I asked Kathy Lynn Douglas to share her stories with AWH: You expressed interest in my stories. One of my best is the story of how I got to Alaska. I hitched a ride with my boyfriend on the crab boat MV Chief, from Seattle, across the Gulf to Kodiak. This is the full text as previously posted on my blog. Use it as you see fit. end of May, 1973 MV Chief Most of the superstructure of the Chief was painted red, to blend with the rust. The radar wasn’t working, and the skipper was angry about that because getting it fixed was one of the reasons he had been in Seattle. The part needed to repair it had to be ordered, and would be shipped to him to be installed in Kodiak in a week or so. They couldn’t afford to wait in Seattle and miss a few days of the fishery, so they had picked up the supplies they needed and were going out without radar. That’s what the mate said, anyway. I only saw Captain Bill Schimmel once the whole trip, on our third day out, and he wasn’t angry at all then. He was pleasant, and in a hurry, as he ducked into the galley, thanked me for the food he’d been eating for the last few days, and headed back out on deck with a cup of coffee. That’s the only time I ever saw the man. He didn’t mingle with the crew and passengers. Except for that one emergence from his cabin in response to an emergency, he stayed in the cabin or the wheelhouse the entire voyage, drunk. He was red-faced and none too steady that day I saw him in the galley. The mate said he would sober up when they started crabbing. This wasn’t a fishing boat, but a crabber. The mate had told Stony that they were leaving before dawn, and suggested that we bring our gear that night and sleep aboard. My boxed possessions, beyond what we could carry, were shipped to my friend’s address in Anchorage, and we boarded the Chief that night after dark. We had a private cabin belowdecks, 2 narrow bunks stacked just a little forward of amidships, starboard, with a curtained entry. Of the boat’s regular complement, there were captain, mate and a crew of one: three men. Besides Gary (AKA Stony) and me, there were six other hitchhikers. One other woman, named Cathy, and her man, and four other men. Cathy and her man were headed to Kotzebue, which was their home. Kodiak is nowhere near Kotzebue, but it was closer than Seattle. They were confident of somehow finding more rides – my kind of travelers. At dawn I stood on deck as we traversed the locks of Puget Sound – fog and fog horns, sea gulls and the scent of the Pacific – headed north, to Alaska on a 300 foot crab boat with that catchy tune in my head as it had been for days and days. As long as we were near shore, everyone was on deck most of the time, watching whales, porpoise, sea eagles, puffins, otters, and the totem poles along the green shoreline. Off the stern of the Chief was a small boat in tow, with its crew of two men, two more hitchhikers on this voyage. Captain Bill was giving them a courtesy tow, saving them more fuel than their little boat could carry, enabling them to shave days and many dollars off their trip from the boatyards of Seattle to the Alaskan fishing grounds. It spared them the necessity of taking the roundabout Inside Passage, with periodic refueling. Our course was roughly northwest, straight across the Gulf of Alaska. The first two days out, crew and passengers got acquainted. The mate asked if any of us could cook. I was the only one who professed any skill, and Ive got plenty. He showed me the lockers full of canned goods and meat and fish, and the bins of beans and flour, etc. It was a well stocked, well-equipped, efficiently-arranged galley. When I was in there, one other person could step in far enough to reach the pot and pour himself a cup of coffee, but we couldn’t pass each other in there, and no one else could get in without some part of each of us overlapping a cooktop or sink. Aft of the open common area of the crew’s mess where most of the berths were, was a head with toilet, urinal and shower. We were asked not to use the shower because of the limited water supply. There was a multi-band radio receiver in the mess, a table and benches welded to the deck, books, magazines, maps, playing cards, and board games. I spent a lot of my time on the voyage with my butt parked on one countertop in the galley, feet up on the one across from it, listening to the radio while I read a book or stirred a pot. Just as in the similar confinement of jail, eating was everyone’s favorite pastime. Cathy, the other female aboard, was soon tagged with the nickname Space Panties, by one of the men. He said it was because she thought her ass was out of this world. She was affected and whiny, abrasive and generally unwelcome in the mess. Nobody hesitated to tell her to shove off, and she spent most of the trip in the cabin she shared with her man, or else sitting quietly on the deck in the corner of the mess, playing solitaire. One morning, she did join the group around the table as we looked at the maps. She pointed out Kotzebue, and Kotzebue Sound, and the route she expected to take from fishing port to village up the coast. One of the others pointed out the Matanuska-Susitna Valley where he said the cabbages grew to 75 pounds. That was a long time ago. In 1999, the record cabbage at the state fair topped 100 pounds for the first time, and that record gets broken every few years, but 75 sounded impressive enough to me at the time. Those who had been in Alaska, about half of us, had fun impressing the newcomers with stories and descriptions. The rest of us enjoyed being impressed. This was the first time I really had a clue what I was getting into up here. The third day out we hit a storm. The storm hit us. I noticed the ship rolling and pitching during the night, and felt the rhythms and sensations change as the seas grew higher. Everyone was out of their bunks early, before dawn, almost tossed out of bed by the rolling, pitching boat. The rigging on deck and the stacked crab pots were shifting and clanging, spray was blowing across the deck, and occasionally a wave washed over the deck. Only once during the storm did I stick my head through a hatch into the open, to shout to the men on deck that the fresh pot of coffee was brewed. The rest of the time, as morning dawned, I was in the galley, glued to the porthole, watching the storm and the men on deck. The captain, mate and crew were up there, and they got four volunteers to put on rainsuits and help them. The task was to rescue the two riders in the towed boat. The shackle in their bow, to which the tow cable was attached, was being torn out of the boat. At one point, the boat was tossing on the waves almost amidships of the Chief on the portside, right outside my galley porthole. First, the Chief was in the trough of a wave and the little boat was riding the top of a green wall of water thirty-some feet above, and then I was up on top of the wave and the little boat was at the bottom, looking like a toy boat in a dark bathtub. Stony was out there, and I watched as he and the other men hauled on the lines they had thrown to the two aboard the little boat and pulled them on board as the shackle tore loose and the little boat disappeared aft. Crises are great ice breakers. Adversity shared tends to bond us to others. We were a different crew after that, not just bigger by two, but closer, no longer strangers. Some shuffling was done in the sleeping arrangements to accomodate the others, and we all sat around quietly stunned and glowing with relief as the storm eased and the water gradually grew calmer. Two visual memories come to mind of the day after the storm, the day before the one when we would make landfall. The first was a pod of whales, jumping, blowing, following the Chief in the morning. The other was the mate and crew loosening the lashings of three 55-gallon drums of waste oil and pushing them overboard, leaving an oil slick in our wake. Coming into the harbor at Kodiak the next day, past Strawberry Island, miles of green shore, and some other small rocky islands, the beauty took my breath away. I’d never seen anyplace that looked that good or felt that good just to me, just being there. It was June 5, the sun was shining and I was freezing. I found myself looking around wondering how it could be that sunny without being warm. I had a helluva lot to learn.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 15:07:31 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015