Photo by Craig Carlson

Bumble Bee will buy the Rose Ann Marie's 930-ton load for about one million dollars.

The skipper's side

Tom Crivello is a tuna boat captain and owner of two large seiners, both of which carry helicopters that are used in hunting for tuna. The first time he scrambled aboard one of his helicopters it crashed. “The theory of tuna fishing is to hurry, and with something that sophisticated you can’t hurry,” he recalled recently.

Tom Crivello: “When you’ve done what I’ve done for as many years as I’ve done it, it’s hard to change.”

Photo by Craig Carlson

“We were in a big rush to go up because we saw a school of fish from the boat. We forgot to untie one line, and as we were taking off, we just flipped right over. Lucky, very lucky that we both survived. The pilot had a concussion and bruised ribs. The helicopter was literally demolished. If you saw it you’d say to yourself, ‘No way in the world anybody walked away from that.’ And yet all I did was scratch my finger. The strangest part about it is it didn’t really register with me. I mean, I thought I ate it, but 1 was probably the calmest guy on the boat afterwards; I took charge. It really got to me the next day. My hand started shaking and I couldn't hold a cup of coffee, thinking I came that close. I had reservations about going back up in one, but the first chance I got I went back up because I knew I had to take that first step.”

Rose Ann Crivello: "Our kids don’t know any other way and I never have either."

Photo by Craig Carlson

Crivello’s two boats are the Rose Ann Marie, which is 220 feet long with a capacity of 1050 tons of fish, and the Marla Marie, which is 151 feet long and holds about 500 tons. They are both registered in the U.S. and are based in San Diego, along with about 125 other boats from the American tuna fleet of nearly 140 boats. About a year ago, after fishing for twenty-one years — since the age of sixteen — Crivello decided to retire and try to sell the Rose Ann Marie, which is valued at about five million dollars. He was feeling the effects of relentless pressure and he was determined to do something about it while he still was capable. Others had reached the limit, pressed on, and ended up with drinking problems or even nervous breakdowns.

The retirement lasted only eight months. There was barely a nibble at the sale of his boat. At the same time, without Crivello as skipper, the Rose Ann Marie was only bringing back half loads of fish, and the Marla Marie wasn’t fishing at all because of a broken mast. If the boat owner isn’t working his boat himself, the only money he can make is through management fees, but with such small catches, there was no money at all left over to pay Crivello. So in January of 1982, with bills mounting, Crivello contracted with the Bumble Bee Seafoods cannery for his expenses and catch and once again set out to fish. When he returned April 14, the same day Bumble Bee announced it would be closing down permanently, he had a full load of fish.

Bumble Bee will honor its contract and will buy the Rose Ann Marie's 930-ton load for about one million dollars. Though that is certain, Crivello’s future in the tuna industry is not. Recent contract negotiations between fishermen’s representatives and the remaining canneries, temporarily settled at $1200 per ton, have been proposed by canneries as low as $720 per ton. Crivello claims the boats can’t survive on that. Since the canneries are having trouble selling off an oversupply of tuna, generally caused by a banner-year catch in 1981 and a flagging economy at large, the industry is in trouble of severe decline. Crivello almost moans when he says, “I didn’t invest in real estate or anything else: everything I’ve got is tied up in tuna boats. What this all means is that I just might go broke. Good-bye twenty-one years.”

Financial trouble was the major cause of the abrupt end to his retirement at age thirty-seven, but Crivello had other reasons for returning One of them was Sicilian family tradition. His father, who died in 1965 while Crivello was at sea, owned a small boat and fished out of San Diego, and Crivello’s two older brothers, both of whom are now dead, were fishermen. “When you’ve done what I’ve done for as many years as I’ve done it, it’s hard to change,” he says. ”I like playing golf and doing all the things I never had a chance to do, but I knew it was time to go back to work. I think the ideal situation for me would be to make every other trip, knowing when I got home 1 wouldn’t have to push, because three weeks between three-month trips goes by too fast. It’s the lifestyle that makes me go back. I like the lifestyle my family has.”

