 When you like what you're doing, I think it makes a difference, and I think most people that like what they're doing are probably better at what they do because they like it, you know, and being around people that like what they're doing, it's just a good environment, a good thing to, it just, I think it builds success a lot of times, not just economic success, but, you know, things work that way. I started fishing in 1973. I was going to college back east and somehow we'd heard about fishing in Alaska, and I had a good pal who, we were really good friends and we decided that we wanted to go to Alaska, it was always a dream to go to Alaska and then remember just started talking to the trollers and talking to people and starting to learn, and of course the lore of all the boats and the water there was really, really profound for a young boy, and it just was really neat. I started fishing while working on the boat as a tender when I was about eight years old, and then we switched over to sanning when statehood took away the fish trap. So 59 was the first year of sanning and I've been doing it ever since. Well, we all jumped in a truck one day and decided we were going to actually had a friend fishing down in southern Texas there and went down to see him and when we got down there, we drew straws because he had room for one more crewman on board and I won or lost. Anyway, I went out for 15 days. I got seasick for three days and the first three days and then after that I thought, well, this is pretty cool being out on the ocean, catching fish and shrimping and I kind of fell in love with the water right then and there. I got into the fishing business. I came up here one day and started walking the docks and talking to some skippers and eventually landed a job as a cook first off and started fishing. I finally met a guy, had a little boat and was just getting started and put me on and brought me up here. I spent the summer sanning with him and I just thought it was awesome. Loading the boat with salmon and the way the salmon come in and all the boats are loading up and it's pretty exciting with the competition between the boats. You know, even a couple of minutes, you know, make a difference, you know, and hauling the gear, you know, to beat another guy hauling gear and then run back to the set and get the set out and I was just cool. I just loved every part of it. It was beyond my wildest dreams. I actually couldn't believe that, well, first that we actually, that it was actually happening and that it was, I really like sanning and I love net fishing and for me, I just thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen or done, you know, and that just, you know, the environment in Alaska is just absolutely beautiful, just gorgeous and all the nooks and crannies and coves and mountains and beautiful weather and long daylight and being out on the boat on the water. Everybody has a different role in the boat and everybody does their, takes care of their position, takes care of their, we have the deck boss, the engineer, we've got a skiff driver, skipper, and a cook, so everybody performs their role. So on these boats, a lot of what happens is you just kind of get thrown into it as far as learning what's going on, you end up making your first set basically and figuring it out from that point on. It's not, you don't, for the first setting, you don't go through a whole lot of training or anything, you just kind of like jump into it and you figure it out as the gear comes spilling out of the block at you. Pretty much everybody has a job, a specific job that they're pretty much expected to do and to stay with and that's what works best for the most part. And so you set the gear and basically follow the routine, you get used to how it works. After you see it a few times, you know, you get a lot more comfortable with it. I mean, you're not going to come on board and be an engineer right off the bat, you know, if you don't know anything about, you know, maintaining or maintenance or engines or mechanical stuff like that, but you start as maybe a pollen web and then you move on to pollen gear and then you start getting more familiar with maybe, you know, rigging the lines and the net is real important to understand how the nets put together and how it works and the differences between parts of the net. Then you might jump in the skiff and become a skiff man. Okay, speed up a little, keep towing a little bit. Basically, it's important to have everybody pretty much know what their job is. And then on here, you know, after time to break the routine up when people are familiar with it, they can switch jobs, you know, we switch jobs around, it breaks up the routine and it's kind of common that a greenhorn would be a webpoller, mostly to pile the web and then he would probably move up to leads or quarks or something like that. Of course, you know, you do your best to maintain your gear so that lines aren't going to break or that type of thing and hardware, you know, there's a lot of hardware involved in the links between the lines and the net and that hardware has to be in good shape. And it's important, you know, how those things are connected and you minimize your risks in those ways. You know, one of the things about commercial fishing is that, you know, we're all driven. Everybody's driven, too. I mean, we like what we do, of course, but that aspect of being driven is really important. It is very competitive and, you know, I think sometimes you think, especially when you're younger, you think that, you know, the key to success is working harder, pushing faster, you know, and there is some merit to that, but it also makes you take more chances that, you know, that make it a little more risky and it's hard to slow down when you're young, you know. It's hard to slow down because you like it so much and you want to do well and, you know, the more effort you put into it you think will pay off. When I jumped in, permits were at a premium and, of course, boats and everything were at a premium. The fishery was strong and so I wanted to do good. I jumped in and I wanted to be a high liner. I wanted to just, you