Deadliest Sea (14 page)

Ryan had seen a lot of little boats at the Kodiak docks. He hoped to get on one of the bigger ships, which he knew mostly had owners in Washington State. He thought a larger boat would be a smoother ride and a little nicer to work on. For the most part, Ryan got answering machines. But at the Fishing Company of Alaska, someone picked up. He was told they could put him on a boat if he could get himself to Seattle by Friday. It was Tuesday. Ryan bought the ticket and showed up at the FCA’s Seattle office a couple days later.

He filled out some paperwork and watched a video of pro
cessors working in the factory of an FCA boat and of a ship under way in rough seas. The company didn’t try to sugarcoat it. He’d probably get seasick. He’d definitely be sleep-deprived. He’d most likely dream about fish, about kicking fish and slicing the heads off fish and wading day after day after day in a river of thousands of dead or almost-dead fish. If you don’t think you can handle it, leave now, the recruiter told Ryan and the other hopefuls in the conference room. It’s not too late to back out. The job’s not for everybody. No one will think less of you if you don’t want to do it.

There was no chance in hell Ryan was backing out. When the orientation was over, he walked to a nearby health clinic and pissed in a cup. A few hours later, he got a phone call: Be at the Seattle airport at 6:30 the next morning. The ticket would be waiting.

The job sucked, and so did the pay: fifty bucks a day to start. But turnover was high. A bunch of guys quit after his first trip on the
Alaska Ranger
. Ryan didn’t. He got promoted to tally-man, one of three men on board responsible for keeping track of the number of cases of fish loaded into the freezer during each six-hour shift. The new job came with a $30 a day raise, plus an offload bonus of five cents per case. Ryan had only been working for the company for two weeks.

Back in the fish-processing plants, Ryan had heard from the older guys that if you’re still young, you’re better off working on the ships, where there’s more money to be made—provided you’re strong enough to do the work. Ryan was making more money. But the work was unpleasant and dangerous. It wasn’t uncommon for men to lose fingers. The catch was sometimes hauled up covered with muck and he’d seen fish accidentally coated with hydraulic oil processed and frozen along with the rest. The job made him never want to eat fish again.

He always felt ready to go home. In between stints in Alaska
he went back to Spokane, where he’d moved from Great Falls with his girlfriend, Kami, soon after he got that first cannery job. He’d be so tired, so sick of fish. The smell would have coated all his clothes and penetrated his skin. After a few months in Alaska, his hands were swollen and chapped from being in salt water all day. But once Ryan was back at home, he’d think about the boat and his friends from the
Ranger
. Sometimes they talked on the phone, retelling funny stories from the fishing season. They mostly remembered the good stuff. The practical jokes, the nights in the bar. It was never, “Hey, remember when your back hurt so bad you couldn’t get your boots on?”

The first couple of times, Ryan felt like going back up to Alaska when the time came around. After a couple months at home, he and Kami often had trouble getting along. Even she said it was better for their relationship when they spent time apart. He liked intense jobs. All the free time made him restless. Sometimes he drank too much and got into fights. But when Ryan got back to Spokane in late 2007 he felt like things were going to be different. He had a lead on another job, cleaning restaurant exhaust hoods again, this time in Washington State. He said no when the FCA called in December, asking him if he’d come back for the winter A season. He thought he was done with Alaska and with fishing. But on January 2, there was another call with an offer of more money. The FCA didn’t have many experienced guys coming back to the
Ranger
. They said they needed him. Ryan’s other job still wasn’t a done deal. A few days later, he was on the plane. One more three-month contract in Alaska, Ryan figured. Then he’d call it good.

L
IKE MOST NEW PROCESSORS
, R
YAN DIDN’T
ask questions about the company’s safety record. His priority was getting a job—
and a paycheck. In fact, his boat would be the second ship lost by the Fishing Company of Alaska.

