I was one of the lucky few that February of 1971 - getting a deckhand job on a shiny new 104' king crabber, headed up into the Bering Sea for the latest Alaskan gold rush. Our boat looked sooo tough tied to the dock in Seattle - like it could take anything that the North Pacific could throw at it.

The second afternoon out of Seattle on my watch, alone in the pilothouse, I saw a target on the radar through the snow ahead where there should have been only open water. I woke the skipper, the crew came up and we slowed, peering into the gloom and swirling snow. Then we saw it: breakers - in a hundred feet of water, where a southerly gale was meeting a fierce tidal current. We tried

to find a way through, but there was none. So with no chart, and only the mate's thin memory of a trip years before, we tried to pick our way through the islands to the east and into the sheltered waters of the Inside Passage. Twice we picked our way through the dark and snow only to have our brillant crab lights reveal a dead end, with angry seas freezing on a granite shore and spruce trees.

Two days after that a bitter gale roared out of the Copper River Valley, and blasted our boat so heavily with ice at Cape St. Elias, that we were in danger of capsizing. "Suiting up" in raingear over insulated coveralls, we crept up on deck with baseball bats and hammers to beat off the ice and shovel it over the side. Finally finding a few acres of shelter off a long dead town, we put as many crab pots as we could into our big crab tanks below deck, to lower our center of gravity.

To be continued...