inFlux 2005

story_Sarah Kai Acker
photography_Ryan Falley

In the coastal waters of Oregon, men — some barely out of high school — work around the clock to earn the kinds of paychecks that doctors see. For a few months amid the unforgiving winter swells of the North Pacific, they pick their way along the rocky Oregon coast, hauling crab pots.

Claude Badet, a Frenchman who fell into fishing half a lifetime ago, says life on the boat is like the Wild West. Trade buffalo for migrating gray whales clipping along at twenty-six knots per hour and dusty leather chaps for orange rubber suits slick with rain and fish guts, and the image is apt. These men are governed by few rules, and they work in a wild and dangerous place. The time the men spend beyond the jetties at the mouth of Oregon’s Yaquina Bay may be the only thing that holds them together in their boom-and-bust lifestyles. But one day, they will return from a run, look into the hold at too few crabs, and realize that the season is almost over.

The work is dangerous: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and depending on the year, fishing and logging vie for the title of most perilous profession in the United States. In the beginning of the crabbing season, which opens December 1, crews spend weeks on the ocean derby fishing — working night and day with no respite. To add to the danger of difficult work on zero sleep, the Dungeness crabbing season can be the most volatile fishing time of the year, with sudden swells periodically capsizing boats led by weary skippers. Most fishing fatalities occur in December and January — the two most profitable months of the season.

Perhaps danger, and its payoff, is the draw. Dungeness crab is the most valuable single-species fishery in the state of Oregon. Last year, fishermen caught an unprecedented thirty-one million dollars-worth of Dungeness. Al Pazar, a forty-nine-year-old lifetime fisherman, holds one of the 350 coveted permits that allow Oregon fishermen to catch the crustaceans commercially. He inspires my confidence with his paternal mien and a kind, knowledgeable bearing when he agrees to let me come along on an eighteen-hour run.

I meet Pazar in Yaquina Bay at 7 a.m. (an atypical late start) near his boat on Dock 5. Delma Ann, a fifty-one-foot crabbing boat, can be retrofitted with equipment for fishing Chinook salmon and albacore tuna during Dungeness off-seasons. He leads me through the cramped cabin of the forty-two-year-old boat, up a ladder precariously mounted to the cabin wall, and through a trap door.

We enter the top house, a control room and an office rolled into one — with the spaciousness of a handicapped bathroom stall. It contains a Global Positioning System, a sonar Downsounder that doubles as a TV, a laptop, a CD player, a FISH 12 MK-11 (a device that records Delma’s path, or “slug trail”), and about a dozen other gadgets either tacked to the ceiling or balanced on the dash. This is where Pazar spends most of his time on the boat, shouting orders through an open window to his two-man crew, joking with other fishermen over a CB radio, tracking weather conditions, keeping an eye on currents, and navigating Delma Ann over swells as smoothly as possible.

Pazar leans against an upholstered swivel chair bolted to the floor, and I sit down next to him on a matching blue vinyl bench, its color corroded by the briny ocean air. A school portrait of his sixteen-year-old daughter is mounted to the front windshield. He engages the throttle, flips a few rusty switches, and we’re off to sea.

Pazar explains through his coarse gray mustache that the first leg — crossing the bar — is the most dangerous part of the journey. “I’ve had some experiences on this bar that have made my knees weak,” he says. The blood drains from my face. To cross the bar, Pazar must navigate through two jetties that redirect the Yaquina River into the Pacific Ocean. The competing currents of the two bodies of water can cause thirty-foot swells. Noticing my white hands death-gripping the vinyl bench, Pazar assures me that things are pretty calm today.

As we make our way out to sea, we pass Hallmark Fisheries, a large seafood distributor where fishermen can load bait directly onto their boats and unload their catch at the end of their run. As a gift to the fishermen, Hallmark commissioned a mural of a well-endowed, topless mermaid on one of its large façades facing the bay. On the side visible to tourists is a breaching gray whale.

Pazar confidently maneuvers Delma Ann under the Yaquina Bay Bridge and “between the jaws,” or the jetties, as he tells me his life story. “You know, there are old fishermen and there are dumb fishermen. But there are no old, dumb fishermen,” he says with a wry smile. Pazar’s father was a schoolteacher in Tacoma, Washington, who ran a charter boat in the summers, so Pazar has been fishing since he was eight. He bought his first boat at sixteen and fixed it up in his high school shop class. Pazar enrolled in the fishery science program at Oregon State University but dropped out after running out of money. There, he met his wife, a business major, and they began fishing for salmon together in Washington.

