Leadership, Failure, and Commercial Fishing

lifting a man by the collar doesn’t make him love you

Sometimes the most important lessons about leadership come from watching it fail spectacularly. Here's what I learned about power, mentorship, and the difference between strength and violence on a fishing boat in Alaska.

It was a bright, clear day on the Nushagak river, halfway through sockeye season. The net was in the water but it was just about slack tide and there were few fish around. Skipper took the opportunity to train up the greenhorn, Hunter, a ripped surfer kid from south of Big Sur. The kid had thrown the hook on the last set and missed—twice.

In case you never watched Deadliest Catch, missing the buoyline with the hook is a sin. The boat has to turn around, we lose precious fishing time. This was a salmon gill netter, granted, but skipper—let’s call him Bob—had been a crabber, and more importantly was the uncontested most legendary fisherman in Bristol Bay at the time. To crew on his spankin’ new boat carried a privilege and a weight most experienced deckhands in the Bay did not want.

“Practice throwing the hook, Hunter,” Bob said over the intercom. It wasn’t a request but to his credit he never carried a grudge after his crew made mistakes. “I want you to throw it a thousand fucking times so that you don’t even know how to miss.”

“Chill out, man,” Hunter responded, looking over the gunwale as he weakly lobbed the grapple hook into the water port-side, then began to pull it in.

The intercom clicked. Bob’s footsteps hit the stairs down from the wheelhouse like thunderbolts, reverberating the aluminum hull. The red-faced skipper burst through the door onto the back deck. The man’s bicep eclipsed my thigh. He was big as a bear. Three pots of coffee coursing through his blood made his skin red as a gasoline can, and Hunter had struck a match.

Bob grabbed Hunter by the collar of his Grundens jacket and lifted the not-small young man off the deck and screamed full force into the boy’s terrified face, spittle spraying, bright blue eyes bulging like the veins in his forehead.

Fifteen years on, I clearly remember watching the toes of Hunter’s Xtra-tuff boots dangling six inches off the deck coupled with the sensation of shutting down whatever fear-soaked sound wanted to come out of my throat.

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Prior to that moment, Bob had been my hero. The ultimate badass. He had crabbed out of Dutch Harbor during the boom years of the 80s. He had been a goldminer in the interior of Alaska. He had dropped out of high school in Eastern Europe and hitchhiked across North Africa. He landed, like so many before and after him, penniless in New York with a dream.

Thirty years later and Bob had become the Gypsy King, and no one dared fuck with him. Not even the state troopers, whose lawbooks were practically xerox copies of his gill-netting techniques. Bob’s relatively humble home, bedecked with oosiks and anchors and knots and books on Shackleton and fishermen who shouldn’t have lived but did, overlooked Puget Sound, surrounded by the most epic, beautiful, sensuous garden I’ve ever seen.

And, he was married to the Gypsy Queen, the woman who kept the whole thing humming. She was the longest running crew on his boat. She kept the guys he worked to the bone functioning for weeks on end despite our utter lack of rest. Piles of hot, delicious food appeared from the galley on freezing days of relentless fish-picking. She came out on deck to help sling fish when she knew we needed help, and she stayed in the cabin when we just wanted it. She knew how to be around exhausted, smelly men, and her calm nervous system helped to keep all of us, including Bob, centered, on purpose and on task. Most of the time.

At that point in my life, I was looking for a real-life role model. Someone who would push me to my limits. Someone I could trust to not sink the boat while I discovered who I was when all the bullshit was stripped away and it was just me and death in a battle for life. I was looking for a man from whom I could learn how to be a man.

Of course that’s not how I framed it even to myself at the time, and it certainly wasn’t an agreement that Bob ever made with me.

But as he lowered Hunter back to the deck and stamped back into the wheelhouse in that post-outburst entitlement I know so well in my own body, the façade of badassery had now fallen away, and he had shown me who he was: Reactive. Volatile. Violent.

I wasn’t scared of Bob after that, I was disappointed. He had taken Hunter’s comment personally, let it cut him to the bone. When he lost his cool that day, I lost my trust in him.

