Deadliest Sea (8 page)

By the mid-1980s, the fishing industry was in an insurance crisis: High casualties had driven up insurance prices so much that half the ships in the Alaskan fleet could no longer afford their annual premiums. Fishing vessel owners wanted Congress to cap the amount injured fishermen (or family members of the deceased) could be awarded in a court case. The American Trial Lawyers Association was against the cap, which would limit their profits right along with awards for fishermen and their families. Both sides had lobbyists lined up to fight to the death.

The conflict created an opening for safety advocates like Peggy Barry, who helped to develop a safety bill that included an insurance cap (a sweetener to gain the support of boat owners). The trial lawyers shot that bill down. But Barry and her supporters didn’t give up. They developed another bill; this one focused exclusively on safety. The Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act passed on September 9, 1988.

Because of Peter Barry, every commercial fishing vessel in the United States today is required to carry safety equipment: life rafts, survival suits (for ships operating in cold water), signal flares, fire extinguishers, and a registered EPIRB. Emergency alarms and bilge pumps are mandatory on all ships, and crew are required by law to conduct regular safety drills. The results have been striking. Between 1990 and 2006, the annual fatality rate among commercial fishermen across the United States fell by 51 percent. Boats were still sinking—but men were surviving.

And yet the number of ships going down had barely changed at all. In the average year, 119 U.S. fishing boats are lost. That’s one boat gone every three days. Most years, those losses are responsible for significantly more than half of the total fishing deaths (falls overboard and equipment-related accidents account for most of the rest). It was a source of frustration for some in the Coast Guard—among them fishing vessel examiners Chris Woodley and Charlie Medlicott.

Both were longtime Coast Guard men. Woodley had spent most of his twenty-year career moving back and forth between Alaska and Washington State. The Coast Guard’s operating philosophy holds that diversity of geography and job experience is good, that moving constantly broadens a Coastie’s experience and makes that person more valuable at their next post. But Woodley had grown up in Alaska. He went to graduate school in Seattle and wrote his master’s thesis on impediments to safety improvements in the fishing industry. Even when he was based in Washington, Woodley spent a lot of time in Dutch Harbor, traveling north to help local inspectors like Charlie Medlicott at the start of the busiest fishing seasons. Most years, Woodley watched the Super Bowl with a bunch of fishermen at one of the town’s bars.

Woodley and Medlicott had seen so many boats go down. Sometimes the sinkings were mysteries. The ship seemed as
good as any other in the fleet; it had a competent captain, an experienced crew, a seemingly stable construction—and still it disappeared deep in the Bering. More often, boat losses fit a pattern. Especially with the crab boats. The damned things were so often overloaded by captains who didn’t read their own stability booklet (loading guidelines prepared by a marine architect) or maybe just didn’t care what it said. It was a recipe for disaster: a boat weighed down with crab, empty pots stacked high on deck—much higher than the architect had ever intended—and bad weather. The boat rolled, capsized, and sank.

By the late 1990s, Woodley and Medlicott had had enough.

Under U.S. Code, the Coast Guard has the authority to board any U.S.-flagged vessel, examine it, and—if the boat poses a threat to the environment, to commerce, or to human life—prevent that ship from leaving port. It was an authority that was hardly ever acted on in the Coast Guard. Mostly, the Coasties didn’t want to piss people off. The other services call them “Boy Scouts with Boats.” Most Army or Navy guys mean it as a jab, but many in the Coast Guard are Boy Scout types, and proud of it. These are men and women, after all, who at a young age decided they wanted nothing more than to become professional rescuers. They wanted stability and structure, the honor of the military, but maybe didn’t want to go to war. They wanted to be the good guys. Why would they go out of their way to board boats against the owners’ will when it wasn’t really part of their job? When the law on the issue was anything but clear?

How about to save some lives? Woodley thought.

In October 1999 he and Charlie Medlicott started their own experiment, boarding every Bering Sea crab boat before it left port. A shocking number were overloaded. And it was tough for captains to argue when the inspectors pointed out a discrepancy
between the number of pots on deck and the number authorized by the ship’s own stability booklet. The captains pulled pots off, left them stacked at the dock, and returned to port with their boats intact.

