Deadliest Sea (4 page)

But when he ran back through several minutes later, the Japanese man was still lying in his bunk.

“Get up,” Eric yelled again.

He didn’t tell the men what Captain Pete had said. He didn’t want to start a panic.

J
ULIO FOLLOWED
E
VAN
H
OLMES
down one level to the galley, though the laundry room, and out onto the
Ranger
’s main trawl deck.

“Go to the wheelhouse!” Evan was yelling. “Go to the suits!”

Julio climbed to the ship’s upper deck, where the factory manager began pulling bags containing full-body, neoprene survival suits out of a plywood box on the side of the wheelhouse. He handed one to Julio. The bulky, bright red suits looked a little like children’s footed pajamas. Despite their awkward appearance, the suits provide insulation and buoyancy and—when worn properly—will keep someone dry, which is essential to retaining enough body heat to survive in cold water. Each suit was folded up inside its own bag, which was color-coded to indicate the size. Inside the bags, the neoprene survival suits were stiff from the cold.

On his first day on the boat, Julio had been shown the suits, and practiced putting one on. You were supposed to do it in sixty seconds. The suit had a fitted hood, and a flap to cover your nose and mouth that was held shut with Velco. Julio had been told that the most important thing was not to let water get inside.

The deck of the ship was coated with ice and so Julio brought the suit into the crowded wheelhouse. He shook the survival suit out of its bag, unzipped it, laid it on the floor, and yanked off his rubber boots. He wiggled his legs into the suit, then pulled the torso up over his sweatpants and FCA sweatshirt. It was pretty easy, but as Julio yanked the neoprene suit up, he noticed a rip at the seam on the left arm. There was another small tear at the suit’s left ankle. This isn’t good, he thought. If we go down, I’m in trouble.

There were other guys waiting to get into the wheelhouse to put their suits on. Julio went outside. It was snowing and windy. Only his face was exposed, but Julio was still cold. He stared back toward the
Ranger
’s trawl deck. It looked lower than normal. He watched as a big wave crested over the stern. Jesus, that’s bad, he thought. Everyone seemed calm, though. This ship has huge
bilge pumps. They should be working now, Julio told himself. They’d just wait, he thought. And things would be okay.

W
HEN HE GOT BACK UP ON DECK
after waking up the crew, Eric Haynes saw Chief Engineer Dan Cook stopped at the top of the wheelhouse steps. Cook was bent over, with his hands on his knees. He was breathing hard.

“Are you all right?” Eric asked. Cook told him he was just tired from running up from the engine room. The chief had been in bad health, Eric knew. Early in the winter, he’d come down with pneumonia and was sent home to San Diego. When he came back a few weeks later, it was obvious he wasn’t fully recovered. Cook had been hacking and coughing constantly; twice a day he slipped away to his stateroom to use a special breathing machine. He didn’t seem good, but there wasn’t much Eric could do for him at the moment.

Just about everyone was in their suits already. Eric grabbed the last one in the box on the starboard side and then headed back belowdecks to put it on. Most guys were getting into their suits in the wheelhouse, but Eric could see it was packed in there. The suit was tight; he needed help from another crewman to stretch it around his broad shoulders. A few minutes earlier, Eric had passed a brand-new guy who had showed up at the dock just a couple days before. He was standing still, with his suit hanging down around his thighs. It was obvious the guy had no idea what to do.

To comply with Coast Guard regulations, the ship’s crew was required to run extensive drills at least once a month. In the meantime, new crewmen were supposed to be given a primer on the boat’s survival gear, and how to respond to an emergency on the ship. The last few guys who’d arrived hadn’t gotten that
instruction. Come to think of it, Eric realized, the drills they’d been doing lately were much less intensive than what they’d done in the past. Most often, the men just held their suits during the drill. It was too much trouble to take the suits out of the bags and get them folded neatly inside again. That was the thinking at least. And Captain Steve Slotvig had been adamant that only the ship’s officers would need to launch a life raft. Every man on the ship had been taught how to do it in the past. Not lately. Plus, the fish master was always so impatient to get back to the fishing grounds, that it seemed they never took the time for a full drill at the dock anymore. Eric had heard Pete Jacobsen complain about it more than once.

Eric had known the sixty-five-year-old captain for years. The
Ranger
’s cook had first signed up with the FCA almost fifteen years before. Pete had been there much longer. He was fully qualified as ship’s captain, but Eric knew Pete usually preferred sailing as mate. He didn’t like dealing with the fish masters. As second in command, he made the same money, but didn’t have to deal with power struggles with the Japanese.

Pete had first come north in the 1970s, working for the tugboat company Foss. A decade later, he was hired on as one of the FCA’s very first employees. Seafaring was in Captain Pete’s family from way back. He wasn’t really a big talker, but over the years a few crew members had heard some stories about his history back East.

Both of Pete’s grandfathers had worked on whaling ships in Denmark before emigrating to the United States, his maternal grandfather as a sea captain and his paternal grandfather as a chief engineer. Pete’s father, Hans Jacob Jacobsen, became a ship’s engineer as well. Pete was the second youngest of six siblings, all of whom grew up with the family’s sea stories in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Pete’s parents split up when he was young. He left
school, got a job working at a nearby shipyard, and married his childhood sweetheart, Marie Allen. By his mid-twenties, Pete was the father of two young children, Karen and Carl. He named his son after his older brother, who’d followed their father out West a number of years before. His dad sounded content in Washington State. There was plenty of work out there for a ship’s engineer. Back in Massachusetts, Pete was working two or three jobs just to pay the bills. He felt like he couldn’t get ahead. Two of his four brothers, Carl and Billy, had moved West not long after his dad, and both had found good work in Seattle’s maritime industry.

Pete was going on a trip to visit his brothers, that’s what he said anyway. His family dropped him off at Boston’s Logan Airport. They stood at the gate, waving good-bye as he boarded the plane. A week passed, then two.

“When’s Dad coming back?” Karen asked her mother.

“Soon,” she told her.

It was 1973. Karen was nine years old. After a few months, she stopped asking. A year later, the divorce papers came in the mail. Karen watched her mother cry as she opened the envelope.

Pete sent money and sometimes letters. Karen would write in return, mailing drawings she’d made. Her dad sent back art supplies and, once, two little Eskimo dolls dressed in real fur that Karen loved to rub against her face. One had a baby on its back, hidden deep in the thick pelt. He’d gotten a job up in Alaska, he wrote to Karen. It was so beautiful there, he said. He called it “God’s country.”

Karen missed him. She’d study her memories, and soak in the moments of her father’s attention. She wondered if the shipyards out West were anything like General Dynamics in Quincy, Massachusetts, where her father had worked as a sandblaster before moving away (the other men called him “Jake the Snake” for his ability to squeeze into tight spots). When she was a little girl the
whole family went there one morning for a christening. Karen remembered the champagne bottle crashing against the bow of a ship her father had helped build. They sometimes went to the drive-in theater in Weymouth, where Karen rode a little train that circled the parking lot. Afterward they ordered clam fritters to eat in the car during the movie. She and her little brother curled up in the back, almost asleep by the time the cartoons had finished and the feature film got started. She’d remember how they used to go to a local pancake house on the weekends, or how her dad would pick up a box of doughnuts and the
Boston Globe
and she’d cut out paper dolls while he read the funnies across their kitchen table.

When Karen was a sophomore in high school she went to visit her father in Everett, Washington, a suburb north of Seattle. By that time he’d been married and divorced a second time and was working most of the year in Alaska. The rest of the time he lived with his brother, Billy, in a bachelors’ apartment in Everett. Karen attended the local high school for a couple months. She felt like she and her father had a lot in common. They were both morning people, both crazy about animals. On that trip, she loved to get up early with him to walk a little dog he had at the time, a Blue Heeler named Andy. He was busy, taking nautical classes, studying for his mate’s license. He had a new girlfriend. But he found the time to teach Karen how to drive.

Put your blinker on even when you’re in a parking lot, Pete Jacobsen instructed his fifteen-year-old daughter, even if there’s nobody else around. You want to build good habits, he said. “Your job as a driver is to make the ride comfortable for the passenger.” Years later, Karen and her mother would repeat the words to each other when one lurched too quickly in or out of traffic. Pete had taught his ex-wife to drive, too. Pete’s lesson was a happy memory they shared of him.

