I Spent a Winter Crab Fishing in the Bering Sea - Something Out There was Fishing, too

So, I was reading this story last night, and it managed to make me do that thing where I turn around to make sure I'm still alone in the room. It creeped me out pretty good at a couple parts. I've not heard a creature description quite as vivid and disturbing as this in a long time. Of all the allegedly true stories I've heard, I hope this one is fake the most. It's called "I spent a winter crab fishing in the Bering Sea." Something out there was fishing, too. From an anonymous cinder. Just be careful if you're listening to this. You're going to want the lights on for this one. This is Unexplained Encounters. I am Darkness Prevails. Now, let's begin.

This was the winter of 2006 going into 2007. I was 19. I grew up in Anacortes up in the islands in Washington, a fishing town that's slowly turning into a town for people who like to look at fishing. My dad ran a gill netter before his back went, then ran a forklift at the cannery. We weren't poor, per se, but nobody ever said the word college to me like it was a thing that was even going to happen. I had graduated high school by the skin of my teeth, and I spent a year straight doing nothing. I owed a guy money at the time. I'd also wrecked a truck. I needed to get out. I needed to get some real money, more than what I could make in town. And everybody in a town like that knows there's exactly only one place a dumb strong 19-year-old goes to get it in a hurry. You go north. You go crab fishing.

My uncle Pete had done a few seasons in the '90s and still knew people. He made a call he probably shouldn't have made to be honest. And that's how I ended up in a bar in Dutch Harbor in the middle of October sitting across from a man named Halfthor. Everybody called him Cap. He eyed me up and down like I was some tool he could buy from a yard sale. At the time, I think he was about 60. And he had a face that looked like a worn-out boot. "Pete says you're not afraid of work," he said. "I'm not," I answered, not sure if I was even telling the truth. "Everybody says that. You ever been seasick?" he leaned forward. I felt a little nervous. "I've been out plenty of times on my dad's boat." "Ah," he scoffed. "That's a bathtub. This isn't that. You'll be a greenhorn, half share for you. You'll do every miserable job on the boat and get yelled at. And if you make it the whole season, you'll make more than your daddy made all year. But if you quit halfway, you'll fly home on your own dime. Sound fair?" I was honestly amazed that I was being offered the job right there that fast. It did not particularly sound fair, but I agreed with him and accepted his offer.

His boat was the Saint Jude. I didn't know back then that St. Jude is the patron saint of lost causes. I had to look that up years later, and when I did, it sort of made sense. She was a steel crabber, a little under 110 ft long, red and white except for the spots of rust, and it was mostly rust. Cap owned her outright, which was rare, and it meant the whole operation was his neck. There were five of us aboard besides him, and I'll tell you about them because they matter to this story, and some of them aren't around anymore to tell you themselves.

The deck boss was Wade Tucker. Everybody called him Tuck. He was in his mid-30s and built like a fire hydrant, missing the top of one of his fingers. He taught me everything I know about not getting killed, which is its own dark joke I'll come back to. He was hard on me, but only because he wanted to keep me alive. He'd cuff me on the back of the head, call me an idiot, then sit up until 2:00 in the morning explaining how a coil of line behaves. I know he doesn't sound it, but he was very patient, like a school teacher. And it was mainly when he taught me things, like with that line.

There was Sully, too. Aaron Sullivan, mid-20s, quiet and a good worker. As I recall, he was from somewhere in Oregon. Sully had lost a younger brother to the water when they were children, drowned in a river. I only know that because of what happened later, but he never talked about it. He never talked about much.

There was also a guy named Pogo. Pogo something. I think he was Portuguese out of California. This guy never stopped moving or bouncing or talking and he was cracking jokes that were mostly terrible. He was the youngest after me, 23, with a laugh you could hear over the hydraulics, which is quite the feat. He's the reason I can't watch those fishing shows they put on TV. Every one of those crews has a Pogo, and it reminds me of these days.

There was Gil, too, the engineer in his 60s and deaf in one ear. He had been fishing the Bering Sea since before I was a thought. Gil is the one who told me most of what I'm about to tell you down in the engine room over instant coffee. And at the time, I thought he was a crazy old man just playing me for a joke. So, basically, we're on the same page here, thinking all of this is nothing, just made-up nonsense. But you'll see, just as I would soon see.