Crivello has been married for fifteen years to his thirty-three-year-old wife Rose Ann. They have three children: sixteen-year-old Mia, from his short previous marriage; Anthony, who is fourteen; and thirteen-year-old Marla. The family lives in relative affluence on a promontory in Mission Hills, south of Old Town. The streets there are of the old-fashioned concrete-slab type, sewn together with lines of gummy asphalt. Their house is situated on a V-shaped corner that overlooks the city and bay. Parked in front of the finely kept front lawn is a gold Lincoln Continental bearing both Crivello’s and his wife’s initials on the license plate. Sticking up next to the chimney is a blue antenna for the short-wave radio that Rose Ann uses to speak to her husband most every day he’s out fishing. She uses it as the link in communication between the other men on the boat and their families here in San Diego.

Rose Ann comes from a fisherman’s family as well — her maiden name is Asaro — and says that’s the only reason she’s been able to cope with the unusual family life. “I think you have to grow up with it. Our kids don’t know any other way and I never have either. When you’re married to a fisherman, you have to be mother and father both. The trouble comes," she says, “when he gets back from a trip and the kids run to me first to ask for something. I’m used to being the boss and it’s a big adjustment for him. We sometimes get into our little fights about it because he feels so left out.”

Crivello agrees that it can be difficult holding a marriage together when one partner is gone nine months of the year. “The wife has to be able to shoulder all the responsibilities without the other half there to take part of the load. But then again they have to be sensitive enough to release that responsibility for a period of time. Most of them release it for about a week,” he says. "After that they start saying, ‘You may run the boat but you don’t run this house.’ “The fisherman’s away from his kids, he doesn’t get to see them play football or see his daughters go to the prom. He goes to sleep alone," he says. Rose Ann adds that he missed the birth of their son, among many other events and holidays, because fishing is done year round. Most recently he missed Easter. "I called him on the radio,” she says, "and told him how much we all missed him. He said it was just another day and not to worry, but we were all sad anyway."

Crivello was introduced to tuna fishing at twelve or thirteen, when he went on a summer trip on his father's boat. His first actual job on a tuna boat, at age sixteen, was as a speedboat driver (the speedboats are used to herd the school of fish into the net). "Tuna fishing is easy for young unmarried men to fall into. You don’t need a college education to go tuna fishing, yet you can make $30,000 to $40,000 a year with no training, no high school education. Where’s a kid today going to make that kind of money?” he asks. He attributes his own quick rise in the business both to commitment to the job and to an early marriage at age nineteen, which he says failed but did give him a strong sense of responsibility.

Crivello’s son Anthony will be helping to unload the fish from this catch as he did on the last one, although that’s the extent of his children’s involvement in the industry, and he says he hasn’t encouraged his only son to enter the family trade. After all, no one knows the hardships better than he. "You don’t stop at four o’clock, there’s not Saturday or Sunday out there, every day is the same. You get up with the sun and you go to sleep with the sun. If you’re not on a set, you eat dinner, maybe show a movie, and go to sleep, and then have to get up in the middle of the night for a two-hour watch. The next day it’s back to looking for fish."

Up until the 1960s, tuna was caught using the pole-and-line method; some kinds, such as albacore, still are. A more efficient way of fishing for surface-dwelling yellowfin and skipjack tuna, called purse seining, was then put into wide use and it is the process by which most tuna is caught today.

The method basically involves spotting the fish either from the ship’s crow’s nest or from a helicopter. When the school is located, it is circled by the boat, which releases the net, held in position at one end by a powerful skiff. Small speedboats keep the school tightly herded as the net is placed around them. Then a power winch pulls on a steel cable around the bottom of the net, which draws it closed. If porpoises are involved in the catch, efforts are made to release them, then the tuna is scooped up and put into refrigerated holds.

An average boat has a capacity of about 1000 tons of fish and each set, or individual catch, can yield anywhere from seven or eight tons up to 200 tons. Crivello says a full load of fish will bring in about a million dollars. Out of that comes about $300,000 in operating expenses such as fuel, food, gear, nets, and technical equipment. Another $300,000 goes to the payroll, which is divided up according to a percentage system mandated by the fishermen’s union. For example, an inexperienced fisherman starts out at a quarter share, a proven crewman gets a full share (about $15,000 from a $300,000 payroll), deck bosses and navigators get one and a quarter shares, and the skipper gets three to three and a half shares. It’s a hierarchical system based on skill and responsibility. Of the remaining $250,000 to $300,000, $100.000 goes back into the boat to keep it in top condition and the rest goes to paying for government permits and insurance, along with payments on .the boat's mortgage.

