Everyone keeps asking me how the weather is out here. Today I woke up to pouring cats and dogs rain, and it's about 50 degrees. We had a cold snap in early October which surprised me. It got really cold for a day and the wind wasn't strong, but it was a northerly that had a strong smell of ice from the polar cap. My guess is that the ice will be worse this year than last, simply because the summer was so short and the cold stayed too late into June for it to properly thaw. The winds shifted, having delivered their omen, and the weather has been mild, even when we have had an occasional snow flurry. But that smell of ice is a terrible omen in October. It means a hard winter is coming. When I fished for a living, early ice was a bad thing. It meant that when we went up to St. Paul and St. George Island, most of the grounds would be covered with ice by the end of the season in February. We would try to stay ahead of the ice, but sometimes it would start to move quickly for reasons I never understood, except that a little warm weather was enough to break it up and cause the field to expand. Keep in mind that "warm" is defined by anything from barely above freezing to 50 degrees for a four hour minimum. Then fishing became a game of seek-and-find if you lost out on cat-and-mouse. Cat-and-mouse meant setting pots withing ten miles of the ice and hoping that there would be enough soaking time for them to catch crab before we had to pull them and run. Sometimes we got our pots first, and sometimes the ice got them first. When the ice won we had to get out our binoculars. During those times I was in the pilot house with the skipper, keeping a lookout on one side of the boat, while he watched the other side. The ice covered the buoys we used to mark the locations of our pots, and sometimes it would catch them in a cluster of bergs and drag them along with it. It was not unusual for us to find our pots and other boats' pots 10 to 30 miles from their original set location. One record discovery found a pot over 150 miles away. I liked being in the ice. Occasionally we saw seals or walruses lounging about on icebergs. Sometimes they would slip into the water, but most of the time they just watched us push our way through the bergs. When we weren't chasing pots, or I had to give up and feed the crew before they starved to death, it was strange to hear the scraping and banging of bergs against the hull from inside the galley. If we hit one a little hard it echoed through the galley with a frightening eeriness. Other times I heard the engines reverse as the skipper suddenly realized he was getting a little close to a big berg. I preferred being topside in the ice to listening to the ice bang the hull in the galley. It didn't sound so weird when the noise came from under me instead of around me. In the galley it was like being in a steel coffin and listening to rats trying to scratch their way in. Besides, there were a lot of sunny days and the bergs were beautiful as they sparkled in the sunshine, even if they were a threat to our livelihood and the safety of our vessel. Sometimes the skipper would take a nap and I would drive. One time we hit an opening in the ice that was like a river through land and I gunned the engine. I decided to follow a tributary in the break and found that the wake of the boat started to close it as I entered. I was still doing about six knots, which is fast in the ice, deathly fast, and I had to reverse quick to keep from ramming a berg. We tapped her hard, but there was no damage to the ship. Even so, the skipper got up and gave me a lecture on speeding. Later, when I went down to hang out on deck and help the guys haul pots while someone else eagled the ice for buoys, the guys all laughed and teased me. "Woman," Thor said, "you are crazy!" "What were you trying to do, sink us?" Kevin asked, (he worried about everything.) "There is never a dull moment with you around, I have never met anyone like you!" little Ed told me for about the hundredth time. There is a phenomena known as the Aleutian Stare. If anything will cause it, watching the ice for buoys day after day will. I finally had to tell the skipper I needed a break for a couple of days because watching the ice was starting to weird me out and leave me disoriented. I was good at spotting buoys, and after the first day out of the pilot house the skipper started asking me if I was feeling better because he really wanted me back on sentinel duty. I stayed away from the binoculars for a couple of days and then went at it again. I was surprised to find that other boats had missed me. It seemed that I had sung out the locations of their buoys more frequently than anyone else and had helped quite a few boats get their pots back. One person had started calling me "Eagle Eyes." The first time I called out a fish and game number to let someone know where their pot was I heard, "Hey, Eagle Eyes is back! Help us find our pots, Woman!" The ice was our friend in a storm. It takes wind on water to make waves. Wind on ice only makes wind. There are terrible storms in the winter months on the Bering Sea. When Peggy started hailing our area with a report of gale force winds we headed for the ice if the storm was coming from the south. We would try to move our pots first if it was coming from the north and just let the ice catch up to us. When the seas became too bad for us to work the deck we would dive into the ice, nosing our ship in deep among the bergs, and go to bed. The guys slept while I stood the wheel watch. I sat many long hours watching the wind pick up snow and whip it across the ice like a howling banshee in a confetti parade. Peggy seemed to like the word "gale" in winter. I always promised myself that if I ever had a turn of luck I would buy myself a boat, and just maybe several fishing boats. I would name my boats "The Gale Fleet" and give them names like Gale Force, Gale Wind, Stormy Gale, Gale Winds Tomorrow, Big Gale, and just for laughs, Here's Gale. We fished in 15 foot seas on the smaller boats and then jogged out the storms when they reached 20 feet or higher. The bigger boats could tough it out fishing in 20 foot seas and then they had to quit if it got any worse. I saw a 98 foot crabber called the Guiding Star disappear in the troughs of huge swells that preceded one of the worst storms of the year in 1992. That same storm blew up a 50 foot wave that took out the windows of the vessel I was on. It also sank six vessels and took the life of a deck hand trying to put chains on a stack of crab pots on the Alaskan Trader. Yet somehow the Little Star came home safely. Seeing those seas in that storm made me realize there was no such thing as a boat that is big enough in the northern seas. The ocean is always bigger and mightier and it has claimed many a ship and its crew in November. I wondered if I should take in my Halloween decorations or leave them out for the true Samhain on November 6th. I have been feeling the coming of the winds. But my angel says the first gale of 80+ knots won't come until the day after, which is Saturday. I reckon it'll get up over a hundred knots. If so, I may not go to work, but instead will call in and tell them they might want to close early. I don't get off until midnight and the cabs usually quit running by 10 p.m. when the winds hit their peak. A blow will go most of a day and all of a night, laying down sometime the next morning. I feel sad for the boats out trying to catch king crab. They will get the hell knocked out of them before its over and some will sink. The high winds always find the weak and the stupid and take them down like wolves on a herd of caribou. I know, I've been out there and had my share of close calls. Well, that's all for the weather report. It's been warm for an overcast and rainy day. More like spring down south. But then after eleven years up here, I don't feel the cold like people in the lower 48 do.
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