Anyway, I'd grown up around boats, so I thought I understood things, but I understood nothing. The Bering Sea in winter is the most dangerous water there is to work on, and it's not even close. The water sits right around 38°. Go in without a survival suit, and you have, depending on who you ask, a few minutes before your body stops doing anything it wants to do. Your hands quit first, then everything after that. And it's not even the water that gets most guys. It's the gear. The pots are steel cages, 7 ft on a side, and a king crab pot weighs around 700 lb dry and a lot more wet and full. And it's always getting thrown around. You stack them, bait them, launch them off the side on a line behind a buoy. They sit on the bottom. You come back, hook the buoy, run the line through a hydraulic block, haul the pot up, empty it, and do it again. Hundreds of times for days in a row. You don't get to sleep. During a real opener, you might be on deck 30 hours straight. And you got to do it because every pot is money. The season is short. There's no overtime. There is no second chance. There's nobody coming to make you stop.

Tuck drilled the line into me before he'd let me near the launcher. We were tied up at the dock before we even went out, and he had a length of it coiled at our feet. "The line is the thing that kills you," he said. "Not so much the cold or the falling in, but the line. A pot goes over the side, and that line's going with it, and it's going fast. If any part of you is in it, your foot, your ankle, a loop around your boot, it'll take you over the rail and down to the bottom before anybody can do a single thing. You understand me, kid?" "Uh, yeah, definitely. I understand." That scared me a bit, imagining myself drowning at the bottom of the sea. "Ah, no, you don't understand. Why do I even ask? Nobody understands. Not until they see it." He kicked the coil. "Your job when we're setting is to know where your feet are every single second. Where are your feet?" I looked down. "No, not now. Always. That's the job. Where are your feet?" He said it like a mantra. I came to learn that's exactly what it was. "Where are your feet?" something you need to know at all times without having to look down.

Here's the other thing I have to set up. This is where you'll start deciding about me, so brace up. There were rules on the St. Jude that didn't seem to have anything to do with safety. Cap had them and Tuck enforced them, but nobody bothered to explain them to the greenhorn at the start. We didn't fish a certain piece of ground after dark. There was a spot Cap and Tuck called "the slot" on the plotter. It was just a deep finger of water, a trench dropping off where the rest of the grounds were shallow. The crab were real thick there, too. Thicker than anywhere. I asked Pogo our first week why we always pulled off the slot and ran shallow before nightfall when the fat pots were out deep. Pogo, who'd usually explain anything, just bounced on his feet and said, "Cap's thing. He's got a thing about it. You'll get used to it." And he went back to work. That was the first time I saw a cheerful man on that boat not want to keep talking about something.

The second rule, nobody went out on the deck alone after dark, ever. If you had to go out, you woke up someone else. Even to take a leak over the rail at night, you brought a buddy. I figured that was a hazing thing that they did to the new guy. Remember, I was given no reasoning behind these rules.

The third rule, and Cap said this one to my face the first night. "If you ever hear singing out here, you don't go looking for it. But what you do need to do is wake me up. And I don't care what hour it is." I couldn't help but laugh at that. It was a funny thing to say and I was only 19. I thought it was a joke. The Cap looked at me with that boot face and didn't laugh. And his face was stone cold. I stopped immediately and felt really stupid.

The first opener went about the way they expected, which is to say it nearly killed me, and I loved and hated it about equally. King Crab. We pounded out to the grounds and weather I thought was a storm, but all the other guys treated it as a Tuesday, and we set our string. I learned that cold and wet and exhausted was a state you can live in for a very long time. I threw up once from the bait. They chop herring and cod heads and the bait freezer is its own circle of hell. And Tuck never let me forget it. I learned to coil line clean and keep my feet. We hauled and baited and launched for what the log said was 31 hours straight and what felt like one gray unending hour with no front and no back to it.

