DASH FOR SCALLOPS

Subhead IN THIS LUCRATIVE, FAST-PACED
MOLLUSK 'DERBY,' TIME IN PORT MEANS CASH OVERBOARD

Run Date 8/23/1998

Day Sunday

Page E1 Section Lifestyles
Dateline Kodiak

Photo By Jim Lavrakas And Sandi Gerjevic
Daily News Photographer
Photo Courtesy Alaska Department Of Fish And Game
Story Byline By Sandi Gerjevic

Every sip of beer Chris O'Callaghan took at Henry's downtown bar was costing him.
About $500 a day, he figured. He shouldn't have been there.
Like his crew mates, O'Callaghan should have been in Shelikof Strait hauling in scallops,
carving away their meaty, white adductor muscles with the flick of a swift knife. He
should have been washing, grading or stacking the coveted mollusks in freezer trays,
sealing them in boxes and shoving them deep into the boat's frozen hold.
Served on white tablecloths from Anchorage to Paris, high-quality Alaska scallops
command a premium price -- $12 to $15 per pound. That's a far cry from the market's
critique of the product in the 1980s as poorly processed and poorly preserved. Industry
changes have created a promising fishery, even while Alaska scallopers characterize
themselves as a small, labor-intensive work force battling it out for a modest resource.
TX: In 1997, Alaska fishermen produced 786,043 pounds of shucked scallop meats, a
take valued at more than $5 million at the docks (about $6.50 a pound). This season
opened July 1, with eight boats going after the shells in Prince William Sound and off
Yakutat, then moving into Shelikof Strait and Bering Sea late in the month.
O'Callaghan, a lean, intense worker nicknamed ''Critter,'' itched for the work, but the
scalloper he'd hired onto, the FV Provider, was dead in the water, crippled by a bum
compressor, the chunk of machinery that keeps her freezer trays cold. Tethered to the
city dock, the boat and its crew loitered in a kind of agony as the competition skimmed
distant sea bottoms, crews manhandling load upon load of fresh scallops, lessening the
quota with every haul. In such a so-called ''derby'' fishery, when the quota is met, the
season is over. And so is the money.
Like hobbled horses, the men of the Provider waited, cursing their luck and figuring their
losses. Since each shares in the catch, all faced financial catastrophe if the boat's problems
weren't fixed, and soon. As the engineer made emergency phone calls about the
compressor, deckhands watched videos, put away gear and smoked cigarettes. Widely
shirtless and earringed, they mainly worked on their tans.
''Oh, how depressing,'' said Mike Andrews, the Provider's captain, a stout, huggable man
with a head of black curls, known for his unflappable demeanor. Like most of his crew, he
sails from Massachusetts and spoke about the summer's quest for ''scaw-lops.'' He first
tested his sea legs at age 14, working for his father, whose trawler, the Captain Bill,
capsized off the tip of Cape Cod in 1978, drowning every man aboard. Yet like his father,
Andrews made fishing his livelihood, first trying his luck in Alaska waters nine years ago.
It's a nice life when things go right, he said, slumped in the wheelhouse, cradling the boat's
cell phone, trying to decide what to do.
The Provider, owned by Mark and Teressa Kandianis of Ferndale, Wash., had been at sea
nearly a month and hauled in 50,000 pounds of meat before docking. The take was
respectable, but the Pursuit, owned by John Doody of Absecon, N.J., tossed off 40,000
pounds in town a week earlier. That's about $230,000 in scallops. Now the Pursuit was
away again, fishing an average 2,000 pounds a day. In the race, the Provider's 12-man
crew had only about 24 hours to drop their load, replenish the boat and strike out for
more. That's when the faulty compressor began to squeal, hitting a note that made every
man aboard wince.
As the Provider's hour of departure came and went, a powdery half-moon floated over
St. Paul Harbor like sifted flour, a tableau in contrast to the turmoil below decks, where
Andrews and his engineer, Ernest Ostler, shouted over the grind of motors. The men
nursed and cursed the compressor half the night, greasy wrenches in hand. They
monitored its innards with a stethoscope and sniffed its oily discharge. They huddled in a
pod with a hired mechanic, who finally gave up and went home. Late in the night,
Andrews threatened to rip the bloody thing out and install a replacement, to the tune of
several thousand dollars.
The next morning, a Saturday, the compressor still was broken, the boat still in port.
With nothing to do, Andrews' crew pestered him like teenage sons, who, if they weren't
going to fish, ached to be in town. The captain's temper erupted like whale spouts, and
around 2 p.m. he dismissed all hands until Monday morning, when he could fly in a
refrigeration expert.
A short time later, Andrews, too, was sitting at the bar in Henry's.

