Bering Sea crab boats

After digesting a day's worth of "Deadliest Catch" episodes, I am even more impressed with the crab boat captains and crews that work the Bering Sea waters. It's not so much the bravery (whether it is bravery, avarice, or stupidity actually seems to be a point much debated, and I'm not sure I have a position on the matter) that pushes them to work in those waters, but the subtle expertise they demonstrate in the difficult situations in which they find themselves. They may come off in many episodes as regular, working-class joes doing a tough job of an industrial variety, but in fact they are generally a bunch of savvy, intelligent, supremely capable individuals who happen to be doing traditionally blue collar work. It's a bit like astronauts out building new modules onto the International Space Station; they're turning wrenches, sure, but that doesn't imply they are simple grease monkeys.

As one of the captain's observed in an episode I saw today, "These guys up here are all the real deal." You don't stay employed, or alive, in that environment if you can't think as well as act.

Nothing reinforces this more for me than some other reality programs that have come out over the past couple of years in the hopes of duplicating the success "Dangerous Catch" has found. Discovery has one called "Lobstermen" that basically is the same show only covering fishing boats working the North Atlantic, and someone else had one about loggers working here in the Pacific Northwest.

Watching those just reaffirmed all the low opinions that us elitist snobs often have about folks in those professions; they tend to be the dregs, who can't get work doing much else, certainly not for any more money. They posture and then whine, make dumb mistakes and then walk off, and seem utterly incapable of addressing obstacles with the least bit of ingenuity or cleverness. I have trouble sitting through those shows. The drama is usually in the challenges that the crews face, but the challenges presented in those imitation shows either seem contrived or pathetic... obstacles that wouldn't slow, say, the Hillstrand boys down for more than five minutes, instead absorbing an entire episode as a gaggle of loggers stand around flummoxed.

In contrast, watching the crab boat crews reveals a bunch of guys who can navigate, weld, fix hydraulic systems, perform medical diagnosis and field surgery, rescue men overboard in twenty foot seas, SCUBA dive in icy waters, splice cable, clamber ashore from a wrecked boat using an improvised ladder of crab pots and safety rope of shot line, and perform a whole host of other mechanical and intellectual tasks that would strain the capabilities of professionals from any number of fields... in short, they exhibit the modern equivalence to the traditional abilities to "hand, reef, and steer" required of the able seaman in the age of sail.

I guess that's something that appeals to me about boating in general, though, the idea that if you keep putting yourself in that environment, you can pick up many of those diverse and useful skills. Of course, every summer here we see plenty of evidence that isn't universally the case, but at least the potential is there. And I'm constantly amazed, even here in the tame waters of Puget Sound, how many truly excellent skippers there are out there. They may be your dentist, a mechanic at Boeing, your local postal worker, or a software engineer in "real" life... but on the water, they have all the skills and poise of those iron men of yore sailing wooden ships. Watching from shore, few lubbers have any idea the depth of knowledge and expertise that can be involved in making those fluffy white things scud about on the placid waters, but the more I learn, the more impressed I am with the local sailing community. It's not the Bering Sea, but it's challenging enough!