Passing the Bar at 3am

“If you don’t go you don’t get”

Heidi and Ben on their first boat, the Kate M., Noyo Harbor, Ft. Bragg CA, circa 1999.

No, not that bar, the one with two jetties for entering the Pacific Ocean. A captain I worked for years ago told me “I do my best thinking at least 10 miles offshore, that’s why it’s better if I stay out here most of the time.” I’m pretty sure his ex-wives number one to three would have agreed with this statement.

My uncle Skip Hurwitz loved being a commercial fisherman, but he mainly loved tuna fishing. His best tuna boat was the North Cape, a big wood jig boat with a “crows nest”, which is really just a big bucket mounted high up the mast for spotting bird or fish action from miles away. The ability to spot the slightest activity on a vast ocean, and the patience and skill required to master binoculars, is key to successful tuna fishing. Which is maybe why I’m not so good at this particular fishery.

Uncle Skip liked to climb up there after he got a few miles offshore, with a bottle of whiskey, and “clear his head”, or polish off the bottle, whichever came first. Pretty good place to get drunk, actually, as long as you don’t pass out and the pilot malfunctions, sending you back towards land. Otherwise, the only negative consequence would be waking up cold and hungover, and having to get back down below to figure out how far you traveled…and to where you had traveled, because the old “Iron Mike” Wood Freeman pilots never held a good course for too long, even when functioning perfectly. Definitely not long enough to get drunk, pass out in the crows nest and crawl back to the cabin after waking up. Could be heading down to Mexico by then.

But that’s not why I’ve brought you all here today. Yes, I did just head out of Noyo Harbor at 3 am with two full totes of bait, three eager crewmen and one howling deck hound. We aren’t going for tuna this time, but we do hope to find some crabs. And these night runs really help put the troubles on land into perspective. But mainly they are a meditation, a prayer of gratitude and a chance to come to peace with “what is”. Because on the ocean that’s really all that there is; there’s no “kind of’s”, “maybe’s” or “what if’s”.

Forget all the romantic bullshit, this is the true power of the ocean. The sea is nature in its most raw form, a place where all great plans are laid to waste. And, unlike on social media where you read this line all the time, there really are “no fucks given” from the ocean. The sea gives and it takes away, and it doesn’t even blink while doing it.

During my regular bedtime call to Heidi last night, we both mused on how much Noyo and our lives have changed since we met there 26 years ago. We talked about all the loss and sickness, which it seems as if there’s been a wave of it come crashing through our lives lately, and I questioned whether it really is true what they like to say in AA, that “G-d only gives you what you can handle”. I mean, really G-d? Sometimes I think the guy who first declared it in an AA meeting was trying to make a joke. Or maybe he was drunk.

My 85 year old mom is slowly exiting stage left with advanced Alzheimer’s. My older, and only brother just got a crushing diagnosis after suddenly losing most of his physicality in the last 6 months. My niece’s mom (my brother’s first wife) just died suddenly a few weeks ago. My three nieces all still live here, with their own partners and families, too. It’s hard stuff to accept at such young ages, and I wish they didn’t have to experience this at all. Their grandpa, my dad, who they all loved dearly, has been gone from this harbor, and our daily lives, for many years. So many more who were woven into the fabric of our lives, from our little coastal town… now, gone forever. It’s hard to imagine how any of us have continued without them.

The titans of our lifetimes are all mostly departed. And the awareness of life’s ultimate fragility hovers over everything, and has recently become both undeniable and inescapable.

The real-life Miss Heidi is coming down here Saturday while I’m out on this crab trip, so she can see one of her dearest friends, Polly, and attend a memorial for her big sister, Carrie. It’s going to be a somber weekend here, Polly‘s family has been in this town for generations and her sister Carrie had struggled with serious physical illness her whole life before leaving her mom, sisters, kids, grandkids, friends — way too soon. She’s left a huge hole in this community.

And by the way, friends ARE family in small, isolated coastal towns like this one. We don’t say, “this one here is my blood, these ones are just my friends”. If we played together as kids, fished and hunted together, and lived or worked side by side most of our lives, you might be called my brother or sister. If you’re older and you looked after me like your own, you might get called mom or dad or grandma or grandpa. And it doesn’t matter if you’re white, native, Mexican, redneck, hippy, straight — or as gay as the rainbow sunset over the Russian River— a loyal friend is family and family is actually thicker than blood. But personally, it does help me see you as family if you are a fisherman, or at least fisherman adjacent.

