Working on the Edge: Surviving in the World's Most Dangerous Profession : King Crab Fishing on Alaska's High Seas

The pay was fabulous--a deckhand could earn $100,000 in four months--but working conditions were nightmarish. Fishing for king crab in Alaskan waters is the most dangerous occupation on earth, stresses Walker, who crewed with the crab fleet during the boom years 1976-84 and here presents bone-chilling tales about men (one woman), ships and the sea. Deckhands frequently worked around the clock, pushing 750-pound crab pots over a pitching deck swept with icy, stinging salt spray, enduring gale-force winds and gigantic waves. Because of the lack of privacy and sleep, irregular meals, darkness and isolation from civilization, the offshore life affects sailors mentally as well as physically. Walker gives a gripping account of the 1981 fall season, with its lost ships and heroic rescues. He combines his personal experiences with sailors' stories for a vivid picture of an occupation that challenges nature. Super adventure. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gripping, true-adventure account of crewing on deep-sea Alaskan fishing boats. In 1978, Walker arrived in Kodiak, Alaska, with $20, one skipper's name, and a determination to hook a berth on a crab boat. That year saw an unprecedented increase in the numbers of king crab on the continental shelf, boats fishing them, and prices paid at the canneries. Working on shares, a skilled deckhand could easily make $60,000 in one seven-week season. Walker, whose last job was as a lumberjack, discovered on his greenhorn cruise 80-mile-an-hour winds, 20-hour stints of pulling 450-lb. crab pots, and the right way to knot and coil rope, taught to him by Suzey, a 20-year-old fireball who gave quarter to no fisherman. As Walker became saltier and the fishing intensified, he crewed on boats that made up to $213,000 in one day. Ship capsizings, men washed overboard, collisions in fog banks, sailors swimming to barren islands in 39- degree water, and dangerous Kodiak bears are the stuff of this modern-day gold rush. Equally interesting are Walker's tales of nights ashore in the boomtowns: ten-foot lines of cocaine on the bars, $174 rounds on the house repeated 16 times, and, from old tars, yarns of fortune, disaster, and death. Skillfully written and intelligently observed with all the muscle, beauty, and energy of a 145-foot Alaskan fishing boat making way through the treacherous waters of Shelikof Strait, hard by the 8000-foot passes in the Aleutian mountains. (Sixteen pages of b & w photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Walker shares his experiences of crab fishing off the coast of Alaska in an interesting and informative anecdotal style. Readers will learn that the dangers that make crab fishing such a risky if highly profitable profession don't all come from the sea itself. Fear, depression, greed, and drugs have played a large role as well. "For too many caught up in the 'go to hell' lifestyle . . . there was cocaine--grams of it, ounces of it, pounds and kilos . . . ." And then the fishing industry collapsed due to a number of reasons: natural biological cycles, overfishing, large numbers of predators, disease, etc. Recommended for general collections.
- Mary J. Nickum, Fish & Wildlife Reference Svce., Bethesda, Md.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.