It didn’t take long to see a difference. By January 2005, there hadn’t been a Bering Sea crab boat lost in five years. Charlie Medlicott was the law, but he’d been around long enough to be respected, even liked, by a lot of local fishermen. He was in his mid-forties, with ruddy cheeks, wild eyes, and a bow-legged stride. Charlie knew the fleet, knew the boats’ histories and challenges. He wasn’t above talking out a problem over a beer in the bar.

Charlie was different from many of the Coasties Dutch Harbor fishermen encountered, often young officers who’d never been in Alaska before they got stuck with this assignment, and who’d never be back after their year-long hardship post was up (like St. Paul, the assignment to Dutch was one the Coasties reported to without their families, for only a year at a time). Charlie, on the other hand, loved Dutch Harbor. He was fascinated by the place from the first time he landed there—the weather, the characters, all the big boats. He was a boat guy, after all. He’d served for years in the Coast Guard, worked at the small boat station in Juneau, and on the
Liberty,
a 110-foot patrol boat. He got out after that. He fished for a couple of years and then worked for a company selling marine supplies and safety equipment, packing life rafts. In 1993 he got back in the Coast Guard as a civilian employee. Since then, he’d been bouncing back and forth between Anchorage and Dutch Harbor. He knew a lot of people there; he was part of the community.

Charlie wasn’t coy when he ran into Gary Edwards at the hotel bar at the Grand Aleutian one evening in January 2005.
“I’ll be down tomorrow morning to check your boat,” he told the captain of the crabber
Big Valley,
which was scheduled to leave Dutch Harbor to fish for opilio up near St. Paul Island. Gary was well-known around Dutch. He was probably the only guy in rural Alaska who regularly dressed in a tweed jacket and a beret and kept a Buddha shrine on his boat, complete with burning incense. In two previous instances, both men knew, the
Big Valley
had been overloaded when the Coasties came down to the dock, and Gary was forced to remove pots before leaving port.

“Sure. See you then,” Gary said to Charlie in the hotel.

But the next morning when Charlie got down to the pier, the
Big Valley
was gone. Not long after, he heard the news: The ship had sunk. Gary was dead, along with four of his five deckhands.

The lone survivor was a crewman who had been asleep in his bunk when the
Big Valley
rolled over on its side—and failed to roll back up. The man had his survival suit with him in his cabin and put it on before he went up on deck. He got into the water and found his way to the boat’s life raft. A few hours later, a Coast Guard HH-60 Jayhawk predeployed to St. Paul plucked him out of the ocean. Two bodies were recovered soon after: One fisherman had failed to get the hood of his survival suit over his head; the second never got his suit zipped up all the way. The other three men, including Gary, were never found. The survivor was the only one of the men on board who had taken a safety course.

It didn’t take long to count the pots back at the dock. The
Big Valley
’s stability booklet approved the ninety-two-foot ship to carry thirty-one 600-pound crab pots on deck, and 5,000 pounds of bait below. The crabber left Dutch with fifty-five pots, each of them closer to 700 pounds. It was carrying almost
11,000 pounds of bait. What an asshole, Charlie thought. What an idiot. Gary sure was a character, though. People would miss him. They’d say he ran into shit luck, and probably that God took him before his time.

T
HE MOON WAS ALMOST FULL
over the cutter
Munro
. On the lookout deck, two crewmen scanned the modest waves. They’d grown bigger in recent hours, but it was still relatively calm near the ice edge. It was 2:52
A.M
. when a petty officer standing night duty answered the phone in Combat, a cramped compartment in the belly of the ship lit mostly by the green glow of computer screens. It was District Command in Juneau: A large trawler with forty-seven people on board was taking on water approximately 150 miles south of the
Munro
’s position.

Less than a minute later, Operations Specialist Erin Lopez was shaken awake in her rack.

“OS1, we have a Mayday case!” the young seaman told her. “You need to come down.” Like Ops Boss Jimmy Terrell, Lopez was from Texas. The twenty-six-year-old was the only person on the
Munro
who had graduated from the Coast Guard’s Maritime Search and Rescue Planning School. Tonight she’d be the ship’s Air Direction Controller (ADC)—in charge of the radios and communications with the Coast Guard aircraft. In seconds, Lopez was out of her bunk. Without changing out of her pajamas, she slipped into her boat shoes and ran the one level down to Combat.

