Working on the Edge: Surviving in the World's Most Dangerous Profession: King Crab Fishing on Alaska's High Seas

A memoir of adventure and survival that re-creates the boom years of Alaskan crab fishing and the crash that followed.

This will become the definitive account of this perilous trade, an addition to the literature of the sea. —James A. Michener

No profession pits man against nature more brutally than king crab fishing in the frigid, unpredictable waters of the Bering Sea. The yearly death toll is staggering (forty-two men in 1988 alone); the conditions are beyond most imaginations (ninety-mph Arctic winds, twenty-five-foot seas, and super-human stretches of on-deck labor); but the payback, if one survives can be tens of thousands of dollars for a month-long season. Walker rivetingly depicts the modern-day gold rush that drew hundreds of fortune—and adventure—hunters to Alaska's dangerous waters.

Walker writes with such intensity that no one will walk away from this book without traveling some small part of the way with these men (and a few women) who work on the wild, watery edge of civilization, pushing and pushed to the limits of strength and stamina. — Alaska Fisherman's Journal