Fifty Years Before The Mast.

I'm half jokingly naming this story after one of my favorite books " Two Years Before the Mast" by a

Richard Dana.Dana was a Harvard law student that jumped on a four masted sailing schooner around 1820 when his eyesight went bad from the measles.Since the steering wheel is aft on a schooner "before the mast" means your a deck hand.

In my life I have always been on vessels with the house forward so "before the mast " means the captain. My title is a bit of a stretch as 40 years have been as captain and 10 years on deck.So this is a story of my family's life in the fishing business. It's meant to cover three generations including my grandfather, father and my two brothers.

My story starts just over hundred years ago when my grandfather left northern Norway in 1912 for a new life in America.He was the seventh child of nine but his father had died of TB when he was only five years old. He and his brother Arent had been fishing together in their skiff for almost ten years to help make ends meet and feed the family. There oldest brother Jens was trying to support the family by fishing and farming.Although Bjarne and Arent were very good at it and actually famous in the Alta Fjord there just wasn't enough money to support the whole family. So at the age of fourteen he saved up enough for a ticket on a steam ship to America.

Bjarne Hansen most likely landed at Ellis Island and signed in as Bernard Hanson.He probably wanted to sound more American. In those days the new comers were a bit jealous of those that had been there for a while.

He had a sister Anna that was living in Minnesota on a farm. She had left the Alta Fjord a year or two before him .Barney ,as he called himself now, headed there. Little is known about that part of his life as he stayed only a couple of years and then headed toward the nearest fishing port which was Ballard in Seattle Washington. I'm guessing that this was around 1916 and he would have been 19 or 20 years old.

There isn't much known of the first years of Grandpa's life in Seattle. My father once told me that Barney talked someone who owned a fishing boat into letting him captain it and the rumor is that he spent very little time if any on deck. Recently Aunt Margaret said that she thought it was Anna's Mike ,his brother in law that gave him his chance.For sure though he started running halibut schooners at a very young age. This is remarkable to me as navigation in those days was extremely difficult. Some how though he was very successful. I know that he was a driven, stubborn man that would do whatever it took to get the job done.I often wonder if it even seemed a little bit easy for him after the years in the North. Remember that Alta is 1000 miles north of Dutch Harbor. It wasn't an easy place to live in those days.

So around the age of twenty five he started to build his own boat at The Seattle Boat Works.This was going to be a sixty five foot halibut schooner named the Rainier. The boat was launched sometime in 1924 and I'm sure that he was very proud of his new vessel. Around this time he met and married Selma Skeisvold from Karmoy Norway. Shortly after my Aunt Marion was born.

He was very successful with the F/V Rainier and in 1925 he started planning his second schooner the 78 ft McKinley named after the mountain in Alaska. The McKinley was launched in 1927. My father Bernard Arnold Hanson was born in September of 1928.My father told me many stories of Grandpa's fishing adventures and he was, like so many foreigners in that era, an iron man. Or as they say " a steel man in a wooden boat".

When the McKinley was launched grandpa turned the Rainer over to his main deck hand Trigvi Jacobson.Sometime in 1929 after crossing the gulf for three days the McKinley hit the rock called Spanish Island just south of Cape Decision and sank. Grandpa had a crew of eleven men who all got onto the rock and waited a couple of days for a passing vessel to rescue them. In those days it was easy to sink a boat in the fog. They way Grandpa would find the entrance to Cape Decision was to run seventy two hours Southeast from Portlock Bank east of Kodiak and stop the boat. Then he would drop a hollow sounding lead to the bottom. If it came up with clay in it he would go north. If it was sand he would go south. In the fog they would then ring the ships bell and count echoes to see how far off the beach they were. This was more than likely still something passed on from the Viking navigation heritage.

The sinking of the McKinley must have been very devastating as the vessel was almost brand new and probably shortly after she sank the stock market crashed. I doubt that he had any insurance and to top it all off the halibut prices crashed too.

But being the driven man that he was, twelve months later he put together a hard hat diving expedition and headed north to go save his boat. I'm sure a lot of people thought he was crazy as this was a huge and unheard of undertaking in those days .After no communications for a month grandpa sailed back into Ballard with his boat. 47 years later I became the captain of the McKinley ! Unfortunately grandpa had died nine years before.

This is chapter one. I hope to have many more.