The Day I Fell For Patty Smyth
..or..
Tales of the Blue Viking

It was in the early 80's, . . . along about the tail end of the great Alaskan King Crab boom that had started taking off around 1976-77. Instant millionaires had sprung up everywhere amidst the survivors of the great King Crab rush. Even skippers who were only marginally successful, . . . and the lowly deckhands on the great crab boats of the Alaskan fleet, were suddenly lavishly wealthy. Most of these guys weren't shy about showing off, either, unabashedly wallowing in the playthings and finery that their hard-earned wealth bought them.

The word was out. In every fishing port great and small, on every seacoast in the world, news of the wild bonanza in Alaskan King Crab spread like a wildfire. Every young kid on every dock with a scrap of balls and the slightest dreams of making a fortune, yearned to sign on with an Alaskan crab boat–––any Alaskan crab boat.

The crabbing was still fairly wide open back then, too, the choking regulations and burdensome mandates of the fishcops and politicians still not yet foisted upon the burgeoning fishery. That inevitable strangulation followed predictably soon thereafter, as the inefficient but inexorable bureaucracy caught up with the lightning-paced, free-booting crabbing industry.

Ah, . . . those were simpler times. Survival of the fittest, . . . dog-eat-dog, . . . kill or be killed.

Yeah, it was a tough deal chasing the big bugs . . . and for every wild success story, there were legions of ship's crews on the fickle waters of the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska who perished futilely in their quest for a piece of the big King Crab bounty . . . many simply vanishing without a trace. Brutal winter storms wreaked swift havoc on hundreds of seemingly stout and secure marine vessels, making those unfortunate souls aboard some of them the the fodder of officially compiled work-fatality statistics, trumpeting commercial fishing as the most dangerous occupation on the face of the earth.

Damned right the memories of those voyages are growing fonder!

Yes, in the rich nourishing soil of passing time, those recollections of a raw and prehistoric landscape hulking from the iridescent green broth of a violent ocean, . . . those memories of the jubilation, the excitement, and sometimes, the pure sheer terror of the whole thing, . . . grow even larger than the larger-than-life scenes they began as.

I got on the Viking in the winter of '83. I can vividly recall sitting at the familiar, well worn bar of the renowned Anchor in Corona, Alaska that evening, all those years ago. The Anchor Bar is situated directly across from the main entrance to Corona's boat harbor, and as I drank, I could see the reflection of the harbor's hypnotic twinkling lights in the Anchor's sweeping backbar mirror. I had was killing a little time swilling down beers and schnapps, and the alcohol seemed to be slowly warming my frozen extremities on that particularly numbing, cold northern night. My modest intoxication suddenly turned into an ecstatic euphoria, though, when Billy Hunter came bursting through the Anchor's front door.

The little harborside tavern seemed busy that night, as always, but somehow it was unusually quiet. Groups of normally loud and intense fisherman sat at their respective tables drinking and talking with rare reserve, while a few cannery rats quietly shot pool at the far end of the room. Billy, a drinking buddy of mine and a long-time deckhand on the Blue Viking, brought me out of my boozy reverie amidst the murmuring voices and clacking billiard balls. Billy told me he'd been looking for me everywhere. Seems they were short a crewman on the Viking, and he said that if I wanted to, I was welcome to come along on their next trip out first thing in the morning.

Are you kidding? Of course I would go!

I hit the docks bright and early the next morning, whistling a tune and dancing on air, my bulging sea bag in tow, feeling light as a bag of feathers. I was just like a kid with a brand new toy.

There was the Viking, gleaming and immaculate, an 80 ft. steel monster waiting patiently at her moorings for her next adventure. The crisp February air chilled my lungs as I sucked down nervous breaths stepping from the Viking's slip onto her spotless ironwood decking. A burly browed, rosy cheeked, smiling face popped out of the wheelhouse window nodding for me to come right on up. It was Siggy.

Siggy Iverson was the skipper and owner of the Viking. He had helped build her and he was never long away from the Viking and her tidy stateroom and the helm that was the center of his universe and the true love of his life. Siggy was married, but his wife stayed in Seattle while Sig fished 11 months a year in Alaska.

Siggy was a full blooded Norwegian, a big burly hunk of a man who towered over most mere mortals. There were lots of Norwegian fisherman around Alaska in those days and they proudly called themselves Squareheads. "Uff da, baby!" Other folks called them Squareheads too, but not so lovingly.

For a skipper–––many skippers were notorious for being assholes in the eyes of their crews–––I found out that Siggy was one great guy. Sig was someone you'd want on your side in a fight in a dark alley, a genuine give-you-the-shirt-off-his-back sort of fellow, and a ruthless scrapper all rolled into one . . . and damned if he didn't have the most monstrously huge square shaped head you ever did see!

