The Copper River Wind
Most fishermen who work the Alaska coast in winter have a tale or two about the dangers of ice accumulating from flying spray in cold weather. But the swiftness with which dangerous icing happened to us was sobering.
It was February 1971: the legendary Alaska King Crab fishery was just starting to get rolling, and we were headed north to the Bering Sea in our new state of the art 104’ steel crabber with a load of 700-pound crab pots.
We were concerned that if we got into cold rough weather, the ice would accumulate on the pots and threaten our stability. The shipyard engineers had told us not to worry - that as long as we had no more than one layer, we’d be safe.
Our skipper’s brother with years of winter fishing under his belt had a different viewpoint: even our single layer would be too many if we really got into bitter weather.
On the fifth night of our trip, off lonely Cape St. Elias, far from any help, something woke me in the deep of the night. The engine was just idling: unusual, but something else: our little ship had a queer motion, rolling much slower than I was used to. Out the pilothouse windows the problem was plain: ice. A bitter wind and the rough sea had coated every exposed surface with thick ice.
On the bow, our anchor winch was an unrecognizable white lumpy mass, the guard railings becoming a solid wall. On the back deck it was worse: our full load of crab pots just a solid mound of ice.
Then as if to warn us of what was ahead, we dipped the bow into the steep seas, the flying spray freezing instantly to anything it touched, adding to our already dangerously top-heavy condition. Without a word we suited up: raingear over long underwear and sweats, and edged out onto the bow and back deck, with baseball bats, breaking the ice, kicking and shoveling it over the side.
We knew that this was how crab boats died. If the wind came up any stronger, we’d make ice faster than we could get rid of it, our center of gravity inexorably rising until at the end of one of those long slow rolls, we simply kept going and capsized. Other crabbers had; few had survivors.
Three hours we were at it, beating off the ice, finally creeping into the shelter of the land, probably fifty miles from the nearest human. But we couldn’t rest: the wind could change direction, get worse without warning: we had to reduce the number of pots on deck.
So we hoisted off the heavy steel hatch covers, lowered as many pots below deck as we could, laid the rest flat, lowered the boom to the deck. Only then did we feel safe enough to go inside, warm up.
“It’s the Copper River wind,” the skipper’s brother said later up in the pilothouse, “that air gets frozen over those glaciers and just rolls down the valley out over the ocean.”
I told those guys down at the shipyard to put those pots into the hold when we loaded them. ‘Oh, no’ they said, ‘you don’t have to do that.’ Those guys don’t even know what ice is except in their drinks. They think these new super boats can take anything.”
Photos: UW Thwaites 0024-F25, 0036-4024
From my Bering Sea Blues.