know, be right on top there and come home with the bacon, you know. And we tried probably harder than what you would. I mean, at least, you know, trying to do the best we can and probably got a little overzealous. You do the best you can to be vigilant as far as with safety practices but the nature of this business is that things do happen and accidents do happen and people get hurt and gear gets destroyed, boats sink, boats roll over and oftentimes it isn't always neglect. You know, it's just a situation that comes up that creates another situation that leads to another situation and those are the things that get people a lot and, you know, you can't always prevent every little incident but, you know, we have to do our best to try and be ready for that type of thing and, again, being aware is a really big issue. For our crew now, counting myself is five. A lot of the guys get by with three. I still like to have the five-man crew for safety because the fewer men you have, the hours are just as long and it doesn't go around quite as well. Well, everything could go wrong on a boat. Man overboard is a big, big concern and I want everybody to know because I might be the one in the water. First I instruct them on how to turn the boat around because it's, you know, 35 tons of motion going through the water and the big thing is to keep an eye on that individual in the water. Have someone, you know, looking at them the whole time because a head in the water gets real small, real fast and I've heard stories about guys going over within that. Of course, horse play, you know, after you do this stuff for a month at a time it's repetition and the repetition gets you good at doing what you're doing, you know, what to do and how to do it and what things should look like and if something gets out of place well, I've heard of guys in horse play start jumping line like it's a jump rope and getting caught up and they just get bored, you know, and it just gets repetition, you know, every day, you know, just the same thing kind of going on and you make, you know, 15 sets a day and they want to make something, you know, out of it. They want that adrenaline pump and they want something to go wrong. I mean, and I've seen that before where guys get antsy and they want to make something happen that, you know, might be kind of exciting and that can be dangerous. You know, I see that happen. I get down on a crewman real hard, you know, for doing horse play. Of course, they get into the tired, I mean, especially after we've been working hard and you know, unload and you get, you know, two, three, four hours sleep and you're back at it again and guys walking around like a zombie and not doing his job, not picking up on what, you know, slacking back on, you know, uncoiling the line nice or whatever needs to be done there and sometimes, you know, he just gets down to, you know, laying the law down to him and, you know, saying, you know, this is it and we've got to, you know, we've got to keep it together here and let's not be f***ing up, you know, and hurting somebody. You know, a lot of what fishing, commercial fishing is, is preparing to go and cleaning up afterwards and a lot of the actual work sometimes doesn't really last that long, you know. Like I say in some of our fisheries, like we spend more time getting ready and cleaning up than we actually do a fishing. And then when you get to the actual fishing part, that's a different situation. There you need to be, you need to have somebody who's aware and as a greenhorn, you need to be aware. And that's a problem sometimes because, you know, you're overwhelmed with what you're doing. It's new to you and, you know, you're concentrating everything you can on your job specifically, like say, for instance, piling web. And it's tough and so it's hard for you to be aware of what else is going on around you and that's very important in commercial fishing. You have to get to the point where, you know, you're constantly watching out paying attention to what else is going on. And basically in a sanding operation, what happens is, you know, you have your net on the stern and you have it piled with leads and quarks opposite or in a manner so that it will go off without tangling and you have your skiff in the back. So the skiff, you release the skiff and we say let her go and then the skiff takes off and we're making a set it's called. And most sets in salmon are open sets. They're not necessarily round hauls where you just set and you come right around. Most of the time we make an open set so there's some time after the gear goes off. While the gear is going off, it's very important, of course, that everything goes off even and smoothly and naturally, of course, you know, you don't want to be standing on moving gear that's going off over the stern. So, you know, you stay out of the way and you don't want to be in it in a way of any lines that possibly be tangling. And it's important to keep the lines clean and off the deck. When it's time, you bring the skiff back in and it's called what's closing up. And he comes alongside, he passes off his lines and we get ready to haul the net in. And one line comes from the skiff and goes across through the purse block. Then it goes on to the winch. It's on all the time, more or less, when we're hauling gear. And then the skiff goes around, gets through and goes out on the side of the boat and then attaches to a bridle and holds the boat steady. So he's in position to just keep the boat into the wind or tide. And then the net comes through the power block and starts coming down on deck. And the cruise job on the back part of the cruise job is to separate the leads in the corks and haul the gear in a manner so that the end of the net will be on the bottom and the top of the net will be what we call the bunt will be on top. And then when we set again, hook up and it goes off evenly again. And really for the most part insane, a lot of what we do is setting over and over and over. So it has to go smoothly and the routine of it because you do it a lot is important. And the first part of the operation is slower than the second part of the operation. After we