We were actually only in port for 24 hours: we came up from Bodega Bay, re-set 400 crab traps down below Pt. Arena and did a 4-day trip before running all night to Noyo to deliver yesterday morning. It was a bluebird day in the harbor, a perfect 65 degrees, t-shirt weather. I got a chance to visit with a few local captains I’ve known most of my life while walking Mortimer around the mooring basin. While it was all new to my 17 month old basset, most of what I saw reminded me of some particular events from my 20 years of home-porting out of here (8 as a deckhand, 12 as a boat owner) and from the 15 years since then, after we moved away, coming and going as the skipper of a traveling boat.

Right here next to the bathroom at the head of ‘C’ dock is where I got hired at 16 years old by Rich Bush on the Grace L., for my first job on a boat which wasn’t run by my dad. Turns out Rich liked to drink, talk on the VHF and shoot at things over my head more than he liked to fish, so I only worked on his boat for one salmon season. Before that summer I was still a kid, and it seems like I’ve been an adult ever since.

Over here in the parking lot next to the harbor office is where the first girl ever said “yes” to me asking her if she might want to spend the night. That night, by the way, was spent on the floor of the focsle, because the bunks were only one-body wide. It was pretty innocent, and only Pg-13 rated, to be honest. She was my first real girlfriend, Judy Marble: me 16 and her 15 and her dad Mike also had a boat in the harbor. Her brother Johnny and I competed at everything, even who could dump the most sand bags the fastest back into the hopper up in the semi trailer for Dale Erb, the sandblaster/painter who we worked for over in the boatyard, prepping new steel boats between salmon and crab season.

And at this dock over here is the old Tommy’s Marine, where a few of my old hand painted signs still hang 28 years after I worked off some of my monthly bill by painting them for Tommy Ancona, the proprietor. They are faded but still intact. Tommy, who used to travel to all the regional council meetings with my dad, got cancer and died about ten years ago, and the store didn’t make it much longer, either.

While talking to Heidi last night it occurred to me this is just how it is, and I’ll need to learn to accept it just like I had to learn, at a much younger age, to accept the uncaring brutality of the sea where I make my living. Not too many lucky souls get to slip quietly into the night, do they? Death is generally preceded by some awful sickness, terrible accident or sudden violence. Rarely do we get to ease into it like a wizened old patriarch or matriarch of a Hollywood movie, healthy and sharp of wit until the last breath, having lived a long productive life, respected and loved by all and surrounded in our final days by all the trusted and loved family and friends of our lives. If it were only so…

My uncle Pete was a lovely person, an intellectual and secular Jewish bachelor. He was a remarkably unsuccessful lawyer who loved Paris but spent much of his life alone in NYC, in a 5th floor rent-controlled walk-up in the Village. His body during his last months was riddled with a cancer he had been waging a war against since he was 20 years old. He had been physically active, slim and never smoked or drank. He finished his tour here on earth destitute, incontinent, refusing to leave his apartment until his only friend finally got him to the hospital. In his last days, all he could hope for was for it to all end as soon as possible — so he quit eating until it finally did end.

I’m not saying it’s all that depressing: even my uncle Peter had love and friendship during his final days. My aunt Juliette flew in from Canada to hold his hand and comfort him in the hospital during his last week.

My own dad, 27 years ago, after having fought a brave fight against an unknown illness, reassured his close family right before he passed that everyone of us would be ok if he didn’t make it, and gave us each our final instructions. He proved that he WAS our true patriarch until his last breath. Not only will his memory always be with us, and we all still rely constantly on the wisdom he shared with each of us while he was here, but his memory will always truly be a blessing in our lives. He was the foundation from which all our lives were built.

Tommy Ancona also left a lasting impact on the fishing industry which he loved so much. We are living with his proposed trap limits today, for example (thanks Tommy, lol). And his passion for Noyo Habor has been carried on by the younger generations of ambitious fishermen, fish buyers and harbor commissioners.

Even my mother is still healthy physically for her age and has a doting husband who attends her every need and reassures her constantly that she is loved. He’s even taking her to a Valkaries WNBA game soon, her first professional live sporting event, which she won’t remember a thing about but it will give them both immeasurable joy in the moment. (But $1,200 dollars to see a game with no dunks? Oi vey).

It’s 5 am now and first light is seeping through the fog. We are off Navarro in 53 fathoms heading down around Pt. Arena to Fish Rocks. All crew and deck hounds are still sleeping. It was here, at 3 am, 26 years ago where I unknowingly made one of the most consequential decisions of my life. And the actual story I was intending to share, and I’m sorry it took so long to get to it:

Less than a year after meeting Heidi I had bought my first full-size commercial fishing boat, a fiberglass and wood troller called the Kate M. I had been rock cod fishing for the first two years of my sobriety out of a skiff and a kayak, but big restrictions in that fishery were looming so I made the jump into salmon trolling and longlining for blackcod. It was late April, we finally had the new (to us) boat ready to go trolling for the summer and now I had to make the run all the way down to Monterey Bay to start the season.

