a checker full of prickly rock fish, accidentally on purpose pushed by Simon.   Later, the next time Phil had to make a quick trip to the rail to get rid of lunch he accidentally on purpose managed to fill the Smoker’s left boot.

     A few hours later, they were heading back across the bar into town.  In the best of weather, the Grays Harbor bar can be treacherous.  The mass of water in the bay flowing out into the ocean along with the ebb tide will cause the swells to stack up in the shallows in front of the entrance.  Many boats are damaged or lost in this area, especially if they have missed the ideal time of the tide, toward high slack water when the currents are the weakest and there is the most water on the bar.  Trying to work every day, and get his catch into market probably took prescience over comfort on the bar for Simon.  He frequently, in his words “dodged breakers” coming across, and this day was no different.  He was on top, where he could see what was coming at him from behind, while the boys nervously sat around the table in the galley.

     Just like bucking into a big sea, crossing the bar takes a steady hand on the wheel and engine control.  As a big sea rises behind you it is important to get your ass directly into the wave, so it does not catch you on the side.  Then the power has to be cut just at the right moment, to prevent the boat from powering down the steep side of the sea, plowing the bow deep into the water in front.  As the weight of the boat is shifted far foreword, with the stern in the air the danger is to broach to, meaning that she looses steering with the rudder in the air and goes sideways to be tumbled over in the next comber.

     The key is to trust in god and manage the power so that as soon as the crest of the wave passes the center of gravity of the boat and she falls back on her stern, give it a snoose of power to regain steering.  The rudder of the boat will only work when there is sufficient foreword movement, or water thrust past the rudder by the propeller wheel.  A moment ago you were standing on your face, hanging on to the wheel to keep from being tossed foreword, then suddenly all you see is sky as she falls down the back side of the wave.  Now is the time to be looking behind for the next comber.  Sometimes you get a break and can move quite a distance before the next attack, other times they will be marching at you in bunches.  I had a couple of friends who were crossing the bar into Eureka, California one afternoon when the conditions were marginal.  One of them was at the back door of the cabin looking back, telling the other guy at the wheel when to throttle back, and when to give her full power.  After a series of particularly frightening encounters with huge waves, the guy at the wheel heard the other fellow at the door kind of laughing.  Thinking this was a sign of relief of tensions, my friend felt secure that they had made it in, and was about to give the boat full power up the channel when suddenly she was on her nose, inches away from going clear over to her doom.  The last sea had loomed up so big behind them that the guy at the door totally lost his voice to terror, only managing to croak out a high pitched laughing sound when he tried to warn the guy at the helm to back off on the power and hang on.

     Phil went on with his story of the, mimicking someone nervously puffing on smoke after smoke, talking about the Old man as they worked their way toward the harbor entrance.  “He is crazy you know!  Scared to get into an air plane, won’t go on the roll a coaster at the fair, but he will come out here any old time!”

It wasn’t crazy, or some kind of macho proof of toughness that motivated Simon to push that boat out across the bar in all weather scraping up a pile of fish to market.  Years later, when talking about that business it was clear to me that he got sick and scared like the rest of us.  His explanation was simple,  “did it for the love of the family.”

     Back in the Commander, we spent the rest of that night idling along toward Kayak Island, rolling heavily as the wind and sea blew past us from behind.  After the incident with the skiff’s lashings the previous day, we were especially careful to keep an eye on the back deck.  If the original lashings had held just a few hours longer, breaking loose in the heart of the gale, the outcome of our little adventure would have been tragically different, but a combination of luck, and the skill of the boats builders were with us that night, and at six in the morning, I even managed to scramble up a bit of breakfast before lurching my way into the little stateroom where my sleeping bag provided a few hours of fitful rest. 

     When I made my way back up to the wheel house at noon, mug of strong coffee mixed with two packets of hot chocolate in hand the visibility was only marginally better than it had been the night before.  The sky was on the water, with wind driven spray and rain squalls reducing visibility to near zero.  Thankfully the radar provided a comforting vista, showing the western tip of the island. Cape St. Elias just a few miles ahead off our starboard quarter.   Safety just around the corner, but it was not going to be easy getting there.  The relative comfort of the downhill slide was ending as we encountered lines of tidal currents peaking the waves up and throwing them at us from a variety of angles.  We were frequently pitched over from one side to the other, reducing speed even more and hanging on to keep our feet somewhere near the deck.  I remembered that when we were kids the Old man had told us that he used to walk from the deck up onto the wall in the wheel house of the Meldon as she rolled along the Washington coast.  At the time we thought he was just bull shitting, but now I knew it was true.

