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Q: Do you have another occupation during off-season?
A: No, being the captain and owner of the Wizard is a full-time job. Although the boats only work seven months a year, the remaining five months are dedicated to shipyard and administrative work. I'm also very active in the politics surrounding the Bering Sea crab fisheries.
Q: What's is the best prank you've seen at sea?
A: There are a lot of good ones. The best prank I've played recently is convincing a greenhorn that we needed to adjust the radar, dressing him up entirely in aluminum foil and making him jump up and down. This was actually done on another television show that the Wizard participated in for a British film crew.
Q: How long has your crew been working with you?
A: My brother Monte and I have worked together off and on for 20 years. Soper, my mate, has been with me 20 years. The remainder of my crew has been with me for the last one or two years.
Q: Do you miss the Derby or do you like the way it is now?
A: I miss the Derby. I miss the Derby big time. The crab fishery has changed in the last two years. The Derby was wide open: the best boat wins, every man for himself. The new fishery has a whole new set of struggles that we go through that make it just as intense as the old fishery, only different.
Q: Is it difficult getting a boat registered for fishing?
A: There are a lot of licenses and documentation behind putting a vessel into the fleet. My list of expiration dates is immense. Maintaining constant vigilance to avoid having something expire and not being able to participate in the fishery is a real battle.
Q: What's the longest time you've been away from home?
A: The longest I've been away is 11 months. The longest I've been out on the water without delivering back to town is one month.
Q: Do you have much contact with any of the other captains?
A: Yes, absolutely. Modern technology has changed the way we work with radars, plotters and especially communications. We have real-time communication on the ground at all times. It's easy to get distracted and chase radio crabs. A radio crab is that elusive crab that doesn't exist but your partner or enemy is trying to set you on course for it.
Q: When you are all playing jokes on each other, does anyone ever take it seriously and get angry?
A: Absolutely, yes. I do not like people hauling my crab pots. Whenever crab pots get hauled by somebody else, many times they will set it in the wrong position and it may be tangled with one of my own pots or somebody else's pots, or it may be out of line. We set strings of pots in a line for a reason. Weather often plays a big factor in how we set our strings of crab pots. When I come back to my pots, if one is out of line and the weather is bad I may have to make adjustments to haul that pot, which could potentially put my crew in jeopardy with waves coming over the sides of the boat. The Wizard, although very large, also has a downside - all four tanks are always full, it rides low to the water, and is very susceptible to taking waves. If my crew is busy untangling a prank and the weather is poor, this could potentially put them in jeopardy.
Q: What is the speed of your boat? And how fast do you pull and set pots?
A: The boat travels at 10 knots, which is approximately 11 mph. We haul pots at about 4 mph. This sounds really slow, but with everything involved there's always a ton of activity going on in trying to get pots back, pots baited, the crab sorted, and throwing the hook at the next pot. We can haul as many as 20 pots per hour, or better.
Q: Has global warming hurt the crop of crab, or is it likely to?
A: Absolutely. Water temperatures play a huge part in the lifecycles of crab and their predators, and everything in the Bering Sea. But so far the climate change has only made the Bering Sea more unpredictable. In the last 10 years we've had extremes in climate; very cold or very mild. Also, global warming has created larger and more intense storms that track up the Aleutian chain from Japan, making weather conditions more unpredictable and more severe, in my opinion. So I believe in global warming.
Q: What do you think about Blake, and what happened with him and the Cornelia Marie?
A: Blake is young and green, but possesses the ego and arrogance to be a crab captain. He's succeeding using radio, but if he truly wants to be a great captain, he's going to have to turn it off and find his own crab. What happened between the Cornelia Marie and the Maverick happens all the time with guys that use the radio to fish. Radio fishing is something you can only do with an absolutely trusted partner. In my career, the only guy that ever made any effort to help me or repay me for helping him was my brother Monte when he had his own boat, and my current partner, Mark on the Pinnacle, and Tony LaRussa on the Fierce Allegiance; both trusted friends and partners.
Q: When you're setting pots, which do you rely on more: previous hot spots and tips or your gut feeling?
A: A lot of everything. Crab tend to be in the same spot year in and year out, where there are favourable grounds for them to live. I also do a lot of background research before each season. I check water temperatures, the annual crab survey, and the location of crab on that survey. These also help me make my decisions. Ultimately, it's by instinct.
Q: If you weren't a crab boat captain what do you think you would be doing for a living?
A: Before becoming a captain I worked in a French restaurant and had worked my way up to assistant chef. I started in a restaurant when I was 14, and once I started fishing, I never went back. If I were to try something else, maybe cooking might not be a bad occupation, but maybe not a fast food place.
