Deadliest Sea (7 page)

Clearwater was an excellent post for new pilots; conditions were almost always good for flying, which made it easy to rack up a lot of hours. The air station had diverse missions: migrant operations, hurricane response, search and rescue, and, always, recreational boaters who found creative ways of getting into trouble. There were also a high number of false alarms. “Condo Commandos” was the term the pilots used to describe the overzealous Floridians who called in flare sightings from the balconies of their beachside second homes. What they’d usually seen was an odd firework. Still, the Coast Guard dutifully went out to search. There was a lot of flying, but there often wasn’t a lot of true action.

Alaska was a different story. There weren’t as many search and rescue cases. Sometimes a week would go by without an incident. More typically, the ops center at Kodiak would get three or four calls a week. But in Alaska there were few false alarms and few small, no-big-deal kind of cases. Almost every time McLaughlin flew, he was dealing with long distances, icy conditions, turbulence, and high seas. Down in Clearwater, ten-foot seas usually meant a tropical storm was coming in. In Kodiak, ten-foot seas were the norm. In less than two years in Kodiak, McLaughlin had already been on two major rescues that involved pulling multiple people from the ocean, as well as a handful of more typical medevacs and missing hunter calls.

After being woken up by Bonn, he changed into his thermal
underwear and orange dry suit. He’d gone to bed just a couple hours before, around 1:00
A.M
. He’d been awake when Shawn Tripp returned from his medevac, and he had heard Tripp and his copilot talk about the “snotty” weather farther south. Too bad for you, McLaughlin had thought to himself. Those guys were on duty until the next afternoon.

Now, things had changed.

It didn’t take McLaughlin long to pull together his gear. Coast Guard rescuers are encouraged to compile their own custom survival kits for the emergency conditions they may face in the region. McLaughlin carried a hunting knife, a compass, two space blankets, a lighter, waterproof matches, and a snapshot of Amy with their two kids.

Their daughter, Sagan, had been less than a year old when they made the trip from Florida to Kodiak. They spent the whole summer at it, crossing the continental United States and then making their way up the Alaska Highway in a twenty-three-foot RV they’d bought before leaving Florida. It was just them, the baby, and their two Australian Shepherd mixes, Sadie and Roxie.

McLaughlin had talked to his wife on Saturday evening. Their son, Cole, had been born just a month before, and McLaughlin’s mom had come from Massachusetts to help out. The women were planning an Easter dinner and getting Sagan’s basket ready for the morning. Amy told her husband about how there was an egg hunt, and pictures with the Easter Bunny, at the air station that day. There were lots of activities for families at the base, and lots of families with little kids. Amy had worked as a massage therapist in Florida, but she’d been a full-time mom since moving to Kodiak. She’d bring her daughter swimming at the air station’s indoor pool and to the small aquarium run by the National Marine Fisheries Service, where Sagan loved to stick
her tiny hands in the freezing touch tank and run her fingers over the prickly starfish and tissuelike sea anemones.

A couple of nights a week, McLaughlin would be on duty, sleeping at the base. It was the two-week deployments to the remote outposts that were hard, though. Each season was a new place: St. Paul in the winter, Cordova in the summer, Cold Bay in the fall. Amy didn’t worry too much. Brian’s father was a Massachusetts state trooper, and her mother-in-law had taught her that “You can’t worry every time they walk out the door. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you do.”

Amy called the deployments “man camp.” Eat, sleep, movies, video games. She didn’t feel so bad for her husband. He’d already been gone a week and half. By the end of the month he’d be home.

T
HE TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE WAS
–11°F with windchill as the men loaded into the SUVs and headed toward the hangar. It was squalling, with 30-knot winds, and the two vehicles backed off from each other when they reached several large snowdrifts that had blown over the road. One by one they gunned it, barreling through the heavy drifts and spinning and sliding the rest of the way down to the airport.

As the pilots got their gear in order, flight mechanic Rob DeBolt helped the line crew move the 14,500-pound helo from the hangar onto the icy tarmac. DeBolt was twenty-eight years old and had grown up in Walla Walla, Washington. He’d been enlisted in the Coast Guard for eight years. He hadn’t seen that many cases, though. Just a couple of easy medevacs. And lots of training. The mechanics secured the Jayhawk’s front wheel to a tow bar, and then the aircraft was tugged out of the shelter with a golf-cart-size vehicle known as a mule.

On the drive to the hangar, the pilots had told the rest of the crew what little they knew of the case. The boat was big, almost two hundred feet, and the ops center had said there were forty-seven people on board. They should bring a mass casualty raft, McLaughlin thought. It was 100 pounds and would take up quite a bit of room in the cabin. But it could hold twenty people. They’d also bring a dewatering pump, which they could drop to the deck of the fishing boat with their hoist cable. The pump was also heavy: 88 pounds, protected by a hard plastic case.