purse the bottom of the net so that the fish wouldn't be able to get out, once those rings come up as a way we call it, then you just haul the gear back on deck and it's just a matter of getting the gear back on the deck so you go faster then. The power block goes faster. When the net's out, one of our jobs usually what's routinely is you're usually cleaning the deck, hosing down if you have some fish on deck that you're cleaning or dressing or some fish maybe to put back in the hold to push into the refrigerated hold. You're doing that kind of work in between, it's usually about 20 minutes. You have your gear out, we call it making a set. Well the tow line, you have to watch out that that's a vulnerable area. If you're back on the deck and not paying attention and the tow line can come across and that's been a common injury for some people where they've been knocked down by the tow line and most of the time it's not something that knocks them overboard but knocks them down on deck and you know they could hit their head on the railing or something like that and we have had a real bad injury to a skipper that happened to a few years back. The worst accident we've had has not been, it's been myself actually and basically I got hit by the david right here behind me, the purse block popped out, swung around while we were purse and popped up out of it's socket as I was standing next to it hit me in the head and I'm by my temple and cracked my skull and severed my artery and I lost a lot of blood and they flew me out and you know it's one of those situations where I was lucky because there happened to be an EMT on board on one of my friends boats and she came over and I called her and there was a plane nearby and they flew me in and so I was very fortunate in that. A lot of kids get hurt and being you've seen a sane operation when the skiff comes alongside lots of times they get their fingers smashed by hanging over the side or they'll go to step up and get a leg in between so that's one of the big things. Setting the sane, there's been guys that have been drug overboard, they've been tangled up in the purse line, had broken legs, there's a lot of things that can happen. Falling in the hatch, there was a kid here a few years ago that was tangled up on the winch and it threw him down in a hatch and broke his neck and killed him. That was about 10-12 years ago. So it is a dangerous job, it can be. As the summer goes on in Alaska it seems like the jellyfish increase. Some years are bad jellyfish years, other years are not. You can't help when you're piling gear, the power block is above your head and water, you get wet and that's why you wear a rain gear for the most part. It's not always raining and windy in Alaska like you might think although a lot of times it can be. But the jellyfish come down out of the power block and they spray and it's like the red ones, they have long tentacles. Some of those tentacles are 15 feet long and it's really just the mist that comes off and sometimes they're just really hot. Some of them aren't, you can't necessarily tell by looking at them in the water and say, oh that's a really hot one but just some spots are just really hot and you can't avoid them really but what you do want to avoid is getting them in your eye. Well when we're working and setting the net there's obviously a lot of things that can go wrong. Lines getting tangled, crewmen trying to save the day by jumping in there and trying to untangle a line when you've got 350 horsepower pulling against a quarter mile net and 35 tons of boat and motion. So when you're setting that that's a really important time to pay attention to and could be a very dangerous time if you were in the wrong spot. You get a little careless sometimes or you get too rushed. I think probably most of the injuries that I've seen and most of the things that have happened have been from being in a hurry. The pressure to produce, to get your net in, to compete, to get the net set, you know. That's a lot of what causes it and it's hard to slow down and realize that you can still be as productive and maybe as successful. I find that I think my biggest thing is complacency and that's what gets a lot of people is you start getting a little bit lazy and then you have thousands of pounds of pressure on all these lines that are going across the deck and going to the deck when it's coming out of the power block. And if you start getting lazy about it, you start not paying attention to what's going on and something happens and you get caught and stuck in a line and there's really nothing you can do about it. There's so much pressure on these hydraulic winches and stuff that you can't, there's no way you can overcome anything like that. I was percing up the end of the net and the line coming around the deck winch got backlash and instead of shutting off the deck winch by the control and backing it up and fixing the problem, I decided to reach in there and try and see if I could snap it free. So I reached in with my right hand and tried to snap it free and my glove got caught in the line there and started going around. At this point I should have reached across and tried to reach the deck control. It was kind of a far reach and so my immediate reaction was to reach in with my left hand and try and free my right hand and then my left hand got caught and both my arms started wrapping around the deck winch and they popped out as they came up over the top and popped out of the gloves. My hands popped out of the gloves and the gloves kept going around and finally shut it off. The gloves kept going around and cut the fingers off the gloves and finally we untangled it. I came away with basically my fingers were all sprained and I tore up the back of my hand and got rope burns all of both arms so I'm very lucky for that. The winch is probably insane and probably most people are the worst accidents other than sinking or drowning and people have gone down but as far as working accidents have come from the winch, the sane winch and people getting wrapped up in the winch everyone's aware of it that's been fishing for a while and has heard of the stories. An old