Summary

Every Alaskan king crab season, brothers Andy and Johnathan Hillstrand risk their lives and seek their fortunes upon the treacherous waters of the Bering Sea. Sons of a hard-bitten, highly successful fisherman, and born with brine in their blood, the Hillstrand boys couldn't imagine a life without a swaying deck underfoot and a harvest of mighty king crabs waiting to be pulled from the ocean floor. In pursuit of their daily catch, the brothers brave ice floes and heaving waves sixty feet high, the perils of thousand-pound steel traps thrown about by the punishing wind, and the constant menace of the open, hungry waterepitomized in the chorus of a haunting sailors' sing-along: "Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep, so beware, beware." By turns raucous and reflective, exhilarating and anguished, enthralling, suspenseful, and wise,Time Banditchronicles a larger-than-life love affair as old as civilization itselfa love affair between striving, willful man and inscrutable, enduring nature.

Author Biography

On board Time Bandit, their family owned and operated vessel, brothers Johnathan and Andy Hillstrand share the skippering duties. Johnathan, a resident of Homer, Alaska, takes the helm during the king crab season. When not on deck, chances are he can be found on the back of his Harley Fat Boy. During opilio season it is Andy who sits in the wheelhouse. In the off-season, however, he can be found training horses on his ranch in Indiana.

Malcolm MacPherson is a former correspondent for Newsweek and the author of more a dozen books including most recently the satirical war novel Hocus Potus and the nonfiction account of battle in Afghanistan, Roberts Ridge. He lives near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia with his wife and children.

www.timebandit.tv/

From the Hardcover edition.

I Live Like a King	p. 3
The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday	p. 40
He Was Our Lodestone	p. 48
Up or Down, Broke or Flush	p. 73
Like Tides in My Veins	p. 97
We Started Throwing Fists	p. 109
No Such Luck	p. 127
The Greater the Greed the Faster the Pace	p. 130
I Fear What Lives Under the Sea	p. 151
Do Flowers Hurt When You Pick 'Em?	p. 178
I Was Tango Uniform	p. 182
A Fork in the Road	p. 200
I Had Better Get It Together	p. 202
Epilogue	p. 221
Acknowledgments	p. 229
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Excerpts

Chapter One

I Live like a King
- Johnathan

I am a fisherman, an Alaskan fisherman, and a Bering Sea crab fisherman with thirty-seven years on commercial boats. I am tagged as a “bad boy of the Bering Sea” in “the deadliest profession in America.” I have fought forty-foot seas and seen rogue waves one hundred feet high. I work on water cold enough to kill a man in five minutes, and I have bent under the power of 120-knot Williwaw winds and watched the crushing strength of the Arctic ice pack move south from Russia around the hull of my boat, Time Bandit. I am Johnathan Hillstrand and that is where I stand in the universe.

Right now, that might be another man’s life, because I am drifting in a small boat without power, alone, and with no help in sight. Waves no taller than my forearm lap the hull with a rhythm that makes me want to dream. Nothing here threatens me. The sky is a washed-out blue without a cloud to the horizon in every direction.

It’s creeping me out.

The boat I am on, a thirty-eight-foot Weggley gill-netter I named fishing vessel (F/V) Fishing Fever, bobs with the tide in full ebb at about four knots. The boat and I are captives of a moon that pulls us southwestward. I am, I can only estimate, fifty to sixty miles southwest of the mouth of the Kasilof River where I started this morning. I have about ten dozen fat, fresh, Cook Inlet, red sockeye salmon on ice in my tanks. I care where the tide is drifting me (not just because going where I do not want to go is an inconvenience); I would prefer to be back at fishing camp by nightfall with my buddies in the junkyard behind the Kasilof cannery with a bottle of Crown Royal in one hand and a hot dog in the other, telling stories around an oil-drum fire. Almost certainly, that will not happen.

I started drifting when Fishing Fever’s engine blew up more than three hours ago. The reduction gear fried with a grunt, and the boat shuddered and died like it had been sapped. The demise did not come as a complete surprise. The boat’s former owner never changed the oil, and the engine was flooded twice. I bought the boat four years ago because I liked the shape of its hull, not the thrum of its engine. The blame is also mine. I had gunned the engine at stressful rpms back and forth along the hundred-yard length of the gill net in an attempt to herd the spawning salmon toward the mesh. I cannot make repairs to the reduction gear until I can get back to Kasilof, lay the boat on the mud, and get a mechanic in the tiny engine compartment with wrenches. I opened up the cover and squeezed myself—I am 6’ 1” and weigh 205 pounds—behind the drive shaft for a look. The shaft is not spinning, and clear oil leaks in the reduction gear when I turn the engine off. Murphy’s Law works on water as well as on land. My batteries are not charging. I am leaking power slowly. With batteries fading, no motor, no radios, I am, in a word, fucked.

I shut the cover, wishing I could forget what I saw.

The tide is drifting me faster than I like in the direction of Augustine Island and beyond, into the Shelikof Strait, where anything can happen, and sometimes does. In his ship’s log, Captain Cook supposedly wrote that the second worst weather and currents on earth, after Cape Horn, can be found in the Strait. Like the Bering Sea where my brother and I fish, storms come up in the Strait with startling speed and a violence that can turn a pond into a maelstrom in six hours, and often less. The winds whip off the icy fjord walls that overlook the Strait; currents from the Kennedy Entrance compete with currents from the Cook Inlet, Kachemak Bay, the Gulf of Alaska, and several tidal rips. Put together, these produce swells like nowhere else in Alaska. I look at my watch. As we say, shit happens when you party naked.

It was not long ago that I

Excerpted from Time Bandit: Two Brothers, the Bering Sea, and One of the World's Deadliest Jobs by Johnathan Hillstrand, Andy Hillstrand, Malcolm MacPherson
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