Shortly after the Boldt decision passed in 1974, which allotted half of harvestable salmon to Native American tribes, they moved to Florence, Oregon, and continued fishing together until they had kids. In 1986, they bought the Krab Kettle, a seafood market in Florence, which Pazar’s wife runs during the labor-intensive Dungeness crabbing season.

By the time we’re safely through the jaws, I feel a little queasy. Pazar recommends I get some fresh air. I climb down into the cabin where a young crewman is sleeping and head to the back deck. There, Badet, thirty-nine, is leaning against the railing. He pulls a cigarette from a blue box of American Spirits, offering one to me.

One thing has become routine in Badet’s life — he always comes back to the same little coastal town to crab with Pazar.

Badet looks no older than thirty — which he attributes to the sea air — despite a penchant for chain-smoking. He is friendly, yet he smiles rarely and unconvincingly. Badet amuses me with stories of his recent five-week transatlantic adventure as he pulls on his cigarette between sentences. After spending the summer traveling Europe, he hitched a ride on a French charter boat to make it back to the United States before the Dungeness season began. He landed in Annapolis, Maryland, and made his way to Newport in time to help Pazar ready Delma Ann for the start of the crabbing season.

In preparation for the season, the men baited six hundred buoyed crab pots, each weighing up to 125 pounds when empty. They positioned the traps on the ocean floor by attaching them along strings. Each buoy has a number, identifying the fisherman who owns the trap. The boat moves along a string, and each successive trap is emptied. Some strings have as few as a dozen pots, others more than one hundred. When fishermen find a good spot to place a string, they hold onto it for seasons to come. “Crabs are like the swallows at [San Juan] Capistrano or the butterflies at Monterey,” Pazar explains. “They come back to the same place at the same time every year.”

The same could be said for Badet. After a couple months of eighteen-hour days, he has the money, hence the freedom, to do things he enjoys: traveling, playing guitar, silk-screening T-shirts with a homemade printing machine, and picking up new hobbies on a whim. But one thing has become routine in Badet’s life — he always comes back to the same little coastal town to crab with Pazar.

Badet is a renegade among renegades. “I’m a minimalist,” he says. “That’s the thing about fishermen — they’re not very smart,” he comments, referring to the many who blow all their money early in the season on big trucks and alcohol.

Badet started fishing as a “freak accident” in Alaska. He was living in San Francisco and bought a twenty-dollar book entitled How to Make a Lot of Money that directed him to travel to Seattle and join an Alaskan fishing crew. After three months at sea working eighteen-hour days fishing for black cod, he received the biggest paycheck he’d ever seen. “I brought it to the bank and was like, ‘Is this a joke?’” Badet says. When they cashed it, he succumbed to the impulse common in other fishermen — he threw a party and bought a motorcycle, riding it home to San Francisco.

“I had a boat sink on me once. So I went for a swim for a while.”

With Dungeness crab meat selling for up to fifty dollars per pound, the money is good — paychecks for crewmen in the first two weeks average ten thousand dollars. Pazar cuts his crew 25 percent of the boat’s revenue. But about 75 percent of the season’s Dungeness crop is caught in the first two months, so profits quickly dwindle. Although Dungeness fishing season is long — running from December 1 until August 14 — few fishermen find it profitable to fish the “scratch,” the meager harvest left after the first few months.

Like gold, the Dungeness is a potentially exhaustible resource despite strict industry-imposed regulations that attempt to maintain the crab’s population. Furthermore, the West has a monopoly on the crustacean; the Dungeness can only be found along a twenty-three hundred-mile swath of coast from central California to the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, the most dangerous North American region for fishing.

Even after two decades in the profession, Badet claims he’s never had a near-death experience at sea. “I had a boat sink on me once.” He shrugs. “So I went for a swim for a while.”

We enter the cabin, and I lie down in a shoebox of a bottom bunk, still feeling nauseous. Badet steps into his rubber suit — bright orange overalls that rise midway up the chest — seeming to intuitively anticipate that the first pots will soon be unloaded. He sits down at a tiny galley table littered with heavy mugs, their bottoms crusted with hot chocolate dregs, and flips through an issue of the Smithsonian. After a few minutes, Pazar disengages the throttle, turning off the soothing hum of the John Deere engine in the hull. The silence stirs Tony Fultz, twenty-two, who has been sleeping soundly for the two hours since we left port.

