Tramper: Sailing the Aleutians

By George Lowe

TRAMPER tells the story of the Capelin, a battered old World War II supply ship that earns its keep crossing the stormy North Pacific between Seattle and the Aleutian Islands delivering cargo to the remote fishing villages of Western Alaska. Rugged trip, rugged people and a dangerous part of the world with a violent history. Its not tourist Alaska.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 31, 2003
• ISBN: 9781469112022

George Lowe

George Lowe (1924-2013) was a New Zealand-born explorer, mountaineer, photographer and film-maker. He was a leading climber on the 1953 British Everest expedition, forging the route up Everest's Lhotse Face and cutting steps all the way up the summit ridge for his best friend, Ed Hillary. A true hero.

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Copyright © 2002 by George Lowe.

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Contents

PROLOGUE 

ONE 

TWO 

THREE 

FOUR 

FIVE 

SIX 

SEVEN 

EIGHT 

NINE 

TEN 

ELEVEN 

TWELVE 

THIRTEEN 

FOURTEEN 

FIFTEEN 

SIXTEEN 

AFTERWORD: 

Endnotes 

To John Miller,

the crew of the Capelin and Aldene,

my own beloved first mate.

PROLOGUE

 

The native Aleuts called the islands Aguna Laksh which translated from their language means the shores where the sea breaks its back. No white man’s metaphor describes them any better.

The Aleutians are an eleven-hundred-mile chain of some 200 named islands and uncounted numbers of rocks swooping across the North Pacific like a curved saber dangled under the cold forbidding brows of Siberia, The furthermost island, Attu, is directly north of New Zealand and a bit closer to Tokyo than Ketchikan. Stretch a string on a globe tautly between Yokohama and Seattle and its shortest arc—the Great Circle Route—will pass up through the Aleutians before swinging down again past the Kuriles to Japan. The islands are battered by some of the worst weather on earth—fierce winds, driving rain, dense fog. And blinding blizzards any month but July or August. But in addition to the strenuously unpleasant climate, the Aleutians are remarkable for their stark beauty, bloody history, scientific interest and economic importance. There’s no place else on earth quite like them. Few tourists ever get a glimpse of the Aleutians.

Or want to. Unless you’re a fisherman, a scientist or a seriously intrepid birdwatcher you’re not likely to visit. But for souls ravenous for money or knowledge, the Aleutian Islands exert a mighty pull.

It is the raging sea that provides the wealth of the Aleutians, and it is a curious fact that the source of that wealth actually begins in the seas of the tropics. Unlike the lushness of equatorial jungles, the vast mid-ocean equatorial seas are surprisingly barren. Protozoan and planktonic life swarms there under the warm, rolling surface, but by far the larger part of their nourishing remains and residues sink unconsumed to the great depths. It is the upwelling of currents and waves along the continental shelves of the world that bring this richness toward the surface, the first link in the chain that leads to krill and shrimp and crab and mollusk and fish and bird and mammal and man. And nowhere on earth is this icthylogical dynamic expressed in greater profusion than in the islands of the Aleutian chain. What the Amazon rain forests are to terrestrial life, the waters of the Aleutians are to creatures of the sea. The mighty currents and storms of the North Pacific crash unceasingly against these islands bringing primal nourishment to the surface supporting quite incredible masses of life.

For while they are notably inhospitable to humanity, the Aleutians are a paradise for the birds and fish and aquatic mammals. And it is these last two, of course, which, despite the climate, have attracted man. First the aboriginal Aleuts who clung to these shores for the sake of the abundant salmon, halibut, cod, seal, otter, sea lion, walrus and whale. And latterly, the hungry, greedy, destructive homo sapiens of modern times who over the past two centuries succeeded in becoming the most destructive and voraciously predatory species the earth ever known. Compared to cunning and ruthless modern man, the dinousaurs were puppy dogs.

ONE

 

And then there’s Seattle. Soggy, soft, self-centered Seattle. Wrapped up in its trendy boominess, its sports teams, its traffic problems and tiresome self-pity about the weather. It’s been a long time since Seattle was a two-fisted seaport mill town. Walk the downtown streets today and you’ll smell more espresso or pesto than salt air or sawdust. Most Seattleites today are surprised to learn there ever was such a thing as an Alaskan Gold Rush—the event that put the city on the map.