     The strategy from the beginning of our run toward the island had been to arrive at the cape far enough to seaward not only to clear the shallows extending for some distance out from the point, and to miss some of the worse of the tide rips created by the island interaction with the sea.  At the same time we close enough to minimize a lengthy run taking the sea on our starboard beam.  Uncomfortable in most sea conditions, this morning it would be dangerous.

     Throughout these long early afternoon hours, Tom stayed on the wheel much of the time, the intensity of the changing sea conditions proving too much for the automatic pilot to manage.  The radar sang a steady beat, giving a clear picture of the island, even showing the scrambled water extending like a fog out from the sharper image of the rocky coast line.  I kept thinking about the time a few years before, when I met guy at a party who had been cast away somewhere along the shoreline that we were watching as a green blob extending out to the north east in the radar screen.  I clearly remembered the boat in which he was working in town that spring, getting ready for the trip north, although it never occurred to me that a vessel that small, and seemingly unfit for the open ocean would be making its way across the gulf past Kayak Island.  Apparently the skipper had been doing it for years.  On this occasion, his luck ran out, and they were caught in a screaming southeaster, not unlike the storm we were fighting at the moment.  No doubt they were anticipating the same refuge for which we were headed, but a fatal miscalculation put them on the beach somewhere short of the cape.  I don’t know if their navigational systems were washed out by the storm, or the engine failed and before they knew it they were in the breakers and the boat that had carried them all the way from Bellingham was suddenly gone.  The fellow telling me the story said that when the boat disappeared he didn’t see his boss again, but by some fluke of luck his head managed to come to the surface just in time, with seemingly endless periods of being forced below by the huge breakers marching toward the beach.  To his amazement he managed to crawl up the rocky beach, where he hung onto life by a fingernail for a couple of days until his rescue, at one point actually going back in the water and working his way off shore a bit in an attempt to keep a comfortable distance from an aggressive looking bear.

     Sea birds skimmed the sides of the huge waves as if it were just another day in the office for them as we inched our way closer to the island.  Determined to avoid a trip through the surf, we watched our curse closely, keeping the rocky point well to the east of our projected course.  Radar will pick up any object it hits, wave tops and rain as well as the things a guy really needs to see in order to run the boat.  Tuning adjustments are made to minimize the return from rain and sea, especially in a circle closer to the boat, but of course one needs to be careful not over adjust.  I once had a fellow fishing with me who liked a clear screen for better viewing.  Once when I got up from a nap, and had a look into the radar to check our position, I noticed that a five hundred foot ship less than five miles from us, clearly visible by the naked eye, had been tuned out in his attempts to clear the screen of some rain squalls that had been moving through our area earlier in the afternoon.

     By now, the sea conditions were getting tricky.  The combined effect of the current, waves coming off the island toward us that were generated by the huge combers breaking and bouncing back, with the wind still blowing at storm force, spelled trouble.  Both of us were kept busy watching for the moment when we would suddenly drop into a hole at the base of a peak of water moving into us from an angle just off our right bow.  Tommy was on the wheel, and I had one hand on the throttle and the other on the clutch lever.  As she fell into the deep trough in front of one of these little mountains of water, I would pull the throttle back to idol, and slip her out of gear.  This prevented us from powering into the sea with less than desirable results.

With a huge scoop of dark water, frothing at the edges lapped over the bow, she would suddenly rise and be tossed back on her ass, as if we were on a surf board paddling out for a good ride.  Hanging on we rode it out, up and back then in one motion plunging back down the other side of the wave into the next trough line.  Usually these steep ones ran in pairs or several in a row, and it was a trick to put it back in gear and goose it just enough to maintain steerage before diving into the next one with a bit more energy than would have been good for us.  Then too, every time the engine slowed we had just that much more to go before clearing the point and gaining the respite of the flat water.  So as soon as she began rising from the second big one, I would slip it back into forward and advance the throttle in an attempt to regain weigh to the maximum extent possible.  It may have been as dangerous as other situations in which it was touch and go for the boat, but my recollection is that we were just taking it as hard work and no more.  Tommy fought the wheel to keep her on course, and I attempted to keep her from plowing into a wall of water that could easily stove in the windows and wash the accommodation out with icy salt water.

     Every time we got into an area of comparatively flat water, not that anything that day would fall into a category the average person would recognize as flat, Tommy would engage the auto pilot and turn back to peer into the rubber hood on the radar.  I always took the next turn, anxiously measuring our progress with the range rings that the rotating cursor scribes at intervals of two, four, or eight miles depending on the maximum range setting on the instrument.  The painfully slow progress was marked in the movement of these rings across the black circle of our radar reality, milestones marked by reaching the ring that represented the next range setting.  At the beginning of the watch the bright line of the island’s rocky shore jutted into the upper edge of the twenty four mile range.  In that setting the distance from the center of the round cathode ray tube, that defined our visible world was twenty four miles with each range marker appearing at eight mile intervals.  When the tip of the island just began to cross the third ring, representing the sixteen mile range, we switched to the closer maximum range, which was not only a psychological step, but also improved our perspective and the detail we could see in the image on the screen.