Ten years earlier, on February, 11, 1998, a 198-foot long-liner named the
Alaska 1
sank after colliding with a freighter thirty miles north of Dutch Harbor. It wasn’t a fair fight. The container ship, the Korean-operated, Panamanian-flagged
Hanjin Barcelona,
was almost five times the length of the
Alaska 1.
After the collision, against the wishes of local authorities, the foreign vessel continued on its planned route toward Taiwan. If any repairs were necessary, the ship’s crew evidently felt confident that they could cross a few thousand miles of Pacific Ocean before tending to them.

No one was seriously injured in the incident. Most of the
Alaska 1
’s crew of thirty-three were sleeping when the collision occurred, at close to 11:00
P.M
. All of them abandoned ship into two life rafts and were quickly rescued by a Good Samaritan vessel. The successful evacuation was seen as a validation of the 1988 law that required safety gear and training on commercial fishing boats, though there were a couple of serious fumbles. One large crew member couldn’t fit into the only remaining survival suit and ended up abandoning ship without a suit. And once the rafts were in the water, the crew couldn’t find the cutters supplied to sever the painter lines and free the rafts from the boat. Luckily, there was enough time for a crew member still on board to run down to the ship’s store and grab a couple of knives to cut the lines.

The
Alaska 1
was at fault in the crash. When the courses of two vessels cross each other and there is a risk of collision, the ship that has the other on its port side has the right of way. In this case, that ship was the
Hanjin Barcelona
. However, the Coast Guard investigation concluded more was at play than just a confused traffic rule. A preliminary drug test administered
soon after the sinking indicated that the
Alaska 1
’s on-duty officer, First Mate Randy McFarland, had cocaine in his system at the time of the crash. He’d also had just eight total hours of fragmented sleep in the previous thirty-six to forty-eight hours. Due to a problem with the size of McFarland’s urine sample, the Coast Guard was ultimately unable to include the drug test results in evidence. Several months later, though, McFarland was arrested in Seward, Alaska, on charges of selling cocaine. (He served time in jail, and now works for a sports fishing company that caters to tourists on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula and runs a local lodge named the Fish Whisperer.)

The
Alaska 1,
meanwhile, was never salvaged from the ocean floor. It took less than an hour for the vessel to disappear below the surface and sink to the bottom, in eighteen hundred feet of water.

Just a few years before, the FCA had suffered still another major casualty—this one far more tragic. On May 27, 1995, the trawler
Alaska Spirit
was moored near a dock in Seward when a fire that began in a stateroom burned much of the interior of the boat and killed the ship’s captain.

A National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation ultimately determined that the fire was most likely started by an electric rice cooker in a room normally inhabited by the boat’s assistant fish master. The ship had no sprinkler system and no smoke detectors. Its fire hoses were incompatible with available hydrants, and the crew had little firefighting training.

The blaze began about 2:00
A.M
. and wasn’t entirely extinguished until 11:00 the next morning. An autopsy determined that the captain, who was overcome by the fire while asleep in his stateroom, was intoxicated at the time of the incident. The damage to the ship was estimated at $3 million.

The NTSB concluded that the lack of fire-safety standards for
commercial fishing vessels contributed to the damage and loss of life on the
Spirit
. The incident prompted the board to issue a series of recommendations on improving fire safety in the fishing fleet. None of them, however, ever resulted in a change of law.

R
YAN’S MIND WAS RACING
. He was pretty sure he’d heard the ship’s officers talking to the
Warrior
. The other FCA boat would be on its way, but would they have relayed a message to the Coast Guard? If they did, the Coasties would be coming all the way from Kodiak, Ryan thought. That was so far, hundreds of miles away. It was still dark. Would it be easier to spot him at night, or during the day? he wondered. Maybe at night. His strobe light was still flashing. He thought about how he’d look from the sky. Would they see the suit, the light? Jesus Christ, how long could he stay like this?

The waves were huge: twenty-footers, Ryan guessed. From the deck of the ship, seas this size wouldn’t be any sort of spectacle. It was a different story when you were submerged in the goddamn things. He couldn’t keep the freezing spray out of his nose and eyes, the only parts of his body that weren’t protected by the suit. What if no one was coming?