But surprisingly perhaps, Seattle is still a seafaring city. It’s not the swarms of local yachts and pleasure boats that make it so—many seldom leave their moorings. Nor is it the huge container ships along the Elliot Bay waterfront. The Port of Seattle handles more tonnage than ever before, but the container ships are in and out so rapidly that the crews—underpaid third-worlders in the main—scarcely have time to go ashore and buy a T-shirt, let alone get laid or bag a hangover. In the old days of break bulk cargo, it took a week or so for a ship to be turned around and merchant seamen had ample time to raise plenty of Skid Road hell and get in fights with the locals and each other. Not these days.

Seattle remains a seafaring city because of the several thousand men—and increasing numbers of women—who own, skipper and crew the large local fleet of tugs, trawlers, processors, seiners, trollers, tenders, draggers, crabbers, halibut schooners, longliners and tramp freighters who earn their living by voyaging to Alaska and the Aleutians. With few exceptions, their boats are relatively small. And the roaring seas, icy storms and rockstrewn coasts they face make their occupation strenuously uncomfortable and dangerous.

At the foot of the memorial obelisk at Fisherman’s Terminal in Salmon Bay there are 485 names of Seattle fishermen lost at sea. Eighty five of them have been added since 1990. Twenty were added in 1996—including the skipper and crew of a well-built 100-foot crab boat that disappeared in the Bering Sea as well as all hands aboard a big steel seiner that sank in an April storm just north of Kodiak Island. Anybody who makes his living in the North Pacific has to face the real possibility that his name might one day show up on one of those bronze tablets. Because of this, those who keep going north are fine seamen who have to be tough, courageous and careful to survive.

But they’re matter of fact about it. There’s no swagger to them. They melt anonymously into the local scene and the city of Seattle pays them little notice. True, some lead disorderly, hard-drinking lives, but the greater number live modestly well. The guy next door, perhaps, who is often gone for weeks or months at a time. If you don’t go to sea you have no concept of what these crews and their vessels are up against.

One of these northgoing boats is the Capelin, a small tramp freighter that earns its keep hauling cargo between Seattle and the Aleutian Islands. The Capelin is one hundred and eighty-five feet long and disarmingly homely. Straight almost vertical bow, slab sides that bear the dents and scars of thousands of landings. Rusty pipe railing all twisted and bent. A deck that doesn’t get painted because the constant scuff of cargo handling keeps the rust worn down to bare metal.

She is a converted U.S. Navy Yard Oiler—a small harbor tanker called a YO. Built in 1943 of good Birmingham steel she was retired from the Navy in 1972, and sold to a couple of local Norwegians who converted her into a crab boat. After the Bering Sea king crab boom collapsed in the early 80’s she was bought by the Western Pioneer Company, who took off the crab handling gear, added fore and aft cargo booms, insulated and refrigerated the holds and turned it into a cargo vessel. Renamed the Capelin, by 1996 she had logged 113 round trip voyages between Seattle and the Aleutians. At roughly 5000 miles per round trip that’s something like 565,000 sea miles or 20 some-odd times around the world at the equator. Only those were not equatorial miles, they were North Pacific miles. Gulf of Alaska miles. Bering Sea miles. The Capelin may not be much for appearances but you can’t question her durability, seaworthiness or good luck.

From where I sit writing this I look down the ship channel leading to the Hiram Chittenden Locks that separate Puget Sound from freshwater Salmon Bay. I can see every vessel that comes in or out and just about every Friday evening, one of the blue-hulled Western Pioneer freighters—it’ll be the Capelin or one of her seven sisters—comes slowly down the channel, low in the water and decks piled with a dog’s breakfast assortment of cargo. Winter, spring, summer or fall, the destination is two thousand five hundred miles away across the Gulf of Alaska to Dutch Harbor half way out in the Aleutian Chain where Western Pioneer operates a terminal. But they also unload supplies at Kodiak Island and a number of other remote Aleutian fishing communities along the way, or past Dutch Harbor to the Pribilov Islands up in the Bering Sea. And coming back they carry frozen fish—salmon, halibut, pollock and crab.

