My Life as a Dungeness Crabber

Tenakee From the Ferry Dock

 

During my summer working as a crabber, I stayed with my sister in Tenakee Springs, Alaska.  Tenakee is a tiny village tucked in Tenakee Inlet on Chichagof Island, southwest of Juneau.  In the winter there are only about 60 permanent residents, but in the summer the population can swell to over a 100 with tourists and residents with summer homes and cabins in the area.  In my experience, it seemed like the population doubled every time they had a community BBQ.  This suspicion was confirmed when I was told that the traditional Crab Boil for the 4^th of July was cancelled years ago due to the influx of ‘guests’ from Juneau, and even yacht clubs from Washington state.  Despite the lack of crab, the 4^th of July celebrations still bring a lot of weekenders, fishermen and even an occasional cruise ship. 

4th of July Underwear Race

 

Since the town is on an island and is surrounded by national forest, the only access is via boat or seaplane.  There is a single dirt road that runs through the town with beachside stilted houses on one side and hillside homes on the other.  The only vehicles in town are the fuel and fire trucks.  The rest of the residents rely on boats, bikes, 4-wheelers, and carts for transportation.  I usually walked, since everything is within walking distance, and it afforded me the opportunity to pick and eat the many different berries that grow wild along the side of the road: tiny strawberries, delicious thimbleberries, huckleberries, blueberries, plump and colorful salmon berries and even cherries from trees that have beautiful blossoms in the spring. 

The town is named after the local hot springs, which serve as the public bath.  The public bath adds to the communal vibe, but it is also a bit of a necessity, since some of the homes do not have running water, or their water lines run from streams or springs and can freeze in the winter.  The bathhouse is covered in murals, which are one of the first things that greets visitors as they enter town from the ferry terminal.  Inside, the bath itself is little more than a crack in the earth surrounded by a 5x10 foot cement square bathing basin to pool the 108-degree spring waters.  The basin and changing room have recently been renovated, but the structure itself dates back to the 1930’s, when it was built as one of the many Conservation Corps projects in the region. One of the interesting things with having the bath house in the middle of the small town is that you occasionally see people wandering down the street in pajamas or a bathrobe.  And, coatracks double as shower shelves inside the front door of some homes, where shower caps and shampoo share shelves with knit caps, and hangers are hung with rain coats and bath towels.

It's difficult to describe Tenakee in just a few words, and I've heard it described several ways: a base camp for hippies, a Geriatric camp, and even a shire.  Having lived on many military base camps overseas, the base camp connotation makes sense to me.  The town has a generator humming on the hill to provide power, and has to ship in all of its supplies from Juneau or even farther afield, which gives it a base camp kind of feel.  And, although there is a bit of a soldier/survivalist vibe, since you must be pretty self-reliant in such a remote village, it also has a strong hippy vibe, with local artists and a communal atmosphere that comes with living in a small town.  Then there are the rising property prices, which are pricing out new buyers, so the town is filling with retirees and ‘old-timers,’ making the Geriatric camp a fitting description as well.  The communal vibe also plays into the shire reference, along with the gardens, greenery, wild fruits and flowers that grow abundantly in the rain-forest climate. 

However, I would also call it an art community with a fishing problem.  This occurred to me while I was sitting in the local bakery, enjoying both their Artisanal Pizza and all the local artists’ work that decorate the walls and shelves.  There’s the famous work of Rie Munoz, who lived and painted here for several years of her life.  Ken Wheeler has a collection of woodwork, Cynthia Meyer has an assortment of photography books and calendars available, and several other artists have paintings and jewelry available as well.  Also, as I mentioned, the local bath house is covered with murals and has stained-glass for the windows in the changing room, which were all done by a local artist.  



Rie Munoz's painting of the Ferry arriving in Tenakee Springs.  Snyder's Mercantile is the general store on the left, and the bath house is the small white building to the right of the ferry dock, next to the Blue Moon Café.

Cynthia Meyer's photo of me kayaking in front of town. 

 

In addition to artwork and artisanal food, the small town even has a music scene.  It's hard to imagine that a town with only sixty people would have a band, but it actually has two or three depending on who you ask.  I saw the rock band perform at the local school graduation party (graduating class of one), and I saw the folk band perform at the 4th of July festivities as well as a local birthday party. 

  Folk Band jamming in the 4th of July Parade

 

As fun as it was to hang out around town, the fishing is what I came to town to experience, and as one local fisherman said, “The problem with fishing is, if you want to make a small fortune, you need to start with a big one.”  I wasn’t out to make a fortune, and you can start as a deck hand without needing a big fortune either.  Working on an Alaskan fishing boat has been on my ‘adventure jobs’ list for several years, but I had never really learned much about the industry.  I just figured you either fished or crabbed, but it turns out there are quite a variety of fishing methods and boats, from net fishers like gill netters and seiners, to hook fishing like trolling and long line, and then there is shrimping and crabbing. 

Gill netters use different sizes of nets to catch fish.  When the fish try to swim through the net, they can only fit their head through, and then catch their gills if they try to back out.  Seiners also use a net, but they run a large net around schools of fish using a second boat to pull the net in a large loop around the fish.  Trollers drag multiple lines of hooks with bait or lures to catch fish, much like sport-troll fishing.  Long liners leave lines of hooks and bait on the ocean floor to catch bottom-feeding fish like halibut and flounder.  And then there are shrimpers like Forrest Gump, the king crab fishers of ‘Deadliest Catch’ fame, and the lesser known Dungeness crabbers.  I was one of the latter. 

Rosanna Marie at the Tenakee Springs Harbor

 

I crabbed aboard the Rosanna Marie, named after the original owner’s daughter.  It’s bad luck to change the name of a boat, so it was wise that he didn’t name it after his wife, since he remarried four times.  He had her built after his first boat sank in a storm.  He washed up on a beach, salvaged the ship's compass from the wreckage, and had the compass built into the table of the Rosanna Marie in 1979. 

Compass in the table, next to my laptop as I wrote this blog.

Sinking his first ship didn't make him more cautious at sea.  When he sold Rosanna Marie to my captain, he told him in passing that he had replaced all the windows of the wheel house with Plexiglas after the glass ones had all been blown out by a wave in another storm.  He also said the boat could be used for king crab, and could carry 14 pots and 1200 crabs, but the load would push the deck under water!  Fortunately for me, my captain isn’t as cavalier on the ocean, and Dungeness crabbing is a bit tamer than the open-ocean fishing the first owner had done. 

I crabbed in Tenakee Inlet, off the inner-coastal waterway, which is protected from the winds and waves of the open ocean.  It's also much more scenic than the open ocean.  Rather than a vast and barren horizon, I was surrounded by grand glacial valleys and bays.  The last remnants of winter snow dusted the mountaintops above the lush greens of summer.  The inlet stretches 35 miles to the west off the Chatham Strait, and is up to three miles wide with multiple bays and valleys extending off of the southern shore. 

The head of Tenakee Inlet where we would anchor at night

 

Throwing crab pots for a living.

The crabbing days were long, and physically tiring, but I never grew tired of the scenery.  My captain often spoke about the fall season, and how the daylight was shorter and the weather and water was colder, but the inlet on a blue-sky day, with glass calm waters and fresh snow on the mountains, just couldn't be beat.  Unfortunately, I didn't get the chance to experience the fall season.  Instead, I packed my bags and headed for Florida where I'm now enjoying the warm weather and waters of Fort Lauderdale as I search for my first job in the yachting industry.  As far as I can tell, Fort Lauderdale is a party town with a yachting problem, and I hope to have a yachting problem of my own soon.