The Deadliest Earmark

  Deadly commercial crab fishery getting safer

CRAB FLEET: No deaths reported in three years for Bering Sea crabbers.
Alaska's deadliest catch -- the Bering Sea commercial crab fishery -- isn't so deadly anymore.

No crabbers have died in nearly three years, and the death rate this decade is a far cry from the carnage seen through the 1990s, when 70 were killed, figures from the U.S. Coast Guard show.

"This is a really cool story," said Coast Guard Cmdr. Chris Woodley, who worked for years to improve safety in the crab fleet. "I don't think people realize how much things have changed."

Monday kicks off a new crabbing season, with dozens of boats expected to sail out of Dutch Harbor and other ports in pursuit of enormous Bristol Bay red king crab, a regal item on restaurant menus.

The king crab fishery is one of Alaska's most valuable seafood catches, worth at least $53 million at the docks last season. The catch limit is up 31 percent this year to 20.4 million pounds.

Another major harvest, snow crab, won't start in earnest until January.

Alaska crabbing used to be an obscure trade in which taut young men stood an equal chance of flying home rich or in a box. Today, people all over the country know crab captains and crewmen by name, voyaging vicariously aboard wave-battered boats by watching the top-rated Discovery Channel reality show "Deadliest Catch."

The show's cameras will be aboard several crab boats again this season.

Charlie Medlicott, a Coast Guard vessel safety examiner, was in Dutch Harbor on Friday, walking the docks and checking boats loading heavy steel crab traps onto their decks.

"I was telling the Discovery Channel guys the other day, 'You guys calling this show the "Deadliest Catch," you're wrong.' There are other fisheries around the country that have higher fatality rates," Medlicott said.

Read the rest after the jump...

"If you were lucky, like I was you found your destiny. If you were unlucky you found your fate.” That’s how one veteran fisherman described the remarkable Alaska king crab fishery that made millionaires out of men who had no particular qualifications other than a willingness to work ’round the clock whenever they were on the crab, and to risk their lives in one of the most dangerous occupations on earth. See first-hand the efforts of the original pioneers who explored the Bering Sea...the boom era when fortunes were made and boats and shore plants paid off within a single season... and the crash that killed the golden crab. For all those who fish, or simply love adventure."

In Seattle's sprawling Todd Drydocks, workmen this week put the finishing touches on a strange vessel. On its flush deck were a twin-motored seaplane and a radio tower. On port and starboard decks were long rows of machines connected by conveyor belts; in its hold were gleaming, white, airtight compartments.

The ship was the 8,800-ton Pacific Explorer (formerly World War I freighter Mormacrey), the first big floating fish cannery owned by the U.S. Government. It needed all this un-nautical equipment to process daily 700 cases of canned crab and 150 tons of filleted and frozen fish, store 6,100 tons all told. Next month the Pacific Explorer will pick up her brood of four trawlers, sail for a winter cruise in the South Pacific, then next spring head for the Bering Sea.

There, with the blessing of the Department of Interior and the backing ($3,750,000) of RFC, the privately operated Explorer and its trawlers will conduct an important experiment. It hopes to prove that U.S. fishermen can replace the Japanese who, prewar, caught and processed 66% of the world's tuna in their floating canneries, virtually monopolized the $8-million-a-year catch of the Bering Sea's huge king crabs. The Explorer will also find out if Russia will, like Canada, respect international conservation regulations, or, like Japan, flout them.

For use of the ship, the Explorer's operator has guaranteed to pay RFC $50,000 or 55% of the profits, whichever is larger.

Row a Boat. That operator was recently hunched over a tumbler of bourbon in Seattle's exclusive, leather-lined Rainier Club. In his Sunday best, he looked very uncomfortable. He became more uncomfortable when told that the club's whiskey deliveries were smaller than those of some newer clubs. "Goddamn it," he roared, "I go and talk to Mon [Governor Monrad

C. Wallgren]." A Seattle industrialist playing dominoes turned and frowned disapprovingly until someone whispered: "That's Nick Bez. You know, fishing." The frown promptly dissolved into an understanding smile.

Two years ago the frown would have stayed. Few around Puget Sound bothered to inquire about Nick Bez until he was photographed rowing the boat as President Truman fished for salmon in Puget Sound in 1945 (see cut). Puget Sounders learned that hard-muscled, hard-talking Nick Bez was quite a fisherman himself. He owned or controlled 1) three of the biggest salmon canneries in Alaska, 2) a string of fishing vessels, 3) two gold mines, 4) an airline—West Coast Airlines, which next month will start a feeder service fanning from Portland into southwest Washington and western Oregon. Since then Nick Bez has also acquired, with financing from old

A. P. Giannini's Transamerica Corp., the Columbia River Packers Association, the largest salmon cannery in the Pacific Northwest (last year's sales: $8,600,000).

Born 51 years ago on the island of Brae off the coast of Yugoslavia, "Big Nick" came to the U.S. with $1.50 in cash, at 15. He started out fishing for smelts in a borrowed rowboat, was master of a big salmon boat, a purse seiner, within six years. In bloody battles, Big Nick (6 ft. 2 in., 226 Ibs.) led other purse seiners against the beach seiners (who use horses to drag flat nets up on shore), drove most of them out of the $59-million-a-year Alaska salmon industry.

Catch a Big Prize. From then on Big Nick expanded by buying one little boat after another. He branched out into airlines with Alaska Southern Airways in 1931, later sold it to Pan American at a big profit, got back in the business this year with West Coast Airlines.

Big Nick, a generous contributor to the Democratic Party, has been accused of using his political connections to the detriment of small fishermen. This hurts Nick. He confesses that packers, including himself, "cotch too damn many feesh" to maintain present sources of supply. "My interest [in the Explorer]," he recently protested in a ghostwritten letter, "[is] for the postwar stability of the industry, to develop new grounds and methods."

TIME