friend of ours Gunnar Nielsen was I'll never forget that's the first one that I was aware of I'll never forget when it happened. On August 15th of that day it was rough out in the ocean we decided to move into a place called Boca de Finis to fish where it was a little bit of sheltered water. There was four other boats there and two from Petersburg and two from Dobzinski family boats. So there's plenty of room for five boats to work there so I was working with them. I waited for a tide you can turn your net around and fish either way there and so I got in line to get a tide set and I was trying to time my set properly and we made the set and when we closed up and brought the skiff alongside one felt we hooked, it was right at the beginning of the set we hooked up the ends of the net and my one deck man dropped the line going to the skiff in the water so we lost control of the skiff. He was messing around with trying to fix that and I was tending the purse line. I got in my corner of my eye and saw a jump salmon jumping in the corner of my net so I wanted to keep the purse rolling even though the guys were messing around with this other little problem. I went over like this to put another ramp on. My rain gear went right underneath this line and got caught in the line. I then reached back here to this lever, I reached back like this, grabbed this boat was a little smaller than this one so I had room, grabbed this lever right here and it slipped out of my hands. It then just pulled me right through the winch and I proceeded to go over the winch and went around in between this passage in here three times. I went right over this button basically. I knew I saw my rain gear go into the line and I reached down to pull it up. I reached for the handle and that's all the time I had. It happened so fast. This is not the first set of the day. It was not the first set I'd made. It's not the first time the purse line slipped. It's the first time I got caught. That's the only thing that happened. You know the calls on the radio and again there was an EMT came on board and probably helped save Gunner's life but it was very harrowing to listen to on the radio. I remember the whole fleet just basically stopped dead and just listened to the accident happening and developing and just keeping our fingers crossed. But yeah and Gunner is not the only one that's happened to. Randy Dabrinja, Ketchikan, fell on the Cape Falcon. I leased an old boat and it was a little bit defective. It was a little bit defective as far as the quality. It was old and the Dabbit was broken at one time and they simply welded a pipe straight down to the rail and it was no more a Dabbit. It didn't have the overhang and the traditional method of hanging a purse block on the Dabbit and percing in the bottom of the net to the boat no longer function properly. The problem I had was that the purse block would lock into the Dabbit and not turn with the net as you brought the leads up to the boat it needs to turn it would want to come out of the shiv of the purse block so I couldn't figure out how to remedy it. I took a crowbar and I would try to pry the block around like that and eventually what I figured out was I could undo the purse line as it was lifting the weight. I would undo it, I'd go over to the rail and I would kick the purse block loose from the pipe that it would lock into and then go and catch the line as it's sinking and wrap it back around the cap and as I was doing that one day and we did this all summer long accident waiting to happen because it wasn't functioning properly the corner of my raincoat about one inch just the corner caught under the cap and as the line was coming in it just kind of caught and started wrapping around the cap and taking more raincoat until eventually it just kind of wrapped up tight and pulled me down into the horns on the top of the cap and I hit my jaw and snapped my head back and at that point the raincoat ripped and ripped free but the damage was already done. I snapped my head back and broke my neck and I fell back into the fish hold which was pulled back and landed on a bunch of fish. Thank God we were half full of fish and so that cushioned the fall when I landed but immediately upon landing in the fish hold my leg was caught up in the line and I thought well I want to straighten out and at that point I realized I couldn't move anything I couldn't move my hands I couldn't move my legs and I was paralyzed I was laying on these fish and paralyzed on in the fish hold there The deck winch is the most powerful thing on the boat you know it's the scariest piece of machinery that we work with pretty much and if you don't respect it if you're not paying attention to what's going on then you definitely end up in the wrong place for sure So I was lifting the ring like this and I set them down on deck and I reached over with a pair of nylon gloves like this and the same type of line and you reach over and touch it like this and take the turns off. Well for some reason my arm went down and started going around and it built the line up over the top again and again and again so that it had three or four wraps over my arm and it started here and went all the way up to here and then jammed me against the deck and started to pull my arm off and this all happened in seconds I mean it's just not even minutes it's just probably 30 or 40 seconds from the time I got tangled up my daughter was piling the corks on the back end and she ran over and shut it off and then untangled me My son that was out fishing with us was a paramedic that worked for the fire department so he came over and assessed my arm and there was no external bleeding or anything so we just headed for town and called an airplane and I climbed in the plane and walked up and climbed in the ambulance and went into surgery for four hours putting the arm back together I had dislocated the elbow for one thing it smashed it so that it was all dislocated and then it broke the bone here and as it pulled around the winch it pulled the main artery out and the nerves for these two fingers which I can't do this anymore the doctor said that it snapped in my neck and