Captain Phil Harris by Josh Harris, Jake Harris

crabs live ten to twenty years and weigh an average of six to ten pounds, but some grow in excess of twenty pounds. The world record belongs to a red king crab caught in the northern Pacific Ocean that weighed 33.1 pounds.
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    In his early years aboard the American Eagle, Phil learned many lessons, some harder than others. One of the toughest came in his first year on the boat. He was being taught how to operate the crane that lifts the eight-hundred-pound cages—or pots as they are commonly called—used to catch crabs.
    “It takes a little bit of finesse to work that crane,” Joe said.
    On deck, the pots are stacked and tied tightly together until they are needed. On that particular day, they were piled high in the stern.
    Phil was being instructed on how to lift one of those pots in the grasp of the crane, but he could only get it to rise a couple of feet before the crane stalled. Phil soon discovered the problem: there was one line still keeping that pot tethered to the stack.
    A crewman named Bob Mason, armed with a knife on the end ofa stick, climbed up on an adjoining stack to cut the line, but it was just out of reach, the stick a little too short. So Mason got on his stomach and stretched his body down in order to sever that final restraint.
    At that instant, Phil eased up on the crane, and the pot came hurtling down. “I don’t know if he had a brain fart or what,” said Joe. The eight-hundred-pound pot came crashing down on Mason’s head, squeezing it between two stacks.
    “Fortunately, he was wearing a leather flier’s cap with earflaps,” said Joe, “but still, that pot almost took his ears off. He was bleeding from both of them.”
    Joe and the other crew members lifted the pot off Mason and gently lowered him to the deck.
    “Phil was beside himself,” Joe said.
    “Oh my God, oh my God,” Phil shrieked to no one in particular. “What have I done?”
    Mason had suffered a skull fracture and was taken to a nearby clinic, then flown out to a fully equipped hospital. Although Mason survived, no one on the American Eagle ever saw him again.
    Neither Joe nor the rest of the crew criticized Phil for what had happened. “He felt bad enough already,” said Joe.
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    Phil stayed on the American Eagle for nearly four years. As he gained experience and confidence, his desire to be more than a deckhand grew.
    He could see, however, that his dream would never be fulfilled on the American Eagle. “I certainly wasn’t going to let go of the throttle and turn the boat over to him,” Joe said. “He had higher aspirations than working for me, and I could certainly understand that.”
    But opportunity beckoned elsewhere. Phil’s father, Grant, an engineer on the Golden Viking at the time, had accepted an offer to buy a piece of that crab boat and become its captain in 1976.
    Grant assured Phil that, if he joined him, he would soon make that coveted climb to the wheelhouse to be the relief skipper.
    So in 1977, Phil said farewell to the only crab boat he’d ever known and joined his father who, a year later, let him live his dream by taking command of a boat.
    Grant didn’t make Phil the relief captain just because he was trying to further his son’s career, although that was certainly on Grant’s mind. He wouldn’t have allowed Phil to become a captain if he didn’t think his son could handle it. Not with the lives of the crew dependent on the competence of the man in charge of the boat.
    “As a matter of fact,” said Grant, “Phil was a much better fisherman than I was.”
    “Phil was ready when he went over to the Golden Viking ,” said Joe. “I knew he’d become a captain because he had more drive than Grant. I don’t mean any disrespect for Grant, but he was more of a gentleman fisherman.
    “If Phil had stayed on the American Eagle, he might have wound up like some of the crew members that were there fifteen, twenty years and never advanced.”
    While