A Perilous Way to Make a Living

Paul Pellegrini has spent most his life on the sea, fishing California’s stormy north coast waters. He has seen death there, too.

Pellegrini lost his younger brother to the ocean. His wife’s brother died in the same accident, their commercial fishing boat swamped at the jaws of Humboldt Bay. All told, the sea has claimed about a dozen fishermen Pellegrini once greeted daily on the docks.

But that doesn’t dim his resolve. Hours before dawn, Pellegrini marches through the shadows and briny air to his boat, the Calypso, to begin another day at what has been called America’s most dangerous occupation.

Federal officials calculate that the commercial fishing business is more deadly than any other industry. Most perilous of all is crab fishing, an increasingly important market for Pellegrini and other north coast anglers scraping to survive as the state’s other commercial fisheries decline.

This season has been among the most deadly in memory. In a typical year, four commercial fishermen might die statewide. But in just 24 hours along the north coast, four crab fishermen lost their lives.

A powerful 18-foot wave at the mouth of Humboldt Bay ripped the pilothouse clean off the Silver Spray just before dawn on Dec. 14. Al Burns, the skipper, watched helplessly as the wall of white foam swallowed his crew. A second breaker sank the 35-foot boat and carried Burns away.

The 44-year-old captain somersaulted under water. “I had a good feeling I was going to die,” Burns said.

He popped up in the froth a hundred yards away and grabbed a five-gallon oil can floating nearby. Two other crewman scrambled aboard a raft and eventually pulled Burns to safety.

But no one ever found boat owner John Raxa. A father of three and a devout Christian, Raxa had been pushing hard for a big catch to finance an evangelical trip home to his native Laos.

To the north off Crescent City, three fishermen died the next evening when the Paul C ran aground on a harbor jetty.

Paul Dunham, the skipper, had inherited the boat from his father. Lost with him were crewmen Den Whitson and Tom Watkins. The only survivor was Dunham’s 17-year-old son, Ryan.

As the boat sank, Ryan’s father grabbed the sleeping teenager from a bunk and threw him onto a life raft. Waves repeatedly dunked the raft, but the teenager clung for his life until a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter plucked him from the surf.

Independence Is Hard to Resist

Like many fishermen, Pellegrini brushes past such tragedies with a proud fatalism.

He knows the risks. He knows he’ll be lucky to net $40,000 in a good year. But Pellegrini says the independence of the trade--where the only bosses are the weather and the swells--is a powerful lure.

With salmon, rockfish and other fisheries shrinking, competition for crab has grown intense. Crab has become California’s most lucrative catch, at $20 million annually. The season opens in December, just as the weather here is turning foul. In the stampede to get the catch before someone else does, even cautious fishermen sometimes forge ahead through stormy seas that once might have sent them back to port.

On the north coast, waves and weather are the biggest dangers. The mouths of harbors routinely shoal up with sandbars that are the perfect underwater landscape to send dangerous surf thundering toward plodding vessels.

The entrance to Humboldt Bay, home to a crabbing fleet of about 100 boats, is among the most notorious on the coast. Despite a $15-million dredging job over the last year, the harbor mouth still surges with breakers, sometimes of astonishing size.

An 85-foot commercial fishing boat carrying Pellegrini’s brother and brother-in-law went down in a set of 20-foot waves at the harbor mouth in 1987. They had survived a horrendous night in heavy seas, then drowned just a mile from home.

Jody Stewart, the 25-year-old brother-in-law, had taken to fishing relatively late, figuring it would be a safe haven after a bad logging accident in the redwoods. It was only his second time out on a commercial fishing boat. Rescuers found his body an hour after the boat sank.

Pellegrini’s younger brother, Milt, was missing for weeks. Like a bull rider getting back up on the beast, Pellegrini continued to fish after the funeral. At home, his sleep was interrupted by nightmares. Afloat on a strange sea, he would see himself discovering his little brother’s corpse.

Milt’s body finally washed up six weeks later on a beach in Trinidad, 15 miles north.

Even now, a dozen years later, the tragedy casts a shadow. Pellegrini’s wife, Ronnie, said her husband always seems cranky right before crab season kicks off, reliving the accident.

“Every time I go over that bar I think about it,” said the 38-year-old fisherman. “Especially when it’s bad.”

Death has always stalked fishermen at sea. In the whaling ports and fishing villages of 19th century New England, 100 lives were sometimes lost in a single night when a big storm hit unexpectedly. The seaport at Gloucester, Mass., historians estimate, has lost 10,000 fisherman since colonial days.

Improvements in boats, skills and survival gear have cut the fatality rate dramatically. An average year might see 75 commercial fishing deaths nationwide. Three of 10 occur in Alaska, where fishing is a major industry. California accounts for about 6%, tied with Oregon.

As many as one in 16 commercial fishermen will die during a prolonged career on the sea, federal work experts figure. Logging came in a close second during the 1990s, followed by piloting commercial aircraft.

Death can come any number of ways. Fishermen have been swept off by waves, pulled over by lines attached to crab pots or yanked into the sea by hooks or nets.

Boats go down when they hit logs or run onto rocks in fog or are mowed down by lumbering tankers. Greed can also play a role: Vessels have sunk when too many fish were hauled aboard.

Or sometimes, a motor simply conks out.

Al Burns, who has fished a quarter century, spent his worst week stranded on a disabled drag-net boat in 30-foot seas and 70-mph winds near the Oregon border in 1983.

