At Sea With Salty Soviets : L.A. Woman’s Fish Story Can Be Told in Russian

She grew up in La Canada, attended the private Mayfield School in Pasadena and is a Stanford graduate. She has four older brothers and an older sister, two of them lawyers and all upscale achievers. Her father, a retired investment counselor, and her mother now live in exclusive Hancock Park.

So what then is Marianne Clarke, 27, doing chattering in Russian and skylarking with a boatload of salty Soviets, mostly males, on a seagoing fish-processing factory, sometimes working knee-deep in a mess of fish entrails? Especially since she gets sick to her stomach almost at a mere glimpse of the ocean?

For when she is not at home in Los Angeles, Clarke works for Marine Resources Co., a Seattle-based venture owned jointly by the Soviet Fisheries Ministry and Bellingham Cold Storage, a private American firm. The business they are in is fishing in American waters for a product that ultimately will be consumed in the Soviet Union. Marine Resources contracts with American trawlers to catch the fish, which then are flash-frozen or converted into fish meal aboard Soviet factory vessels.

Clarke got this improbable job through a combination of chance and design.

Design: She had majored in Russian at Stanford and refined her grasp of the language as an exchange student on two occasions in the Soviet Union because she had hoped to teach English in the Soviet Union. Failing that, she knew she wanted to get involved in something that would permit her to speak with the Soviets in their own language.

Chance: When an opportunity to teach in the Soviet Union failed to materialize, she got a telephone call from a Stanford friend who had risen to an executive position with Marine Resources. Would she like to try the job for five weeks? She would.

“I had no idea how I would feel about the job itself, about working on a ship,” Clarke recalled. “But I knew I was anxious to use that opportunity to live and work with Russians. I decided if I didn’t like living at sea, if I didn’t like the job, I could stand anything for five weeks. As it turned out, I decided to stay until the end of the season.

“It was exciting. It was challenging. It was such a stimulating environment in so many ways. Just being able to speak Russian every day was very exciting. I was always learning.” A linguist who also is fluent in French and Spanish, Clarke found herself learning, among other things, “a lot of interesting colloquialisms.”

Works Aboard Processor

Clarke works as one of the firm’s Russian-speaking company representatives (reps) between the trawlers and the Soviet processors, and, as such, was stationed aboard one of the latter.

She will be showing up for work again in April when “the fleet” begins fishing for sole in Alaskan waters. Her first tour of duty lasted four months, from mid-summer until October, during which time the fleet caught and processed hake off the California, Oregon and Washington coasts.

The only other American on board was an observer for the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service. The Soviet population on ship totaled about 80; of that number only eight were women, who mostly performed traditionally female chores--a cook, baker and laundress--but who also worked in the processing operation below deck. The fleet included 10 Soviet factory ships and 16 American catcher-boats.

Clarke began her adventure under the shakiest of circumstances. She reached the vicinity of the big Soviet ship aboard a catcher-boat that set out from Newport, Ore. “I was terribly seasick and I was shaky when I got into a lifeboat to transfer to the factory ship. A member of the big ship’s crew who steadied me told me later, ‘That night I held you in my arms, I looked up at the sky and said, “Thank God for sending us a woman.” ’

The Russians, she said, are gregarious and great kidders: “They are very witty. It’s part of their life at sea. They tease each other and they teased me ruthlessly. Nothing is sacred. No topic is sacred. You have to be able to take a joke.

“I learned a lot about how to stay cool under pressure from them. They’re very good at it. And they were very supportive of me when things were difficult.”

Clarke, the crew and the fishermen worked long, hard days--literally from dawn to dusk, seven days a week. Even before breakfast, she was in radio communication with fellow reps and the lead rep, who was in daily contact with company headquarters in Seattle, about plans for the day and what had been processed the previous day. She also was required to closely monitor each transfer of fish.

Compatibility between the catcher-boats and the processors, she said, was essential, and they never drifted far from one another “because you cannot tow fish a long way. You also cannot wait a long time to get the fish aboard the factory ship or the fish are going to be damaged while waiting in the water. The Soviets were extremely conscientious about quality control.”

Transfer of the fish, Clarke said, not only is a delicate task and physically draining, but dangerous as well because of the heavy equipment involved and slippery footing when the weather turns sloppy.

Her travail was lightened by her Soviet crew members, who told her sea stories--and asked a lot of questions. “What do Americans like to do? What kind of houses to they live in. What do they do for fun? Do they go to movies? Do they go to plays? What kind of music do they like?

“They also read a lot. They are very avid readers,” Clarke said. “There is a library on the ship. They had Russian literature. More contemporary than classics. But they had some Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevski. They read a lot of history, especially about World War II. There were a lot of stories about life at sea. There was some Hemingway and probably some Jack London. They love Jack London.”

She took along a tape deck and her favorite classical and rock music. “They liked most of it,” she said. “Not all. Some of my tastes are pretty esoteric. They liked Cindy Lauper and the J. Giles Band a lot.”

Clarke had a comfortably sized cabin of her own, complete with wash basin and mirror, bunk, closet, desk and even a couch. No private toilet or bath, however. Hot water was available only once every week and a half.

Colors Her Nails

Clarke wears no makeup but colors her nails--an activity that was a source of amusement to the Soviets. “I’d paint them black or blue or green,” she said. “They thought that was pretty funny.” The Soviet reputation for hospitality is no exaggeration, said Clarke, who calls the Russians “formidable hosts.” The Soviets and catcher-boat crews often exchanged not only gifts but periodic visits.

“Very often the catchers (who put into port every two or three weeks) would send over packages with candy or beer,” she said, adding, however, that hard liquor was taboo among Soviet crew members. The factory crew frequently responded by sending the American fishermen savory black bread baked fresh each morning.

To illustrate how friendly relations were between the Americans and Russians, she recalled an incident one day when a boatload of bird watchers came out from Newport, Ore. “The captain of the bird watchers’ boat sent over a big bag of popcorn. Our captain sent them Champagne.”

Despite the generally deferential attitude toward her, Clarke said “a lot of residual traditional attitudes about women on ships” existed aboard the processor. “For instance, while he was very jovial about it, the mechanic and his crew never liked me to go down in the engine room,” she said. “They felt it was bad luck.”

Clarke said her ultimate career goal is to be involved in some kind of cultural exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States. Just now that includes a plan to expand the distribution of Soviet films in the United States.

Reflecting on her experience, she observed that “the average Soviet knows much more about life in the United States than the average American knows about life in the Soviet Union.”

“Part of what I’ve learned about Russians and Americans is how much they have in common. Their temperaments are, if not totally alike, very complementary. Russians and Americans are warm people. They are basically open to other people. The Russians are very warm people. They welcomed me on the ship from the very beginning with open arms. They went out of their way to be friendly. I think Americans generally are very hospitable people. They enjoy sharing their homes, their lives, with other people.”

And by the way, Clarke never did whip her motion sickness. But luckily the processor was a huge ship and the weather was mostly fair during her months at sea. She also wore a patch behind one ear that releases a drug which seeps slowly through the skin to alleviate seasickness.

“That’s something they asked about a lot,” she said. “It does work. But it’s not an absolute cure against any weather.”