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\The potential payday for this hard and dangerous work is huge. If they survive the voyage, each boat's crew divides up the profits, though not exactly equally. The lion' share goes to the boat{for expenses}, to the owner, and to the caption. In the heyday of crabbing, says Captain Jonathan Hilllstrand, who co-owns a deadliest catch boat called the Time Bandit, an ordinary deck-hand could make 6 figures. "I was making 120 grand a year then", he told me,"and blowing it all on women and marijuana and cocaine. I always got the presidential suite with a hot tub.
\\\That was the 1980s, when Hillstrand was 17. The King crag catch peaked in 1980 at 12.5 million pounds, then crashed completely, and has been a slow recovery since 1983. Until very recently the crab season was run on "derby-style rules; On opening day, the Alaska department of fish and game essentially fired a starters pistol,designating a time when the boats could drop their pots. Then they fished like mad for days on end, racing one another and going without sleep until the state declared the season "closed", sometimes after as few as three or four days. As more and more boats joined the lucrative fishery, the competition between them intensified.
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