Deadliest Sea (30 page)

Lincoln quickly reached some first conclusions. It was apparent that the newly required strobe lights had saved lives. Until the very end of the rescue, there had been little “search” in this search and rescue case. The flashing lights on the fishermen’s survival suits had directed the Coasties right to their targets. And though the abandon ship procedures had been anything but smooth, the life rafts were each successfully launched by one or two people. When the rafts bolted away from the boat, a number of individuals entered the water by climbing down the ship’s Jacob’s Ladders, survival equipment that was mandated through ACSA.

Lincoln found that 30 percent of the people on board—fourteen in all—had had recent safety training. The number wasn’t ideal, but chances are it would have been lower without ACSA. Most significant, she discovered that 80 percent of the people who were recently trained got into a raft, while only 38 percent made it into a life raft without training. All of those who made it to a raft survived.

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
30, 2009,
A YEAR
and a half after the
Alaska Ranger
was lost in the Bering Sea, NTSB investigator Liam LaRue presented his group’s findings to President Barack Obama’s recently appointed head of the National Transportation Safety Board, Deborah Hersman. As LaRue and his coinvestigators gathered their papers and settled in front of microphones, Captain Mike Rand and two of the other Coast Guard Marine Board members found seats together in the spacious auditorium. Their own report was still working its way up the Coast Guard chain of command, and the Coasties had yet to see the NTSB’s findings. Most of the seats in the large room were empty, but a handful of people sat in the front row. Among them was Karen Jacobsen, Captain Pete Jacobsen’s daughter.

“We are here today to make sure an accident like this does not happen again. That’s the purpose of our work,” began Hersman.

She turned to LaRue, who described the ship, its fishing practices, and its crew, then gave the board a condensed timeline of its last hours: The flooding was discovered in the
Alaska Ranger
’s rudder room around 2:30
A.M
. There was no evidence of any collision or breach in the skin of the ship. LaRue’s team had concluded that, as originally reported, the flooding had most likely resulted from the physical loss of one of the ship’s two rudders. The board members had found that the
Ranger
’s conversion to a factory fishing trawler years before the accident had left the boat sitting more than two feet lower in the water than as originally designed. The difference was enough to bring the waterline to the top of the ship’s rudder shaft and to allow a constant flow of seawater into the ship. Rough seas most likely made the situation worse.

Losing a rudder is a bad—and unusual—scenario. But it should not have caused the boat to sink. The NTSB’s marine engineer explained to Hersman and her colleagues that if the
Ranger
’s watertight integrity had been intact, even complete flooding of the rudder room would not have led to the loss of the vessel. But the ship’s watertight integrity was not, in fact, intact. Testimony had revealed that there was a permanent breach in the rudder room bulkhead, and that at least one of the ship’s watertight doors had begun leaking not long after it was closed.

The final blow to the
Ranger
came when its controllable pitch propeller (CPP) system kicked into reverse soon after the vessel lost power. The CPP system was a remnant of the
Ranger
’s earlier life as an oil-rig supply boat. For a time, many ships were designed to automatically shift into reverse at an unexpected loss of power, the idea being that it would be far better to suddenly back away from an oil rig than ram right into it.

The NTSB concluded that the
Ranger
’s movement astern both
accelerated the sinking and prevented the fishermen from entering life rafts directly from the boat. The officers on board the ship did have the ability to shut down the ship’s engines and stop the vessel’s backward movement. There was no testimony or evidence, however, that any member of the crew attempted to do so.

In July 2008, three months after the accident, the Coast Guard had issued an industry-wide safety warning titled “Controllable Pitch Propeller Systems and Situational Awareness.” There had been other recent incidents of CPP systems surprising crews with a shift into reverse. For instance, just a few months before the loss of the
Ranger,
a cruise ship carrying adventure tourists sank off the coast of Antarctica (all 154 passengers safely evacuated the ship before it shifted astern). The Coast Guard’s warning encouraged owners and operators of boats with CPP propulsion to be sure they understood their system and knew how to react in the case of a sudden casualty. LaRue explained to Hersman that it was unclear if the officers on the
Ranger
actually understood the ship’s CPP system. What was clear was that the ship and its crew would have fared better if the boat was dead in the water during abandon ship procedures, rather than moving full-speed astern.