From nose to tail, the Sikorsky helicopter is sixty-five feet long. The cabin, though, isn’t any bigger than the inside of a typical SUV. The extra gear would take up considerable space. McLaughlin thought about his earlier rescues. The biggest one had been five people in the cabin, in addition to the aircrew. That had been damned crowded. They’d bring the extra equipment, though. If they needed to, they could ditch it in the ocean.

McLaughlin climbed into the helicopter and punched the
Alaska Ranger
’s coordinates into the aircraft’s computer. The ship was 197 miles south of St. Paul. There was a tailwind. Still, they’d load the aircraft with the maximum fuel allowance. When the crew got to the hangar, the helicopter was already gassed up with 5,000 pounds of jet fuel (736 gallons), the normal load for a take-off from St. Paul. The crew added another 1,200 pounds—the aircraft’s “max gas”—which would give them an extra hour of flying time. McLaughlin was in the left seat, Bonn in the right. The Jayhawk can be flown from either seat, though the flying pilot usually sits to the right. If needed, McLaughlin could jump in at any time to take control of the aircraft from Bonn.

It was just before 4:00
A.M
., with sunrise more than five hours away, when the crew slammed shut the helo’s doors. DeBolt and Starr-Hollow buckled themselves into jump seats in the back, and the helicopter lifted off into the black night.

T
he water was still, the surface smooth. The Coast Guard had a term for the conditions, FAC: flat-ass calm. When the ocean was this way, it felt more like floating in a lake than in the Bering Sea. A very cold lake, thought Operations Boss Jimmy Terrell. Slabs of broken ice were scattered across the glassy ocean. It was Saturday afternoon, and though the sun was close and bright on the horizon, the temperature hadn’t nudged above freezing all week. Terrell had been stationed on board the cutter
Munro
for a year and a half, and he’d never seen conditions quite like it before.

The 378-foot ship was patrolling near the Arctic ice edge, up near the Pribilof Islands. They’d turned off the engines. It was unheard-of to drift in the Bering, but the ice edge had pushed far south this season and the wind had been from the north for
weeks. Deep in the ship the crew could still feel the hum of the generators, but on deck everything was still. It was quiet, like floating near shore in a sheltered cove when the breeze is blowing out to sea.

Terrell was thirty, from El Paso, Texas. Ever since his graduation from the Coast Guard Academy seven years earlier he’d been following Craig Lloyd, a twenty-four-year Coastie and the
Munro
’s captain. They’d worked together on the
Mellon,
a 378-foot cutter out of Seattle. Then, both men transferred to Alameda, California, where Lloyd served as the chief of cutter forces for the entire West Coast. Terrell was his admin guy. The placements were just a coincidence, but the two joked that Terrell had become Captain Lloyd’s permanent lackey.

By August 2006, both had moved to the
Munro
. Under Captain Lloyd’s command, the ship had gained the reputation of being one of the best run boats in the fleet. It was a good thing, because the Bering Sea wasn’t exactly the most popular place to spend a couple years working on board a Coast Guard cutter. San Diego, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico—any of them sounded a whole lot better than winter in Alaska.

The
Munro
’s crew numbered 160. Under Captain Lloyd was Executive Officer Mike Gatlin (“XO” the crew called him), and Operations Boss Terrell (“Ops”), who was responsible for the ship’s operational strategy, and served as a mentor to the
Munro
’s dozen junior officers, most of them recent graduates of the Academy. The majority of the crew was enlisted men and women, many of them on their first deployment, some of them only eighteen or nineteen years old and just weeks out of boot camp in Cape May, New Jersey.

Like Terrell, the typical crewman was serving a two-year billet on board the
Munro
. The previous fall, the ship’s home port moved permanently north from Alameda, California, to
Kodiak. Most of the crew kept homes in town, where they’d stay for the months between deployments while the ship remained tied up at the base’s pier. The
Munro
had set sail for a two-month deployment less than two weeks before. On the day the ship left port, wives, husbands, boyfriends, and girlfriends clustered on the broad, wooden pier, waving good-bye as the huge white ship backed away from the dock and slowly vanished down the mouth of Womens Bay.

Reveille was at 6:45
A.M
. The days were tightly scheduled: meals, training, cleaning, more training. The
Munro
’s mission included law enforcement, which involved at-sea boardings of fishing vessels. The crew was constantly conducting drills: fighting mock fires, controlling hypothetical flooding, or rescuing plastic dummies flung over the side of the ship. The drills were timed, and the minutes that the victim had been overboard were piped over the shipwide intercom system. When the drill was complete, the crew were told if they passed or failed. More than seven minutes meant the dummy was near death when it was hauled back aboard—and that the drill would likely be repeated in coming days. When the weather was cooperating, the
Munro
’s crew assisted the helicopter team deployed aboard the ship with its own flight training regimen.

