Working on the Edge

Hello Fishies!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with him, Spike Walker is the author of several books relating to commercial fishing in Alaska. He appeared on the first episode of After the Catch (where I thought he seemed uncomfortable) in order to facilitate the introduction of some of the men who were involved in the vignettes aired in prior seasons. The book, Working on the Edge: Surviving In the World's Most Dangerous Profession: King Crab Fishing on Alaska's High Seas, was written in 1991.

From page one:

As I pounded the waterfront of Kodiak’s Cannery row in search of work, I stretched my black wool cap over my numb ears and withdrew farther into the warm protective folds of my Navy pea jacket. Broke and unemployed, with virtually no experience at sea, my stomach felt empty with apprehension. Huddling against the cold, indifferent winds of January, waiting, literally, for my ship to come in, I tried to imagine what Donny Channel and John Magoteaux, as well as the two men who died, Tom Miller and Tom Davidson, had endured.

Several days earlier, a hard-drinking fisherman in the B & B Bar had told me the Master Carl story. For a bar-stool rendition, it was surprisingly accurate, except that he had the grizzlies chasing Magoteaux and Channel for two whole days. “And the bears would of got ‘em too,” he put in finally, “if the Coast Guard wouldn’t have come along and chased them off!”

Here is the presser on it and on Spike:

No profession pits man against nature more brutally than king crab fishing in the frigid, unpredictable waters of the Bering Sea. The yearly death toll is staggering (forty-two men in 1988 alone); the conditions are beyond most imaginations (90-mph Arctic winds, 25-foot seas, and super-human stretches of on-deck labor); but the payback, if one survives can be tens of thousands of dollars for a month-long season. In a breathtaking, action-packed account that combines his personal story with the stories of survivors of the industry's most harrowing disasters, Spike Walker re-creates the boom years of Alaskan crab fishing--a modern-day gold rush that drew hundreds of fortune-and adventure-hunters to Alaska's dangerous waters--and the crash that followed.

About the Author

Spike Walker spent nine seasons as a crewman aboard some of the most successful crab boats in the Alaskan fleet. While "working on the edge," the crewman's term for laboring in the brutal outer reaches of the Bering Sea, Spike encountered 110-mph winds, road out one of the worst storms in Alaska's history, worked nonstop for seventy-four hours without sleep, participated in record catches of king crab, saw ships sink, helped rescue their crews, and had close friends die at sea. He currently lives in Clatskanie, Oregon, and returns each year to fish for halibut in Alaska.

This and others of Waker's books are readily available.

Stay tuned!

<')))>{