Melee in Dutch Harbor

I progressed well in my career as an at-sea company representative with Marine Resources. Company officers, impressed with my performance during my first season in the Bering Sea fishery, offered me a plum position on the hake fleet operating off of the coast of California. The reps had a saying – hake is cake. Hake disperse to feed during the evening and so the fishing quit after sundown. This made it easy to set up a sweet little work routine: Get up at six, get the first fish on board by about nine, take another delivery at eleven, another at about two, and then two more around seven or eight at night. The rest of the time was spent on the radio, crunching numbers and listening to music, sunbathing on the flying bridge, and doing factory coefficients. It was indeed a lovely place to work after the round-the-clock, insomniac routines of Alaska.

Nevertheless, the hake fishery only worked during the summer months, and so I wound up spending the fall and spring up in the Bering Sea. After half-dozen or so expeditions, I managed to work my way up into one of my typical do-it-all positions, handling not just a main job but also some difficult or out-of-the ordinary tasks inevitably arising when Russians and Americans work together.

The job this time was to handle a produce delivery to the fleet. The basic plan was simple: A transport ship, the Yellowfin, would come up to Dutch Harbor bringing a load of meat, vegetables, fruit, and dairy products for the Russian boats, since they could not be re-supplied from Russia. Three factory ships – the Pavlik Morozov, Pyatdecyat Let Sovetskoi Vlasti (Fifty Years of Soviet Power) and the Akademik Buratino – would come into the Dutch Harbor bay, where each would load on food for three other boats, which would keep working out in the fishing grounds. My job was to coordinate the delivery schedules, work with the mates of each factory ship to make sure everybody got the right quantities of food and handle anything else that might come along during provisioning.

I was excited to do the job – it was always a treat to go into Dutch Harbor from the fleet since it was an opportunity to eat some real food and grab a beer or three. In addition, I would be working with my good friend Mark, a bespectacled, red-haired, rail-thin Seattleite with excellent Russian whose jolly mien concealed a sharp, orderly mind. Mark was the company rep in Dutch Harbor that year and did a great job of taking care of us; he somehow managed to come aboard the Soviet ship I was on, the Morozov, with a hot pizza and six-pack of beer within minutes of our dropping anchor.

Mark brought good food and bad news. Apparently, the Soviet fleet commander made a small accounting error in his order. We were to offload quantities that seemed normal for an operation of our size – a few tons of meat, a few tons of carrots and beets, a few tons of apples, a few tons of yogurt, cheese, sour cream and butter…and fifty tons of cabbage. The fleet commander ostensibly put together the produce order when he was drunk, and wrote fifty instead of five tons on the requisition forms. When questioned about the number, confirmed it – twice. So MRCI went ahead and dutifully ordered the cabbage and had it delivered to the Yellowfin in Seattle. By the time the fleet commander got off his bender and realized his mistake, it was too late to send the order back. And so our first challenge was to find space on the Morozov, Vlasti and Buratino for ten times the quantity of cabbage they were expecting. Each factory ship would have to take on over 600 50-pound cases of cabbage.

The next morning the Yellowfin showed up; I met the captain, a big bear of man with huge forearms, and went over the scope of work with him, the Morozov captain, and the first, second and third mates, who would work the operation while the captain went into town for shopping. The Yellowfin captain was on a tight schedule and wanted to be done with the offload and out of Dutch Harbor within 36 hours, 48 hours tops. With that in mind, we worked at ‘marrying’ the ship’s cranes (joining them together to work off a single control point). I went down into the hold of the Morozov to take on produce, counting cases with the Russian tallyman and comparing our piece counts to get it right.

Things went well enough on board the Morozov and we made good time. Fortunately, the ship had plenty of room in the hold and could take most of the cabbage below deck. Meanwhile the Vlasti and Buratino came into Dutch Harbor. If going into Dutch Harbor for a few days was an eagerly anticipated treat for an American company rep, it was like a visit to Candyland and Disneyland all mixed together for the Soviet sailors. Back in the 1980s, most Soviet citizens had about as much chance of going to America as they did of going to the Moon. The Soviet government did not let its citizens travel, and even if it did, nobody would give them visas, and even if they got visas, they had no way of getting their hands on foreign money since their salaries were paid in non-convertible rubles. Except at MRCI, where they earned the princely sum of $6 per day on top of their rubles. Because of this, the Soviet sailors I knew spent years maneuvering themselves onto the fishing boats and paid substantial bribes to secure a spot on the crew. A call into an American port like Dutch Harbor made it all worthwhile – they could buy blue jeans, music tapes, perfumes, VCRs and tape decks, and re-sell them at home for a fortune.

As soon as the Vlasti and Buratino dropped anchor and went through US Customs and Immigration, their crews made a beeline for Dutch Harbor and the cornucopia of the Unisea general store, taking off in groups of 20 or so sailors across the bay in their hot dog-like shlyupki, or covered red lifeboats. I labored away in the hold for hour after hour, powered by coffee and anticipation of a nice dinner in town. After about ten hours, we finished loading the Morozov, the tallyman and I happily coming up with the same piece counts, and closed the offload on a positive note. I got into town on the Morozov’s lifeboat and enjoyed a nice dinner with Mark and the reps from the Vlasti and Buratino.