For seven days the boat rose up one towering swell then slid down the other side, an endless roller-coaster ride. Burns can’t remember sleeping. The three crew members shot flares at passing tankers, but help never arrived. Finally, they got a radio working and summoned the Coast Guard.

Friends were shocked to see the three men return to shore. Everyone had given them up for dead. Burns, who remained calm through the ordeal, recalls a car trip with his girlfriend a few days later. He broke down, shaking uncontrollably.

“It lasted maybe an hour,” he said. “But it wasn’t too long until I was back out fishing. I really don’t know how to do anything else.”

When a boat goes down, north coast fishermen do the best they can to help bereft families, often running a lost comrade’s crab pots for a spell to keep money coming in.

In Eureka, memorial services follow an all-too-familiar ritual and often draw more than 200 mourners to the marina. Wayne Clower, a local pastor and commercial fisherman for three decades, reads Scripture and struggles to come up with just the right words. “I know the families,” he said. “And I know the sea.”

After the service, mourners descend on BCs, a fishermans bar a block from the bay. They eat, toss down a few drinks and talk of the dead. Then everyone follows Billy Christensen, the bar’s portly and gray-bearded owner, down to a dock. He throws a floral wreath into the bay as the tears flow.

“It’s a club none of us wants to belong in,” said Ronnie Pellegrini, who met her husband at her brother’s funeral. “Everyone feels it on such a personal level, because they know it could be their family the next time.”

Each morning, Ronnie Pellegrini tells her husband not to be a hero. And when the storms brew, she can’t help but fret. “Sometimes I get a funny feeling,” she said. “When it’s really windy.”

Even with the danger, Paul Pellegrini and other fishermen say, the nationwide fatality statistics are unfairly skewed by the large loss of life in Alaskan waters. Stricter safety rules since the mid-1980s have saved lives, but have proved an economic burden for commercial anglers.

Fishermen are required by the Coast Guard to pack life rafts that cost $3,500 apiece and each year pay $500 to have them checked. They must keep $600 worth of safety flares on board, and pricey electronic buoys that alert rescuers after a boat sinks.

They also must stow bulky “survival suits,” one-piece foam rubber ensembles suitable if a crewman goes in the drink. But they’re cumbersome and impossible to work in, fishermen say. Few put them on, even in the worst conditions. If a boat is going down, crewmen rarely have time to yank one on.

Without the suits, a fisherman swept overboard has at best a few hours before hypothermia sets in.

Joe Wallace, a fishing captain out of Crescent City, witnessed the sea’s cruelty a few weeks ago. He watched the Paul C hit the rocks, then heard the cries of a crewman struggling to stay afloat in the swells.

In the inky dark, Wallace couldn’t reach him without endangering his own crew. “There were sinker rocks everywhere,” he said. “There was really nothing we could do.”

As the fishermen listened helplessly, the man’s pleas grew faint, then stopped.

“I had crewmen quit after watching that,” Wallace said. “They said they weren’t going back on the sea.”

The Coast Guard is still investigating the three deaths. Wallace figures the pilot of the Paul C probably fell asleep at the wheel. It’s not uncommon. During the early days of crab season, fishermen go hard on virtually no sleep. Though the season runs to July, the bulk of the catch is landed in the first frantic weeks.

Fishermen Pressed by Competitors

Competition has only escalated with the entrance into California waters of big, 100-foot boats. Such bulky craft can stay out longer and brave rougher seas.

To keep up, Pellegrini and other small operators say they feel pressure to work longer hours and remain in stormy seas.

But some days, the fishermen catch a break. On a recent morning, Pellegrini headed to sea with old friend Jimmy Smith. Under a cloudless sky, their boat sliced through the waves at the mouth of Humboldt Bay. A few miles offshore, Pellegrini spotted the distinctive hue of the orange and black buoys that hover over his crab pots.

He bellowed to Smith and the skipper swung the wheel. Pellegrini, outfitted in waterproof overalls and rubber boots, hauled up one of the steel traps. Inside were a half dozen crabs, skittering in the first light of dawn.

“There we’ve got some!” roared Pellegrini, whose great-grandfather, Virgilio, started fishing these waters in 1910.

Pellegrini moved fast, sorting through the catch. Working a string of crab pots is like working an assembly line, but in a factory pitching violently from side to side. Pellegrini has mashed his hands and been conked on the head by pots slung up out of the sea. Fishing salmon, he has caught big hooks deep in his flesh. Friends have lost fingers in winches.

Hours later, back on shore, Pellegrini wandered to the end of the marina. On a rock is a bronze statue of a fisherman pulling in his net. Nearby, a stone obelisk, tall as a man, is etched with names, more than 60 dead out of Humboldt Bay over the past 50 years.

There’s Mark Aguirre and Jon Gildesgaard, who capsized up toward Crescent City. “Dirty Ernie” Cannon got rolled up in his own net, crushed to death. A freak wave swept away Larry Yeths but spared his crew. Keith Young flipped his boat in 1988 because he had too many crab pots aboard. Bernard Weick, Melvin Rose and Roger Anderson simply went down on a rough night at sea. No one knows what happened.

Pellegrini slapped the stone. A whole side remains clean, free of engraved names.

“Got room for lots more,” he said. “Hope they don’t fill that one up. Ever.”

Lethal Jobs

Fishing was the United States’ most dangerous profession during much of the 1990s. Estimates of the most fatalities per 100,000 workers from 1992 through 1998:

Occupation Fatality Rate

Fishing: 140.6

Logging: 134.7

Commercial aviation: 96.2

Structural metal working: 68.6

Mining: 55.7

Note: Totals represent only industries that employ at least 50,000 workers.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics