Deadliest Sea (9 page)

Schmitz and Gedemer were part of Kodiak’s ALPAT shop, short for Alaska Patrol, and that’s why they were stationed on the island. The larger Jayhawk helicopter was always the first aircraft to respond to search and rescue calls directly from Kodiak—it was bigger, tougher, and had a much greater range. In Alaska, range is probably the most important attribute of an effective search and rescue vehicle. Of course, if for some reason every 60 aircraft were already in use, a 65 team could launch on a call from Kodiak. For the most part, though, the 65 crews were in Kodiak to train and prepare for deployment on Coast Guard ships patrolling the North Pacific.

Every winter fishing season, two ALPAT pilots, along with a team of several ALPAT flight mechanics and one ALPAT rescue swimmer, were stationed on board Coast Guard cutters during their Bering Sea patrols. Few men looked forward to the winter assignment, though the
Munro
was better than most ships. Schmitz had told the scheduler that he’d rather spend sixty days on the
Munro
than forty-five on another boat. He got his wish. This deployment would be his last during his time in Alaska. He’d be partnered with Gedemer, who had arrived in the state just a few months before.

Schmitz had served for a decade as an Army pilot before join
ing the Coast Guard. He’d been stationed in Bosnia in the late 1990s while his wife and baby daughter were back in the States. When he got home, Schmitz put in an application with the Coast Guard. It wasn’t an unusual move. More than a quarter of all Coast Guard aviators are “prior service,” meaning they have previously served in the Army, Navy, or Air Force. The months at sea weren’t easy on Schmitz’s wife and kids, who were left alone in a small, cold Alaskan town. Still, it could have been much harder. It could have been eighteen months in Iraq.

S
CHMITZ HAD BEEN UP LATE
the night before. He was waiting for word that Shawn Tripp’s Jayhawk crew was safely back in St. Paul. If the larger helicopter got into trouble between St. Paul and Dutch Harbor, the
Munro
’s 65 Dolphin would be the rescue aircraft.

Meanwhile, Gedemer had gone to bed early. Saturday was “morale night” on the
Munro,
which meant pizza for dinner, often creatively prepared by a group of volunteers from the crew. Then there’d often be some all-crew activity scheduled: a casino night or bingo game. There was no real gambling allowed on the ship—and no alcohol permitted on board. They’d have prizes, though. Tonight, the incentive was a good one: a free dinner out in Dutch Harbor.

Erin Lopez was the cochair of the morale committee. The evening’s activity, though, wasn’t her idea. It came directly from Captain Lloyd. He was a big supporter of the morale efforts and made some himself. The captain was known to throw on a cook’s white shirt on Sunday mornings, stand behind the griddle in the galley, and take custom-omelet orders from the crew. After dinner on Saturday, the pipe came down that the crew should report to the mess deck for “The Number-10 Can Challenge.”
The rules were simple. Three-person teams would volunteer to get a paint-bucket-size can of food from the ship’s galley—with the label removed. When the captain said “go,” the team would open the can and start eating. The first team with an empty can would win the contest.

One of the ALPAT mechanics, Logan Cole, wanted to organize a team. TJ Schmitz bowed out: No way was he doing it. He’d watch. Cole tried to convince another ALPAT flight mechanic, Al Musgrave. “No, no,” Musgrave said. He didn’t want to be the one to let the team down if they got something nasty. But pilot Greg Gedemer was game, as was Abram (Abe) Heller, the ALPAT crew’s twenty-three-year-old rescue swimmer. The trio pried off the oversized can top to face a vat of cold baked beans. Gedemer must have wolfed down 3 pounds. It looked a lot better than what some of the other groups ended up with: pickles, potatoes, apple-pie filling, and—worst of all, Gedemer thought—beets. That team had to drink the juice as well. The ALPAT crew came in third out of eight teams.