A scruffy goatee sprouts from Fultz’s chin and thick metal hoops pierce two earlobes and one eyebrow. He is initially a little reticent around me, probably because women rarely board crabbing boats. He hops off the top bunk and suits up in orange rubber, concealing the flame and skull tattoos adorning his lean arms. Fultz and Badet slide on shiny, brown rubber boots and wrap themselves in hooded jackets, readying themselves for the first pots of the day. They slip on cotton gloves, then blue rubber ones, and take their places on deck.

I ascend the ladder to the top house, and Pazar yells explanatory notes as I watch the crewmen’s maneuvers. Badet, the blockman, dips a hooked ten-foot stick called a buoy stick into the ocean and fishes out a rope attached to a buoy. He winds the rope around the block, a hydraulic pulley on an adjustable metal arm.

As the contraption whirls, sputtering saltwater, it pulls up the first crab pot. There is a one-way trap door, called a trigger, and two escape rings the precise size to allow small, unharvestable crabs to flee the pot.

Badet and Fultz hoist the pot onto the ledge of the boat and chuck the usable crabs into the dump box, an open-topped wooden box on four legs. They toss the females and small males — which are illegal to harvest — back to sea and pitch the large males into the fish hole, a 280-cubic-foot pit filled with circulating seawater for storing live crabs. Fultz, the “baiter” (generally prefixed with an obvious joke indicating his proficiency of skill), slaps a vile handful of chopped sardines, razor clams, and squid into the bait jars atop the crab pots.

Even though they’re working with the most repugnant materials — fish guts, acrid base detergents, and all kinds of sea scum dredged up by the pots — the men move together in a graceful pas de deux, each of their quick gestures silently interpreted by the other and reciprocated by an appropriate response.

Between strings, Badet shoots pictures of the shoreline with a 35mm camera. “Every day you see things that no one else sees,” he says. The Oregon shoreline is exquisite: misty coves with waterfalls spouting from jagged cliffs, green, wooded mountains, and fog-eclipsed bluffs. Then Fultz approaches me: “So, you’re from Eugene? There’s some good reefer there, eh?”

Fultz grew up near Newport in Siletz, population 1,133, and has never been more than a hundred miles from home. When he graduated from high school, he went into logging. Shaken after witnessing a gruesome accident involving his father’s best friend, he took a couple of weeks off and never went back. He then decided to try his hand at another dangerous profession — crabbing.

But, for Fultz, greater dangers may lie on solid ground. In the last six months, he has attended two funerals of friends who died in drunk-driving accidents and has blown up or totaled three automobiles of his own. “I fuckin’ like to party real hard, and I fuckin’ hate being tied down,” he declares. A picture of the most recent incendiary vehicle — a glossy, raised red truck — is taped to the ceiling of his bunk as a memento.

I head into the cabin to chug some water, dehydrated from the salt and sun so ubiquitous on deck. Pazar descends the ladder. “I guess I haven’t explained the bathroom situation,” he says. “We have a bucket.”

The men continue to work the strings until dark, repeating the same graceful motions with precision and complete concentration. Between pots, Fultz rips up razor clams with bare hands, saws through partially frozen sardines, and slices up a four-foot squid — its vivid red, green, and orange viscera oozing from its rubbery body.

In the muted watery plain, streaks of purple clouds obscure the setting sun, suffusing their edges with a fiery orange glow — the same colors as the Dungeness.

Delma Ann covered about a hundred miles that day, zig-zagging deeper out to sea, from Newport to Neskowin. We sail back to port on an obsidian landscape — chipped black water heaving beneath our feet. The men’s boots dry on electric boot warmers, Fultz’s with “Fultzy” scrawled in black marker.

It is 1 a.m. when we reach harbor and unload the day’s catch under the mermaid at Hallmark. Badet descends into the fish hole and crates up crabs, as Fultz hoists them onto Hallmark’s platform. Fultz shouts to Badet in a mock French accent, “Claude-ee! Claude-ee!” Badet ignores him and continues to work earnestly with Pazar. “You can see the bottom,” Badet says disappointedly, pointing to the bright aqua floor of the fish hole peeking through a tangle of legs and claws. Scratch season has already begun.

Badet offers his couch for me to crash on. His place is meticulously clean and uncluttered — a vast contrast to the cramped, chaotic cabin on the boat. He brews peppermint tea and I quickly pass out to the sound of the ocean winds.

I awake early, the foggy sky outside aglow with a warm sun. Badet emerges from his bedroom. He smiles at me and walks to a large window facing west. There, a pair of binoculars sits near the window. He raises them to his eyes and stares out to sea.