Lopez’s boss, Chief Luke Cutburth, called her a “SAR dog,” a moniker she accepted as a badge of honor. It was obvious to Cutburth that the younger OS ate, slept, and breathed search and rescue. Lopez loved the strategy of juggling data to form a rescue plan. She thrived under pressure. Cutburth could relate.

In his off time, he competed in pro mountain-bike competitions. Meanwhile, Lopez was training for a half-Ironman. She is tiny, a self-described “five foot nothin’,” with long brown hair that she pulled back in a firm ponytail. She’d secured Coast Guard sponsorship for her upcoming race and impressed some of the less coordinated crew members with her endurance on the
Munro
’s single treadmill. The gym was in the very bottom of the ship’s bow. It was easy enough to get vertigo just standing down there, but Lopez managed to balance on the jolting exercise machine for hours at a time. Back in Kodiak, she taught a weekly spinning class at the air station’s gym. She’d spent the previous evening helping to make Easter goody bags for the crew. The effort had been planned far in advance, with a shopping trip to Kodiak’s Wal-Mart before the
Munro
left port. She’d done it the year before, too, pacing every level of the ship early on that Sunday morning to leave the homemade candy packets next to each pillow. It was a small thing, but she knew it’d make people happy to wake up on Easter morning to that little surprise.

Lopez opened the door to the dark control room. Formally, the space was known as the Combat Information Center (CIC) but most of the crew preferred just “Combat.” The dark, cool cabin is the
Munro
’s war room, the brain of the ship. It is where they collect intel on nearby vessels to prepare for boardings, control the helicopter operations, and make decisions on any law enforcement or search and rescue mission. It was Operations Boss Jimmy Terrell’s home—and Erin Lopez’s.

The watchstander was on the radio with an officer from the sinking ship, the
Alaska Ranger
. Lopez took over. Could he tell anything about the rate of flooding? she asked.

It was in the rudder room. They couldn’t keep up with it—the water was rising too fast. They’d already given up on the pumps and the fishing vessel’s crew members were in their survival suits.

The voice on the other end of the transmission was clear and even, but Lopez knew that didn’t mean the situation was under control. She’d worked for four years as a search and rescue specialist on the East Coast, and had already spent close to two years on the
Munro
. Most often when you got a panicked voice screaming “Mayday, Mayday!” it was some rube who’d run out of gas. The more experienced captains—and they were mostly experienced guys up here in Alaska—would be more likely to calmly report “Uh, Coast Guard, we got a little problem here”—even when their boat was already halfway underwater.

By 2:55
A.M
., the
Munro
’s watchstanders had finished copying down the critical information and made the necessary calls. They called Jimmy Terrell, Captain Lloyd, and the engine room. Less than five minutes later, Lopez felt the
Munro
jolt and then bound forward at flank speed. The ship’s engineers had switched the
Munro
from its standard Fairbanks Morse diesel engines to two Pratt and Whitney jet engines, huge turbines similar to those that power a 707 airplane. The turbines would suck down two thousand gallons of fuel an hour, as opposed to the two hundred gallons burned by the standard diesels. On the diesels the ship maxed out at 17 knots. The turbines could deliver 27—officially. With the wind and waves blowing their way and the engineers pushing their equipment for everything it had, the ship was soon speeding south at 30 knots, close to 35 miles per hour. They were four and a half hours away from the
Alaska Ranger
. As planned, the sprint would all be downwind.

L
IEUTENANTS
TJ S
CHMITZ AND
G
REG
G
EDEMER
were asleep in their racks when the phone rang in their tiny windowless cabin. The two men shared a four-man berth on the 02 deck of the ship, one level below the bridge and just aft, or behind, the cap
tain’s private stateroom. They had a private toilet and shower, a luxury on a ship. Both Schmitz, thirty-nine, and Gedemer, thirty-three, were helicopter pilots, trained to fly the Coast Guard’s HH-65 Dolphin. (The first letter indicates the mission: in this case
H
is the military’s code for search and rescue. The second
H
stands for “helicopter.” The number represents that the Dolphin was the sixty-fifth helicopter design, or model, accepted by the U.S. military.) A smaller, lighter aircraft than the HH-60 Jayhawk, the Dolphin was slight enough to take off and land from the
Munro
’s basketball-court-size deck.