S
IX HOURS AFTER THE CONTEST
, Gedemer was woken up by the ship’s phone. He rolled out of his rack and picked up. It was Ops Boss Terrell. Gedemer handed the receiver to Schmitz, who as the more senior pilot was the aircraft commander on this patrol. Soon after, he felt the ship jolt forward and start tearing south through the swells with a high-pitched whistle. They were up on “the birds,” the ship’s 18,000-horsepower turbine engines.

Schmitz was the first one out the door and down to Combat to meet Terrell. Gedemer followed a few minutes later. “Do you know something I don’t?” Schmitz asked the younger pilot
when he showed up in the control center. Gedemer was already dressed out in his orange dry suit.

Schmitz stayed in Combat while Gedemer went to wake up the flight mechanics, who slept in a ten-man berth three flights down from the pilots’ cabin. Then he made his way aft toward the hangar. The place was a mess. The ALPAT shop had their own small lounge just forward of the flight deck: It served as their workspace, their storage locker, and their clubhouse. They’d been watching DVDs of the television show
Heroes
in there the night before. The door of the small ALPAT fridge had busted open and food was everywhere. Cereal had spilled all over the floor. Gedemer had spent his first couple years out of boot camp on Coast Guard ships. You always think you’re secured for sea, he remembered, until the first big storm. In this case, it was a man-made storm: the ship on turbines in rough seas. He started straightening things up, securing their snacks and extra gear.

Around the corner in the hangar, the four mechanics were beginning to prep the aircraft. Greg Beck was the head guy, then there was Logan Cole, Al Musgrave, and a newer mech who wasn’t Alaska-qualified yet. He’d help out in the hangar, but he wouldn’t be flying on any real cases on this patrol. The mechanics had come up with their own rotation schedule. One man was “on” until he flew, either in training or on a case. Then it was the next man’s turn. They were free to arrange the system for themselves, and this seemed the fairest, especially in the Bering Sea, where they might easily go a whole week when the conditions were outside the limits for training flights.

Al Musgrave was happy with the system. In his experience, Coast Guard people were pretty good about coming up with a plan that made sense and was fair. Musgrave was from Barbour
ville, Kentucky. It wasn’t the type of place where kids thought about joining the Coast Guard or where many people had even heard much about the service. Musgrave graduated from high school in 1997 and enrolled in the engineering program at the University of Louisville, three hours from his hometown. By the end of his freshman year, he felt directionless. He was partying more than studying. He paid a visit to the city’s Coast Guard recruiting office. If the country had been at war, he probably would have dropped out of school and joined the Army or the Marines. But it was the late 1990s, and things were pretty quiet. The Coast Guard sounded good. Wartime, peacetime, it didn’t matter: Coasties did their jobs every day. Six months later, Musgrave was at boot camp in Cape May.

His first assignment was a year-long detail on the
Midgett,
a 378-foot cutter based in Seattle. He timed it right: The ship was slated for the next over-the-horizon deployment, to the Persian Gulf to enforce the U.S. trade embargoes against Iraq. It was a pretty great job for a kid two years out of high school. The ship made port calls across the Middle East and Southeast Asia; the seamen were able to walk around foreign cities and try interesting foods. Musgrave hung around with the ship’s ALPAT crew. By the time he got back to Seattle, he’d decided he wanted to be a helicopter flight mechanic.

Musgrave went to A School—the several-month-long training program that qualifies a new Coastie for a specific job—and afterward found himself stationed in North Bend, Oregon. There wasn’t much action there. The small boat stations handled most of the rescues on the rugged Oregon coast. Musgrave’s aircraft would often just be hovering above, taking video for the Coast Guard’s public relations department. A couple times he helped deliver a pump to a boat taking on water. Once he rescued a surfer stranded on a rock after the ocean got a little too
big for him. He’d never really been involved in anything major, though.

By the time Musgrave got his orders north to Kodiak in 2004, he was married with a little girl. The family moved into a house on base and joined the Mormon church in town. Musgrave was a woodworker and there was a shop he could use for bigger projects. He built bedroom furniture for his oldest daughter, and two more children who were born after he and his wife moved to Alaska.