The cutter often felt like a floating technical college: On the bridge, young Coasties learned to drive the ship, to navigate, and to read the charts and constant streams of weather data that kept the boat safe in one of the world’s most violent oceans. Five decks down, in the engine room, others learned the ship’s mechanics: how to spot the earliest signs of an engine problem or oil leak, how to manage the ship’s tanks and optimize its fuel use. Meanwhile, other seamen learned to cook, clean, and dispose of the ship’s trash. Senior enlisted men apprenticed young officers on managing the ship’s supplies and finances. Everyone had a job to do.

The
Munro
’s primary mission, though, the duty that came before all others, was search and rescue.

Captain Lloyd had spent a total of six years in Alaska and the
Munro
was his third Alaskan ship. He knew the Bering and its traffic well, and he’d chosen the ship’s ice-edge position out of concern for the fishing fleet. If he kept his ship north of the fleet, he could sprint downwind in case of an emergency. He’d make better speed if he wasn’t fighting the seas. And the strategy had another advantage as well—pounding into the swells in cold conditions can cause sea spray to turn to ice on the bow, the rails, and any other exposed area of the ship. Fishermen call it “making ice,” and it can have catastrophic effects on a boat’s stability. Terrell had experienced it several times back on the
Mellon,
where a senior officer had taught new crewmen about the danger of ice by warning that a half-inch of buildup around a 378’s pilothouse has an effect equal to parking a Ford F-150 on the house’s roof. When more than a few centimeters of ice built up, crews were sent out on deck with wooden mallets and baseball bats to bang it off, which was a dangerous undertaking in itself. (On the
Mellon,
those deicing details were named after professional baseball teams.)

By late March, the crab season was ending. The ice edge was nudging so far down that the opilio boats had been pushed out of some of their favorite northern fishing grounds. There were a lot of ships farther south, though—trawlers, mostly. Many of them were factory boats with large crews of twenty, forty, even fifty men headed to fishing grounds hundreds of miles from the closest port. The Coasties called them draggers, and they weren’t always the most popular boats to deal with. The Coast Guard didn’t need a specific reason to board a fishing vessel at sea, but they often targeted boats that had avoided the Coast Guard’s voluntary inspections in Dutch Harbor or ended their dockside visit with holes in their safety checklists.

The
Munro
would radio the fishing vessel that they were coming, then send a half dozen crew in one of the cutter’s two orange, rubber Zodiacs, which were stored in cradles on either side of the ship. The boardings usually kept the boat away from fishing—and profit—for a couple hours. Not too many fishermen were thrilled to see a Coast Guard cutter on the horizon.

T
HE VAST MAJORITY OF FISHING BOATS
are classified as “uninspected vessels” and aren’t required to be classed and load-lined like cargo carriers and passenger ships. Nongovernmental classification societies determine construction standards for most large boats and periodically examine them to be sure they remain up to code. Among those standards is the load line test, which ensures a boat has a good watertight envelope. Go to any large marina, and you’ll notice physical load lines—painted stripes around a ship’s hull right above the waterline. A load line test establishes how low a ship can safely sit in the water, how heavily it can be loaded, and how the weight can be safety distributed—as well as that different compartments of a large boat are watertight from one another. Class standards, meanwhile, focus on the upkeep of a ship’s engines and electrical systems. With just a few exceptions, though, fishing vessels are immune from those standards.

Coast Guard officers in Dutch Harbor do regularly examine most of the boats in the Bering Sea fishing fleet. Unlike the inspections for cargo ships and passenger vessels, however, the fishing boat examinations are technically voluntary and don’t focus on the seaworthiness of the ships. What they do focus on is safety equipment. Maybe the Coast Guard can’t prevent a boat from sinking, but at least they can give the fishermen a decent chance at survival if it does.

At the request of vessel owners, once every two years Coast Guard fishing vessel examiners in Dutch Harbor board most boats in the fleet and fill out a safety equipment checklist. Ships are required to have life rafts sufficient to carry everyone on board, as well as a survival suit for each crew member. (The spongy coveralls are wide-legged and force the wearers to shuffle when they walk. They’re often called “Gumby” suits, after the stop-motion clay character who walks the same way.) During each biennial inspection, the bright red suits are pulled from their individual bags and spread on the deck of the ship to be examined for tears and wear and to see if the zippers are in working order. The Coasties check if the ship has emergency flares, fire extinguishers, and an emergency position-indicating radio beacon (EPIRB).

