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 water—epitomized 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 Bandit chronicles a larger-than-life love affair as old as civilization itself—a love affair between striving, willful man and inscrutable, enduring nature. “Gripping . . . enjoyable reading.”— Roanoke Times “You know that cool reality-TV show Deadliest Catch ? . . . The boat captains featured on the series . . . continue to scare us in this behind-the-scenes book.”— Sacramento Bee “This boys’ own adventure is delivered with the irresistible bluster of a fisherman raving to a rescuer about how he has just cheated death . . . again!”— Sydney Morning Herald “Their first-person accounts matter-of-factly explain what it’s like to constantly face death on the Bering Sea and what it does to your life back on land.”— Rochester Democrat and Chronicle 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. 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 d