Deadliest Sea (13 page)

Then she overheard Silveira and the engineers discussing the possibility of the
Warrior
towing the
Ranger
back to Dutch Harbor.

“We’re not going to get towed in,” the assistant engineer, Rodney Lundy, said. “There’s already water spraying in around the doors.”

I’m getting into a life raft, Gwen thought. I’m going to have to get into a tiny life raft in the middle of the Bering Sea.

Gwen thought about her kids. She always called home when she was in port between trips. But this time, she’d only talked to them for a couple minutes. She hadn’t seen them in two months.

What am I doing here? she thought.

About twenty minutes after Gwen overheard the engineers talking about the spraying water, the ship’s lights began flickering.

“The water’s made it to the engine room,” Gwen heard Cook say. The engines were sputtering, gurgling.

The lights went out.

Silveira was at the helm. “I’ve lost steering,” he said. He repeated the words several times.

“The engines are backing up,” Silveira said. “They’re backing up!”

Moments later, Silveira gave the order to abandon ship.

Gwen was assigned to the number two life raft, stored on the
Ranger
’s port side. When she got out on deck, the emergency squad member who was supposed to launch that raft didn’t know how. The Jacob’s Ladder wasn’t tied off. Gwen felt panicked. She knew how to launch the raft. At her last briefing in Seattle, there had been a refresher class on safety training; a Coast Guard officer had come to talk to the group and each student had simulated launching a life raft. She had no idea, though, how to tie off the Jacob’s Ladder.

Gwen was relieved when Evan Holmes ran over from his post on the starboard side of the ship and tied the raft’s port ladder to the boat. He saw Gwen standing by the rail.

“Don’t you worry. We’re going to get you off this boat,” Evan yelled to the fisheries observer.

The words of reassurance made Gwen feel calmer. She looked at the raft.

“I just pull the pelican hook, right?” she yelled back to Silveira over the growling engine noise.

What if I do it wrong? Gwen thought. She was seized with fear. This isn’t just my raft, it’s everybody else’s raft, too. She knew that was the correct way to launch the raft, but she wanted the confirmation of the mate.

“Yes, pull the pelican hook!” Silveira yelled from the wheelhouse.

Gwen and another crewman pulled the hook and pushed the raft over the port rail. The bulk hit the water, then nothing. Gwen couldn’t see it. She had no idea if it hadn’t inflated at all, or if it had just somehow swung out of sight. The ship was listed far to starboard and Gwen’s side of the boat was raised high above the water.

Maybe the raft is stuck down against the hull, where we can’t see it, Gwen thought.

She could see the painter line. It was right there in front of
her, pulled taut. The raft had to be somewhere. Then, not much more than a minute after they’d launched the raft, she saw the line snap.

Gwen strained her eyes into the blackness. Still, she couldn’t see the raft.

Gwen could hear people yelling “Abandon ship!” but jumping blindly seemed like a bad idea. Her training had taught her to get directly from the vessel into a raft if humanly possible. The instructions had been repeated again and again: Get into the raft. You
must
get into the raft in the Bering Sea. The words came into her mind now.

Gwen went back into the wheelhouse to talk to Silveira. Pete was inside too, along with the fish master and the engineers. The two head officers were taking turns working the radios.

It was 4:15
A.M
. when the officers on the
Alaska Ranger
radioed the Coast Guard that they had lost life rafts.

“COMMSTA Kodiak, COMMSTA Kodiak, this is the
Alaska Ranger
.”

“
Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA Kodiak, over,” watchstander David Seidl answered.

The ship’s transmission was completely muddled by static.

“
Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA Kodiak,” Seidl said once more. “Request you say your last again, over.”

“Yeah, the boat took a big-ass list to starboard,” the ship’s officer answered. “We launched the port raft. The painter broke.” There was more, but again, static drowned out the transmission. After a few minutes, another few words were audible: “We’re getting into the rafts right now.”

“
Alaska Ranger,
COMMSTA Kodiak, roger,” the reply came back. “Have you weak or readable. I think I got a good copy. Understand your vessel listed to starboard, and you lost a couple rafts into the water. Is this correct, Captain?”

“Yes, we did, we lost one of them. On the port side. The, uh, the painter broke.”