To get a fishing trip underway, the boat owner needs front money to pay for fuel, food, and other expenses, so he contracts with a cannery, of which there are principally four: Bumble Bee Seafoods (soon to shut down permanently) and Van Camp Seafoods (Chicken of the Sea), both in San Diego; and Star-Kist (closing down temporarily) and CHB, both in San Pedro. The cannery advances the fisherman the money in return for the sale of his future load of fish at an agreed-upon price per ton. When the fisherman returns, he must pay back that expense money, with interest, from what he makes on the catch.

The first boat Crivello owned was the Marla Marie, which he bought seven years ago from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which had repossessed it from its previous owner. “The FDIC decided the boat should be sold to the people who caught the fish. I thought the terms were really stiff when I bought it, but compared to today, it was nothing, ” he says. Right now the Marla Marie is docked alongside the Bumble Bee cannery with an FDIC marshal aboard. Crivello has been late on his mortgage payments, but the FDIC has not yet begun court proceedings. “The mast is broken so I can’t send the boat out fishing because someone could get killed with it like that. But I haven’t been able to get a loan to get it fixed to make any money with it,” he complains.

Independent U.S.-registered fishermen must contend with myriad government regulations such as rules regarding insurance, fishing permits, incidental-porpoise-kill quotas, and specific technical equipment required aboard. These are among the reasons blamed for the attrition of forty-five boats in the last nine years to foreign flags, according to the locally based American Tunaboat Association. The advantage of fishing under the American flag, the association maintains, is that it provides the fisherman with access to the American marketplace and the flexibility of fishing nearly anywhere, since the U.S. government recognizes no territorial fishing zones. “They tell me I can fish anywhere off the twelve-mile limit, yet they won’t back me up. They [other countries] can seize us any time they want. It’s a political form of piracy,” Crivello contends.

On July 8, 1980, Crivello’s boat, the Marla Marie, was seized by Mexico and taken to Mazatlan, where its net and catch were confiscated and a fine was imposed. Since Crivello had the required government seizure insurance, he applied for reimbursement for lost time in getting a new net. The policy provides for fifty-percent reimbursement of that time when the boat could be fishing. He claimed he lost forty-five days, which he considers a reasonable amount of time. "After eighteen months I only got half of what they were supposed to pay me. If the insurance was through a private company, it would be considered fraud, but since it’s the government, we can’t do anything,” he says. (Government officials in Washington say delays in Congressional funding and recent changes in regulations slowed the processing of Crivello’s claim and eventually provided him less money than he’d expected.)

Another aspect of government regulation that has reportedly led a number of boats to change their national registration is the enforcement of the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. Through public opinion and intense lobbying by environmentalist groups, the protection act was passed by Congress in an effort to stem the alarming number of porpoises being killed in tuna fishing. Before any regulation, an estimated 300,000 porpoises per year were dying in tunamen’s nets; currently, rates hover below the quota set by the government—about 20,000 per year.

Crivello, whose distaste for government regulation is visceral, argues that it is not in the best interests of the industry—from a purely financial standpoint—to eliminate the porpoise because even though it is expensive and time consuming to remove porpoises from the net, it is worth doing so in order to maintain porpoise populations, which account for sighting a third of the tuna caught. He attributes the earlier high mortality rate to general inexperience with the new purse-seining technique. Further, he adds that the industry, left on its own, would have devised ways to lower the porpoise death rate.

Since passage of the protection act, scientists and fishermen have worked to find effective ways of releasing porpoises unharmed. Their efforts have resulted in a ninety-five percent reduction in porpoise mortality in the last ten years. One such successful and widely used method is called "backdown,” in which the porpoises are herded out of the net through a mesh panel. Another method is used if porpoises become entangled in the net. Fishermen equipped with snorkels and face masks work from a rubber raft and jump in the water with the mammals if necessary. They aren’t required to get in the water by law, but often it’s the only way to get porpoises out of the net. Since tuna tend to be bloody fish, sharks are often involved in the catch, and there have been at least ten shark attacks in the last three to four years, according to the Tunaboat Association. Twenty-two-year-old Jerry Correia bled to death on August 18, 1981 after being slashed by a shark while trying to free a porpoise from a net. The boat was 1500 miles at sea and couldn't get ashore in time to get Correia medical attention. His father, skipper Joe Correia, watched his son die slowly. Such cases inflame the hearts of fishermen who find it hard to place any other creature’s life above man’s.