they found it down in here I think I got complacent I think that I'd worked around the winch so much I would never let a rookie work on the winch and if I saw one of my crew members doing something bad or wrong on the winch I would advise them right away in front of everybody and not let them use it for a while I thought it was a little bit ironic that I was the one that got hurt because I would ride my guys hard about that winch I was always worried about it I was worried about how I was going to be working with it my arms turned numb and they started tingling like if you were getting frostbite it gets real charred tingly electric kind of feeling and my whole numb started getting my arms started getting numb and then started going into pain and my fingers and my fingers are still numb to these days and then cold if I start getting cold I just go numb so I've got residual effects I did not recover 100% but I feel lucky is the fact that I can even walk and be alive and I just wanted to go I wanted to live I wanted to recover and it was a good year before I got into a state where I could actually say that yeah, I'm going to make it and I'm going to be alright but you're changed you can't move as much as you used to and there's always that pain in the neck I have about 30% range of mobility I had 5 hands searched 10 in transplants in my hand to give me use of my hands I'm considered a walking quadriplegic now I have some sort of paralysis in all four limbs that will never go away 11 years after the accident I got rid of my cane now I'm now a stage professional I think about this accident every morning and I've analyzed this accident many many times and the one thing I can think of is that maybe I got complacent around the winch the other thing I think about is the greed of getting that one fish that's what got me excited to reach across there the other thing that was odd that day was that I was wearing a raincoat and I usually did the deck winch is extremely powerful extremely powerful because my feeling being caught in that was completely helpless I've never felt that helpless before I just realized there was nothing I could do do about it while I was going around yeah I am a lot more conscious of the winch and I'm conscious of my crew it's such a slow turning device that it seems so simple that this line is just coming in and it's moving so slowly and it eludes you that this thing could be that dangerous that there's that much pressure and you look in the crew is all of a sudden they're dancing around the thing they're leaning over it like it's nothing and I just freak I go into it and you know get away no you don't do that what was amazing was when I was in the hospital someone had a similar accident I said well this must be a pretty rare accident having someone get caught up in a cap and he said well no not really we got another guy down the hall about every other skipper I know after this happened came and talked to me and told them their winch story about how they had a lot of close calls how they had been able to turn off in time and I probably heard over a hundred stories about people being that close I know at Harborview they told me three to four people would come down from Alaska a year hurting a winch most of them don't make it so I just feel very fortunate and I'm happy I can keep on doing what I'm doing so yeah safety safety is one big concern of mine because I've been hurt and looked at it at a different angle you know and I always thought that they should have more artwork on the ceilings of hospitals you're laying in a gurney and all you look at are ceiling tiles if you don't want to be on a gurney you don't want to see anybody on a gurney it's not a good position there's not a good spot to be with the emergency stop circuit has been shortened to e-stop what we believe the e-stop will do is reduce some of the danger involved around the capstone winch e-stops are designed to shut down equipment quickly e-stop was tested in the 2005-2006 there were surgeries on the FV lake bay it's a personium vessel out of Seattle our goals for the e-stop the emergency stop was in the development of the of the circuitry as well as the placement of the switch the switch criteria was important because it had to stand up to the rigors of the harsh fishing environment it also had to be convenient the position where it wouldn't be susceptible to false posby where the rope would hit it or it would be it would shut down in an inopportune time we looked at a number of types of switches and placements for those switches but the final decision to use the type of switch and the placement of the switch was was verified by the vessel skipper by the Maurice as what would be convenient for him and other fishermen yeah I really like the e-stop we put it on last year as you know with your guys help and since then we just get more and more I really think it's a really nice feature if we had an emergency stop this accident would have never happened if I'd had that emergency stop right there where I could have shut it off myself it would have never happened so e-stop would definitely be a good investment for any saner you know if it saves one person they don't have to go through what I did it would be wonderful I wouldn't wish what happened to me because the victims never have a good day and that just don't want to be one it's a little hard in the winter when it's raining and blowing sideways for a month at a time but you get over that you learn to adapt it took a couple of years like what are we doing here but then spring rolls around and then summer is coming with the fishing by golly that gets my heart pounding that's what I just love doing well it's not for everybody that's for sure but for those that it works for it's wonderful I would say that as great as the adventure and the highs and lows of fishing have been that's really part of it the people have been tremendous I've often said that Alaska's best resource is its people I still believe that but that's a really important part of it too the friendships if you're not catching fish it's not much fun that's for sure but you can live with almost anything efficient