Chapter 4

Beginning a Career

I had a friend Vern, who worked as a tech at Seatron, a marine electronics company at Seattle's fisherman's terminal. He urged me to come down for an interview. The Seattle King Crab and Halibut fishing fleet was enjoying one of its biggest booms in history and the latest radios, navigation equipment, autopilots and radar were all things that could give one boat an edge over the other guy.

Vern told me stories of assignments to Dutch Harbor, Alaska and being the most popular guy in town. The highly competitive fishing boats, would seek out electronics techs to fix whatever was wrong so they could get back out and catch more fish and crab. Savvy licensed techs were in high demand and well paid.

Seatron offered me a job and it seemed a good fit, the Seattle-based crab fleet had lots of dollars to spend on top notch electronics equipment and I enjoyed the mostly outside work fixing and installing radio equipment, early navigation computers, antennas and radars.

There were five or six techs working installations and fixing radios and other equipment. It was a small family owned company and they'd buy beer for an after-work party every Friday. Soon I was assigned a trip to Southeast Alaska to visit half a dozen canneries with a bush pilot.

There were no roads to most of these operations and it was vital that each cannery had their radio equipment in top working order for the upcoming season. I started at a cannery town called King Salmon where I confirmed a radio relay schedule with Seatron's friend, a cannery guy, Fred. We agreed on a schedule where he'd listen on Channel 8981 marine shortwave radio at 8PM every night for a check in and if I needed any parts, he'd relay my request to Seatron in Seattle by radio. I was a little dubious about Fred's reliability and hoped he'd be there listening every night.

The plan was to meet up with bush pilot, Ben and spend a week flying to Southeast Alaska canneries in his Cessna Skymaster. We'd spend as much time as I needed at each cannery and then move on to the next.

I thought it was a pretty cool assignment as we dropped into a couple of small villages along the way. Native kids would run up and watch us unloading the plane.

At the end of each short gravel runway, he'd put a rock under one tire and we'd both grab the tail and turn the plane around at the very end for takeoff.

During the flights, Ben would try and find a bear to show me while flying low between mountain peaks. It was a fun and exciting trip until we got to Chignik Bay. When I turned on the cannery's marine radio, a cloud of smoke came out the back, one of my worst nightmares. I soon realized I needed repair parts that I didn't have with me.

It was the only radio and the cannery loaned me their "3 wheeler" ATV to ride about five miles around the large bay to the rival cannery. Riding the three-wheeler for the first time to that cannery, I nearly had a fatal accident. It was a rough gravel road with sharp corners and large boulders on each side. I was going too fast and momentarily lost control and narrowly missed turning over and colliding with one of the large boulders. It was scary wake-up call to slow down.

Later banned, three wheelers were known for their unusual steering characteristics and riders could be easily hurt when first learning to ride. Arriving at the rival cannery office, I introduced myself and had a cool but friendly reception. The relationship between the two canneries wasn't that good but it was Alaska and people helped each other out.

I used their radio for the 8pm schedule to make contact with Fred in King Salmon. No Fred. I was finally able to raise Fred but not after a near meltdown trying to reach him. It was a two day wait for the parts to be flown up from Seattle and meanwhile I got a taste of life at an isolated Alaska cannery. There was room for about two dozen people in a couple of large dormitory style trailers with a connected dining room and kitchen.

There wasn’t much outside except for rocks, a few tufts of hardy grass, a sandy beach as far as I could see and a pier. Looking further, all I could see were rugged gray mountains rising behind a field of bare rocks and a sweeping vista of the wide curving Chignik Bay. Because the fishing season hadn't begun yet, the place was empty except for a small crew. Meals were prepared by a young lady who even offered to do my laundry. I got permission to borrow the ATV and had a blast exploring up and down the wide sandy beaches around the bay. I vowed that I'd buy one of these machines someday.

My next big assignment was to a Mississippi boatyard installing about $1M of electronics on a new king crab boat along with my friend Vern. Fishermen were making a ton of money on Alaska King Crab and it had attracted wealthy investors who wanted in on the large profits. Everyone in the business with extra dollars was having a crab boat built.