     As the afternoon dragged on the lines of tide rips and scrambled water got closer to one another until finally we were in a whipped up froth that was tossing us around in a constant flurry of pitching and rolling.  We would drop into the front side of a sea, be slapped on the side by another, rolling us on beams ends with the bow battling its way up from a deep scoop of green sea water, then the force of many tons of concrete in her belly would be yanked once again toward the center of the earth sending us reeling back across the ark not unlike going over one of the steeper humps on a huge Roller coaster.  Tommy was furiously working the wheel to keep us on course, as these seas and currents were swishing us left and right with nearly the same force as we were going up and down.  Tommy fighting her every move with an expert hand on the wheel, and me doing my best at the throttle to keep us chugging forward without driving too deep into one of those ragged monster seas as we slowly made the point and beyond to the deep water where we could make our turn for the promised land of protection under the lea of the island.

     It had been a fight, more like a tough period playing defense on a hockey team, against an offensive powerhouse that keeps coming at you with rush after rush across the blue line.  Let up for a moment and the puck would be in the back of the net, or in our case we could easily have taken a one way swim.  Never the less, we did begin to ease up a bit as the big wheel at our stern turned water that was beginning to experience the calming effect of the wall of rock slowly closing us off from the open sea to the south.  By now we could see three huge Russian factory trawlers that had pulled in for refuge from the storm ahead of us.  Lit up in the distance they looked like little towns, representing warmth and comfort with the lights showing through the mist.  Phil had come in when we made the corner, and seeing the Russians hiding behind the island he felt vindicated in his decision to turn tail and run from the storm.  A skipper always feels as if it is his first duty to push through no matter what, and turning around just because the wind blows a little can make a guy feel a bit of a (woos).  If those big ships found it prudent to duck in for a while, and got there ahead of us, then we certainly made a valiant attempt to get on down the line before being forced back.

In calm water now, we passed close by one of the trawlers, and saw a woman stuck her head and upper body out of a window to have a better look at us.  Close enough to identify as a woman, to far for a good look, in my mind at least she was an exotic beauty, and I imagined all kinds of things about life in that ship, with girls and parties of vodka and other strange, foreign delights.  The reality of life in those ships may have been somewhat less glamorous.  Whatever the case, in a moment the fog and rain closed in and the international encounter was over, just a memory and fading blips on the radar behind.

     By now the Barbara Ann had come in view on the radar as well.  They had never been more than a couple miles from us throughout the entire night, but we could not pick them out in the radar due to the sea conditions.  Now we even caught a glimpse of them in the occasional openings through the mists, and it felt comforting knowing that we were not completely alone with the Russians in this desolate country.

Once we were well in the lea of the island the sea conditions calmed down considerably.  The boat was rolling along about the same as a typical day on the ocean, but we were not able to move around with out hanging on at every turn and life quickly began to return to normal.  A large roast was produced and prepared in a big pan along with potatoes and carrots to cook in the juices.  Soon the smell of a hot dinner wafted throughout our little home, and tired spirits began to recover from the long hours in the storm.  The twelve or fifteen mile run into the hidie hole seemed to take forever, but by late afternoon Phil had idled the boat up close to a shingle beach in a bite somewhere toward the back end of the long narrow island.  By now a light snow was falling, and we could smell the deep forest close above us as the anchor chain rattled out over the roller on the bow, and the boat was backed up several yards to allow enough scope on the road to hold her in place for the night. 

     Soon we were nestled snugly in the protection of the island with the Barbara Ann rafted up alongside, the water now quiet except for a very low level surge that just moved the boats a bit on the anchor cable.  Sometimes they would pull one way or another and the length of heavy chain that added weight and holding power to the anchor would roll a bit, sending a clanking sound through the steel cable into the hull, letting us know that all was well in the mud below our feet.  Settling down to a huge, hot dinner was a joy that is very hard to describe.  Life on the beach does not usually offer the level of contrast between surviving the raging gale at sea, followed by the relief of a hot meal in the quiet safety of the little protected bay, close up to the primeval Alaskan forest.  We were still a thousand miles from home, but as the savory roast beef and gravy smothered mashed potatoes were enjoyed over uproarious laughter filling the now fully let galley and mess room, it was much further than that to the still raging storm on the other side of the mountains of Kayak Island.  Let it blow, we were safe and warm with good food and friends.

Copyright 2012 - Paul Petersen

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