A
FTER
E
RIC
H
AYNES HAD HIS OWN SUIT ON
, his focus turned to the muster sheets. He went back up to the wheelhouse, where lists of the crew were sealed inside a plastic pouch that was taped to the wall. Years ago, Eric had been part of the
Ranger
’s e-squad. Not anymore, but he was still on the muster team. With his hands encased in neoprene, Eric couldn’t easily rip open the plastic pouch. He struggled with it for a minute, then grabbed a pen, and stabbed into the plastic envelope. He pulled out the sheets, which divided the names of the forty-seven-person crew into three groups, one for each of the
Ranger
’s twenty-man life rafts.

The muster groups roughly corresponded to the
Ranger
’s three factory shifts, and the crew was already gathering in the proper groups out on deck. The names on the sheets, though, were two trips old. Since they’d been printed up, at least half a dozen guys had left, and an equal number of new crew had boarded the ship. Eric handed out the sheets, and each group mustered as best they could. Then most of them crowded back inside the wheelhouse.

Evan Holmes looked around. Okay, most of these guys have their suits on pretty good, he thought. When they’d drilled in the past, there’d usually be a couple people who wouldn’t want to take their beanies off. You couldn’t have a hat on and get the hood of the survival suit sealed properly around your face. Evan had to tell one of the Japanese techs to take his off. Overall, the situation seemed relatively calm. Even if this thing sinks, there’s probably time for another boat to get here, Evan thought. The officers were saying the
Alaska Warrior
was just a few hours away.

“M
AYDAY
. M
AYDAY
. M
AYDAY
. This is the
Alaska Ranger
.” It was 2:46
A.M
. when First Mate David Silveira picked up the HF radio and called the Coast Guard. Evan heard him repeat
the ship’s coordinates and listened in as the Coasties answered back.

“
Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA Kodiak,” the voice responded over the 2182 frequency. It was watchstander David Seidl. He was collecting the information the Coast Guard would need to launch an effective rescue mission to a spot almost eight hundred miles away, across a huge expanse of black ocean.

“Roger, good copy on position. Understand you are flooding, taking on water from the stern. Request to know number of persons on board, over.”

“Number of persons is, um, forty-seven persons on board, okay?” Silveira answered.

Everyone was talking. Many people were smoking. The wheelhouse was growing cloudy with cigarette smoke. Eric Haynes could tell that the captain was stressed. He needed the men out of his way. The
Ranger
’s long-time cook herded the processors out to the exposed deck, where they immediately had trouble keeping their balance on the iced-over metal platform.

Eric went back inside. Most people already had their suits on, but not the captain or the mate. Konno, the fish master, hadn’t put his on, either. He was talking with his technicians. Just the day before, Konno had been showing Eric pictures of his home in Japan, where he had a wife and teenage children. He had pictures of his Japanese garden. There were rocks with holes in them that Konno had drilled by hand. It looked to Eric like a lot of work.

Eric noticed that Chief Engineer Dan Cook had made his way into the wheelhouse and was sitting in the captain’s chair. Cook was talking with Captain Pete and Assistant Engineer Rodney Lundy.

“It can’t be saved,” Eric overheard the chief tell the captain. “We should abandon ship.” It sounded like Dan was convinced there was no hope, while Rodney thought the
Ranger
might
make it if the watertight doors held. David Silveira was still on the radio with the Coast Guard, answering questions. The Coasties had their position, but Eric knew the rescuers would be coming from far away.

O
UTSIDE, THE DECK WAS SLICK WITH ICE
. The bow was covered with snow. Almost forty men were gripping the rails, some talking, many managing to smoke cigarettes even with both hands covered in thick neoprene. With everything but their eyes covered up by the red survival suits, it was hard to tell one man from another.

Julio Morales gripped an ice-encrusted rail. It seemed to him that a half an hour had already gone by since the alarm went off and he’d woken up to all the yelling. It looked like almost all of the crew was already in their survival suits. Julio was just outside the wheelhouse, struggling to balance on the icy deck in his footed suit. There was a crowd inside, but he and most of the other factory workers had been ordered out. Now they were lined up against the metal railing, wondering what the hell was going to happen next.