Every boat should have this device, which can cost more than $1,000 and which sends a satellite signal with the ship’s location and identification number when activated. Most are properly installed on an outside wall of the wheelhouse. Dead batteries are common, though. New Coast Guard fishing vessel examiners—especially those who are used to working with inspected vessels—are often surprised by how little attention some fishing boats pay to safety. Those who’ve been around for a while know things are a lot better than they used to be.

Before the early 1990s, even the most basic safety equipment was often absent on Alaskan fishing boats. Ships regularly went to sea with no life rafts, no survival suits—no way of letting anyone know when the worst was about to happen. Then, as today, many of the hired crew were novices, men who had little experience with the sea or with judging a boat’s seaworthiness, certainly with no firsthand experience of the particular hazards of Alaska, with its unforgiving cold and freezing seas.

Peter Barry was one of those young men. It was the summer
of 1985 and he was nineteen years old, looking for an adventure out West before returning to his junior year at Yale. Peter was tall, six foot three, and slender, with a thick brush of blond bangs that swooped across his forehead. He spent a number of weeks working on the “slime line” in one of the Kodiak canneries. When a strike erupted among the mostly Filipino workforce in midsummer, Peter didn’t want to cross the picket line. Instead, he started walking the docks and soon met Jerald Bouchard, captain of the
Western Sea,
a fifty-eight-foot wooden purse seiner that sailed with a five-man crew and had been fishing for salmon in northwestern waters since before the end of World War I.

Bouchard had just lost a deckhand. He offered Peter the job.

A few weeks later, another boat found Peter’s body. He was floating facedown in the water, three miles offshore on the backside of Kodiak Island. He was dressed only in jeans and an old-fashioned Mae West–style life preserver.

The
Western Sea,
it turned out, had no life raft and no survival suits. There was no Mayday call. The first clue anyone had of a problem on the seventy-year-old ship was the discovery of the body, which was identified through a letter found in the pants pocket. It was from Peter’s college girlfriend.

Despite an extensive search by the local Coast Guard, all that was found of the salmon boat was odd debris, a piece of the wheelhouse, and a life ring printed with the ship’s name.

Several weeks later, two more bodies were found. One of them was that of a twenty-five-year-old crewman from Washington State, also a summer worker. The other was that of Captain Jerald Bouchard, whose decomposed remains were spotted floating in the ocean and recovered by crew of the cutter
Munro,
which was on patrol near Kodiak at the time. A toxicology exam revealed that the captain had cocaine in his system when he died.

P
ETER
B
ARRY’S STORY WASN’T THAT DIFFERENT
from tragedies that were happening every year. It was a predictable formula: a captain with minimal regard for safety; an inexperienced crew member; and an old, undermaintained boat, often fishing in waters more dangerous than its size or condition warranted. Barry was one of 102 people killed on fishing boats in U.S. waters that year.

But Peter Barry was different from all those other fishermen. He was an Ivy League student. His father, Robert Barry, was a senior diplomat in the U.S. State Department. And his mother, Peggy, was a woman who would not allow her son’s death to be dismissed as just another accident—nor tolerate the idea that the tragedy was either bad luck or God’s will, as so many people would say about boats and men lost at sea.

The Barrys heard again and again that fishing was a dangerous business, that their son’s death was a travesty, but that there was nothing to be done. They were told a ship at sea is at the mercy of the elements, that these things happen all the time, and that everyone who gets on a boat up north should know what they’re getting into—that their fate is out of their hands. Fate? Peggy Barry thought. This boat had no life raft. It had no survival suits. This wasn’t fate. A man can’t survive in those temperatures for even an hour. The way she saw it, her son’s death was criminal.

The Barrys began a campaign to mobilize elected officials, safety professionals, and the families of other lost fishermen in support of federal legislation to improve safety in the fishing fleet. Safety advocates had pushed for similar legislation in the past with no success. The fishing industry lobby was just too powerful, contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to congressmen from Washington State and Alaska, most of whom remained opposed to increased regulation of commercial fishing.

The data were on the side of safety: In the mid-1980s, more than one hundred people were dying in commercial fishing accidents each year. Meanwhile, fishing vessels were the single major category of boat whose seaworthiness was not under government purview. It was clear that increased federal regulation had made a difference for other vessels. Small ferries and tourist boats, for example, had been unregulated until the 1950s, when a string of highly publicized disasters led Congress to act. Within a few years, the average annual fatality rate for that class of passenger boat had fallen from twenty-nine to five. Back then, boat owners had argued that the higher cost of meeting safety requirements would put them out of business (of course, fifty years later, we suffer no lack of duck boats and sunset cruises). Fishing vessel owners had long made the same financial argument. This time, though, the timing was right for safety advocates.