“Roger, Captain. Good copy. Be advised we have an ETA for Coast Guard rescue 60, should be there in approximately five, zero minutes. How copy on that, sir?”

“I copy.”

“Roger, Captain. We appreciate the information. Please keep us informed. We’ll be standing by for you, sir.”

B
ETWEEN CALLS
, P
ETE TURNED TO
G
WEN
. “This vessel is going to capsize any minute,” the captain told her. “You have to get off.
Now
.”

Gwen couldn’t mistake the urgency in Captain Pete’s voice.

She went back outside, to the stern deck on the starboard side. One of the other rafts was floating not too far from the ship. It looked pretty stable in the water. A group of fishermen were standing around an empty life raft cradle.

“Go, go, go, go!” Gwen yelled. “We have to get off this boat now!”

Gwen watched as one guy grabbed hold of the painter line and shimmied down into the water. Gwen followed, but almost immediately lost her grip on the rope.

She bobbed up, spitting out a mouthful of salt water. She could see the raft. She started swimming: two breaststrokes. Then she stopped. She thought back to her training. Stop and think, she’d been instructed back in Anchorage. Try to relax. Get your breathing under control. If you have to swim, swim on your back, or you’ll end up with water inside your suit.

All I have to do is get hold of the painter line, Gwen thought. Then she could exert less energy by pulling herself into the raft. She was lying on her back in the water with her legs and arms
crossed, the best way to conserve heat, she remembered, when she saw the line. She reached out and grabbed it through the neoprene mitts of her survival suit. Hand over hand, she walked her way up the rope to the edge of the bobbing life raft.

Through the open door of the tented shelter, she could see that a couple of the Japanese technicians were already inside. As she reached the shelter, one of the men leaned out, and grabbed on to her. With one strong yank, he hauled her up into the safety of the tented compartment.

T
HE CREW OF THE
C
OAST
G
UARD’S
Hercules C-130, rescue plane 1705, launched in textbook time, half an hour after pilot Tommy Wallin got the call. From Anchorage, it was about nine hundred miles to the sinking ship. They should be on scene within three hours.

The Herc had been airborne for less than an hour when a communication came over the radio. The boat was sinking. People were abandoning ship, straight into the water.

The mood in the aircraft grew tense. Pilots Wallin and Matt Duben had already calculated their route to the
Ranger,
but now they decided to ascend another few thousand feet. The airframe can get more speed at higher altitude—and flying higher also helps preserve fuel. The 60 Jayhawk helicopter from St. Paul Island would almost certainly reach the spot before they did, but once they got to the emergency site, the C-130 crew would take over on-scene communications. At their altitude, the plane would have the ability to communicate directly with the 60 Jayhawk, the Coast Guard cutter
Munro,
the base in Kodiak, and District Command in Juneau. Until they were on scene, the Coast Guard assets would be communicating as best they could through VHF and UHF transmissions. Until they
got there, the crew of the C-130 wouldn’t be doing anybody any good at all.

B
ACK AT THE
C
OMMUNICATIONS
S
TATION
in Kodiak, the transmissions from the
Ranger
’s officers were growing more and more muddled.

“
Alaska Ranger, Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA. Be advised I have you weak and barely readable,” watchstander David Seidl radioed to the ship at 4:22
A.M
. “Understand you have lost
all
your power, over?”

“That is correct. I also have a twenty-five-to-thirty-degree starboard list. I got two people, two people, in the water.”

“
Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA. Confirm, two people have gone
in
the water at this time, over.”

“Roger, I’ve got two people in the water,” the response came back from the ship. “I have no power, all right?”

“
Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA. Do you have a visual on the two people, over.”

“No, I do not at this time.”

“
Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA. Roger, understand. Stand by one, over.”

“Roger.”

Several minutes later, Seidl attempted to make contact with the
Ranger
again: “
Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA Kodiak, over.” He waited.

Nothing.

“
Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA Kodiak.” Still, silence.

At 4:36
A.M
., almost two hours after David Seidl heard the first “Mayday” broadcast into his Kodiak cubicle, the watchstander scrawled the words “No Joy” in his notebook.

He had lost all communications with the sinking ship.

R
yan Shuck stood at the starboard rail, near the empty canister that had held the number three life raft. The guys in charge of his muster group, Evan Holmes and Eric Haynes, were telling people to go, that they had to get off the boat and try to swim for the raft.

Indio Sol, a Thai crewman everyone called by his nickname, “Rasta,” went first.

“I guess I’m going in,” he said.

Then just like that he climbed over the rail and descended the Jacob’s Ladder into the water. A young processor named Kenny Smith went next.

Ryan watched each man hit the waves and take off—two red dots drifting fast toward the boat’s bow. The two starboard life rafts were tethered to the moving ship with their painter lines. The lines were pulled taut and the rafts were a good distance
beyond the bow. Ryan watched as his two crewmates drifted past the end of the ship, then beyond the rafts. He couldn’t tell if his friends saw the life rafts—or if they were even trying to swim at all. They were already just tiny specks, powerless under the strength of the waves.

Ryan climbed down onto the ladder and tried to launch himself farther away from the side of the ship. He surfaced quickly and started swimming on his stomach, pushing hard for the nearest raft. It seemed like his strategy was working. The raft was ten feet away, then three. He was there. He hit the dead center of the tented structure and tried to grab on. But with his hands wrapped in the thick neoprene he couldn’t get a good hold on the slick rubber raft. It was like trying to grab and climb onto a giant inner tube that was rushing by in white water. Ryan was up against the side of the raft. Then he was sucked underneath it. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t breathe. And then he surfaced—with the raft behind him.

E
RIC
H
AYNES BALANCED ON THE EDGE
of the deck, staring down toward the waves. He could see the two starboard-side life rafts bobbing out beyond the
Ranger
’s bow. Then both rafts seemed to disappear. It was so chaotic that it was hard to tell what was happening. Most people were already off the ship, but Eric didn’t know if any of them had made it to the rafts. Then all of a sudden the rafts were in view again. Eric was shocked to see that they’d somehow swung all the way around the boat and were bolting back up the starboard side. The
Ranger
was still at a severe list. The drop from deck to water that normally would have been a fifteen-foot plunge was only a few feet. It felt almost like stepping off the end of a dock into the water.

Eric sank under and swallowed a mouthful of seawater.
When he bobbed back up, he saw the raft’s painter line—which had broken off from the ship—right in front of him. He reached out, wrapped his hand around the line, and was immediately jerked under. He fought his way up and dragged himself along the line to the raft. He’d almost reached the shelter when he saw someone a few yards away. The man was floating spread-eagled, facedown in the water.

Eric reached the raft and then maneuvered around it, pulling himself closer to the floating body using the ropes built into the sides of the shelter. He grabbed on to the floating man’s leg and turned his head up out of the water. It was Joshua Esa, a processor from Anchorage.

Eric couldn’t tell if Joshua was alive as he struggled to pull him back around to the raft’s entrance. He wasn’t responsive.

I just need to get him in the raft, Eric told himself. If I can’t, I’ll just have to stay with him in the water.

Eric pulled Joshua around to the entrance of the shelter. David Hull was in the opening. He’d have to get himself in first, Eric realized. With David’s help, Eric kicked and pulled his way in, finally collapsing like a huge gaffed fish on the soft floor of the raft.

It took a minute for Eric to pull himself up from the raft’s floor. Every time he moved, he seemed to sink deeper into the collapsible plastic. By the time Eric got back to the raft’s entrance, David had lost his grip on Joshua, who was now drifting away.

Then Eric saw Joshua kicking his feet. He was alive.

Seconds later, Boatswain Chris Cossich floated into view next to Joshua. Chris grabbed onto Joshua, and within seconds the two were at the door of the raft. Eric yelled for the other men in the raft to help, but the five or six people inside just sat there. Maybe they’re in shock, Eric thought as he grasped onto Joshua and tried to pull him into the shelter.

It was no use. Without Joshua’s cooperation, it was like trying
to lift a bag of cement over a high railing. Then Eric had an idea. He yelled to Chris to lift Joshua’s legs into the doorway. Eric leaned out of the raft and hooked one arm under Joshua’s knee and the other around Joshua’s shoulder. He’d pull while Chris pushed. They struggled for a few moments, and then Eric and Joshua tumbled back into the raft. Chris and a few other guys climbed in after.