Still, LaRue resisted judging the actions of men who weren’t there to explain themselves. All of the
Ranger
’s top officers, after all, had died in the sinking: “We don’t know what they knew and when they knew it, so it’s hard to make a judgment on what they should have done,” he told Hersman.

In the end, the NTSB’s investigation resulted in five recommendations to four different groups. The Fishing Company of Alaska was advised to “review and modify as necessary the procedures for enforcing your drug and alcohol policy to ensure full crew compliance.” Though there was significant evidence of substance use on the vessel, LaRue stated that the NTSB had been unable to deter
mine whether alcohol or drugs had played a role in the incident since no drug or alcohol testing was conducted on the survivors.

“They definitely talked the talk but didn’t follow through,” LaRue responded to Hersman, after she quoted from the FCA’s strongly worded no-tolerance drug and alcohol policy. “It appears that the policy was not enforced.”

Though the NTSB had investigated the role of the fish master on board the vessel, LaRue said, they’d concluded that there was no compelling evidence that the fish master’s power exceeded that of the captain, and had taken no action on the issue. Under questioning, former Captain Steve Slotvig had maintained that he left the
Ranger
of his own accord, and that he was, in fact, in control of the vessel.

The board’s second and third recommendations were to the National Marine Fisheries Service and the North Pacific Fishery Management Council. Both organizations were told to amend their regulations to allow ships like the
Alaska Ranger
to be replaced in situations other than vessel loss without a company sacrificing its quotas.

The final two recommendations were directed at the Coast Guard. The Marine Board’s investigations had revealed that the engineers on board the
Ranger
were not properly licensed. Chief Engineer Dan Cook held a Coast Guard license for vessels up to 6,000 horsepower. The
Ranger
’s horsepower was 7,000. Only one of the ship’s two assistant engineers was licensed, and his license was for up to 4,000 horsepower. There was no reason to think, the investigators said, that the licensing of the engineers contributed to the casualty, but nevertheless their lack of qualifications was a notable oversight on the part of the FCA—and the Coast Guard.

The most significant of the NTSB’s recommendations was one that the safety agency had made four times in the past twenty years, with no results. LaRue’s group concluded that the Coast
Guard should go to Congress and seek the legislative authority required to regulate commercial fishing boats to an appropriate level of safety. It was clear that the
Ranger
’s demise was the result of a series of preventable malfunctions. Had the ship been required to adhere to higher standards of seaworthiness, the
Ranger
and her entire crew would very likely have made it safely back to Dutch Harbor.

The NTSB recognized that the problems the Coast Guard faced in improving safety in the commercial fishing fleet went far beyond the lack of dedicated resources for Woodley’s ACSA program. The Coast Guard needed Congressional authority to regulate the entire industry to a common standard. Like every other type of boat, commercial fishing vessels should be inspected.

“There are a lot more regulations for the fish than there are for the fishermen’s safety,” Hersman noted in her concluding statements. “That needs to get rectified…. The
Deadliest Catch
is not called that for no reason. The statistics bear it out. This is the deadliest industry…. Whether you’re on the
Cornelia Marie
or the
Alaska Ranger,
you should be assured of one level of safety.

“Issuing these recommendations is not the end. It’s just the beginning of the process,” she promised. “We’re hoping the fourth time will be the charm.”

Meanwhile, in Alaska and throughout the United States, fishing boats leave port every day, many of them headed to some of the most violent and unforgiving waters on Earth. As always, many of the vessels are crewed by greenhorns, with little or no experience in using the safety equipment that the owners of their boats are finally required to provide. When disaster strikes, they may be able to make their way into a survival suit or a life raft. As for the actual seaworthiness of their ship? As long as commercial fishing vessels retain their uninspected status, all the fishermen can do is pray.

J
ulio Morales hired a lawyer and agreed to a settlement that allowed him to buy a modest home in Southern California. He hasn’t been working since the sinking, but has been thinking about getting another job in Alaska, maybe in the oil industry. Julio has some arthritis that he attributes to the accident, as well as quite a few nightmares. Every time he smells diesel fuel, he tastes it as well.