Musgrave missed his family during his months at sea. On the ships, the ALPAT crew spent quite a few hours sitting around, waiting for something to happen. They watched a lot of movies. Most days, Musgrave spent an hour or two working out with a 200-pound sand bag in the hangar. He would sometimes go down and help wash dishes in the galley. You didn’t need a special qualification to scrub pots, and it helped to pass the time.

B
ACK IN
C
OMBAT
, S
CHMITZ AND
G
EDEMER
had been listening in on the radio communications between the 60 Jayhawk helicopter, already airborne from St. Paul Island, and the officers on board the
Alaska Ranger
. Captain Lloyd was listening in, too, along with Terrell, Cutburth, and Lopez. The captain towered over the rest of them. He was six foot six, thin and fit, with gray hair that made him look distinguished and slightly older than his forty-three years. Craig Lloyd was a lifetime Coastie. Both of his parents had served in the Coast Guard. His wife was in the service, and so was his brother. He’d seen a lot: He had played a key organizational role during Hurricane Katrina back in 2005, and had led his share of cold-water search and rescue cases. He could already tell that tonight would be one he—and his 160-person crew—wouldn’t soon forget.

Soon after 5:00
A.M
., the
Munro
’s crew held a preflight brief. They reviewed the weather conditions, the information they had about the sinking ship, the geographic plan, and the objectives of the mission. Then, led by Erin Lopez, the crew drew up a GAR model. The acronym stood for both General Analysis of Risk and Green, Amber, Red, and it was an exercise the ship’s crew completed before beginning any operational mission. Common sense in a bucket, Captain Lloyd called it. There were six categories to evaluate: planning, supervision, equipment, mission complexity, crew fatigue, and crew selection. The staff would assign each a number between one and ten. The higher the total number, the higher the risk: twenty-three and lower is considered green, or low-risk; forty-four and higher is considered red, or high-risk, and requires approval from District Command to pursue.

Lopez asked Schmitz to assess event complexity. The pilot thought about the distances involved, the long night (sunrise wasn’t until 9:07
A.M
.) and the sea state. They’d be dealing with high winds, snow, and—potentially, it sounded like—multiple victims in the water. Schmitz rated event complexity a ten. The GAR model revealed what was already obvious to Schmitz, Lopez, and just about everyone else in the room: They were about to take on a very high-risk, very high-reward mission.

The captain turned to Schmitz. Where did he feel comfortable launching?

“Eighty miles from the sinking site,” the pilot said. It was farther than anything they would ever do in training, even in perfect weather. But he felt it was reasonable. The ship would be closing the distance, which meant the return trip should be shorter.

T
HREE DECKS UP FROM
C
OMBAT
, Musgrave and the other flight mechs were busy preparing the helicopter. When not in use, the
forty-five-foot Dolphin was stored inside the U-shaped hangar at the rear of the ship. To fit inside the garagelike structure, the helicopter’s rotor blades were folded in while the helo was still out on the flight deck, each along a hinge in the center of the blade. The bird was pulled back and forth from deck to hangar by a team of specially trained seamen known as the tie-down crew. Heavy canvas straps were secured to each corner of the aircraft and then cinched down inside the hangar or to holds on deck. No matter how rough the seas, the helicopter should be secure.

At the word from Combat, the tie-downs began to move the helo out onto the pitching deck. As the four-man team traversed the helo in the darkness, they could see the tips of the waves, whitecaps rushing by them at speeds they’d rarely—if ever—seen. Freezing spray pelted their backs and the backs of their heads, the cold water working its way toward any millimeter of exposed skin.

Slowly they tugged the 6,500-pound aircraft to the center of the platform, directly over a honeycombed metal platform known as the talon grid. A hydraulic arm, the talon, was lowered from the belly of the helo and latched on to the grid. The aircraft was safe.

The crew went back inside the hangar.

Now they’d wait.

E
van Holmes had his survival suit on and was ready to go. As a member of the emergency squad, the twenty-five-year-old factory manager was responsible for one of the life rafts and for helping the crew to abandon ship in an emergency. Of course, he’d never launched a raft for real, never done anything more than stand around the sealed canister and talk about what they would do in an abandon ship situation.

Together with a few other guys, Evan grabbed the ship’s Jacob’s Ladders, strong yet flexible ladders made of line and wooden dowels. They secured the ladders to the rail—one near each life raft—and hung them down over the side toward the churning seas. Once the rafts were launched, they’d climb down the ladders to reach them. But for right now, there was nothing to do but wait.

Eric Haynes was inside the wheelhouse. The glass on the wheelhouse windows was iced up, but the windows had a couple of small circles of thicker glass that remained clear even in the worst weather. Through one of the circles Eric could see Marco Carrillo smiling and waving to the people inside. Eric looked at the blurry line of red figures out on the deck. If they were really getting off the boat, he thought, they’d better not be hypothermic before that happened.

“Pete,” he said to the captain, “how about if we do a rotation? Bring a few guys in at a time, just to warm them up. I’ll tell them to keep quiet.” Pete agreed, bring them in, but tell them to keep it down. No smoking. And tell the guys to turn their lights off, the captain added. Each of the ship’s survival suits was equipped with a small strobe light. Many of the men had turned theirs on as soon as they got into the suits.

“They need to conserve the batteries,” the captain said to Eric. “Tell them to turn those lights off!”

T
HE INDIVIDUAL STROBES WERE PART
of a new Coast Guard program called the Alternative Compliance Safety Agreement (ACSA), designed specifically for the Bering Sea head-and-gut fleet. Like the dockside exams that had reduced casualties in the crab fleet since the late 1990s, ACSA had been designed to address safety problems within a very specific group of boats. And like the crab initiative, the ACSA program had been spear-headed by Coast Guard Commander Chris Woodley, with civilian Coastie Charlie Medlicott as his wingman.

There were just over sixty head-and-gut boats sailing out of Dutch Harbor. Like the FCA boats, most of them were owned by companies headquartered in Seattle (85 percent of all fish harvested in Alaska is caught by boats with owners in Wash
ington State). The head-and-gut ships operated with the same unregulated status as little mom-and-pop catcher boats—even though the H&G fleet had proven in recent years to be much more hazardous.

Like with the crab boats, there were some obvious reasons why: The H&G vessels were big, most of them between 100 and 250 feet. All had treacherous processing equipment on board and enormous freezers that were cooled with dangerous chemicals like ammonia and Freon. On most boats, the frozen fish was packed into waxed cardboard cartons, packaging that had proven in the past to be a fire hazard.

The head-and-gut boats sailed with large crews of up to fifty people. Most of those men (and, with rare exceptions, they were all men) were working in the factory, not as full-time deckhands. It was common for the H&G boats to hire workers who were new to fishing and had little to no experience with boats or cold-weather hazards. The ships tended to sail with multicultural crews; cultural and language differences could cause problems during emergencies when quick, precise communication was critical. The ships regularly spent long periods at sea, weeks or even a month or more at a time. It followed that they were often far from port, far from shore—far from rescue should something go wrong. The combined hazards concerned some people in the Coast Guard, especially given recent casualties.

The ninety-two-foot H&G trawler
Arctic Rose
was home-ported in Seattle, and sailed out of Dutch Harbor. At 3:35
A.M
. on April 2, 2001, the Coast Guard received a hit from the ship’s EPIRB, transmitted from a spot several hundred miles northwest of St. Paul Island. The Coasties tried to hail her, with no response. A Hercules C-130 from Air Station Kodiak was launched around 4:00
A.M
. and arrived at the EPIRB’s coordinates at 8:40
A.M
. The search plane identified an oil sheen and
a large debris field. Another ship owned by the same company arrived around the same time and spotted a single person in the water, a man in a bright red immersion suit. A crew member jumped into the ocean to recover the man, and the body was hauled up on deck. The crew recognized him as the
Arctic Rose
’s captain, David Rundall. The fishermen attempted CPR on Rundall but with no success. The captain’s survival suit was flooded with seawater.