Crivello has not suffered a shark attack on any of his trips, but he relates one incident that, he says, has since caused him to be more cautious about sending his crew members into the water, whether to rescue porpoises or for any other reason. "One time off Ecuador we were fishing skipjack,” he recalls. “You set the net around the school and there’s an opening around the boat for a period of fifteen minutes or so and you try to keep the fish away from the boat. You use cherry bombs or pounding on the deck, because the fish will charge the boat and you have to turn them back until you can get the bottom of the net closed. Especially down there and especially with skipjack, if a crew member dives off the side, that big white splash seems to get the fish to shy away.

“I remember one particular set, the fish kept staying in part of the net and the other part of the net was all nice and open and clear but the fish wouldn’t go up there, and I didn’t know why. It struck me kind of funny but I really didn’t pay too much attention to it. Meanwhile, the fish kept charging the boat and guys kept diving into the water one after another I remember there were two or three guys left on the boat; they were all in the water because it was just touch and go. touch and go. We had to keep that pressure on them.

"That’s when I noticed why these fish were coming toward the boat, why they didn't go up there into this big open section of the net. I looked over there and I saw a huge shadow real deep. I thought, ‘Well maybe that’s a marlin or something.’ But it wasn’t a marlin; it was a great white shark, and he was about twenty-one feet long and weighed about 3000 pounds. He was far enough away, the guys weren’t in any real danger, but when I noticed it was a shark, I told the guys they better get out of the net because I think we got Jaws in it. We always catch sharks and they’re predominately ten-, twelve-foot sharks, they’re not that kind of shark and the guys are saying, ‘Don’t worry about the sharks, sharks are no problem,’ until they saw the fin of that thing break the water. It stuck up about three feet and some guys turned white and looked up at me and said, if you want anybody to dive, you better dive yourself. ’

“It was really eerie. The shark drowned in the net and we had to pull it out. It took the winch to lift it up. Even though it was dead, it had eyeballs like platters, real dark, and it had a sinister look to it. Even though it was dead and it was on the deck, it still scared you. I’ve had guys dive in the net after that but ever since, every time I tell someone to dive, I think about that.” Another part of the tuna/porpoise problem involves the Marine Mammal Protection Act’s mandate that government-sponsored scientific observers should be stationed aboard boats for an average of half the trips each seiner makes. Initially the observers were collecting data for the purposes of improving techniques to release porpoises unharmed, along with biological testing to determine population demographics. But when data reports were turned over to government officials and used as evidence to charge fishermen with violations of the protection act. a new battle began between fishermen and the government.

In April of 1981, a federal judge ruled that government observers must have search warrants in order to gather information on alleged infractions of porpoise-kill quotas while on board tuna boats. However, since that decision is being appealed, observers are still on boats, still collecting data, but that data legally can only be used for scientific purposes. The government’s main defense in the case has been the lack of other methods of enforcement. “We rely on having people like disgruntled crewmen, observers from other boats, and helicopter pilots come tell us of violations,” commented one government official recently. "That doesn’t happen very often but we don’t have the means to scan an ocean half again the size of the United States for boats breaking the law.”

On his most recent trip, from which he returned April 14, Tom Crivello had an observer aboard. He says the crew does not easily accept them but that it isn't really the observer as a person who is resented. In a fiercely independent industry, having someone from the government aboard tends to rankle. "They’re saying I’m guilty and putting an observer on board to prove I'm innocent,” Crivello grouses.

Besides complex problems with boat seizures, porpoise deaths, and dislocated family life, tuna-boat skippers must contend with other things. One relatively new problem has arisen from the women’s liberation movement. “Women have come down and asked for jobs on my boats,” Crivello says. “They have no concept, no idea what kind of a problem that would be. You can’t tell them, 'I can’t take you because you’re a woman.’ But it’s hard enough to keep harmony among eighteen men. Having a woman aboard would be like a time bomb. Nothing against the female, but when women approach me for a job, I just don’t need anybody.”

The manmade problems can be solved or at least debated, but Mother Nature is a force with which fishermen can’t argue. Crivello recalls one memorable trip during which his boat got caught in a storm that lasted five days and four nights. “When you looked behind you, you saw fifty-foot waves, but we knew we had to ride with the storm to survive it. Every minute on the clock seemed like an hour. At times I actually thought it was my last day on earth. I think every tuna fisherman is afraid of the weather, although very few of them will admit it. Being captain, you can’t show any fear because if you get scared, your crew will panic.”