Somewhere deep in the second night, working the deck under the sodium lights with the black water heaving past the rail, I heard it the first time. I'll be careful here because this is where it's easiest to lie in these kinds of stories, even to yourself. It's easy to fill things in with what you decided it was later. So, I'll share it with you objectively. What I noticed was that I'd started feeling good. Too good. And at first, I had no way to explain it. I'd been running on no sleep and adrenaline. But suddenly, very, very suddenly, I felt warm and calm. There was a sound underneath the engine and the wind, a low sound. And I thought it was the engine doing something new, maybe hitting a certain rhythm of water. But then I thought it was in my own head, a ringing kind of sound, like that temporary tinnitus you sometimes get. It rose and fell, though. And if you held still and let it, it moved through the deck plates and up through your boots and into your chest. So strange, so joyful. I straightened up from the pot I was working on and looked out past the lights into the dark. I had the strongest feeling that there was someone out there, but not a boat. A person, a person very close looking back at me. But I didn't feel scared. I should have been in that situation, but I was not scared. Rather, I felt I should go to the rail and look even closer. That's when Tuck's hand came down on the back of my neck hard, and he physically forced me to turn around. "Eyes on your work," he said. "Only seriousness in that phase, which was 4 in from mine. You hear something? You keep your eyes on your work and you tell me. Did you hear something?" "I don't know. Thought I heard the engine acting weird," I told him. He looked at me a second longer than the reply needed. "That's not the engine," he said. But that was it. He then went back to the block. For the rest of that haul, Tuck kept himself between me and the rail, but he did it sort of subtly, not making a deal about it. We came off the slot and ran shallow before the sun was even down. By the time we'd offloaded, I'd slept 14 hours and eaten everything in Dutch Harbor. But by then, the whole thing had shrunk in my memory into nothing. Tired guy hears weird noise. That's all it was. I didn't need to think about it more.

But Gil would not let it stay nothing. We were tied up a couple days between openers and Cap had me learning every job on the boat. That week it was Gil's job. We were drinking the worst coffee I've ever tasted. And out of nowhere, not looking at me, Gil said, "You know, I heard her out there. The first night, Tuck had to grab you." I wasn't sure what to say. "Ah, you don't have to say anything. I've seen that look on about 40 greenhorns by now. I had it myself 40 years ago." He set down the rag and cleared his old throat. "You want to know what it is? Or you want to be one of those guys who decides he didn't hear a thing." Now, I should have been one of those guys, but instead I asked, "Okay, Gil, what is it?" He explained seriously. I'd been expecting his expression or tone to be like telling a ghost story, but it was nothing like that. "All right. There's a thing out there on the grounds mostly out deep. The slot and a couple other trenches. Been here longer than any of us. Longer than the fishery. I'd bet the old hands call it different things. Some of the boys called her the lady on account of the singing, like the singing rocks that wreck the ships." He almost smiled. "Except it's not a lady and no ship gets wrecked. So the name never made sense to me. I just call it the devourer because that's what it does. That's the only part anybody really knows for sure. Near as anyone's put it together, and I've listened my whole life, mind you, so I've got more than most. Firstly, it sings. And the singing does something to your head. It makes you feel real good. And it makes you not so afraid. And that makes you want to come even closer to the rail to the water. Now, some men it gets its hooks in deep. Secondly, it puts pictures in your head, people you've lost. It'll show you somebody dead, but like they're right there under the surface, reaching up for you, and you'd swear on your mother it was real. And go in after them. Men have done it right in front of me. I've seen it. Going over the side, going in after someone 20 years in the ground. Could be hallucinations." "From the thing that's singing?" "Well, call it that if it helps you. Going on. Thirdly, and this is the only part that lets me get some sleep out here. It has never once that anybody can tell me taken a man that was breathing. It doesn't itself pull you in. Doesn't reach out and grab you. It can't do that. Or maybe it won't. I don't really know. The ones it draws to the rail go on their own. And mostly somebody grabs them in time and they're just fine. The ones that go in didn't drown because of it. They drowned because they went into 38° water in the dark. And that's the sea that kills you. 3 minutes flat. No help needed." He relaxed and sat back. "It waits for the water to do the work. Then it comes and takes what's left."

"Gil, that's insane. So, you're telling me there's a sea monster out here and it only eats dead guys after luring them into the water?" I was pretty blunt about it, but Gil didn't get mad and that stuck with me for years. The way he looked at me, I could tell he thought I was just naive. He pied me. "Son," he said, "You ever wonder why the Coast Guard recovers so few of the people that go overboard? The boat goes down six aboard and they only find one. Then they find no one else year after year. Where do you think they all go?" "The big ocean. Sure. The current, the cold." "Yeah, that's what everyone says." He picked the rag back up. "I've pulled gear off the bottom out here for 40 years, and I'm telling you, a man in a survival suit floats. They're made to float. That's the whole point. So you tell me why we find the empty suits sometimes and not the person who was inside." I didn't have anything to say to that really. I was getting the heebie-jeebies.