After catching his breath, Eric stared out the open doorway. He couldn’t see anyone else. Lots of guys didn’t make it into the rafts, he thought. They’re out there, and we have to look for them.

“This is what we’re going to do,” Eric told the group. “We’ll take turns keeping a lookout for those guys. We need to keep yelling to let them know we’re out here.”

For more than an hour they screamed almost constantly. Nobody yelled back. It seemed like the weather was getting worse. With the door open, water splashed inside the raft, making people even colder. Joshua was awake, but he didn’t look good. He was zoned out. Several of the guys were shivering. Finally, Eric zipped up the door and leaned back against the side of the jolting raft.

F
ACTORY MANAGER
E
VAN
H
OLMES
was bobbing in the swells. Back on the ship, he’d been standing next to a friend of his, a small-framed Laotian guy named Phouthone Thanphilom whom everyone called P. Ton. The men were holding on to each other as they balanced on the listing deck.

“Hey, Holmes, you’ll take care of me, right?” P. Ton asked Evan back on the boat.

Evan thought of P. Ton as his little buddy on the ship.

“Yeah, I’ll take care of you,” he said.

He was relieved when they found each other again after just a few minutes in the water. Evan could immediately see that P. Ton was panicking, trying to swim on his stomach in his enormous suit. The Laotian man couldn’t have weighed much more than 100 pounds.

“Get on your back!” Evan yelled as he helped to roll P. Ton over in the waves. He noticed that his friend’s strobe light was off, and turned it on.

“Grab my legs,” Evan told P. Ton as they linked together in the swells.

K
ENNY
S
MITH FELT LIKE HE’D BEEN
in the water for a long time. He had been one of the first to jump off the boat, and was carried right past the raft. For a while after he hit, he felt all right. It was probably the adrenaline keeping him warm. But water was slowly leaking into his suit. The fishing gig was pretty much Kenny’s first real job. He was twenty-two and had been on the
Ranger
for about nine months. Before Alaska, he’d worked as a newspaper delivery boy. And he’d spent some time in jail after the police found stolen goods in his apartment. He was storing the stuff for a friend. Just a few weeks before, he’d called his girlfriend back home in eastern Washington. It was her birthday, and it cost him thirty bucks for a twenty-minute call on the ship’s SAT phone. She told Kenny she was pregnant.

By half an hour after he abandoned ship, Kenny was freezing. The waves were crashing right over his head. He felt like the water in his suit was dragging him down. He didn’t want to swim anymore. He felt like he couldn’t hang on. Screw it, I’m going to die, Kenny thought.

C
OAST
G
UARD
J
AYHAWK PILOTS
Brian McLaughlin and Steve Bonn stared out into the dark night. It was flurrying on and off, with wind gusts up to 35 miles per hour. The only thing between St. Paul and the spot they’d programmed into the aircraft’s computer was the inky blackness of open ocean.

The time spent approaching a rescue scene is a chance for an aircrew to talk out scenarios—to discuss what they might find, what actions they’ll feel comfortable with, and how much risk they’re willing to take. The Jayhawk crew had already heard from the Coast Guard cutter
Munro
that at least two fishermen from the
Alaska Ranger
had gone overboard without getting into a life raft. It sounded like the flooding was advancing fast.

The aircrew hashed out their options. Obviously, they couldn’t airlift a forty-seven-person crew in one load. If the ship couldn’t be saved, they’d most likely be making multiple trips. Even half a dozen people would be cramped in the helo’s cabin, especially if they were wearing Gumby suits. If necessary, though, they might be able to squeeze in twice that many.

The men had calculated the distance from the
Ranger
’s last known position to the Dutch Harbor airport, the nearest landing spot. Given the poor weather conditions, they’d have to circle around the north coast of the island and approach the airport from the east, which would make the total trip close to 150 miles. If they needed to return to the sinking site, the crew agreed, it would make the most sense to lower the survivors to the
Munro
.

McLaughlin had been communicating with Operations Specialist Erin Lopez. Now he heard another voice break through over the radio.

“Rescue 6007, this is cutter
Munro
.” It was the ship’s commanding officer, Captain Craig Lloyd.

“Sir, we think we’d like to bring any survivors straight to you,” the pilot reported.

