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good time to handle what you are going to be dealing with. He’d be in the bars throwing the drinks back, trying to stay loose because he knew, once he got ready to leave the harbor, he was going to be an absolute nervous wreck. Once he left the dock, the fun time stopped.
    “Going into a crab season, you are about as tense as you can get. It’s like a game seven of the NBA playoffs. You’ve got maybe four days to fish and, if you fuck up, you are going to be screwed. But, if you land on the crab, you are going to be a hero.”
    To Colburn, Phil was a hero. “There were hooligans and bums in the fleet,” he said, “even pirates and crooks. Phil was nowhere near those guys. He was a class act.”
    Sig Hansen, captain of the Northwestern, said Phil took a unique approach to the pursuit of happiness from the moment his boat docked in Dutch Harbor. “For the rest of us, the routine was standard,” Hansen said. “You live on your boat, you go out and party, and then you come back to your boat.
    “Not Phil. He’d get a room at a hotel on shore. He had that style, that coolness. He’d say, ‘I don’t want to have to worry about crawling back to the boat if I’ve had too much to drink. I’ll crawl back to my room.’ ”
    Hansen thought it was such a great idea that he started to get a room for himself when coming into Dutch Harbor. “I didn’t do it in the beginning because I’m too damn cheap,” Hansen conceded, “and I thought it made you look like you were just trying to be a big shot.
    “But I came to realize that Phil was right. So you spend a hundred dollars for the night if you’re going to go out and act goofy, and then you don’t have to worry about getting back to the dock. You just have to get to your hotel bed. That’s more civilized.”
    While the comforts of a soft bed might still be appealing, having a private party headquarters is no longer as practical.
    “It’s all different now,” said Joe. “It only takes about eighteen hours to off-load and you’re back out again, so that has cut way down on the partying.”
    •   •   •
    There was no such thing as cutting down on the partying when Phil would return to Bothell after a fishing trip.
    “When Phil came home,” said his longtime friend Jeff Sheets, “he’d call me immediately. It was usually about four in the morning. I’d pick up the phone and I’d hear the voice on the other end say, ‘Get over here. I’m back.’ My wife would chew me out as I got dressed because she knew I wasn’t going to work that day.
    “By the time I got over to Phil’s place, he had already gotten a quarter ounce of coke and a couple of bottles of Stoli vodka.”
    Joe Duvey, another Bothell friend, said the routine was always the same throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s: “Drinkin’, druggin’, and ridin’ bikes. That was about it.”
    Once he became established as a crab boat captain, Phil had plenty of money to spend on toys. For him, the toys consisted of Corvettes, Harleys, and a Porsche, his wild rides in the driver’s seat fueledby drugs and alcohol. It was never boring when Phil was in town. “Total chaos was more like it,” Joe said. Sit around with the Bothell gang today and the tales from the old days never seem to end.
    “One night,” Joe said, “Phil was riding one of his bikes, the beautiful, supercustom one. Hauling ass with a couple of other guys, he went off the road.”
    Phil went flying into some bushes, winding up scratched and bruised. But where was his motorcycle? Lying flat on his back, Phil spotted it.
    Directly overhead. It had soared twenty feet into the air and come to rest upside down in a tree.
    “The guys he was with came back and helped him drag the bike down,” Joe said, “but one wheel was bent.”
    Phil tried to straighten it out by bashing it with a tree branch. But when he got back on the bike and attempted to ride it, the cycle weaved all over the road, that wheel far from