At Sea With Marine Resources Company, Intl.

My first experience working with Russians happened back in 1986. I was a newly minted graduate from the University of Vermont Department of German and Russian, and trying to find my way after college in the working world. Career choices for Americans with Russian language degrees were limited in those days to jobs in the CIA, FBI or academia, none of which appealed to my adventurous and wandering spirit. It was a letdown to find my prospects so circumscribed but these were the final years of the Cold War; only a few years before, President Ronald Reagan had joked into an open microphone that the Soviet Union was cancelled, and that “the bombing begins in five minutes.” So maybe we were all lucky to make it even that far.

In any case, I found myself working in a pasta restaurant in downtown Burlington, Vermont, pretty much doing the same thing I did before college except I was now stuck with thousands of dollars in student loans. Then one day out of the blue, a friend of mine called from Seattle, where she was working at an outdoors outfitter. One of her customers worked for a Soviet-American fishing company up in Alaska and she thought this might be an opportunity for me. I called the phone number she gave me the next day and got through to an outfit called Marine Resources Company, International. They interviewed me by phone, apparently liked what they heard and invited me out to Seattle for training.

Marine Resources Company, International, or MRCI, fished for yellowfin sole up in the Bering Sea. Some smart fishermen out of Astoria, Oregon, figured that they could get more use out of their boats if they used them up in Alaska on under-utilized fish species, but they lacked any way to process the fish at sea, while distance and weather made taking the catch into shore-based plants impossible. They needed sea-going fish processing capability and found it in, of all places, the Soviet Union.

The USSR had a fleet of dozens of deep-water factory trawlers, commissioned in the 1960s to catch fish in seas around the globe. Unfortunately the Soviets built the fleet based on their biologists’ mistaken presumption that the oceans had unlimited fish resources; and after a few years, the Soviet fleets all but wiped out a series of important fisheries (including the George’s Bank off Newfoundland). Fishing nations banded together at the United Nations and passed the Law of the Sea, introducing the concept of a 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone.

It just so happened that the Bering Sea was one of the last unexploited areas in the 200-mile EEZ belonging to the United States, and it just so happened that a large proportion of the mothballed Soviet fleet sat in the Russian Far East ports of Vladivostok, Nakhodka, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii. The Oregon fishermen, led by the estimable Mr. Jim Talbot, negotiated and concluded a joint fishing venture with the Soviets.

All of these unlikely and fortunate coincidences led me away from a life of restaurant scullery and introduced me to a life of working as an intermediary between Russians and Americans. To make the venture work, MRCI hired eager recent college graduates with Russian language skills at $54 per day to start; not bad for 1986, especially considering that an average expedition lasted two months or so and that all of the money earned at sea couldn’t be touched until the expedition’s end. Three thousand dollars pure profit for a few short months sounded pretty good to me, too. The job, of course, sounded like pure heaven – live and work as the only American on the Soviet factory trawler, coordinate movements between the trawler and the American draggers, act as the interpreter between the Soviet and American boats and be present during all fish deliveries.

And so it was that I found myself one cold midnight in May standing on the front deck of the MV Golden Venture as she plowed away from Dutch Harbor. A full moon lit the scene – enormous, snow-shrouded mountains encircling the bay on all sides – and lit a road ahead of us out to the Bounding Main. I had spent the evening waiting for the call to come to the Golden Venture at a Mexican restaurant, eating burritos and nachos and flan and washing them down with shots of tequila, chased by margaritas. Then the MRCI Dutch Harbor rep drove us out to a Polish boat and we went aboard to continue the party. By midnight, I was pretty well lit up myself and fairly glowing from within as I stood at the bow of the Golden Venture, breathing in vast lungfuls of brisk Aleutian air and watching the mountains slide majestically by.

I slept that night in a bunk in the dragger’s bow and woke up to the novel sensation of feeling my feet rise up above my head, scrunching my head and shoulders down into the pillow, before they sank down again to a level far below my head, enough to reverse the scrunching process from my head to my feet and knees. I got up, brushed my teeth in the tiny bathroom and went upstairs to the bridge to say good morning to the captain. He was friendly enough, talking around a cigarette stuck in the side of his mouth and blowing smoke in my face while asking if I’d spent a pleasant night – we were still a good days’ run from the fleet up to the north, no worries. We spent a long time talking and looking at the overcast sea, which was filled with long, hefty rollers of grey water curling into occasional spume tops. The Golden Venture climbed and rocked over some of them, hitting every fourth of fifth head on, so that satisfying splats of raw sea hit the windshield. How’re you feeling, inquired the captain. Lots of new reps get seasick. Me, I never felt better, I said. This is great.