Seven more suits were later found amid the debris—all empty. The
Arctic Rose
’s life raft was spotted floating upright and vacant. Rundall’s body was the only one to be recovered. The boat wasn’t fishing at the time of the disaster; most likely, the majority of the other fourteen men on board were asleep when the tragedy occurred. With fifteen fatalities, the
Arctic Rose
sinking was the deadliest single fishing vessel casualty in the United States in fifty years. The Coast Guard investigation into the sinking later found that of the fifteen men lost, nine were new processors who had been in the job for less than a year. Three of the dead were Mexican nationals working under assumed names.

Whatever happened to the
Arctic Rose
happened fast. There was no Mayday call. The debris provided few clues as to what had caused the tragedy, though a later examination of the sunken ship by an unmanned ROV (remotely operated vehicle) revealed that the aft weather-tight door that led from the stern deck to the processing space had been left open at the time of the sinking. What was known was that the tiny
Arctic Rose
had a reputation as one of the most poorly maintained boats in the H&G fleet (and the Coast Guard investigation found that the ship’s owners had ignored many of the stability requirements mandated by its marine architects). Many in Dutch weren’t surprised by her sinking. More than a few people wondered why someone in the Coast Guard hadn’t stopped that “piss pot” from leaving port.

A year and a half later, there was another major casualty in the head-and-gut fleet, on the 180-foot freezer long-liner
Galaxy,
which had been built as a Navy minelayer in 1942 and converted to a fish-processing vessel in 1997. It started with a fire in the engine room, and a backdraft explosion that blew several crew overboard. While a rescue effort for those men was under way, a massive fireball from the engine room vents set the wheelhouse on fire and separated most of the rest of the twenty-six-person crew from their survival suits. Heroically, the captain remained in the burning wheelhouse long enough to get out a Mayday call and to help launch a life raft from the ship’s top deck. He suffered severe burns in the process, but he lived—as did all but three of the other people on board.

There was some significant luck involved: Fifteen of the crew members managed to jump into the ship’s just barely launched raft and were rescued by a Good Samaritan vessel about an hour and a half later. Three more people were rescued directly from the water by Good Sams, also within a couple hours of the sinking. Finally, Coast Guard rescuers were nearby, predeployed in Cold Bay, at the western tip of the Alaskan Peninsula, for the fall red king crab season. Five
Galaxy
crew members were successfully airlifted from the burning ship by a Jayhawk helicopter in the final hour before the sixty-year-old boat disappeared beneath the waves. Several of them had to leap into the water first to escape potentially toxic smoke and ongoing explosions.

It took several years for the Coast Guard to release their final reports on the sinking of the two ships. When they did, there was pressure to improve safety in the rest of the head-and-gut fleet. Many people in the Coast Guard thought the service didn’t have the power to do much without new federal legislation; these were uninspected boats, after all.

Chris Woodley saw things differently. He found a loophole in
the law, one that would allow the Coast Guard to improve safety in the H&G fleet, without waiting for Congress to act.

W
OODLEY HAD BEEN THE LEAD INVESTIGATOR
into the
Galaxy
sinking and was also involved in the
Arctic Rose
proceedings. Both investigations had found that the lost ships were doing more processing than they were regulated to do. Under U.S. Code, the H&G fleet had very specific products they were permitted to make. They were allowed to cut the head off a fish, but not the tail. They were allowed to remove a fish’s entrails, but not to package and sell what were referred to as ancillary products, like fish eggs or roe. There was little logic to the regulations. There was no added danger in gathering the eggs from the refuse. Leaving them there was just money out the shit chute, as more than one fisherman had pointed out. And did cutting the tail off a fish rather than the head somehow justify more government regulation? Nope, it really didn’t make much sense. Coasties and fishermen were in agreement about that.

But the law could be used to make everyone safer nonetheless, Woodley realized.