These vessels are among the last of their breed.

Coastwise shipping played a historic role in settling the Pacific Coast starting back in the 1840’s with the California hide trade so memorably described by Charles Henry Dana in Two Years Before, the Mast. Seattle itself was founded by men who came here to cut piling which was then shipped down the coast to build the docks of San Francisco. And up in Alaska, unless it’s constructed of wood or whale bone, nearly every man-made object originally came up by coastal steamer. Nowadays barge lines supply most of Southeast Alaska and a couple of Mariner class freighters have been converted to roll-on roll-off ships which ferry loaded semi-trailers from Tacoma to Whittier to supply Anchorage and Fairbanks. Big container ships now call weekly at Kodiak and Dutch Harbor mainly to tranship fish to Japan. But to this day, nearly everything in non-tourist Western Alaska—the small towns and fishing communities of Kodiak Island, the Alaskan Peninsula, the Aleutians—still arrives aboard small coastal freighters. People and parts, magazines and medicines come by air, but not much else.

In our high-tech, media-driven, inceasingly pudgy age, it’s worth remembering that some people still earn their bread by pitting themselves against the challenge of one of the world’s most forbidding coasts and dangerous seas.

This is the story of the Capelin’s 109th voyage to the Aleutians. The one I was on.

TWO

 

It started one cold November noon at the Hiliner Tavern.

If you should ever find yourself in Seattle with a couple of hours to kill, come on out to Fisherman’s Terminal on Salmon Bay and walk the docks. If you’re there around lunchtime you’ll have your pick of three reasonably decent places to eat. Fish boat owners and seafood industry people like to rub elbows at a brown gravy and mashed potatoes kind of joint served by bustling waitresses in starched uniforms Necktie wearers prefer a somewhat more upscale fishhouse next door that also has a bar and serves dinner. Fishboat crews, shipyard workers and construction guys gravitate to the Hiliner, a clattery beer and burger tavern around the back of the main building. Two TV’s going. Loud music. Loud voices. Big portions. Quick service. It’s strictly come as you are even if you spent all morning making love to a diesel engine in the bilge of a seiner.

The Hiliner was owned by a friend of mine, and I used to drop in for lunch every week or so. The food was simple and good and I enjoyed being around people who work skillfully with their hands and backs as well as their brains.

One of the silent partners in the tavern was John Miller the skipper of the Capelin. Nicknamed Little John, Miller is a lanky six-foot-seven and in his early forties. When in port between trips, John liked to stop by for a few beers, see how the Hiliner is doing, bus a few tables for the fun of it and shoot the breeze with old friends and shipmates.

I’m in there this day having lunch with a friend, when John came in and joined us. He had just returned from his last trip of the season. He told us with jovial relish of the storms they encountered and the Capelin’s close call with the ice on the way back from the Pribilovs. The ship had been almost trapped in the advancing seasonal ice sheet that spreads down across the Bering Sea in the fall. By backing up and punching into it time after time, they managed to crack their way out of the rapidly thickening pack ice and get safely down to Dutch Harbor. The first day they made less than 20 miles.

John had skippered the ship for nearly fifteen years. He started out with Western Pioneer as a deckhand after college and worked his way up to mate and skipper. He loved the life. And although he possessed an all-ocean, all-tonnage captain’s license that qualified him to captain any vessel afloat, John was quite happy in command of a battle-scarred little coastal tramper like the Capelin. From a seamanship standpoint, it was as challenging a job as any sane captain could ask for.

John’s stories that day set me to thinking.

I saw him the next day in the Hiliner and told him that I dreamed about him last night. Was I wearing my leopard skin jockey shorts? he asks. Not that kind of dream. I want to go along on the Capelin sometime. John said he thought that was a great idea.

He told me there was no point going in winter because I couldn’t see much, the days being so short that far north. Best to go in early summer after the