Despite all its drawbacks as a career— the long hours, the physical danger, time away from family, and increased government regulation—Tom Crivello keeps going fishing. To ask him what he’d do if he weren’t a fisherman is to elicit a blank stare. “Early in my career I quit and became a barber,” he says finally. “I couldn’t stand to stay inside. I was very good at what I did, but I felt I was moving at ten-percent capacity. There’s no challenge, no future either.

“Is it worth it?” he asks himself. “I don’t know. I personally have a lot of resentment, but then again, if I had it to do over again and I did a nine-to-five job . . . I think I'd resent that too. When I got into this business, I was going to retire at thirty. I’m at least seven years late on that.” □

— Margaret E. Cull

An observer's notes

For some strange reason, I expected the fishermen to untangle the porpoises from the net and release them back into the water immediately. It took me a moment to realize that this was not going to happen. Everyone was more interested in extracting the fifteen or twenty small tuna than the seven or eight struggling porpoises. The mammals lay there, tangled and bleeding, stepped on by the fishermen and thrashed by the dying fish. It was not my position to tell the skipper or crew what to do, but the situation was driving me crazy. I turned to Cookie. “Are they going to get those porpoises out of the net?”

Ship's mess, "The cook, if we must call him that, was Panamanian and as deficient in culinary skills as he was in English. What was initially bad got progressively worse."

Photo by Craig Carlson

The question seemed to wake him up. “Hey!” he yelled down. “Get those porpoises out! What the hell’s wrong with you? Can’t you see the observer standing right here?”

There followed some of the most pathetic scrambling and stumbling I'd ever seen. Crewmen slipped and fell, tried to pick up porpoises and dropped them. I couldn’t stand it. I slid down the ladder to the working deck and ran over to two of the porpoises. They had been pulled from the net but had been left on the deck instead of released, while the crewmen went back to disentangle the rest. They were breathing in explosive gasps and both were bleeding from superficial cuts to the eyes, mouth, flippers, and tail.

John Silva, skipper of my first boat, had been very territorial about his radio. I was never allowed to touch it by myself.

Photo by Craig Carlson

I bent down to pick one up. It was slippery and heavy, perhaps heavier than I was. At first (couldn't hold on to it and had to let it down again. It lay completely motionless except for a slight quivering of the flukes. I hoisted it again, cradled it in my arms, and staggered over to the rail. I could just barely lift it high enough to get it over the rail and send it tumbling into the water. Immediately it shot off into the depths, then leaped away from us over the waves at high speed. I ran back and, with the help of a crewman, managed to get the second, larger porpoise over the side. By then the rest had also been released by the crew. Shaking with adrenalin and covered with blood, I climbed back up to the speedboat deck.

I had known about the observer program since the early Seventies, while still going to San Diego State University. Observers, I knew, were sent out on tuna boats by the federal government primarily to estimate the number of porpoises captured in sets ii (the entire procedure of locating the school of tuna, dropping the nets, and hauling in ) the catch), count the number of porpoises killed, and keep track of sightings of other whales and porpoises. It sounded like an interesting job, but I never seriously thought about giving it a try. Then 1980 found me holding a perfectly good, and perfectly useless, degree in zoology, out of work and out of money. Someone suggested that I apply to the observer program. I had always enjoyed going to sea, and it would give me a chance to clear my head and forget about the problem of paying rent. (The roughly $2200 per month the job paid—even though long, often arduous hours were involved—certainly would take care of the rent.)

I rapidly discovered that, while going to sea may be enjoyable at times, it can lose something in the company of fifteen or sixteen potentially hostile fishermen. The simple, unassailable fact is, the fishermen don’t like, and don’t want, observers on their boats. They were adamant about this ten years ago and they remain adamant about it today. This point is frequently stressed vocally by varying levels of repetition and volume, and once (1 am told), even by bullets.

Still, my first trip was about as trouble-free as observer trips get. It was relatively short, the fishermen filled their hold, made a lot of money, and got back home in time for Christmas. The president of the Sierra Club probably wouldn’t have had any difficulty on that trip.

There was, however, one brief period of discomfort. The Sea Quest quit San Diego Bay, John Silva commanding, on October 7, 1980. After about three weeks of fruitless searching for tuna, part of the crew decided that shaving the observer’s head would change the luck. I, on the other hand, was not enthusiastic. Irresistible force meets immovable object. Fortunately, the first good set took their minds off hair and put it back on fish where it belonged.

