The Deckhand's Tale: How Landless Farmers Spend Their Winters

Opening the door of the Newport, Oregon Starbucks, I spot Captain Dave immediately. In grease-stained jean overalls and a peaked fisherman’s cap, he stands out against the plush green velour of the sofa chair he’s parked himself in. As I approach and introduce myself, he sizes me up with his one good eye, feeling his grizzled white beard like he’s asking for its advice. I take the chair next to his. The coffee shop is loud, and I lean in to catch what he’s saying as he rattles off a rant about his previous deckhands (druggies, scumbags) and gives me a brief outline of his typically rural-white-Oregonian-male political views (do-gooders, you’ve been warned). Nonetheless, he's confident that hiring women deckhands, even completely inexperienced ones, is a smart business strategy. We're not interested in stealing his tools, he tells me, and we're easier to get along with. My eligibility for employment established from his end, he then he asks me why I want to work on a fishing boat.


Somehow, although I was aware that I was going to a job interview this morning for a position I had expressed an interest in, I didn’t really have an answer to that question. The job posting he’d placed on craigslist had simply filled my three main requirements for employment these days: it didn’t require any previous experience, it sounded interesting, and it was something I could quit after two or three months without feeling guilty. No, I didn’t have any idea what I was getting into. Fishing hasn’t been a lifelong dream of mine. It's just that I was swiftly discovering the limitations of farming as a career choice.

Although those farmers lucky enough to have land to live and work on have plenty to keep them occupied (not to mention fed) through the winter months, I found myself greeting 2010 with no work and no carrots or potatoes in cold storage. Telling prospective employers that you’ll likely be leaving them come springtime in order to participate in the planting season doesn't really give you a leg up on the competition. But what scared me more than unemployment was the potential boredom of clicking a mouse or shuffling files all day. More than that, even though I tried telling myself that whatever menial employment I found would only be to get me through the winter season, the thought struck me that I might wake up five years later and find myself going to the same dreary office, driven ever forward through a bleak but not completely miserable existence by the promise of a bigger paycheck. My goals and reality thus in conflict, I found the months of January through March were stretched before me like a giant white question mark on a giant white space (in the middle of a giant white cloud of obscurity, no less).

In fact, any close examination of large blank spaces present around the first of the year would have revealed me right in the middle, hunkered down at my Grandma’s place on the central Oregon coast, watching my bank account balance dwindle. Then, on a whim, I responded to Dave’s “Deckhand Wanted” ad, explaining in the message I left that I probably wasn’t what he was looking for but I did need a job. To my complete surprise, he called back, and we arranged to meet at Starbucks. After I explained to him that day that the temporary, erratic, somewhat dangerous and often uncomfortable nature of the work he was offering was precisely what attracted me to it, he hired me, probably more out of curiosity than real faith in my potential as a deckhand. It helped that at the time he put his ad out, he didn’t have a crew – which would normally consist of two to three trained individuals working from December through August, the length of the crabbing season. There were crabs out at sea waiting to be caught, and his desperation was such that he’d rather train “girls” than try his luck with the riff-raff that normally hung around the docks. If I stuck with it, he told me, and if the crab are good, there’s money to be made. So far, this year’s crab season looks like it will be a record-breaker for Oregon – fishermen brought in $60 million dollars’ worth in the first month alone (in a typical year, the fishery is said to be worth about $44 million.) A deckhand typically takes around a 10% cut of the catch; depending on the price of crab and how much was caught, this can mean $50 to $500 per fishing day. Suddenly, I didn’t hear Dave’s rantings about do-gooder environmentalists or worry about the impact only having one good eye might have on his navigational skills. I was in. From now ‘till spring, I decided then and there, I’ll be farming the high seas.

The day after the interview, I met up with Dave down at the Port of Newport, where all the commercial fishing vessels (around 100) make harbor. As we stepped onto the docks, the briny scent of the ocean entered my brain via my nostrils and stirred up a few memories. Although I've never so much as set foot on a commercial boat, I actually grew up in small fishing village on the southern Oregon coast about 150 miles from Newport. Port Orford is one of the few coastal settlements that attempts to keep fishing as the defining industry of its economy, pushing hard against the tourist chintz that seems to have transformed the rest of the coast into an endless series of glass-blowing studios and Moe’s seafood joints. As a kid there, vacationing Californians and refugees from the Valley never really crossed my radar; I dug my sandcastles and hung around on the commercial fishing docks in peace. Today, the sound of pylons creaking in the water brings me back to the many late nights I spent with my father and older brother, fighting sleep and throwing our crab pot off the old wooden dock at low tide in hopes of pulling up the next evening’s supper. We just did it for fun; the men and women who run boats out of the harbors of Port Orford, Newport and Oregon’s many other fishing towns do it for their livelihoods. It’s a dangerous profession – in 2008, a federal study declared Oregon’s Dungeness crab fishery to be the nation's deadliest (more dangerous than Alaska’s king crab fishery, which is the subject of the Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch”). In good seasons, like the one so far this year, the money seems to justify the risk for fishing families. But there could be something else about it, too. The men who own fishing boats that I’ve met in Newport so far give me the feeling that they would be out there on the ocean even if they didn’t rely on the paycheck.

The relationships men have with boats is one of those earthly mysteries, and suffice it to say that when I met Captain Dave’s “baby,” I felt like I should have kissed her hand. The Golden Sunrise, as we'll call her, is a 36-foot fiberglass boat rigged to pull crab pots from the deep or cast longlines for tuna and salmon. She has red, orange and yellow stripes running across her hull and a definite personality. When Dave and his crew aren’t out at sea, he told me, we’re either working on equipment (making buoys, coiling ropes, repairing and building crab pots) or fixing up the boat. She’s temperamental, he explained, patting the steering wheel inside the cabin and adding a few more words aside that I didn’t quite catch. They weren’t meant for me anyway.

As it turned out, the Golden Sunrise and I had the opportunity to get to know each other quite well before actually traveling to sea together. For the rest of January, the coast was hammered with weather system after weather system, keeping us shorebound. As Dave puts it, "It's called fishing, goddamn it, it's not called catching." It's always a gamble. To make up for the lack of fishing days, Dave offered me paid labor in his shop and I accepted gladly. Putting sealer on the emergency "survival suits" for the boat, wrapping buoy ropes and drilling holes in bait jars, I began to get a better idea of what going out on the boat would be like. The time ashore also gave me a chance to get to know my fellow deckhand, Hannah. a feisty Minnesotan in a position remarkably similar position to mine - 23, broke and  dreaming dreams of sandy silt loam and prizewinning tomatoes. She’s spent the past three years working at her friends’ organic farm back home and admits that she misses it. But she also saw the attraction in heading west and spending a bit of time on a fishing boat. I liked her attitude, and suddenly, Dave’s political rants and weirdly oozing right eye became a lot more bearable. That, or the crotchety old guy was starting to grow on me too.


Next time: My first bout with seasicknesses; then, we (finally) catch a few crabs.