It no longer mattered to me that he could disassemble and rebuild every complicated system in the engine room in the dark in a thirty-knot wind, or that in those pre-season moments when he took me to the river and pointed at how the ice floes at the river’s edge moved in the opposite direction of the tide and said with a glimmer in his eye, that’s where you’ll find the fish.

He wasn’t mentoring me; he was grooming me to be him. And now, he was showing me how he chose to lead when no one else was around. Not that it mattered whether anyone else witnessed him—he condescended to everyone.

Except his queen. It became clear to me then that while he may have been the engine, she was the rudder—and his anchor.

Hunter quit a few days later. He was making more mistakes instead of fewer. After he made one that could have cost me a body part, I asked him, pretty kindly I thought, just to tell me that that particular thing wouldn’t happen again. He said nothing.

I stopped smoking pot with him when the sun was low, after mending nets.

I worked for Bob for one more season. Turned out I couldn’t hack it either. Bob’s and my personalities smashed like ram heads. I said things that undercut his authority just to watch him flinch, and he said things that cut me down, down, down. For me, the stakes were too high for him to make mistakes. The water was too big for my non-crabber self. I was too close to my edge, and I didn’t trust him to hold the container steady. So we sucked towline after towline into the jets. Set the herring net in the middle of a school so that we needed to jump down to the swimstep to cut away two shackles of brand new gear, full of fish. Where he let go of grudges for his crew making mistakes, I never let one of his go, and my disappointment smeared the boat like self-adhesive herring roe.

I also wasn’t willing to take responsibility for my role as a deckhand, which was to communicate my situational awareness to him so that he could make the best decisions possible.

My desire to learn how to be a good leader got in the way of learning how to be a good follower. Over the course of a year, I had absorbed what I’d learned from Bob into my nervous system. I was reactive, sharp with my words, insecure, full of ego. Tense all the time.

Photo by Linda Xu on Unsplash

A crewmate lost a finger near the end of that second season. I don’t know what else to say but that I’d been watching him take little shortcuts all season, doing unnecessarily dangerous things like stabbing victorinox knives into the herring slide and leaving them there. This time, instead of using the handle on the dog brake, he used the brake itself, and his pinky fell between the dog and the reel, which happened to be pulling two hundred fathoms of net out of the muddy shallows at the time.

His pinky was hamburger. Once again I got to see Bob at his edge. He flailed about for the first aid kit while his wife called a local bush pilot to meet us at Ekuk. He’d been proud that he’d only had two true crew injuries on his boat in twenty years. Apparently human blood made Bob queasy.

It was just Bob and his wife and I on the boat after that, and the tension broke our season. He rolled me a beer across the flying bridge deck and asked if I wanted to keep fishing. We had caught orders of magnitude more fish than anyone else in Bristol Bay that year, and no one was happy. I wanted to go home.

I knew that I didn’t want to become a skipper because I knew that I would have become like Bob. While that might have meant success on a certain level, I would have been abandoning a deep part of me that knew a more powerful kind of leadership was possible. I wasn’t strong enough then to transmute what I’d learned into what I knew was possible.

If you’ve never worked on boats, you might not understand how men change when they hit the water. It happens less so with women. Maybe women know how to handle life-or-death stress with more grace than we do.

In Bristol Bay, the entire season lasts less than six weeks. Imagine working for your yearly income in the space of six weeks. Being responsible not just for your own livelihood, but that of your crew. And not just their livelihoods, but their very lives. If a crew really fucks up, it’s on the skipper’s soul forever.

So many of us have learned to lead through inducing fear. We have learned to follow by fearing. Maybe it’s in our genetic makeup, but I don’t think so.

When I’m leading men through transformational retreats, and someone is in the deepdeep of their scary-scary, my body remembers the relentless wind and pounding waves, the topsy-turvy of the boat, keeping my balance while knee-deep in dead fish, pulling in the nets with the last bit of strength I have.

There’s nothing that scares me about a man’s internal landscape, on or off psychedelics. My work in that space, and in life—with my toddler, too—is to be the anchor, the calm sea, the fucking earth itself. Unsnappable because there’s no tension. There’s just spaciousness, the container, the truth of the moment.

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