The next morning found me bright and early on the Vlasti, embroiled in an argument between her captain and the captain of the Morozov, who, according to the Vlasti captain, should have loaded more cabbage on board since she had more hold space. The Vlasti captain had almost no room in his holds; he hadn’t offloaded his fish in a while and would have to find space on and around the decks for all the cabbage. The Yellowfin captain started to get impatient – every minute spent arguing was one minute less working, and he didn’t need it. Finally, the captains calmed down and the offload commenced. This time it went much slower – the Yellowfin could only drop cases of cabbage onto the Vlasti’s foredeck, and sailors scrambled around trying to find places to stow it. Boxes of cabbage went everywhere; into the crew dressing room on the trawl deck, up onto the flying bridge, into crew quarters, down into the fishmeal plant. The work went on and on – after ten hours, the Yellowfin offloaded only about half of what it should have. I called Mark, who had gone into town to help out with the crew visits to town, and asked him to come out and lend a hand with the tally counts.

He showed up and was working down in the hold near the ship’s refrigerator when the first disaster struck. The Yellowfin was lowering a pallet loaded with yogurt when it caught on the edge of a hatch and tipped over, sending hundreds of individual serving size containers plummeting twenty feet to their explosive doom. Work screeched to a halt as Mark and the second mate laboriously pawed through a mess of yogurt, salvaging and carefully counting unexploded containers. At last, the second mate emerged from the hold, his coat splashed with strawberry, blueberry and boysenberry yogurt; Five hundred and thirty seven, he announced dolefully. Somehow, Mark came up with a different figure, and the two spent another hour carefully going over their numbers until everything added up right.

Then more hours were wasted on a crew change, which took longer than anybody thought because there had been some disturbance between the crews of the Vlasti and the Buratino on the bus Mark hired to drive them around Dutch Harbor. The bus driver refused to take the sailors any further and kicked them off the bus out on some gravel road near the fuel dock and the sailors, laden with purchases from the Unisea, were slow getting back to the shlyupki for their ride back out to the factory ship. The Yellowfin captain fumed while the Vlasti crew fiddled around on deck. Hundreds of cases of cabbage remained to offload when the third mate came up and announced that the crew would break for dinner.

The Yellowfin captain went ballistic. He grabbed wildly at the crane controls and swung a load of cabbage over the Vlasti’s bridge, a bristling forest of antennae, radio and radar equipment. You tell those SOBs to get back to work right now, he bellowed at me. I’m going to start putting these loads down on their heads if they don’t! Watch me! Soviet sailors scrambled for cover as the cabbage spun around above them. A case flew off the pallet and sailed into the bay with a huge splash. The Vlasti captain ran out to see what was going on and, hands plastered to his face, stared at us, his mouth a wide O.

Get the crew! Get the cabbage! No dinner! No dinner! No dinner! I yelled into the loud hailer. Stress reduced my Russian to mere phrases. Now! Move! Just do it! Do something! Do it NOW! CABBAGE! NOW! CABBAGE! NOW!

That woke them up. Crew boiled out of the doors like ants and swarmed around the deck, carting off case after case of cabbage. It no longer mattered where they put it. They stacked boxes along the gangways, out on the trawl deck, and eventually, just started dragging them off onto the foredeck. The frenzy went on and miraculously, after a little more than an hour, the Yellowfin captain ordered a halt. I can take the Buratino tomorrow morning, he said. You tell those SOBs to be ready because once I get started, I ain’t stopping. You tell them, he said, and walked off the bridge.

The next morning the skies were leaden and the air still; sure signs that a williwaw, a big Bering blow, was on its way in. The Yellowfin captain confirmed this at the weather fax on his bridge. Now we really had to hustle the Buratino crew to work fast; if the seas came up, we would have to untie the ships and wait until the weather came down before resuming the offload. Fortunately, both the boat and the crew were up for the job – as fast as the Yellowfin dropped a load into the Buratino hold, it was carted off by gangs of sailors. We got a welcome bit of bonus news from headquarters. Nobody cared about tallying up the rest of the cabbage and so my job was over. I signed off on the final offload documents with the Buratino tallyman and the Yellowfin captain, and headed off into town on the next schlyupka for an afternoon and evening of fun with Mark.

I got to shore just as Mark was getting ready to go out to the Vlasti on another schlyupka. Apparently, one of the sailors who had gotten into a fight with the Buratino crew on the bus the day before was having trouble. We found the Vlasti sailor sitting in his cabin with his hands clutched between his legs. There was a rotten stink in the air and the ship’s doctor fretted around us. He got kicked in the groin yesterday, the doctor explained. When he got back here, he sat on a box of frozen fish for a few hours and drank to relieve the pain. I think he’s getting gangrene. We quickly hustled the sailor off the boat and into the Dutch Harbor hospital, where an American doctor confirmed the diagnosis. Mark ran out to arrange for a medical evacuation. I was left with nothing to do and decided to wander around Dutch Harbor for a while. I came across a group of Soviet sailors huddled up out of the wind among stacks of crab pots and did a shot of vodka with them. The weather was starting to get nasty – a wind kicked up and snow started to blow across the bay. I could just make out the Yellowfin now underway, heading out into the Bering Sea in the growing blizzard.