SCALLOPS AND SPIES
In the supermarket, Alaska's weathervane scallops look like raw chunks of white meat
shaped like hockey pucks. The meat actually is a muscle, a scallop's only means of
mobility. They may look like motionless creatures, deaf and dumb as rocks, but scallops
use their adductor muscle to snap open opposing platelike shells, propelling themselves
through the water in spurts. They're slow-growing creatures, living up to two decades or
more.
Scallops congregate in long beds and are fished off the continental shelf at a depth of 40
to 60 fathoms. Each has hundreds of black eyes. They're intelligent enough to sense and
avoid predators, but not quick enough to dodge the dredges that scoop them up, said Jeff
Barnhart, scallop fishery biologist for the Department of Fish and Game in Kodiak.
Barnhart researches Alaska's scallops and manages their harvest.
When he accepted the job in 1994, there was no book for him to reference much of what
he needed to know. Like how to sex weathervane scallops, when they spawn, when they
mature, how to age them. Mainly how to manage and sustain them. Barnhart's Kodiak
office is a small repository of sculpted shells, including one plate about 10 inches wide,
twice the average size of Alaska scallops fished today. The shell was about 18 years old
when caught, a reminder of the virgin fishery first-comers harvested here without
oversight in 1967.
One incident stands out in the fishery's management. In 1995, a North Carolina-based
scalloper named Mister Big, large enough to use Seattle as a home port, fished scallop
beds just outside Alaska waters, which extend three miles from shore. Within days, the
boat fished a year's worth of quotas from the management area, causing the National
Marine Fisheries Service to close the area for 18 months. The industry is still rebounding.
''It was devastating,'' said Laura Sullivan, controller for Kodiak Fish Co., which manages
the Provider's finances. Crewmen lived off their credit cards during the closure, she said.
They lost homes. Families fell apart.
Over the years, scalloping has become one of the most closely scrutinized fisheries in
Alaska. The state requires each boat to host an on-board observer, who records a
sampling of data. Observers further monitor bycatch -- what dredges are catching that
shouldn't be caught, namely crabs. There is a moratorium on newcomers. Dredge and crew
size are limited. Captains must register for each zone they fish.
At sea, scallopers locate their catch using a formula of science and wizardry known only
to them. Their clues are undersea topography and ocean currents. They tend to fish on a
best guess and move as a herd, keeping an eye on each other. Not long after the Provider
came to port, Andrews chartered a quick flight over Shelikof Strait. He wasn't sightseeing.
He was spying on the competition, getting a fix on where the other boats were fishing.
Alaska scallopers fish with dredges -- rectangular, metal-ringed mesh bags 12 to 15 feet
wide. The dredges are lowered and towed on either side of a boat. Ideally, they skim along
the substrate on a series of rubber ''shoes,'' flipping or scaring up scallops into the bags.
Because Alaska's scallop fishery is remote, most scallopers do not hand off their catch to
tenders or throw it directly into a hold. In 1990, boat owners began adapting their vessels
to allow them to process and freeze scallops on board, a vast improvement over storing
them on ice, said Blair Culter of Nova Fisheries Inc. in Seattle, a major buyer of Alaska
scallops.
He said Alaska competes mainly with eastern Canada in the marketplace of high-end
frozen scallops. Big scallop losses off China and Argentina, blamed on El Nino, should
have driven the price up this year, but a poor economy in Japan means import
competition. Last season, the Provider's 100,000-pound haul earned $650,000, said
Teressa Kandianis, but the boat is operating in the red.
The Provider was built in 1963, second in a line of prototypes financed by the state of
Massachusetts, designed to compete with foreign fleets fishing Georges Bank off
Massachusetts. Mark Kandianis, who once captained the Pursuit, bought the boat in
1980, converted her to a scalloper and brought her north.
The couple said scalloping made them good money in the past and may again, once the
fishery stabilizes. But even with stringent state and federal oversight, too many boats are
overharvesting the product, said Mark, an Alaska scalloper for 19 years.
''I guess I'm just stubborn,'' he said. ''I'm hoping there's going to be a future in it, but I
don't know.''

