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slacker. Efficiency is the key with three men. But I felt Phil could handle it because, by then, he had earned our respect.”
    Phil’s reputation as a competent fisherman grew in his second season aboard the American Eagle , but the respect he had gained was not unconditional as he learned the following season when he was given the responsibility of manning the wheelhouse at night while the rest of the crew slept.
    “When you start out on a boat,” Joe said, “you normally move up to higher and higher levels of duty. Putting a guy on wheel watch means moving him to the pinnacle of trust. You ease someone into it, starting him out when there is still daylight.”
    When Phil was promoted by Joe, it was back in the seventies when wheelhouses weren’t equipped with all the electronic backup systems built in today.
    “We didn’t have the watch alarms and the monitoring equipment,” Joe said. “You have to have a lot of trust in the guy you put up there, trust that he’s going to check the machinery when he’s supposed to, run the course properly, watch for traffic, and not run over buoys.”
    One night, after the American Eagle had left Dutch Harbor and was heading east through Unimak Pass, Joe put Phil, who had worked day watch, on his first night shift, a two- to three-hour session.
    “Everybody who is sleeping,” Joe said, “trusts you to do the right thing.”
    Interaction with foreign ships, some four hundred to five hundred feet long, the majority Japanese or Korean, began quickly after leaving port. While communication with those ships is relatively good these days, back then, there was little if any talk back and forth. Most of the operators of the foreign ships, unable to speak English, would simply ignore any transmission from a U.S. boat.
    Phil’s job in the wheelhouse that night was to make sure the American Eagle made it safely through Unimak Pass, a section of the Bering Sea that sometimes looked like rush hour on a downtown U.S. freeway, with container ships, fishing vessels, and all sorts of craft plying the waters. The good news was, there was good visibility for Phil’s first watch after dark.
    “It was crystal clear that night,” Joe recalled. “Flat calm. All Phil had to do was drive straight and avoid traffic.”
    Joe didn’t feel fully comfortable leaving Phil, who was still only twenty, up there alone. Nevertheless, Joe went down to his bunk to grab a few hours of sleep. He couldn’t turn off his mind, though. He kept thinking about what could go wrong in the wheelhouse.
    Finally, his concerns overwhelmed his tiredness. “I come upstairs,” Joe said, “walk into the wheelhouse, and there is Phil, sitting in the captain’s chair with his hooded sweatshirt pulled over his head. He was slouched down so low, I couldn’t even say for sure that there was anybody in the chair.
    “When I spun the chair around, there was Phil, dead asleep.”
    What really sent a shiver through Joe was what he saw behind him in the boat’s wake.
    “We had just come through a fleet of about fifteen big trawlers that were now about three or four miles behind us,” Joe said. “He had not even altered course.
    “I thought, Oh my God, are you kidding me?”
    Joe exploded. Phil awakened to the sounds of his infuriated bossyelling in his ear, telling him in very clear, descriptive language that he had endangered the lives of every crew member.
    “I tried him, but it didn’t work out,” said Joe. “It could have been disastrous, but at least he learned his lesson.
    “Still, I never gave him that watch again, never put him in the wheelhouse in Unimak Pass.”

CHAPTER 3
DRINKIN’, DRUGGIN’, RIDIN’
    My dad once told me that when he was a young crab fisherman, he’d get a big, fat paycheck, buy huge amounts of cocaine, stash it all in a shoe box, rent the penthouse of a nice hotel, and rotate the girls in and out. That’s how he lived his life for a long time. He’d get a check for $80,000, but, after