He started digging into the records. National Marine Fisheries Service data clearly showed that just about all the sixty-some-odd vessels in the Dutch Harbor head-and-gut fleet were selling products that only processing boats were technically allowed to make. In order to keep making those products—legally—they needed to be categorized as processing vessels, which meant they needed to be classed and load-lined. They were breaking the law, though it was a law no one had bothered to enforce.

At least not yet. Woodley saw the Coast Guard’s in.

The vessel owners were invited to a series of meetings, and the Coast Guard explained their plan. The new program was volun
tary, the owners were told. The choice was either stop making ancillary products and become a true head-and-gut-only vessel (what they’d said they were all along), or join the Alternative Compliance program. With the Coast Guard’s help, their ships would get safer. And, with the Coast Guard’s ACSA certification, they’d legally be allowed to keep making all their products without worrying about a future crackdown on enforcement.

It was a compromise—a pragmatic approach to a sticky problem. The Coasties understood that many of the H&G ships simply could not become classed and load-lined. Most of the independent societies that performed those tests would not accept boats over a certain age that had not been previously certified. Instead, the Coast Guard would institute its own safety program. The philosophy was separate but equal, or as close to equal as possible.

For the first time, Coast Guard fishing vessel examiners would be boarding the H&G boats at dry dock, examining their hulls and their watertight doors, and truly looking at their structural integrity. There’d be new, additional standards for training and for safety equipment—including the strobe lights on the survival suits.

Almost all the boat owners decided to join the program. Some needed to keep making the ancillary products to stay in the black, but, in Woodley’s view, many of the owners were honestly attracted to a program that would make their ships safer.

Ship owners learned of the program by late 2005. They had to opt in or out by mid-2006. The Fishing Company of Alaska opted in. All seven of their boats—five trawlers and two long-liners—would join the ACSA program.

In the couple years after, the expense of joining ACSA had been made plain. By spring 2008, an estimated $40 million had
been spent fleetwide on upgrades mandated by the program. So many boats were participating that it was difficult for the Coast Guard to keep up. They’d even gone so far as to send examiners to a shipyard in Japan, where the FCA dry-docked their boats. There weren’t any other companies that serviced their ships outside of the United States. To the inspectors, it seemed like a lot of time and expense to sail a ship all the way to Japan for dry dock work. Yet that was the way the FCA did it, and so the Coast Guard went along. In early winter 2007, the
Alaska Ranger,
as well as the
Warrior,
the
Juris,
and the
Spirit,
had spent several weeks at a Japanese shipyard. There’d been a long checklist of improvements that needed to be made. The ship sailed back to Dutch Harbor with about half of the work undone. The amount involved was more than the company—or the Coast Guard—had anticipated.

When the ACSA program officially got off the ground in 2006, it was agreed the final deadline for compliance would be January 1, 2008. By that date, all the H&G vessels enrolled should have reached an equivalent standard to the load-lined boats, according to Coast Guard documents. But several months before the deadline, it was clear to Coast Guard inspectors that the original date was way too ambitious. More boats had enrolled than originally anticipated, straining Coast Guard resources. The program was a collaboration between two Coast Guard districts: District 13, headquartered in Seattle, and District 17, which includes all of Alaska. Neither district had much spare manpower to devote to the new program. Across the board, the ships needed more work than the Coast Guard inspectors had expected. In some cases, it had been impossible for the ships to schedule dry dock time given the increased demand. There were really only a handful of shipyards in Alaska and Washington
State equipped to keep one-hundred-plus-foot boats in dry dock for weeks at a time. And of course, most boat owners wanted to schedule dry dock time during the same times of year, when the fishing grounds were closed.

By late 2007, the Coast Guard was informally letting ship owners know that there would most likely be another six months to get things in order. They were making progress, and that was what was important. Woodley felt that most of the boat owners were making a good faith effort. Certainly, most of the ships in the fleet were in better shape than they’d been just a couple years before—and much safer than they would have been if the Coasties had just let things stand as they were.