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Date: 12/22/2015
EAST LONGMEADOW – Nicholas Tokman, an Alaskan fisherman who has appeared on multiple seasons of Discovery’s king crab catching documentary series “Deadliest Catch,” spoke to grade 6 students Birchland Park Middle School about never giving up on following their dreams.
Tokman, a 26-year-old West Springfield native, was a guest speaker at the middle school on Dec. 18 and shared his story of hard work and overcoming the odds against him to become an Alaskan fisherman working on the ship that inspired him to leave Western Massachusetts for Alaska almost eight years ago.
He said before he was on the television show he was full time college student working three part-time jobs, which included selling suits by day, working at night as a janitor and delivering pizzas on the weekends.
Tokman said he felt “burnt out” and unfulfilled by his college business studies.
“I decided that I was going to Alaska,” he explained. “I continued making my phone calls. There was this guy Jim, he said he was going to pick me up at the airport. I moved out of my apartment [and] I turned down my internships, including for sports radio, and I decided I was going to stand up to my family.”
When Tokman arrived in Alaska, a man named Jim was supposed to meet him, but no one was there to pick him up and he had to hitchhike into town, he said.
“Immediately as I got into town, I started to walk the docks looking for a job,” he added. “No one was even looking at me, I wondered why. And finally I see Jim, and he’s just shocked to see me and he said, ‘Out of hundreds of people that called me for a job, you’re the first person to show up.’”
Tokman said Jim gave him several pieces of advice, including not to join a boat without signing a contract, not to get in a ship in rough shape and to be persistent about finding work by walking miles of docks two times a day and posting a resume on a bulletin board at a local coffee shop.
He added his resume had nothing to do with fishing at this point and he had difficulty finding steady work for months.
“Every day I was walking the docks, I was asking for job [and] every day I heard a ‘No,’” Tokman said.
One boat he joined up with had a captain named known as “The Frying Pan Man,” due to an incident eight years prior where he hit a crew member over the head with a frying pan and threw him overboard. At the time Tokman did not know about the captain’s infamous reputation.
Tokman said he “kept his head down,” but lost the job due to a staph infection on his knee. However, he considers the illness a blessing because his replacement was attacked with an explosive weapon for oversleeping by the captain and was seriously injured in the stomach.
He added after recovering and joining up with other ships he gradually, through trial and error, was able to bear the hardships of 20-hour days at sea and learned the ins and outs of fishing in Alaska.
Eventually, Tokman joined with a ship called “Silver Spring” in 2012 and persevered through the worst fishing season on record for the five months he worked onboard, he noted. During that time, he once worked a 30-hour day and was so hungry he ate raw can of spam.
One of the biggest mistakes he made in his fishing career was accidentally putting water in a ship’s fuel tank, which he was fired for, he added. He couldn’t find work after this mistake.
“Every single boat knew about it,” Tokman said.
Three days before the beginning of the fishing season, he met with Sigurd Jonny “Sig” Hansen, captain of the Northwestern, the ship on Deadliest Catch that inspired Tokman to move to Alaska to become a fisherman.
Tokman said he told Sig he put water in the fuel tank on the Silver Spring, who thought the mistake “wasn’t so bad” and reached out to another captain to help Tokman find work.
After working on that ship for the season, Tokman joined up with the Northwestern.
He added the novel “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho, about a young man who desires to see the pyramids in Egypt, was also an inspiration to him and encouraged the middle schoolers to continue reading throughout their life.
“If you want to be a doctor, you be a doctor,” Tokman said. “If you want to be a movie director, be a movie director. That’s your gift. You’re going to make a mistake. You’re going to fail at times. You’re going to get knocked out. The question is what are you going to do about it?”
He added he plans to leave Deadliest Catch after one more season and after that point would continue to work on writing a book about his experiences and also appear at speaking events.