I wandered back up to Mark’s place and he showed up after a few hours. We were both worn out from the offload and wanted nothing more than to have a few drinks and catch some sleep, when the radio crackled on. A schlyupka was calling the Buratino. The williwaw had whipped up a chaos of big frothy waves in the bay, and visibility was nil because of the snow, now driven into horizontal sheets by high winds. The schlyupka was stuck, banging away at the piles on the dock, with forty sailors inside.

Mark rallied us down to the docks in his pickup truck. I looked into the schlyupka hatch. The scene was desperate, indeed; the sailors, stuffed to capacity onto the benches, each one holding multiple bags of loot from the shopping spree at the Unisea, sat barely visible in a cloud of second hand smoke. Every few seconds the schlyupka would rise, creak, and slam against the wood pilings with a WHAM! Outside the wind howled. We struggled back to the pickup truck and Mark began to make calls.

First, he called the Buratino and told them the schlyupka had no chance of leaving the dock that night. It was way too dangerous. Next, he began patiently to call everybody he knew in town; would they happen to have a place to put 40 Soviet sailors for the night? The local high school gym could do it, but the bus company hung up on him when he asked if they would be able to transport the sailors – too many bad memories from the day before. Mark called vessel agents, the sheriff’s office, everybody he could think of, and came up lemons on each one. Finally, the Unisea agent called back. We could put the Soviet sailors up for the night in their waiting room, provided we kept the place clean and had them out before nine the next morning.

Fortunately, the Unisea agent’s office was a short walk from the dock, and we soon had the sailors waddling penguin-like through the storm to the safety of the waiting room. We took them upstairs to the ‘accommodations’ – a barren hall with a few chairs and tables scattered around and a burnt-orange carpet. I went out and rustled up some bread, meat, and soft drinks for an improvised dinner while the sailors settled in for a long night on the floor.

Misery set in immediately. Forty sailors by any other name would smell not as sweet – and the mixed aromas of unshaven, poorly washed fishermen mingled with fishy smells wafting forth from filthy cloth coats into a dank fog. Somebody belched; the Russians dread drafty rooms, and insisted that we turn the heat up as high as possible. Most of them ignored our request not to drink or smoke in the room – instead, clouds of smoke billowed out of little groups, and when we went up to ask them to take it outside, please, we got blank looks and ‘who me?’ faces. One crowd, red-faced and merry from vodka, broke out into a ragged version of Moscow Evenings.

Noise escalated into a din. I felt like a prison ward, walking around, trying to stop the smoking and drinking and noisemaking. Mark argued gamely with some of the sailors but it was obvious there was no preventing the fun – these guys were in America, they were letting loose, and we came off like a bunch of spoilsports. The room was just short of an uproar when suddenly, and all at once, everybody seemed to run out of steam – like toddlers running out of steam in the middle of some fun, the sailors began to lie down and curl up in their clothes. By midnight, all but the most hardcore were fast asleep. Mark and I began to exact our revenge.

The conversation inevitably turned to comparisons of life in the United States, and we had one particular guy in our sights, a staggering drunk with a wandering eye and bad attitude. We convinced him that it was impossible to fly directly into Dutch Harbor; that it was a secret economic zone, accessible only by flying though multiple airports and passing through many checkpoints. Travel to Canada? Sure, that was possible. It was no problem getting into Canada. The problem was getting out again. The Canadians had a perverse exit visa that put any entrance visa to shame. American roads? Don’t let the movies fool you. Sure, you can drive as fast as you want, provided you can get past the donkey cart traffic jams. See that restaurant over there? Mark is the boss –he can eat there anytime he wants, but not me, no sir. I have to go with him or not at all.

By dawn we were punchy, red-eyed and beyond exhaustion. The weather settled down enough for us to get the sailors to their schlyupka and out to the Buratino. It was a relief to see the hot dog shape receding out into the bay trailing a stream of black smoke from the engine. The Unisea agents weren’t too unhappy with the way we’d left their waiting room, either – it stank to high heaven, of course, and we had to buy them some air freshener, but at least they didn’t notice the burn marks in the rug (burnt orange is great like that). But when I went to clean the bathroom in the morning, I did take a moment to regret the tall tales I’d told the night before. This was back before toilet paper was readily available in the Soviet Union, and people used torn up newspaper for their personal hygiene. Rather than clog up a factory ship’s drainage system, sailors tossed the used newspaper bits into a trash can next to the loo. Seeing an American throne for the first time, none of the sailors thought it operated any differently, and all forty of them thoughtfully tossed all of their used paper onto the floor.

Out of all the experiences I've had working with Russians, this one stuck with me the most over time. I learned a cardinal lesson: The higher you go, the bigger the mess you make. And since nothing ever goes as planned when working with Russians, it's best to be ready to clean up a few messes along the way.