A Bering Sea Crab Fisherman Hauled Up His Pot. A Claw the Size of a Pickup Truck Grabbed the Rail
An Alaskan crab fisherman and his nephew hauled up a claw that crushed their steel rail. They fought it off with an axe, then they saw the sonar screen.
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Hank has fished the Bering Sea for most of his 52 years. He is a white Alaskan crab fisherman with gray stubble, yellow rubber bib overalls and a black wool beanie he has worn so long it is shapeless. This season he brought his nephew Tyler along, a lanky 24-year-old in a red hoodie under an orange rain jacket, who had never worked a boat before.
Tyler had his phone out to film his first real haul. Salt spray kept hitting the lens. The horizon rolled violently behind them under a steel-gray Arctic sky.
He was expecting a crab pot. That is not what came up.
The Haul
Hank cranked the hydraulic hauler, the machine that drags the heavy steel pots up from the bottom. The line strained harder than usual. The motor whined. Hank leaned over the rail, waiting to see the cage break the surface.
Instead, a claw came out of the water.
It was red, crusted with barnacles, and enormous. Tyler later said it was bigger than his pickup truck, and in the video that does not look like an exaggeration. The claw rose up, opened, and clamped down on the steel rail of the boat.
The whole boat tilted toward it.
The Rail
Tyler screamed and dropped the phone. For a second the video is just the wet deck and the sound of wind. Then he grabs it again, and what he films next is the part that makes people’s stomachs drop.
The claw squeezed. The steel rail, the one that keeps fishermen from going overboard in forty-foot seas, crushed like aluminum foil. Ice-cold water poured over the low side of the tilted deck and flooded across it, washing around their boots.
In the Bering Sea, water that cold can kill a person in minutes. If the boat rolled any further, nobody was getting out.
“Uncle Hank, what is that?!” Tyler yells. Hank does not answer.
The Axe
Every crab boat keeps a fire axe on deck. Hank grabbed it.
He swung once, hard, at the joint of the claw where it gripped the rail. The sound of the blade hitting the shell is like a hammer on a car door. He swung again.
The claw let go.
It slid back into the dark water and sank out of sight. The boat rocked violently and then righted itself, the flooded deck draining over the side. And then something very human happened. Both men started laughing. Breathless, shaky, disbelieving laughter, the kind people do when they cannot believe they are still alive.
For a moment it feels like a happy ending. A wild fish story they will tell for the rest of their lives.
The Sonar Screen
Then Tyler turns around and points the phone at the wheelhouse window.
Inside, the sonar screen was glowing. Fishing boats use sonar to find crab and fish on the bottom. On the screen were shapes. Not one. Dozens of them. Each one the same size and outline as the thing Hank had just fought off with an axe.
And they were not sitting on the bottom. They were rising. Straight up, toward the hull.
The video ends there.
Why People Can’t Stop Talking About It
Part of what makes this clip hit so hard is how real the people feel. Hank is not a hero type. He is a tired working fisherman who reacts the way a lifetime on the water has taught him to react: grab the axe, deal with it, ask questions later. Tyler is pure panic, which is exactly how most of us would be.
And the laughter makes the ending brutal. The audience relaxes with them, and then the sonar screen takes it all away.
People have plenty of theories. Some think the hauler line had dragged a pot right through their nest, and the claw was not attacking but defending. Others think the noise of the hydraulic motor called them up. Some fishermen in the comments say they have seen strange large returns on their own sonar in the Bering Sea that they never could explain.
The question everyone asks is the same. One claw nearly sank the boat. What happens when dozens of them reach the surface?
More Stories Like This
If this story gave you chills, read our stories about the research ship whose sonar showed something ninety meters long, the Coast Guard rescue swimmer who saw the sea turn black around a sinking sailboat, and the oil rig worker who watched the platform leg bend.