He offered me coffee from down in the galley, and it sounded pretty good – I didn’t have a hangover but the cobwebs definitely needed some cleaning out and the mental furniture set back in place after the drama of leaving the safety of shore on my own golden venture the night before. I marveled at the coffee maker, the glass carafe set ingeniously on gimbals hanging below the cupboards so that it swayed back and forth with the motion of the boat. I poured myself a stiff cup of black – no cream and sugar for me, thanks, I’m at sea – and took a few big swigs. Yessir, that coffee maker was a marvel, all right. The coffee in it sloshed back and forth, back and forth, in perfect counterpoint to the rocking of the Golden Venture. Fried food smells in the galley mixed in with a strong smell of marine diesel; the door to the back deck banged open, and one of the deckhands came in, big old Ballard boy, hey, howyadoin, hear you didn’t get seasick yet, that’s great. I looked down into my mug, saw the coffee swirling around, and suddenly made for the toilet, just barely making it.

I spent the next three days stuffed into the skanky bed in the bow, stricken by the eternal, endless dumb motion of the Golden Venture in the Bering Sea into a never-ending cycle of semi-conscious lolling among old sleeping bags and filthy rags, punctuated every few hours by panicked runs to the back deck, where I retched and convulsed in helpless animal agony. At last, the deckhands persuaded me that the best way to cure seasickness was to just get over it, man, like eat a good meal instead of leaving your stomach empty all the time, which is what the problem is. They ushered me into the galley, all friendly and solicitous, sat me down in the seat of honor, and set a platter in front of me: Double cheeseburger with onions, tomatoes and lettuce and a mountain of steaming fries. On the side, a cup of New England clam chowder and a tall frosty chocolate milkshake. Go on, man, best thing for ya. Good, ain’t it? Hey, Scott, change that movie, willya, let’s look at something to get the appetite up. Chuck Norris shootouts popped out of the VCR and the screen jumped around for a second as the new movie tracked in. I fought my way through bites of burger, munched fries, and slurped chocolate, as the television began to moan. Hard core images bombarded me from inches away, an avalanche of flesh tumbling on and on in grunting sweating abandon. The deckhands all lit cigarettes and blew smoke at me while I chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed and chewed and then bolted suddenly, pushing my way frantically to the familiar door and onto the back deck where I cut loose, all of it, to a chorus of hoots from the galley. Hey man, that was pretty good. You lasted a lot longer than most. Sure you don’t want to finish that? Ha ha ha.

The next day, mercifully, the weather came down enough for me to transfer to the Soviet factory processor where I would spend the next few months, the Mys Kuznetsova. The Golden Venture laid up a few hundred yards away from the Kuznetsova, three hundred feet at the beam, agleam with white paint and streaked with rust at the scuppers, and flying a glorious scarlet and gold hammer-and-sickle. The Kuznetsova lowered a covered lifeboat, the classic Russian schlyupka, red like a hot dog with a little turret on the back for a mate to stand in and steer. It motored smoothly across the low heaving seas and pulled up alongside, bumping and grinding the Golden Venture’s gunwales. A hatch flew open in the middle of the hot dog and a sailor in a striped pullover stood out of it and made impatient come on motions with muscular arms. We tossed in a few hundred pounds of chains, some boxes of supplies, a bag or two, then my backpack. At last, it was my turn – the jump between the boats had to be timed perfectly, a missed step or slip could put my legs right in the middle of tons of bumping scraping metal. I counted three, stepped up on the gunwale and dove headfirst into the hatch, landing in an ignominious heap right in the middle of the schlyupka in a puddle of sloshing water and diesel fuel. Strong hands picked me up and put me onto a bench; I looked around in wild surmise at a small crowd of about eight Soviet sailors and noticed, as the hatch banged shut, that they were all smoking. The airless chamber exaggerated the sea’s humping sway and I noticed the engine had quit. My college Russian completely and utterly abandoned me – all I could think of to say was, I read the works of Pushkin every day. A sailor banged on the engine with a hammer. I put my head down between my knees and heaved again, and again. Somebody laughed and handed me a bucket. It was my first day on the job in Russia.