Ryan thought about unzipping his suit. He could lie there and freeze to death, or he could make it quick. Just get it over with.

The water was 35°F and the air temperature about 15°F. Even in water as warm as 75°F, the summertime temperature in Hawaii, immersion hypothermia is common after prolonged exposure. Body heat transfer is one hundred times greater in water than in air of the same temperature, according to
Wilderness Medicine,
the academic tome of survival in extreme conditions. Ocean temperature has to reach the low nineties before a naked person in the water has neutral heat loss. In cold seas, with little
protective clothing, it takes just a couple of minutes for the first stages of hypothermia to set in.

When a person first hits frigid water, his or her body has a “cold-shock” response. The colder the water and the more sudden the exposure, the more extreme the response. Survival experts advise that, if possible, it is better to enter cold water gradually, rather than in a sudden, full-body plunge. The rapid cooling of skin that comes with sudden immersion can cause a gasp reflex, which itself can cause drowning, especially in rough seas. It also causes a tendency to hyperventilate. Normally, that hyperventilation will begin to diminish within seconds, though extreme emotional stress or panic can cause it to increase instead. Uncontrolled hyperventilation can lead to muscle weakness, numbness, and even fainting—all of which can lead to drowning. Some cold-water immersion victims don’t survive the first two minutes.

Survival school instructors often teach the 1-10-1 rule of cold water immersion. You have one minute after you’re submerged to gain control of your breathing: That’s the first “1.” Don’t immediately start struggling to get out or swim to safety. Instead, focus only on your breathing for those first sixty seconds. Gain control by taking slow, deep, conscious breaths. Think to yourself: I won’t panic.

Now you have approximately ten minutes before the cooling of your extremities will seriously impact mobility, especially in the hands, where blood circulation is negligible. Finger stiffness, loss of coordination, and compromised motor control will soon make it difficult, if not impossible, to carry out survival efforts, such as grasping a rescue line, according to Alan Steinman, M.D., an expert in cold-water survival and a retired Coast Guard Admiral. Do you have any survival tools (whistle, flares, strobe lights) that will help rescuers find you in the water? Make sure they’re operating and accessible now.

Survival instructors advise using these ten minutes to take stock of your situation and attempt to improve it. Hoods should be raised and drawstrings tightened, which will increase insulation and reduce water circulation. Do everything you can to keep your head out of the water. Is there a life raft or other form of flotation close by? If so, expend the strength to reach it now. Being inside a life raft is always better than being exposed in the open ocean. Absent a raft, any sort of flotation that can be used to prop at least some of your body out of the water—buoys, life rings, coolers, or other debris—should be used. It may not seem like it will make a difference, but even a small amount of flotation is better than nothing. The more of your body is out of the water, the better your chances for survival.

If no flotation is available, survival experts recommend a position known as HELP (for heat escape lessening position). Assume a fetal position in the water, with your arms pulled up against your chest and your legs raised up, and pressed together. Heat loss is highest from the groin, the lower torso, and the neck—areas of the body with a relatively thin layer of soft tissue and a relatively high rate of blood flow. If possible, huddling together with other survivors is also a good survival strategy. It will help retain heat and often improves morale.

Almost all cold-water immersion victims who do not have survival suits lose consciousness within an hour. This is the final “1” of the “1-10-1.” That’s loss of consciousness—not death. Even if you aren’t rescued within an hour, you can increase your chances of survival by trying to position your head so that it doesn’t fall underwater when you pass out.

There are many documented cases of victims being revived even after losing all vital signs, a phenomenon that’s more common in cold water than warm (and more common among children than adults). A cold-water near-drowning victim may
appear dead: unconscious, with bluish-gray skin, dilated pupils, no pulse, and no heartbeat. Still, according to Steinman and other cold-water survival experts, rescuers should attempt CPR. It is possible for some cold-water victims to be revived, without brain damage, even an hour after they’ve lost consciousness.