Billy, the other deckhand Marty Danson, and Siggy were sitting in the Viking's wheelhouse drinking huge steaming mugs of hot coffee as I came up. Siggy was judiciously doling out small bowls of Alaska's finest herbal tonic (some exotic and unctuous import from Hawaii), as I would find he was frequently wont to do. Sig handed me the genuine elk antler pipe that he had crafted himself on some far flung journey whilst anchored up, he said, hidden away from a violent arctic gale.

Welcome aboard!" said Siggy, as I took the tiny pipe in mild astonishment. This was my kind of ship!

And then we were off.

Leaving Corona's snug little harbor, Siggy weaved our way out through the many islands and islets dotting Orca Inlet on the way to the more open waters of Prince William Sound proper. The Viking had some gear strung out inside the west side of Sound and the plan was to work through those strings before we ventured out into the Gulf of Alaska where the rest of the gear was set.

The tools of crab fishing are similar to the more familiar tools of lobster fishing, . . . namely traps, or crabpots, . . . with long lines and buoy markers attached to retrieve them with. The individual pots are set out in the water, one after another in long rows called 'strings.'

I had been on crab boats before––Dungeness Crab boats, fishing in the summer and the fall––but never in the winter time. This was fishing in the major leagues for the big bugs.

It was the middle of February in Alaska–––and that means it's one nasty sonovabitch out there . . . and as we left the inlet and approached the middle of the Sound, the water started getting choppy, stirred up violently by the mirthless arctic gusts howling in over the mountain tops. We weren't two hours out of town before the dreamy honeymoon turned into a dreadful nightmare.

As the Viking's big steel hull plunged violently against the relentless wind and waves, I decided my bunk might be a good place to ride this roller-coaster out. The only problem was that with each rise and fall of the boat, I became momentarily suspended in air, and then slammed into my bunk an instant after the boat hit each new wave. Sitting at the galley table might have been a better idea than the bunk, but by that time I was feeling a tad too queasy to bother getting up.

The next two hours of being hammered into my bunk seemed an eternity, but it finally wore me down into a fitfully uncomfortable sleep. The next thing I knew, Billy was shaking my shoulder calling me up for a wheel watch. Holding on for dear life, I managed to crawl up the companionway into the wheelhouse, and I listened incredulously to Billy's brief instructions.

The Viking was a million dollar rig and she had all the fancy bells and whistles, but Billy just mumbled out a heading while pointing at the big compass, and said to keep my eyes peeled for any floating logs and junk we might encounter. He said I was to knock on Sig's door behind me when we came abreast of a certain headland that he waved at on the radar screen before he vanished unceremoniously to his bunk in the forecastle.

I sat in the captain's seat, still bouncing with every wave while looking blindly ahead into the black winter gale. The huge waves were dark and menacing as they came under our vainly struggling running lights. I realized I would never see any stupid logs in that slop even if we should come squarely upon one. I had literally tons of steel and raw horsepower riding under my aching butt, and I nervously fingered the tiny two inch joy-stick that drove the whole shebang thinking, "These stupid waves couldn't knock the shit out of me! No, Sir!
I was already scared shitless!"

Mercifully, after aeons at the wheel, I heard Sig's stateroom door opening behind me, and an instant later he had his giant hand on my shoulder, laughing and saying something about the "nice weather."

"Lay down for a while," Sig told me, " We'll be on the gear soon."

"Yeah, . . . so?" I remember thinking . . . and then it dawned on me what he meant.

"You mean we're going to fish in this fucking shit?"

Well, . . . we fished. And we fished, and we fished, and we fished, . . . and then we fished some more.

Those fucking crab lights turned night into day and the miserable LORAN radio receiver unerringly brought us to string after string of fucking gear just like clockwork. My brain was numbed by the endless physical exertion, not only from the fishing, but just struggling around in every bit of warm wool clothing I had to my name . . . and we were all swathed in heavy rubber raingear from head to toe, on top of all that.

The only breaks we got from working were when we were running between distant strings or having a hurried dinner. If you want to call a couple of hours in the early A.M. a night's sleep, . . . well, yeah, . . . we got that for a break. Sometimes.

This crab fishing was a ball-buster, too. The crabpots were seven feet square, a couple of feet deep, and weighed several hundred pounds each . . . empty. Sure, we used hydraulics for the hauling and launching of the huge pots, but those lifts were mainly vertical. We still had to move the gear around on deck laterally, with brute force in many situations when the inertia of a swell and some well placed momentum failed to do the trick.

Moving tons of gear around to new locations, I learned, was an integral part of catching the wily bottom dwellers, and this process was no small feat, rest assured. Not only was it necessary to stack the heavy pots on the deck, much like one stacks bowls and dishes in a cupboard, but the line rigging each pot had to be coiled and stowed on deck, as well. Most of the gear was lying in 100 fathoms, or 600 ft. of water . . . and that's a lot of line, Mister!

