Time Bandit

1 I Live like a King - Johnathan I am a fisherman, an Alaskan fisherman, and a Bering Sea crab fisherman with thirty-seven years on commercial boats. I am tagged as a "bad boy of the Bering Sea" in "the deadliest profession in America." I have fought forty-foot seas and seen rogue waves one hundred feet high. I work on water cold enough to kill a man in five minutes, and I have bent under the power of 120-knot Williwaw winds and watched the crushing strength of the Arctic ice pack move south from Russia around the hull of my boat, Time Bandit. I am Johnathan Hillstrand and that is where I stand in the universe. Right now, that might be another man's life, because I am drifting in a small boat without power, alone, and with no help in sight. Waves no taller than my forearm lap the hull with a rhythm that makes me want to dream. Nothing here threatens me. The sky is a washed-out blue without a cloud to the horizon in every direction. It's creeping me out. The boat I am on, a thirty-eight-foot Weggley gill-netter I named fishing vessel (F/V) Fishing Fever, bobs with the tide in full ebb at about four knots. The boat and I are captives of a moon that pulls us southwestward. I am, I can only estimate, fifty to sixty miles southwest of the mouth of the Kasilof River where I started this morning. I have about ten dozen fat, fresh, Cook Inlet, red sockeye salmon on ice in my tanks. I care where the tide is drifting me (not just because going where I do not want to go is an inconvenience); I would prefer to be back at fishing camp by nightfall with my buddies in the junkyard behind the Kasilof cannery with a bottle of Crown Royal in one hand and a hot dog in the other, telling stories around an oil-drum fire. Almost certainly, that will not happen. I started drifting when Fishing Fever's engine blew up more than three hours ago. The reduction gear fried with a grunt, and the boat shuddered and died like it had been sapped. The demise did not come as a complete surprise. The boat's former owner never changed the oil, and the engine was flooded twice. I bought the boat four years ago because I liked the shape of its hull, not the thrum of its engine. The blame is also mine. I had gunned the engine at stressful rpms back and forth along the hundred-yard length of the gill net in an attempt to herd the spawning salmon toward the mesh. I cannot make repairs to the reduction gear until I can get back to Kasilof, lay the boat on the mud, and get a mechanic in the tiny engine compartment with wrenches. I opened up the cover and squeezed myselfI am 6' 1" and weigh 205 poundsbehind the drive shaft for a look. The shaft is not spinning, and clear oil leaks in the reduction gear when I turn the engine off. Murphy's Law works on water as well as on land. My batteries are not charging. I am leaking power slowly. With batteries fading, no motor, no radios, I am, in a word, fucked. I shut the cover, wishing I could forget what I saw. The tide is drifting me faster than I like in the direction of Augustine Island and beyond, into the Shelikof Strait, where anything can happen, and sometimes does. In his ship's log, Captain Cook supposedly wrote that the second worst weather and currents on earth, after Cape Horn, can be found in the Strait. Like the Bering Sea where my brother and I fish, storms come up in the Strait with startling speed and a violence that can turn a pond into a maelstrom in six hours, and often less. The winds whip off the icy fjord walls that overlook the Strait; currents from the Kennedy Entrance compete with currents from the Cook Inlet, Kachemak Bay, the Gulf of Alaska, and several tidal rips. Put together, these produce swells like nowhere else in Alaska. I look at my watch. As we say, shit happens when you party nHillstrand, Johnathan is the author of 'Time Bandit', published 2008 under ISBN 9780345503725 and ISBN 0345503724.