"Ah, the rules ain't superstition, boy," Gil said. "Cap's lost men to it before your time. He don't talk about it and you won't ask him. The rules work. That's all. You don't go out alone at night because alone is when it gets you. You don't fish the slot after dark because deep and dark is where it's strongest, where it gets in your head. And the next thing you know, a man is at the rail. If you hear it, you go wake Cap because he knows how to get the boat loud and lit up and it don't like that. The engine, all the lights, it backs off from that." He shrugged. "That's everything I know. The lifetime out here and that's everything I know. Keep the rules and you go home alive. We all do."

I went up out of the engine room that day, about 90% sure Gil was a lonely old man who had concocted a story to explain a sad fact about a dangerous job. The body's thing had 100 ordinary explanations. The singing was wind and an exhausted brain. I held on to that 90% for as long as I could. The Opilio season is what broke it. King crab wraps up. Then in January and February, you go out for Opilio, snow crab, which is the deep cold, the ice and the dark and those short days. The worst of it. Most of what I'm about to tell you happened then. By then, I wasn't much of a greenhorn anymore. Not really. I'd put on muscle, losing my softer parts, and I'd stopped getting yelled at, except when I deserved it. I'd really started to love it in a Stockholm syndrome sort of way. I felt invincible, though. Maybe it was because I was 19, finally having money in my bank, having calluses on my hands.

The hum came back the first night we worked deep, and it was stronger than I heard it before. Or maybe I was weaker. Maybe I was more open to it. This time I knew what it was the second I felt it coming. The warmth and the calmness, the underneath sound of moving through the deck. So I did what I'd been taught. I went and told Tuck. I said to him, "I've got it again. The thing. I can hear it." He nodded calmly and said to me, "Good man. Stay close. Stay loud. Eyes down." And then he started talking. Just talking loud about a truck he wanted to buy. And he had me talk back. I figured out that talking was a tool, too. It's hard to drift off toward the water and die when you're arguing with a guy about a truck. But this time, I saw something. And that was the first real fear. The kind underneath the false calmness. I kept my eyes down like I was told, but you have to look up to work. And on one of those looks up out past the lights in the black water sliding by, I saw a face just for a second. A pale face down under the surface a few feet like someone's face looks under a water in a pool, wavering but turned up towards me. I want to say it was a woman but the more I think about it the less I'm sure it was anything you could put a sex or an age to. It was just a face, pale and water, no living face could be in. And it was calm. I could tell it wanted me to come closer. My body began to turn toward the rail on its own. And what saved me was Pogo. Pogo had chosen that second to slip out on the deck behind me and go down hard on his rear with a clatter and a string of Portuguese. The noise snapped me out of it. The face was gone. I was just standing there with my heart going like a jackhammer. I immediately told Tuck what I saw. He didn't say "I told you so." He got very still and serious and told me, "Okay, from here on you don't work the rail side at night. You work inboard. You let me in and solely take the rail. You stay on the launcher in the bait in the middle of the deck. You here?" I nodded my head. Then he said more quietly. "It's bad this year. Been getting worse the last few years. I don't know why." He looked at the dark. "Cap feels it too. He's pulling us off deep earlier and earlier." We pulled off the slot that night a full 2 hours before dark. It got worse and it wasn't just me anymore. The greenhorn who could be written off as green. It was getting all of us in different ways. Pogo stopped joking on the night hauls. I know that doesn't sound significant unless you knew Pogo. He joked through everything. That was the essence to his being. And yet there came a point where on the deep hauls he'd go quiet, gray-faced even. He would just do his work with his jaw clenched. Once I caught him with his hands over his ears for a second between pots, like a kid blocking out a fight in the next room, and he caught me seeing it, and he put his hands down real quick, never saying a word about it. Gil stayed below as much as Cap would let him. He said the steel and the engine noise was thicker down there and he didn't hear that sound as bad. I started to understand that Gil being the engineer was no accident. He'd put himself down there on purpose decades ago. It was how he'd survived a whole life out here, burrowing into the loudest part of the boat. And Sully. Sully was the one it wanted. I understood that later. Sully with his drowned brother. Sully who already had a dead person he'd give anything to see again. Gil had said it gets its hooks deepest in some men. And Sully was one of those men.

