The Western Flyer was underway in frigid Alaskan seas, taking on water faster than it could pump it out. It was 1964, and the 76-foot wooden vessel had just been refitted with an aluminum crab tank for the lucrative king crab fishery on the Bering Sea. The new tank cracked, and thousands of gallons of water—held for ballast—poured into the hull, flooding the engine room. The captain placed a mayday call to the United States Coast Guard after pumps failed and the boat began to slowly sink.
An aircraft came to the rescue and dropped additional pumps onto the bow. The captain and crew were able to remove the water and stabilize the boat. But just as the situation settled down, smoke and the smell of burning emanated from inside the cabin. Upon investigation, the cook was discovered in the galley cooking steaks. “If we are gonna go in the water, we are gonna go in with a full stomach,” he told the stunned captain.
That cook was the Norwegian-born Sverre Hanson (father of Sig Hansen, captain of the F/V Northwestern, made famous by his role on the popular Discovery Channel reality TV series The Deadliest Catch). The elder Hansen crewed on the Western Flyer in the 1950s and 1960s when it was a highliner in the Seattle fleet. But he was just one deckhand among dozens of others, over more than half a century, who lived and worked on the vessel.
As retired marine biologist and author of the 2015 book The Western Flyer Kevin M. Bailey notes, the key to the Flyer’s history is adaptability. While John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts’ sojourn into the Gulf of California on a six-week expedition in 1940 brought fame to the Western Flyer, its decades-long journey as a commercial fishing vessel is no less important to its story. It’s a tale that not only chronicles the ecological and economic history of North Pacific fisheries in the 20th century—booms, busts, and all—but also the tradition and the indomitable spirit of fishing communities.
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