For almost a year after the sinking, several members of Julio’s family refused to speak to him. They blamed him for Byron’s death—for bringing Byron up to Alaska in the first place. Julio rarely sees his cousin Marco, who went right back to fishing. Marco worked for the FCA for another year, and then was arrested on an outstanding warrant as he tried to cross back into the United States after a trip to Mexico. He’s still in jail.

Jeremy Freitag also got a lawyer, and ended up with enough cash to buy that house in central Oregon. He promised his mother he’d never go back to Alaska. He’s studying for his captain’s license and hopes to eventually run a sport fishing boat out of the tourist town of Newport, Oregon.

Eric Haynes is at home in Las Vegas, working toward a college degree in culinary management. He’s thought about going back up to Alaska. He misses it sometimes, though he’s not sure he’d be welcome back on another FCA boat after filing a lawsuit against the company.

A little more than a year after the sinking, Eric met Karen Jacobsen, Captain Pete’s daughter, at the Fishermen’s Memorial in Seattle. Karen had planned a sunrise service at the monument where her father’s name—along with those of Byron Carrillo, Dan Cook, and David Silveira—had been inscribed months before. Karen was shattered by her father’s death and sees great significance in the fact that the tragedy occurred on Easter—enough so that she chose to hold the ceremony at sunrise on Easter morning, rather than on the anniversary of the date the
Ranger
was lost.

In the two years since the boat sank, many more names have been added to the Seattle memorial, which is located at the working port known as Fishermen’s Terminal. Several of the names are of men from the ninety-three-foot head-and-gut boat
Katmai,
a one-time shrimp trawler that sank out of Dutch Harbor six months after the
Ranger
(and that was not enrolled in the Coast Guard’s ACSA program). There were eleven men on board. Seven died. At least two of the deceased
Katmai
fishermen had previously worked on FCA boats.

The ship was even farther away from help, and it took the Coast Guard many hours to reach the scene. Jayhawk pilot Shawn Tripp was one of the men on the case. He had been predeployed to Cold Bay, for the fall red king crab season. The future of aircrew predeployment to St. Paul, meanwhile, is expected to continue despite the long-anticipated permanent closure of the Coast Guard’s LORAN station in February 2010.

T
HE
C
OAST
G
UARD RESCUE TEAMS
that responded to the
Alaska Ranger
case piled up awards, especially rescue swimmers O’Brien Starr-Hollow and Abram Heller, who was awarded one of aviation’s highest honors: the Distinguished Flying Cross. The rest of the men on the crews of the 60 and 65 helicopters were each awarded Coast Guard Air Medals.

Soon after the sinking, Brian McLaughlin made the effort to get in touch with the families of the deceased fishermen. He talked with Karen Jacobsen; and he and his wife, Amy, met with Pete Jacobsen’s brother, Billy, a retired tugboat captain who lives outside of Seattle. Forty-two lives were saved on March 23, 2008, but some of the Coast Guard rescuers had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that they hadn’t saved all of them. McLaughlin gave his Air Medal to Billy Jacobsen, who keeps it on his living room mantel.

McLaughlin has since been promoted a rank to Lieutenant Commander, and in 2009 moved with his family to Mobile, Alabama, where he’s now an instructor for new Coast Guard pilots. The family once again made the cross-country trip a summer-long RV journey.

Ed Cook continued working for the FCA for about six months after his brother’s death. And he continued making notes about safety concerns on his daily record sheets. In April 2008, less than a month after the tragedy that killed five men, Ed repeatedly noted that the
Warrior
’s deck crew was tying open watertight doors at sea. By early 2009, Ed had found a new job.

Beyond Ed’s documented concerns, the FCA continued to experience legal and safety problems. In the fall of 2008, the company agreed to pay a $449,700 fine to settle a series of environmental violations, including mishandling prohibited species, fishing in a protected marine area, and multiple counts of
harassment against NMFS observers assigned to its boats. Just a couple of weeks before the settlement was announced, a senior crew member on board the
Alaska Juris
had contacted law enforcement to report that he’d been assaulted by the ship’s fish master. In June 2009 the FCA trawler
Alaska Victory
cracked a hull plate while transiting through ice. And in early July, the
Alaska Warrior
’s Japanese boatswain fell overboard after becoming tangled in fishing gear. He wasn’t wearing a life jacket. Like
Ranger
fish master Satoshi Konno, the boatswain’s body has still not been found.