One night I was still asleep. We were running shallow, anchored up for a few hours of rest in some weather, dead middle of the night. And I woke up because Tuck was already up and moving about. Seeing Tuck moving about fast in the dark woke something in me before my brain even worked. I heard Cap's voice, low and hard. And that's the voice you don't argue with. He was saying a name. So I look up at me. So I came up the ladder and out onto the deck and the cold hit me. The picture I saw there is burned into me forever. It was snowing. That fine hard snow that goes sideways. The deck lights through everything in orange. Sully was at the rail with one leg up over it, arms out, reaching down toward the water. And he was talking. His voice wasn't scared, and he did not sound crazy in the slightest. His voice was gentle and sure, and he sounded like he was talking to a little kid. "Hey," he was saying, "Hey, it's okay. It's okay. I'm coming. I see you. Stay right there. I'm coming." reaching down toward the black water with a look of pure relief on his face, like a man who'd carried something heavy his whole life, finally being told he could set it down. Cap and Tuck had him by the back of his float coat, both of them hauling him back, and Sully fought them hard to get to the water, a quiet and desperate strength, the whole time, saying that gentle stuff to whatever he saw down there. I stood frozen until Cap roared at me. "Grab his damn legs. His legs." I came unstuck and grabbed Sully around the knees and the three of us dragged him back off the rail and down onto the deck. He thrashed. Then all at once he went limp and he started to sob. There was this grown man splayed out on a boat, completely broken, crying his eyes out in front of all of us. He kept saying his brother's name. "Tommy. That was Tommy. It was him in there. He was right there. And you stopped me. He was right there. And I had him." Cap got the engine running and every light on the boat was blazing. The whole thing was loud and as shaky as possible. We ran flat out toward nothing for a couple of hours just so we could be moving, but nobody slept the rest of the night. Come morning, Sully was a different man, hollowed out. He wouldn't talk about it. Perhaps he couldn't, but I saw his hands trembling. When we hit Dutch Harbor, Cap took him aside on the dock. They were out there for a while, but then I watched as Sully got his gear and got off the boat. Cap settled with him in cash. I believe it was more than his share, and Sully shook all our hands without looking any of us in the eye, and he got in a cab. That was the last any of us saw of Aaron Sullivan. So lived.

Okay, if you were thinking I was telling a story about how he died in the water, that is not what happened. It drew him to the rail and it nearly had him. It would have had him if Cap weren't a light sleeper. But Sully was able to go home alive. Years later, I went snooping about and I found an Aaron Sullivan in Oregon, the right age, and an obituary from 2014. It didn't say how he died. He was only 33. I can't even be sure if it was the same Sully. I've decided to believe it wasn't. I get to decide some things after all of this.

