In the wheelhouse, the mate, Hollis Nevells, said that Narcan fit a mentality fishing jobs require. He shared a story of a drunk fisherman who crashed a house party years ago in his hometown on Deer Isle, Maine. To prevent him from driving his pickup truck, other guests took his keys and stashed them atop a refrigerator. Furious, the man produced a pistol, pointed it at Nevells’s face and demanded the keys’ return. Thus persuaded, Nevells retrieved them. The man drove away only to call a short while later, upset. His truck was stuck in mud. He wanted help. Several fishermen drove to him, separated him from the pistol and beat the truck with baseball bats until it was totaled. “Island justice,” Nevells said. In his view, carrying Narcan matched this rough, self-help spirit: On the ocean, crews needed to solve problems themselves, and with Narcan came the power to save a life. Nevells had lost many peers to overdoses, among them the man who leveled the pistol at his face. He remembered feeling helpless as the Jersey Pride broadcast graphic descriptions at the hour of Murphy’s death. He did not want to feel that way again.
The captain, Duane Natale, agreed. He had seen firsthand how delaying death bought time for a rescue. Scallopers tow massive steel dredges that cut furrows through the ocean bottom and snatch scallops along the way. By winch and boom, the dredges are periodically lifted above deck to shake out catch, then lowered again. The procedure is exceptionally dangerous. A swinging dredge, about 15 feet wide and weighing more than a ton, can crush a man in one sickening crunch. In the 1990s, Natale saw a falling dredge shear off a deckhand’s extended right arm. A makeshift tourniquet tightened around the stump kept the man alive until a helicopter lifted him away. Had they not been trained, the deckhand would have died. Natale saw a similar role for Narcan: a means to stop a fatality and let the Coast Guard do its work. “I like it a lot,” he said. “Last thing I want on my conscience is someone dying on my boat.”
In water 45 fathoms deep the boat steamed at 4.8 knots, towing dredges through sandy muck while the crew sweated through an incessant loop. From a hydraulic control station at the wheelhouse’s aft end, Nevells or Natale periodically hoisted the dredges and shook out tons of scallops, which slid out onto the steel deck in rumbling cascades of pink-and-white shells. Working fast, Hollis and the deckhands shoveled the catch into baskets and hustled it to sheltered cutting stations, where with stainless-steel knives they separated each scallop’s adductor muscle — the portion that makes its way to seafood cases and restaurant plates — from its gob of guts. Hands worked fast, flicking adductors into buckets and guts down chutes that plopped them onto greenish water beside the hull. Large sharks swam lazy circles alongside, turning to flash pale undersides while inhaling easy meals. Music thumped and blared: metal one hour, techno the next. When enough buckets were full of meat and rinsed in saltwater, two deckhands transferred the glistening, ivory-colored catch into roughly 50-pound cloth sacks, handed them down a hatch into the cool fish-hold and buried them beneath ice. Everyone else kept shucking.
The deckhands worked in staggered pairs: 11 hours of shoveling and shucking followed by four hours to shower, eat, sleep and bandage hands, then back on deck for 11 more hours. It continued for days. Daylight became dusk; dusk became night; night became dawn. Sea states changed. Fog and mist soaked the crew and shrouded the vessel, then lifted, revealing other boats on the horizon doing the same thing. The work never stopped. As exhaustion set in, people swayed where they stood, still hauling heavy baskets and shucking. To stay awake they downed coffee and Red Bull, smoked cigarettes and spoke little. One man wore a T-shirt stenciled with a solitary word. It read as both a personal statement and command to everyone else: Grind. Early on the fifth day, the Karen Nicole reached its 12,000-pound federal trip limit. Natale turned the boat toward New Bedford, almost a 24-hour steam away, and cooked everyone a rib-eye steak. The crew showered, ate and slept a few hours, then woke to scrub the boat. On shore two days later, each deckhand received his share: $9,090.61.