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as stubborn as my daughter. Sink!” Only at the last minute, Tamira did what she was told, stern first.
    Another time, we thought we had a fire; Andy and I were crewmen on a boat named Caprice. We went to sleep, and sometime later a crewman awoke us, screaming “Fire!” We did’t smell or see anything. The crewman ran to the wheelhouse, still yelling “Fire!” The captain pushed him aside to get downstairs with an extinguisher, yelling at us, “Where’s the fire?” The crewman would not stop yelling “Fire! Fire!” We had no idea what was going on. It was then that we realized in our panic that we had never seen him before. He was not part of Caprice ’s crew. We asked him, “What fire?” He had no time to reply. He ran out on the deck. We followed him and watched him jump overboard. We assumed he was a nutcase, until we saw him race off in a Zodiac in the direction of a fishing boat that was lying about fifty yards off our starboard side, on fire. Its crew jumped into the sea in survival suits. We pulled them out, and together on the deck of Caprice, we watched their boat sink.
    And there was a time when we were tied to the dock in Kodiak in front of the cannery. A purse seiner boat was moored with its stern nearly touching ours. Andy was conducting a fire drill on Time Bandit. In the middle of the drill one of our crewmen yelled “Fire!” I was looking around for smoke or flames.
    “What fire?” I yelled back at him. I was freaking out. Black smoke rolled out of the purse seiner. We were not on fire. It was. We sprayed down their cabin with extinguishers. The flames spread. We needed saltwater, but the water was turned off on the dock. We ran a hose from the cannery instead and shoved it up the vent. About that time, we heard sirens in the distance. Trucks arrived, and an official in a white fireman’s hat came up to the boat and angrily kicked our hose. He told us we were idiots and sent his men down in the cabin with re-breathers. Minutes later, they came out; the chief put the hose back where we had placed it, and Andy and I were going like, “First responders, yeah!” making fun of him.
    Andy and I were on Time Bandit one time at the dock in Homer when a fire erupted in the oven. It was spreading fast. I grabbed an extinguisher, aimed it at the oven, and pulled the trigger: nothing happened. Andy looked through the window from the dock and yelled to me, “PULL the F U C K I N G pin.” I thought I would burn to death. I was so excited I had forgotten to pull the safety pin. The third time he yelled, I heard him. I pulled the pin, and the extinguisher went Whooooosshh.
    With as much time as we spend checking for safety, anyone would have reason to think that safety was always our first concern. But crab fishermen are famously independent. The truth be told, we resisted attempts at safety regulations that are compulsory in other industries. We did not want a faceless government telling us how to do our job. Our thinking was that if you could not figure out how to save your ass you should not go out there in the first place. In 1988, against our strident objections, Congress passed the first and only law aimed at improving the fishing industry’s safety record. The Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act mandated that boats carry life rafts, survival suits, and emergency beacons. But crab fishing on the Bering Sea remains the nation’s most dangerous occupation. Once the new safety measures were in place, we liked them. And then we began to rely on them. Now we will not go fishing for crab on the Bering Sea without them.
    In the final preparation stage, the work can be tedious. Last year while Neal and I worked on the boat, Andy shouldered the hard, miserable tasks of completing forms and other paperwork that one government agency or another require. He filled out Economic Development Reports (EDRs) indicating exactly how much crab we had caught the previous year and how much fuel Time Bandit