Heidi and her best friend Stacy came down to the docks to see me off at midnight. There was short weather window to pilot the tiny 30’ Kate M. south ahead of a strong front, and it was “leave right now or miss the season opener”. As I stood at the trunk cabin wheel, backing the boat out of the slip, Heidi disintegrated into a mess of sobbing. I had never even seen her cry before, aww geez… I wondered for a brief but uncomfortable moment, “what did you drag this poor girl into, fresh out of a rehab, working hard at it, barely got her feet back on the ground”… and maybe for the first time as a young man I became aware that responsibility might be part of the whole “falling in love” deal. But at the moment, I had my hands full. So I waved goodbye again, powerless to do anything about a woman’s tears (not to be the first or last of many times), and left the harbor.

I was supposed to have a running partner for that trip, a hippy carpenter from Pt. Arena who also had just purchased his first troller, but he chickened out before we got to Arena. Some lame-butt excuse about a bad alternator. By then it was 3 am and the wind and swells were picking up on my stern. At that time, the auto pilot decided not to work anymore. As if orchestrated by the Joker himself, a few minutes later the starboard pole (outrigger) started to crack and break the bulwark to which it was mounted.

It was about then when I realized one of the reasons I had got such a smoking deal on this seemingly beautifully crafted boat was because the old guy who built it in his backyard hadn’t actually ever tested any of his designs on the ocean. He died before ever making a trip. I would be the literal test dummy now, and for the next two years I struggled to make it all work, finally realizing it was simply a horrible idea to ever try to marry a wood cabin and wood plank decks to a fiberglass hull. Sorry, sir, it was a nice idea but you should be glad you never had to come out here and realize this hybrid design, which you spent years working on, couldn’t work. I hope you enjoyed the designing and building process. In all respect that is due, I’ll bet he did. Just turned out he wasn’t crazy enough to try to make a living with it. But I was.

So, back to that trip 26 years ago: now it’s 3:30 am and I’m hand steering after nearly rolling the boat over trying to lash the pole to something solid. I got it all on the boat, but not where it was meant to be. Not even close. Luckily, I still had the starboard pole intact with a stabilizer in the water, on the weather side of things, because otherwise I’d be dangerously broaching on the quartering sets of swells, which were coming more frequently now, and much steeper. The tiny double-ender was now listing eagerly into the trough every time we rolled diagonally off a sharp swell.

In those days I had no generator or even an inverter yet, so I had no lights to see anything in front or behind the boat. Just a compass, a paper chart and white knuckles. While I was thanking my dad for teaching me how to navigate, I was also for the first time wishing I had paid more attention to what he was doing when I was his son/deckhand, and less time leaning over the gaffing hatch trying to pop bubbles in the water with my spit and wishing I was hanging out at the river with my friends. Like, how in the heck do I fix the auto pilot? Not having a clue, and not having a cellphone or even a vhf radio which could transmit more than a few miles, I couldn’t ask anyone for advice. Now the only options were to ether turn back towards Noyo in defeat, to be welcomed by a loving girlfriend and interrogated by my buddies, or keep going south, hand steering for 48 hours and hoping the weather got better, and somehow fixing the Metal Mike before opening day. I took my plan as a glimmer of hope, instead of a ridiculous notion, and crossed my fingers that nothing else was going to break (it did).

At some point I realized the half-totes which were still somehow lashed to the rails, which I had purchased to hold my slush-iced salmon up on deck, could also be used for ballast, and I filled them with water from the deck hose, on the port side of the boat. No longer attempting to dip its starboard bulwarks into the ocean and swamp itself on every deep roll, I increased the speed of the boat and kept motoring south. Ten hours later I was approaching Pt. Reyes and slowly relaxing my grip on the wheel as the wind and seas steadily began to ease. That other pole, by the way, had the decency to wait until my second salmon trip before snapping in half .

I made it down there to Monterey Bay late on the third day after more entertaining screw-ups, and joined my pals from Ft. Bragg, Billy Clyde and Johnny Cod, and landed 86 king salmon on opening day. Not bad. I even talked Heidi into coming down and joining me for the summer a month later. And we were off to the races…

Last night I asked Heidi why she stuck it out with me when I threw caution out the window and made the second choice. “I loved you then and I still love you now. I didn’t have another choice.” Dammit, Heidi. She also said something about “it’s who you are and why you succeeded”, but the first part was more true. Because I know I’m just a lucky guy on both counts. One who still can’t, nearly 30 years later, do much to fix either auto pilots or crying women. Or crying anyone. Or most electronic things… but who still goes across that bar every time with a dumb head full of hope. And still gets lucky, on occasion. As Billy Clyde says, “even a blind dog finds a bone every once in awhile.”