We took on a new hand in Dutch to replace Sully, a guy named Warren I barely got to know, and we went back out. The season does not stop for you. There was quota in the water and the St. Jude was Cap's whole life. We had to go. But on that next trip, someone died. It was daytime when it happened. Middle of the day, nowhere near the dark, nowhere near the slot either. We were on a shallow string doing ordinary work. The singing, that humming was not there. Nothing seemed wrong or out of place. Just the usual irritating weather and a sea that was up and a deck that wouldn't hold still. The typical conditions you work in all the time up there, so nobody was thinking twice about it. We were setting, not hauling, launching pots over the side. The way it goes, you've got the pot up on the launcher rack at the rail, baited, door tied, the coiled line and buoys staged so they pay out clean. And on the call, you trip it and the pot slides off and the line zips out after it. It's the most single dangerous thing you do because of the line, which was everything Tuck told me the first day at the dock. Pogo was on the rail. I was on the bait inboard where Tuck had put me and kept me ever since the face. I was about 10 ft away looking right at it. I've gone over what I saw 10,000 times. The boat took a big sea, a roll, a bad one, and the timing was the worst possible. The pot went off the rack too soon with the boat rolling over hard and the coiled line jumped. It came up off the deck in a loop, almost alive, and the loop dropped over Pogo's boot. I saw all of it happen, and I think Pogo felt it because he immediately looked down right at his feet. And then the line went tight. There was a 700-lb pot going over the side and down, and the line between it and Pogo's ankle had about a second of slack, and within a moment, it didn't. Pogo flew off his feet so fast, it didn't even look like a person moving, it looked like the deck had been yanked out from under him. He hit the rail extremely hard and was dragged through the gap where the launcher was. His body folding around the steel horribly. There was one sound, then he was over and gone. The line was still screaming out after the pot, and the buoys went over last, bright orange and bobbing. They seemed perfectly normal, marking the spot where Pogo had gone. It's so crazy to think about. It all happened much, much faster than the time it took for you to read this. Tuck was already cutting it, throwing the brake, and doing everything he could. And Cap was turning the boat. Warren, though, was screaming. And I don't actually remember what I did in those first few seconds. I'm told I was at the rail, but I don't remember getting there. I remember the buoys. I remember staring at them, sitting on the gray water, and understanding that Pogo was at the bottom of the line under them with a pot and 38° water, but knowing deep, deep down his fate was already sealed. There was no chance that Pogo was going to come back up. Not in a situation like that. Cap ran the whole man overboard process the way a professional would. We circled in through the ring and we got our suits half-on. The Coast Guard out of Kodiak was sending a helicopter towards us. But I think we all knew. It wasn't something any of us would or could say out loud at the time. Tuck got the line cut and we hauled that pot back up. But the line came up cut clean. Nothing on the end of it, just the cut line. The Coast Guard did their searching. They're unbelievably good, and they put a swimmer in that water, running the pattern for hours in failing light and in worsening weather until they couldn't search anymore. They never found him. The line had been cut somewhere down there and given him back to the sea, and the sea decided to keep him. I told you it was daytime and that there was no hum or singing, right? That's true. And I say that because it means Pogo's death was an ordinary death, a fishing accident. The kind of thing that happens every year. Gil was right that the thing doesn't kill the living. The line was what killed Pogo. And that cold water with the bad timing of one rough wave. I've never been able to stop thinking about the part that came after. The fact they never found him where the line came up cut clean with nothing on it. You see, a man goes down and is attached to a pot. The pot's on the bottom, the man's on the bottom with it. Recovery sometimes gets them back. But the line came up cut. Somewhere down in the dark, the line Pogo was on parted. And I've spent 18 years not letting myself wonder too hard about what cut it.

We ran back into Dutch Harbor with the flag down and the whole crew a wreck. Cap shut the boat down for a whole week and I later understood that cost him a fortune mid-season. He never said a word about the money though. They had a thing at the Elbow Room, something they do for lost fishermen. And a lot of crews came. You see, everybody's lost somebody out there. People said kind things about a kid most of them never met. Pogo's mom flew up from California and I had to shake her hand and I've never wanted so badly to be anywhere else. We went back out. We had a quota left to fulfill and the Saint Jude had to make her numbers or Cap was going to lose her. Warren quit though. He'd had enough after that, but nobody blamed him. Cap could not find a replacement fast enough though, so it would be the four of us for the last push. Cap, Tuck, Gil, and me. Short-handed, gutted, running on fumes and grief. Which brings me to the most terrifying night of my life.

It was near the end of the season. We'd made our numbers barely, and we were going to run in the next morning. That was going to be the season for us. We were anchored in the lee of an island, getting weather, a real blow coming through. Too rough to fish and nowhere to go, just riding it out on the hook. Cap, for the first time all season, let us drink, though he knew we needed it. He understood the season had broken something in all of us, and a man can only hold so much. He brought up a bottle of whiskey. We sat in the galley, all the four of us, and drank to Pogo, and to Sully, wherever he was at the time, and we prayed that the old boat stayed together. Gil told stories about guys from 30 years back, and for a couple of hours, it was almost fun. Basically, the closest I'd felt to peace all season. I got drunk. And keep that in mind, and make decisions on what you believe here for yourself for what I'm about to tell you. Sure, I was 19 and it wasn't legal, but I'd seen a man die and I needed a drink. I drank more than the other guys somehow. And around 2:00 in the morning, the others turned in. Cap, Tuck, and Gil all went down to their racks. And I should have done that, too. But I was too drunk and too sad. And I didn't want to be in my rack with my own thoughts yet. I figured, we're anchored. We're safe in the lee. I'll just go up a minute and get some air. I broke the rule. The first rule, the one Cap set with his own mouth my very first night. I went out on the deck alone at night with a bottle in my hand. And I didn't wake anybody. That superstitious danger was beginning to feel like a tall tale from an old man again. I should have known better. It had stopped snowing. The blow was up, but it was a clean kind of rough. Big swells, no snow, and there was no moon. Or the moon was buried, and it was dark. Dark like you do not get on land. Kind of felt like I was inside of an animal. Something big on the inside. The deck lights were off. We ran them off at anchor to save the batteries. There was just the one little anchor light up high and the faint glow from the wheelhouse windows. So, understand it was very, very dark. I did not see what I'm about to tell you in very good light. Hold on to that if you need to.