A lot of line, alright! If you were running a string and just pulling a pot up to empty it out and put back in the same spot, the puller would have to coil the line in one spot at his feet as it whizzed in through the heavy hydraulic block. The coiled line from one pot stood almost eye level to a six foot man. When a crew was stacking pots on deck to move them somewhere else, the man coiling would have to break down the lines into two or three separate coils so that they could be carried astern to be stowed with the pots. Even these two and three foot tall coils of line weighed a ton, and it was a herculean effort to move them back and forth, hours and hours on end.

Within a week, my arms, legs, and body went from quivering and exhausted, agony-ridden lumps of flesh to rock hard wiry masses of solid muscle. Better to take on a Jean Claude VanDamme than a well tuned and buffed crab fisherman in top working fettle!

Time spent on deck went from occasional minor apprehension, to downright sheer terror. One particularly nasty day developed into an extremely frightening situation when we encountered a vicious batch of freezing sea spray. This fearful phenomenon encases anything in its path with a deadly layer of ice that grows larger and heavier the longer the object is exposed to it.

The three of us frantically engaged ourselves in beating the quickly forming ice off the rigging and the rails with baseball bats and axes as Sig ran us for the nearest safe harbor as fast as he dared. Unchecked, freezing spray will make a vessel top heavy in a matter of minutes and ultimately cause her to invert. Small wonder so many boats disappeared without a trace in conditions like these.

It wasn't sheer hell all the time, though. During one 60 hour stretch, the fierce waves and winds were even too much for old Sig. We hid out for three and a half days of blissful inactivity, riding the hook in a semi-sheltered cove whose eight foot swells seemed like glass calm compared to where we had just come from. We didn't do a damned thing, either, but lick our wounds, sleep, eat, and play cribbage. We also managed to stay deliciously toasted on Sig's tasty and magical, never-ending stash, which he unselfishly doled out in generous portions.

The maniacal pace Sig set that trip continued for 19 grueling days, interrupted only by the worst weather, and finally, the hold showed signs of filling up with the thousands of bugs we had laboriously hauled up and dumped in it. Heading for the Sound after pulling the final string of gear, Sig was all over the radio waves negotiating like a Wall Street broker, lining up the best possible price he could find for our stuff. Sig spoke with every processor from Seward to Corona and in between before finally striking a deal to sell our catch in Valdez. If the weather held, we'd be in town in 12 hours.

Yahooo! Not that I didn't like these guys on the Viking, but busting our balls for nearly three weeks with hardly a handful of showers between us, I was more than ready for a little jag of what passed for civilization in New Port Valdez.

. . . Me and Patty Smyth? . . .

Well, . . . when we got to Valdez and finally got unloaded, we tied up the boat at the transient dock, cleaned ourselves all up, and hit the town hard. It was a natural progression starting with the sailor's lounge right off the end of the dock, winding the next few blocks into town with a visit to every sleazy gin mill and hole-in-the-wall along the way, and finally culminating at a raucous disco lounge and pool hall at the far end of the village. It sat sparkling and gleaming, crowned with mammoth icicles, bright lights, and loud music blaring into the brutally chill Valdez night.

The place was called Barney's, or Google's, or something, and they had the latest in the new big screen T.V.'s garishly adorning the largest central wall in the joint. In Alaska in 1983, most of the broads around were either still in high school, already married, or were natives or Eskimos. About the only dames you were likely to see out in a bar were heavily made-up coke whores looking for their next horny sugardaddy. Barney Google's was no exception, and already being the wiser to the whole depressing blow-for-sex scene, our little crew contented itself with shooting pool and engaging in the standard practice of prodigious alcohol abuse.

Then it happened. Those miserable fucking sadists at mtv ran a music video that played on the bar's giant screen as big as life, by a new group named Scandal featuring Patty Smyth. The tune was called "Goodbye to You," and the second I laid my female deprived, whiskey-sodden red eyes on Miss Smyth, I knew the world would never be the same....

She was exquisite, . . . a devastating smile, sensuous thick lips, dark deep eyes and a sassy brunette haircut, pert little breasts, and the most finely shaped long legs . . . I mean, man, . . . it was painful! At least when you fell for the little hottie back home in high school, there was a slim chance of doing something about it!

In retrospect, though, it's almost laughable. You see, as the years passed and I became ever more handsome and better looking, Patty's features have hardened and aged, . . . that semi-innocent smirk and fetching insouciance gone forever with Scandal and the infant and novel MtV that once knew how to rock and roll.

Apparently, Patty is nesting these days with that whining has-been tennis playing weasel, Johnny McEnroe, somewhere in the bowels of Gotham. Serves her right. All those years she could've had me, but she ended up with that rich, ex-jock/broadcaster scumbag McEnroe, . . . Tatum O'Neill's cast off garbage.

Ah, well . . . c'est la vie . . .

10-11-2000


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