That trip was actually one of my better experiences all around. I got back for Christmas, paid off some old bills, and went skiing. By the end of February I was ready to go again, and found myself on a plane and on my way to Panama.

Several American tuna boats have the nasty habit of unloading in Puerto Rico, then picking up crew and supplies in Panama City on the way back to the Pacific fishing grounds. Panama, I’ll freely admit, had never been high on my list of places to visit. With good reason, it turned out. As far as I can tell, the place is typified by the shipping agency that handled my transfer to the boat. It was a veritable den of thieves, run by master criminal Rick Cooper and his sidekick Lefty, an overweight, gold-bedecked, fast-talking cab driver. It was only with the help of a former and wizened observer living in Panama that I got out of there still wearing underwear.

The Constellation left Panama harbor, to my undisguised relief, in mid-April of 1981. It looked to be another uncomplicated trip. The Panamanians and the Portuguese nationals on board, knowing me to be a “government man,” treated me at first with a great deal of respect. The navigator, whose help was indispensable to my job, was friendly and talkative. My cabin mates, one of whom was the skipper’s youngest son, seemed easygoing and free of anti-observer bias.

Then there was the skipper. Cookie Virrissimo. One thing about Cookie — he yelled a lot. Still, he was pretty easy to get along with. Most importantly, he was fair with me. “You got a job to do, I got a job to do,” he said at our first meeting.

It was a major relief to hear that. There is no shortage of stories about quite different conditions. Just before leaving on my first trip I heard about one skipper who shot a pistol at the observer from up in the crow’s nest. His next observer faced ninety-eight days of continual harassment and threats. The poor guy was a nervous wreck when he got back. Observers are also often barred from the pilot house and chart room, making the job that much more difficult.

Cookie, on the other hand, gave me free run of the boat. He asked me to steer it a couple of times, let me practice navigation in the chart room, and insisted that I take readings from the weather machine when Mike, the navigator, was busy. He even had me talk to other skippers over the high seas radio.

This came as a bit of a surprise. John Silva, skipper of my first boat, had been very territorial about his radio. I was never allowed to touch it by myself. The navigator would always establish contact with the office for me. I didn’t mind, since this behavior is apparently the norm. The radio is the skipper’s only link to friends, family, and other boats. They generally don’t like anyone else fooling with it, especially the observer.

Since I was aware of Cookie’s propensity for extended radio conversation, I expected him to be even stricter than Silva. Quite the contrary. At his request I frequently relayed messages for him when he was up in the crow’s nest. But if this situation surprised me, it surprised the other skippers, those I actually talked to on the radio, even more:

“Who did you say you were?”

“Jim. The observer.”

“The observer?”

“Right.”

Pause. “Where’s Cookie?”

“He’s up in the stick. He said to tell you we made a set. We have about 800 porpoises in the net, and it looks like about five ton.”

No reply.

“Did you copy that?”

“Yeah, yeah. I heard you.”

“Cookie said to call him in an hour on the other frequency.”

“Yeah. Right.”

The talking observer. A bit of gossip to pass around the fleet.

The first set was a disaster. My only experience, of course, had been with the Sea Quest's finely honed crew. I remember trying to make sense out of the very first set on that trip. Everything was noise and equipment flying in and out of the water. One thing, however, was clear: It went smoothly. The crew was a team. Everyone knew their job and did it. Captain Silva came up to me as I stood at the rail and watched the last of the net being rolled aboard. “That’s what you call a professional crew,” he said.

(I think he got a kick out of watching a green observer try to understand what was happening. “What are those?” I asked, pointing to large shapes moving around in the net enclosure. “Those are the tuna,” he replied.)

So naturally I expected the same excellence out of the Constellation crew. The expectation was misplaced. It became quickly obvious that, except for the small American contingent, most of them had not worked together before. Nobody knew what to do. I watched them stumble around and remember thinking that someone was going to get seriously hurt, maybe killed on this trip.

I was thankful, at least, that no porpoises were involved on the first few sets. This bit of good fortune ran out fast. Before anyone was ready we had a spate of porpoise sets. Most went smoothly and resulted in no mortality. But there were some messy ones, too. Once, a severe equipment malfunction left us with a deck full of dead porpoises. A funny thing began to happen to the way I looked at such a situation. It was an accident, of course, and accidents happen. I found that the idealism which had prompted me to boycott tuna in the early Seventies was being replaced by pragmatism. For one thing, too much strident porpoise-saving fervor would do nothing to alter the situation and would only alienate me further from the crew.