I stood at the rail, the very same rail I had not been allowed to stand at at night for months. And I drank, looking out at the black water heaving up and down back and forth, thinking about Pogo. And that grief came up, amplified by the alcohol. I started to cry, drunk, alone in the dark. I heard the hum. It seemed to be riding along the wind, a low sound moving through the deck and into my boots. And that warm feeling came with it. The false calmness. And in my state of drunk guttedness and loneliness, the most open a man can be. I didn't fight it even a little. Tuck was asleep and I had no one to pull me out of it. So I leaned over the rail and I looked down into the water, letting that feeling wash over me. The water below, right along the hull, started to pale. There was a paleness coming up from underneath, a sort of dim glow, like something light colored rising slowly from far down, getting bigger as it came up. And I watched it probably the same way Sully watched his little brother come up, little Tommy with this awful relief, thinking I was about to be shown something I wanted. I think I was waiting to see Pogo's face. It wasn't Pogo's face. Not at first. At first, it was the size of it that hit me because the pale thing kept getting bigger as it rose. It did not stop at the size of a mere man, and it didn't stop at the size of two. It kept coming up, getting wider and longer, and it broke the surface right against the hull with no splash, like pale oil coming up. This slow swelling up of something vast, and a smell came with it, like a big soggy pile of corpses, ages old. The smell of something from deep, deep down from the bottom of the sea where nothing is supposed to live. That scent rolled up over the rail into my face so thick and disgustingly wrong that that false calmness broke, even if just for a second. And in that second of clarity, where my own animal body knew before my drunk brain did, I looked at what was actually below me. It was huge. It lay along the hull just under the surface and ran the better part of the length of the boat. It was pale, like dead pale, the white of something that has never seen the sun, like the underside of a deep sea fish. The surface of it wasn't skin or scale, but something strange, something in between, wet and slick. And I swear it moved, but it wasn't like muscle pulsating, but like the surface of it was crawling, as if the whole thing was covered in a film that itself was alive, too. I could not see any fins and no shape that I could name, just that pale monstrosity lying against the boat. There was a part of it nearest to me, up out of the water a little that I understood after a second was the front of it. The head, if it had a head, and it was upturned towards me. In the front of it, there were faces. Not one face, faces. There was a place where the pale wrongness had things in it that were malformed copies of human faces pressed up under its surface, like the time I'd seen the single face under the water that first time. Except now there were many. A crowd, overlapping faces, dim and wavering, all pale. I think they were the faces of the drowned, of the waterlogged, damned. I think I was looking at everyone it had ever taken, held out in front of it, used and worn, shown one at a time to men leaning over rails. There were so many. Some looked old-fashioned somehow, like faces from a long time ago. And they were all turned up at me, calm and patient with a terrible kindness, a look that said to me, "Come closer." And near the front of them, lower and newer, was a face I recognized. Pogo. It had his face. It was showing me my old shipmate's face, and that face was beckoning me calmly to come down to join it. Underneath it all, through the vast pale length of the thing, there was a slow motion, and that motion reminded me of one thing. Digestion. It had something. It was working on devouring something very slowly, and it had wanted to show me its food first. Was this how it was showing people all this time? Mocking its prey before taking them. I did not go in. And to this very day, I have no idea why I was spared because every other man I knew that had encountered this thing and had been pulled by it. The influence had not been broken without the help of an outside party. But to tell you the truth, I think it was the smell. The smell was so otherworldly and grotesque, it pushed me away, even as the thing called. Like touching the stove and pulling away in an instant because it's still hot. I came off that rail backward, falling on my rear on the deck. The bottle I'd been holding fell and broke. I scrambled back from the rail on my hands and feet like a desperate animal, and I soon realized I'd been screaming my lungs out for quite some time. At that moment, I was screaming for Cap. The boat came alive fast, lights and shouting. Cap was up in the wheelhouse faster than a 60-year-old man should move, and he had the engine roaring and the deck lights blazing in moments. Tuck came pounding out, finding me on my back near the gear, screaming, pointing at that rail, and Gil was right behind him. By the time the lights came on, the water along the hull was just water again. Black and heaving. That awful smell was already fading away, too. There was nothing there now. That thing made sure it was not going to be seen by anyone else. Just the drunk greenhorn on the deck where he wasn't supposed to see screaming about the faces he saw. It's funny though. Cap did not yell at me and he wasn't asking me questions when I told him what I saw. He did not say I was imagining it. He stood there with the engine roaring and the lights blazing. And he looked scared yet relieved like he thought he was about to lose another one. He looked out at the black water where I was pointing and eventually he said, "How close did you get to going in?" I explained to him that I had not come close. I came off the rail quick, but I was shaking too hard to say much else. He nodded slowly, staring at the water. And he said something, and it was the only time I ever heard him admit that the thing was real. "I've lost two men to it before your time. Good men. I've heard it sing every season of my life. I felt it in my head trying to walk me to the edge, to the rail, like it had walked Sully. And you, in 50 years, I never once saw it. Not all of it. Not like you just did." His expression changed. He looked sorry for me, guilty, even like this was his fault. "You shouldn't have been out here alone," he said. He had Tuck take me below and we ran with every light on until morning. Then we pulled the hook and ran for Dutch and the season was over.