Boatyards were overbooked and you couldn't get one built in the Seattle area, or probably anywhere on the West Coast. One group of investors went to a Mississippi boatyard to have one built, and Seatron got the electronics job. A lot of the cabling had been installed on prior trips so it was up to us to do the final connect and get everything up, tested and working. The new 200 ft crab boat had been launched and was tied to the dock at the shipyard when we got there. There was no engineering design of the electronics installations, we just read the manuals and connected everything using best practices.

It was summertime in Pascagoula Mississippi and the air was heavy with humidity every day. The boatyard was on a small tributary to the Mississippi river, it was sticky and the work was hot and exhausting. It was my first time in the South and it was a real eye opener in more ways than one. The men at the shipyard all chewed "Red Man" tobacco and one time I saw a sign for the KKK on a tree in the middle of a swamp.

Most every afternoon there was a thunderstorm and one day I had just finished installing a long antenna wire up the mast. It had a feed-through to the ceiling of the wheelhouse and we were sitting on the floor taking a break, waiting for the storm to pass. Suddenly there was a nearby lightning strike. As I stared up at the ceiling, a big fat blue two-inch spark jumped from the feed through to the steel roof. I broke out in a sweat because I had just finished tightening the nut on that thing.

Soon we met Tor Olsen, a Norwegian crab boat captain who'd been hired to captain the boat, manage the final stretch of rigging, and ferry the boat to Seattle. Tor Olsen was a huge guy, mostly muscle with a square jaw and piercing blue eyes. He knew the crabbing business and his management style was to thrash his arms around and yell at people. He was also a technology nut and he'd ordered the very latest in radio, radar and navigation equipment. in fact, he'd gone over top in electronics for the new crab boat by ordering two or three of everything. Tor wanted every advantage to bring in the largest catches of crab.

The engine room even had TV cameras, something we'd not seen on other crab boats yet. I was in heaven installing the 1,000-watt marine HF radio and dual C and X band radars. The new boat was christened the Wichmann Command apparently after the Wichmann Marine Engines that were installed for propulsion. Tor and the investors were in a big hurry to make the upcoming crab season and he was all stirred up to get going.

We worked ten-hour days for two months and were still not completely finished. At that point it was September and the crab season was fast approaching.

I was offered a ride through the Panama Canal and on to Seattle to finish up all the final odds and ends of the electronic systems on board.

I was to be one of six people on the boat and I started thinking wow it was hurricane season, we'd be transiting the Caribbean and the Panama Canal. Tt was a thirty-day voyage and even after four years in the USCG, I'd never spent one night on a ship.

I was 28, up for the adventure and it was a memorable trip in more ways than one. The good news was we didn't run into a hurricane, the bad news was the autopilot quit after the third night of the 30-day voyage and I was unable to repair it. So, I was pressed into service to stand a wheel watch 4 hours each day. There was no wheel, only a "jog stick", a small handle on a spring-loaded switch that moved the rudder when the stick was moved from side to side. You sat in a huge padded swivel chair in the wheelhouse with all the engine controls, electronic displays and other equipment. The engines were always at full throttle so all you had to do was steer the compass course given by Tor and use the jog stick and rudder indicator to steer the course.

It took some skill to navigate the 200 ft ship because as soon as you were on the correct course, winds and currents started taking you to left or right and you had to start jogging the rudder, but not too much! One afternoon we were motoring up the West Coast of Mexico, it was a beautiful clear day and I was steering. Captain Tor was on the bridge and he kept looking out the back window at our wake. As far as you could see, it looked like a twisting snake. He shook his head saying "With you steering the ship, we'll never get to Seattle!"

We did get to Seattle and the boat was rigged and loaded with crab pots and quickly set off for the Bering Sea. I never saw it again. But there was trouble ahead for the industry. Too little regulation left fewer crab to catch and Seatron was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. I decided to continue looking for a more stable and permanent career. I won an interview at the local NBC affiliate, KING TV but as soon as I sat down in front of the chief engineer, I knew it wouldn't go well.

He looked at my resume, got a frown on his face and his eyebrows got low and looked at me and looked at my resume and shook his head. Looking straight into my eyes he said "You need to go to Spokane for two years and work in TV there, and then come back and see me" He continued, "Sorry, but we do not hire people in this TV market without experience." I knew I was never going to move to Spokane for two years, so my next stop was The Boeing Co.

Next Back Index