Secondly, I was forced to accept that the fishermen did not share my ecological views. Where I was concerned and interested in the behavior and welfare of marine mammals, the fishermen saw them as a pain in the neck, useful only as an aid in catching tuna. Thirdly, the situation demanded realism. Some porpoises were going to be killed and there was no escaping the fact. Beyond offering a few gentle suggestions that I thought would help, it was beyond my control. True, porpoise mortality is enormously lower now than in the recent past. A lot of progress has been made. Nonetheless, it was still a gut-wrenching feeling to stand by helplessly and watch ten or twenty porpoises wrap themselves in the net and drown.

Federal regulations forbid the observer to partake in the rescue operation. A major reason for this is the significant danger to life and limb which exists throughout the set. But there are times. I could not just stand there and watch porpoises lie gasping and bleeding on the deck. Other observers have even been known to dive into the water to pull porpoises out of the net. And I’ll admit, that urge struck me occasionally also. I never succumbed to it for one main reason—sharks.

The fishermen had an interesting attitude toward sharks. One time, near the end of a set. Cookie sent two men into the net still in the water to rescue porpoises that had become bunched up with the fish. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Everyone had seen that there was a large white-tip shark in there also. I went over and yelled at Cookie. “What are you doing? There’s a big shark in there!’’ He ignored me. “Cookie! There’s a shark in there!’’

“I know,” he said finally. “Don’t worry. ” It was the most surreal and bizarre of improbable juxtapositions. He was at that potentially tragic moment the calmest I had seen him, or would see him for the rest of the trip.

Things changed drastically a month later, after the attack. It happened just after the porpoise-saving procedure called backdown had been completed. Rico, a Panamanian, and another crewman jumped into the raft and paddled out to the perimeter of the net to rescue some trapped porpoises. The water was a little choppy, just enough to make it difficult to see through. Rico reached into the water and under the corkline to pull out a porpoise.

Then Cookie, up in the crow’s nest, saw the shark. It was heading directly for the struggling porpoise. He began to shout through the ship’s P.A. system. “Hey! Shark! Get the hell out of there! Shark!” He never seemed to realize that the men in the raft cannot hear the ship’s P.A.

I saw Rico jerk his arms out of the water, look at them, then shake them in obvious pain. Most of his fingers had been nearly severed. The shark had gone for the porpoise and Rico’s hands had simply been in the way.

“Jesus Christ!” Cookie screamed. “Shit! You see that, observer?” He pointed at me from the crow’s nest. “You see that? No more raft! Fuck the porpoise!”

Before that set was over that one shark had done away with five porpoises and three large tuna, taking huge gaping bites out of each. The crew later tore it apart and presented the jaws to Rico.

By the middle of the third month things were not looking good. The trip seemed to be stretching on indefinitely. The weather was rotten and we were not catching any fish. One day we entertained the idea of sinking. The weather was very rough, we were taking on water, and no one had been paying attention to the pumps. The boat developed a severe list. Cookie began yelling. The Panamanians began wandering around wide-eyed, saying, “Se hundio.” It’s sunk.

I personally was not happy. Although I think there was more hysteria than actual danger, the incident reminded me of two things. One, that Cookie’s last boat had sunk at about the same time a year previously in the same general area; and two, the Sea Quest, on my first voyage, had had a bad moment with heavy seas on the way back to San Diego. I began to think that someone was trying to tell me something.

I hated to think that the now rampant superstition was rubbing off on me. We had already made one unnecessary refueling stop to “get laid and change the luck.” It didn’t work. Tony, the deck boss, began to go through the boat, room by room, swinging an old can full of smoldering, foul-smelling leaves. The procedure, I gathered, was supposed to chase away the evil spirits which were preventing a good catch. Needless to say, that didn’t work either. Then Cookie began demanding that everyone shave off their beards. “Are we, ” I asked of Cookie’s son Jeff, "or are we not in the Twentieth Century?”

Frankly, I was surprised that they didn’t blame the poor luck on me. There would have been a precedent for such an act. After thirty dry days on the Sea Quest, the chief, a fellow not noted for his perspicacity, began to call me a jinx. I nearly exploded. I could just picture the whole crew picking up the banner and turning on me. Captain Silva just laughed, probably at my reaction more than anything. Fortunately it didn’t go any further. By a stroke of luck, most of the crew preferred my company to that of the chief. On the other hand, several crew members blamed me for the fact that the Chargers lost an important game. They had been listening to the game over the radio. The Chargers had been winning, they maintained, until I started to play my guitar.