That's everything I saw and everything I was told. And I've now told it straight through for the first time. And I'll admit my hands aren't as steady right now as I'd like them to be. I'll explain the little that's left. I didn't go back. Cap settled with me on the dock and it was a lot of money, a full share, even though I was technically still a greenhorn. And he shook my hand hard, holding it a second and telling me, "You're a good hand. You could do this, but you don't have to. And if I were you, I wouldn't." That was the kindest and the hardest thing anybody on that boat ever said to me. I flew home to Anacortes, paid off the guy I owed, and I bought a new truck, and I didn't fish again. Not in the Bering Sea.

Anyway, I work in Bellingham now, not in the water. There's something else I still have to say. What I know about the crew and what happened after. They kept on doing their thing, fishing that is, and I know that Tuck died in 2016 of a heart attack, thankfully in his bed, not out there in the sea. Gil, I'm not sure. He'd be in his 80s if he was still alive, which I somehow doubt. I hope he is. I hope he's somewhere being loud and happy. Now about the St. Jude itself. In 2011, the St. Jude went down in bad weather west of the Pribilofs, not far from the slot. There were five aboard at the time, and the Coast Guard recovered two of them out of the water, alive and half frozen, but breathing. They never found the other three. Tuck was one of the ones they did find, but Cap was one of the three they never did. Old Halfthor who'd owned and run and slept aboard that boat for 30 odd years. The guy who made those rules to keep us alive. Well, Cap went down with the ship. According to what I read, they searched and searched and they found only empty suits. They never found Cap or the other two that went down with him. Just remember what Gil had told me about those suits. A man in a suit floats. That's the whole point. And you tell me why we find the empty suits sometimes and not the person who was inside. What does that mean? Well, if I had to answer, it'd be a very dark answer. But here's my conclusion. I think Cap's face has joined the other faces now, and his face is one of the newer ones near the front, waiting and beckoning the next new people to sink into the water. Thank goodness I'm in Arkansas. No seas near me, but I do drive over the Arkansas River from time to time, and I'll be darned if I don't do a double take at that water now, hoping I don't see any faces. Albeit redneck faces, but still faces that shouldn't be here. Good night.

Thank you for listening to the Unexplained Encounters podcast. I've been your host, Darkness Prevails. Catch more scary story narrations from me on my other show, Tales from the Breakroom, which you can find on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast app. If you're wondering about the Eeriecast app, it's still in the works, and we're very, very close to releasing it. So, stay tuned for an announcement. The app will be the place where you can listen to all Eeriecast shows, get samples of bonus content that's members only, or become a member yourself, unlocking tons of hours of extra narrations. Ad-free and you can download for offline listening. It's all coming soon on the Eeriecast app for Apple and Android devices. So again, stay tuned for the announcement. Thank you all for your support and for sticking around all these years. Here's to many, many more to come. Till next time, stay safe out there and stay creepy because this world is a strange one.