When a "Perfect Storm" made a teenager rich
I just caught the last 15 minutes of "The Perfect Storm" on TV. If you haven't seen it it is about a boat going after a late season run for swordfish. If they beat the deteriorating weather, the fishermen and their families will have a more comfortable winter and if they lose-well-well losing is either little money, no money, or worse. Spoiler-they die.
I like the movie. I worked in a gentler fishery and still folks died. I worked it four years and three men died locally.
"My Father was a fisherman, my Mother was a fisherman's friend, and I was born in the boredom and the chowder....
So the summer I was 14 I became a deckhand. My Grandpa captained an oyster sloop and Dad served till the war and even a few seasons after. In '68 two uncles bought a dredger and to work I went. It was backbreaking and sick-making and hard as hell. The same Uncle's-both of whom in their "real" lives were teamsters who would defend a union brother with their lives turned out to be Captain Bligh's love children when it came to onboard productivity.
The first year was a joke-on a new working boat the learning curve is steep. The first forty hours a week at under a dollar sucked but the next twenty really stung. A summer in the pizza parlor would have been easier and more lucrative. It took that full year. The captains had to learn it all-the grounds, the tides, the winds, the drifts, and the seasons.
It was the middle of the next season the "Prowler" (our boat-38' Novi) got hot-the summer of '69 on those really hot days we hit 100 bushel of oyster a day-and a deckhands share hit $125 a day. I was 15.
Of course I loved the money. I worked as hard as any full grown man and took the same job risks. But I LOVED what we did. At the end of those days we brought home 100 bushels of enjoyment to people up and down the coasts of Long Island Sound. That second year the third guy died-his boat was found capsized and he was never found.
The thing is-I'm not sure where this post goes. Other than to say there was a time when a strong back was enough if you bought into a small chance of drowning and that is gone. There was a time when a stocky kid could make man-sized money. I guess the film showed me that still you could bet your own survival and might even get a living wage. And maybe, just maybe I miss a job that starts with just occasionally you die, but if you do it right and get lucky the money was big and you had a right to pride
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How much is the least you would accept to stand in front of a firing squad with 999 other guys, knowing that one of you is going to get executed? Would you go back a second time?
Here in the northwest, you can still sign on to a fishing boat, but (setting aside the issue of being injured maimed or disabled) the odds are still significant that you won't come home.