'PRAYING ALOUD'
Shortly after the Provider docked in Kodiak, Patrick O'Callaghan, 11, lay a pole over her
bow, hooking fish darting by the rocky bank. His father, Chris, worked nearby on deck,
watching the boy. Later, he cleaned Patrick's fish and stuffed them in his son's knapsack
before putting him on a plane home.
Patrick had flown in from Anchorage to be with his dad during the few hours Chris
expected to be in port. In all of last year, Chris, a crab fisherman, spent just 14 days at
home with his family.
Don Gougen, a deckhand on the Pursuit, wasn't around the day his son was born, nor the
day in July that the boy turned 1 year old.
Bryan Perham, 24, left a new wife in Massachusetts and a 2-year-old son with an ex in
Oregon. On board the Pursuit, he readily unfolded his wallet to show a picture of the
toddler. After paying the bills, Perham hoped to end the season with a down payment on
a house back east. He couldn't say when that might be.
''It's not much of a life. It's like a jail sentence,'' J.J. Jardin said of the fisherman's lot.
Jardin, of New Bedford, Mass., said there were two things his mother never wanted him
to be: a boxer or a fisherman. He's been both. The fishing, he said, is good money. A
deckhand working four or five months at sea takes home an average of $45,000 to
$50,000, depending on the catch. Since every hand gets paid the same, slackers soon are
taken to task.
For the money, deckhands endure relentless physical labor, frequently in miserable
conditions, work as mentally numbing as it is dangerous. The Provider's 1-ton, New
England-style dredges are raised and lowered by winches, but must be swung back and
forth over starboard and port by hand. Stray fingers get smashed. A flyaway pulley can
knock a man cold. Always, there are the risks of working at sea.
Commercial fishing is the most dangerous industry in America, with Alaska fishermen
dying at a rate 20 times the overall U.S. occupational fatality rate, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One of the worst fishing disasters ever
recorded off Kodiak involved a scalloper. On Nov. 29, 1981, a thunderous wave pounded
the Saint Patrick, a Florida-based trawler fishing the Gulf of Alaska. Two survived to tell
how 10 crew members clutched a length of rope in the darkened seas, praying aloud. All
10 died.
When the scallop season stretches into winter, crews keep fishing in bitter cold. Each
man must get along at close quarters and nurse grudges silently for the good of all. Boats
stay out until fuel and supplies are depleted. The Pursuit had been out a month before
dropping its first load. In town, her captain, Tom Minio, purchased a sea-water filter to
extend his time away even longer. Fuel and supplies can be brought, he said.
Before setting out for Alaska from Bellingham, Wash., in June, the Provider stored in
$15,000 worth of provisions. In Kodiak, Mike Medo, the boat's cook, spent $2,500 to
restock two Butcher Boy refrigerators with perishables that included half a case of
lettuce, 100 pounds of potatoes and 70 gallons of milk.
The Provider drops 24 tows a day, one per hour, fishing around the clock. The men work
six hours on, six off. Abrupt sleep cycles are bolstered by catnaps. While the captain,
first mate, engineer and cook have private quarters, deckhands bed down in the Provider's
forecastle or ''pit,''a slew of unmade bunks strewn with dirty laundry and girlie magazines.
Shucking is a big part of the deckhand's job, a skill not learned overnight. The best cutters
look for work with highliners, captains who bring in the biggest hauls. New Bedford,
Mass., is the hub of scallop fishing in the United States, and many of its skilled shuckers
are hired away to Alaska.
When the fishing is good, a man might spend 16 hours a day shucking. A scallop knife
becomes a critical tool, pared, taped and customized to a man's grip, one of the few things
crewmen don't share. The best cutters are ''clean and steady,'' said Perham, who claimed to
be no top hand, but merely average. Meat left in the shell, he explained, is money
overboard.
Week upon week, Alaska's scallopers share an unbroken circuit of work and sleep, with
little on a razored horizon to stave off monotony. Even in port, most of them can't tell
you what day it is.
The afternoon O'Callaghan and his mates sat in the bar at Henry's, they couldn't know
they faced a full week of dead time as the Kandianises scrambled to fly their broken
compressor to Seattle, have it rebuilt and fly it back to Kodiak, along with a refrigeration
expert. The debacle had cost the boat $10,000 a day. That money was gone, Teressa said,
with no way to make it up.
The crew of the Provider returned to work in the strait the first week of August, ready to
try.