Two Boats Did Not Come Back

Her name is Joanne Franklin, and her Ketch Joanne coffee shop serves as a sort of family room for crews of the commercial fishing vessels that work out of Pillar Point here, just south of San Francisco. Winter is crab season, and the crabbers come in long before the sun for coffee. They sit around a wood table reserved for them up front. Overhead hang framed pictures of their vessels. On this morning two of the pictures are wreathed in flowers. There is a reason.

On the first Sunday in December, which also was the first day of crab season, several vessels left harbor loaded down with stacks of crab pots--a dangerously awkward burden even in calm seas. The weather was not good, and it only got worse. The wind changed direction, kicking up huge seas. Two boats would not come back that day. Four men were presumed dead.

“Every time one of these accidents happens,” Franklin is saying now, “it’s because of some pressure. They get behind in payments or something, and they take risks they wouldn’t otherwise take. They make mistakes. They go out on days when they know they should not. We had a fisherman here about 10 years ago who had a new boat he had to pay for, so he went out in bad weather. He lost his life. A few years later, his son went out and lost his life, too. Fishing.”

Hers is more than an abstract analysis. Forty years ago, when Franklin was a young woman, her father headed to sea in a fishing boat that maybe was too small for the conditions. He never did come back.

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At the table sits Bob McMahon, the harbor master. “In the 21 years I have been here,” he says, “23 people have died. Think about that. But there never has been anything like this before--to lose four guys in one day. This one is going to stick with us for a long time.”

Outside, rain comes down hard. A red flag flaps in the wind, a warning. Only a few crabbers have ventured out. The others, idled, drift into the coffee shop. They talk of the four lost men--Kirk Pringle and Alex Kovak of the Lisa, Joseph Fischer and Lester Bronsema of the Best Girl. The word family is repeated often. “These were the good guys,” one mourner says bitterly into his coffee mug.

They talk of fishing, the allure and also the ever-mounting economic pressures. As seasons are shortened for various regulatory purposes, risks inevitably are increased: There just aren’t enough days to waste waiting out bad weather. In addition, a strike preceded crab season at Pillar Point this year. The dispute boiled down to a 25-cent disagreement over what a pound of crab should be worth. It pushed everything back three weeks, stretching the finances of all the crabbers.

“Everybody here was hurting,” Joanne Franklin says, and heads bob up and down around the table. Three days before he was lost, one of the fishermen had come to her house for Thanksgiving dinner. “He was hurting financially,” she says. “If he wasn’t, he would not have gone out that day. I know that. It was the pressure, see.”

*

The men at the table all have been in rough water before. They speak of the fear that comes when the weather changes fast, knowing that one mistake is all it would take. White water splashes across the cabin window. The battering of the boat takes on a rhythm, one blow every six seconds. Each blow feels like a car wreck.

They figure the men would have been on the rear decks of their craft, frantically tossing crab pots overboard. It would have happened fast--one big wave at a bad angle. “Imagine,” one says, “this coffee shop turning upside down all of the sudden.” No time to duck below for a survival suit. No time to radio for help. Battery acid and diesel fuel foul the water. Equipment tumbles crazily about.

These doomed men were all well-seasoned, and so there would be a full awareness of what was happening, and a furious battle in a tangle of lines: “These were active, can-do guys; they would have been fighting.” And then a long, slow descent in 56-degree water.

As all this is told, the faces around the table change. Newcomers arrive dripping wet from the docks. Others leave to prepare their vessels. The weather is not supposed to be much better the next day. And yet, as one old salt says as he departs, “you can’t catch fish if your gear isn’t in the water.” The sea calls, and so do the bill collectors. Christmas is coming. The pressure mounts to go fishing.