“That seems like the best plan,” Lloyd agreed. “We’ll be ready to work with you in any way necessary.”

Steve Bonn was in the right seat, flying the helo. The thirty-nine-year-old pilot had just a few months left in his Alaska tour. In early summer, he was scheduled to transfer down to Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Earlier in the week, McLaughlin had decided that if his crew got a search and rescue case during this St. Paul deployment, Bonn would take the reins. McLaughlin wanted to give Bonn the chance to go out with a bang. He certainly hadn’t imagined anything like this—though he was more than happy to have the more experienced pilot in the right seat. Like more than a few Coast Guard pilots, Bonn was former Army. For ten years, he’d flown the military’s Blackhawk, the platform from which the Coast Guard’s search and rescue Jayhawk had been designed. “Sikorsky made the 60 to get shot at and keep on flying,” Jayhawk pilots often boasted of their aircraft. The same was said of the Army pilots: They could take just about anything.

About fifty miles out from the sinking site, McLaughlin was able to reach the
Alaska Ranger
on the VHF radio. First Mate David Silveira told him the situation had deteriorated significantly in the last half hour. Only seven people were still on board, and the 184-foot fishing vessel was listing to 45 degrees. It looked like it might capsize at any minute. Most of the crew had already abandoned ship, the officer said. Some of them had made it into life rafts. Others hadn’t. He didn’t know how many.

F
OR A FEW MINUTES AFTER HE
was sucked under the life raft, Ryan Shuck struggled against the breaking swells, trying to
make it back to the circular shelter. But it was pointless. He was too far away and already exhausted. He lay back in the water, letting his head rest against the inflatable pillow at the neck of his survival suit. His heart was pounding.

Ryan tried to concentrate on how his suit supported him in the water and how best to avoid being pummeled by the swells. He did his best to position himself with his back to the breaking waves. He looked up at the moon, skipping in and out of view in the black sky. In the distance, he could hear someone yelling: “I can’t swim, I can’t swim. I don’t know what to do!”

Ryan tried to talk himself into calming down.

Every time he rose up on a crest, he could see lights spread out behind him in the water. It seemed like he was farther downwind than anyone else. There was a small cluster of lights about two hundred yards away. For a few minutes, Ryan tried to swim toward it, but the waves kept turning him around. He couldn’t even keep the lights in sight, with the way the water was flipping him around. He decided it would be better if he just stayed still.

Gazing back toward the ship, Ryan could see at least half a dozen tiny, solitary beacons flickering among the waves. There was just enough moonlight to make out the outline of the
Alaska Ranger
bulging from the ocean. The ship was dark, just a shadow, really. Ryan watched as her bow turned slowly up, finally pointing straight toward the sky. The wheelhouse was at the waterline when, eerily, the lights inside flickered on for a moment.

There’s still some power, Ryan thought. Maybe she’ll right herself. But then, in a matter of seconds, the ship plunged straight down, swallowed whole by the dark sea.

I
T HAD TAKEN
R
YAN TWO YEARS
to get a job on a fishing boat—two years working even crappier jobs for much crappier money.
He’d grown up in Libby, Montana. When he was thirteen, his family moved to Juneau, Alaska’s tiny capital city. His dad had heard about work at a new mine up there. Ryan went to middle school in Juneau while his dad hauled rubble out of the excavation site. But it was only a year before the work dried up, and the family packed for the ride back to Montana.

After high school Ryan worked in logging for a while. Eventually he found himself in Great Falls, where he got a job cleaning exhaust hoods for restaurants. He was traveling all over the West, making $12 an hour—not bad for Montana. But he kept thinking about Alaska.

In 2005, he saw an ad in the Great Falls newspaper. He went to a meeting at the local Best Western. The cannery hired pretty much everybody, provided you passed the drug and alcohol test. Ryan got the job and was soon in Dutch Harbor, working twelve hours a day on an assembly line in a fish processing plant. They did everything: crab, cod, pollack. He tried to talk to people about getting on a fishing boat, but those jobs were tough to get if you didn’t have experience. And it was impossible to get experience if you couldn’t get on a boat. The next year, he got another cannery job, this time in Kodiak. In the late spring of 2007, he started making phone calls to Seattle fishing companies.