Aboard the Constellation, however, the poor luck was something that we could accept. After all, no one else in the fleet was catching anything either. The ocean was dry. What was unacceptable was the quality of the food. The meals had been so good on the Sea Quest that I naturally expected the same on the Constellation. I believed in that so fervently that it actually took several days for reality to break through my expectations and slap me in the face with a greasy spoon.

The cook, if we must call him that, was Panamanian and as deficient in culinary skills as he was in English. What was initially bad got progressively worse. Breakfast was out of the question. What he did to eggs was criminal. Soon I had to stop eating his lunches, as well. I'd sneak into the galley around 10:30 and make myself a couple of egg salad or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, then hold out until dinner. He was serving some incredible things: fish heads and rice, boiled shoe leather (formerly thick, juicy porterhouse steaks), and freshly caught mahi-mahi, overcooked and garnished with apple pie filling and cinnamon. His idea of spaghetti sauce was straight, unseasoned tomato paste. And he was proud of this stuff.

Humor was probably the only thing that kept our spirits up at mealtime. That and ketchup. “What’s in the soup?” I asked once, taking momentary leave of my senses.

“I don’t know,” replied Mike, peering apprehensively into the pan. “Maybe I’ll ask the cook. ”

I laughed. “Why ask him?” I said. “He doesn’t know either.”

“I’ll tell you what it is,” said Jeff. “It’s Cream of Grease. Ninety weight.”

The cook had a wonderful method for enriching his soup stock. He would simply add yesterday’s leftovers to the remainder of yesterday’s soup. This happened day after day. During a four-month trip he made new stock maybe five times. There were days when we had to deal with beef, vegetable, chicken, rice, noodle, liver, onion, corn-on-the-cob, bean, and lettuce soup. That’s right, leftover salad went in too.

One time Jeff pulled the toe of a chicken, claw attached, out of his bowl and stared at it with a mixture of amazement and disgust. A moment later Ray pulled the rest of the foot out of his own bowl. “Gee,” I said, “maybe we can collect the parts and put it back together.”

We entered our fourth month at sea still less than half full. Time dragged. The weather and the food worsened. Nerves began to fray. It became “attack-the-observer time.” A few crew members began to harass me about not helping them with their work. I was a lazy bum, the implication went, sitting there filling out forms while they worked hard. They began to pressure me to help stack net and sort fish.

One constant that seems to run throughout the fishing fleet is “justification by prior observer.” The fishermen, in attempting to convince observers to help them with their work (which is strictly against regulations), will always invoke that time-honored phrase, “The last observer did it all the time.” I fell for the ruse aboard the Sea Quest, but I wasn’t about to do it again. I wasn’t being paid to get fish blood in my eye.

The chief became downright hostile. Then Paul, one of my cabin mates, started to get surly. It began to look like a confrontation was imminent. The idea wouldn’t have bothered me so much had Paul not been easily four times my size. Taking heart from the story I had heard of the observer who had decked a troublesome fisherman, I decided to put on my own show of strength. I started practicing karate kicks in the cabin. Paul saw me once and laughed. I don’t think it impressed him.

Going home soon became the major topic of conversation. Everyone had ceased to care whether the boat was full or not. Rumors flew and each change in the boat’s direction was closely watched. Cookie, however, remained inscrutable while everyone went crazy around him. I began to think of us as the Flying Dutchman, endlessly cruising the ocean, forever searching.

My dreams, both day and night, became filled with images of fresh salad, juicy strawberries, cantaloupes, watermelons. Jeff and I would sit and talk about burritos, hot pizza, surfing, and beautiful women in scanty bathing suits. Summer in San Diego. Several evenings I sat in Mike’s cabin, sharing a drink of Grand Marnier and talking over his ham radio to friends and relatives.

Finally, what was beginning to seem impossible happened. We were running out of food (thank God) and fuel. After nearly four full months at sea Cookie said. “The hell with it,” and pointed the boat toward San Diego.

I know now, a year later, that I would not give up the experience of that trip for any amount of money. But the evening that we finally pulled into glorious, beautiful San Diego Bay, with the sun sinking behind us and the hills of the city illuminated, was I glad to be home!

— Jim Mastro