Deadliest Sea (5 page)

Julio stared back toward the stern. It looked low. The waves were crashing up past the trawl winches. The back edge of the stern deck looked like it was almost to the water line. He looked again at the rips in his suit and scanned the boat for his cousins, Marco and Byron. He was particularly concerned about Byron, who had only been aboard the
Ranger
for four days. Julio remembered that his cousin had never learned to swim.

Julio wanted to find him, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to move. The deck was so slippery. He’d just wait, he thought, for someone else to tell him what to do.

I
t was just before 3:00
A.M
. and Coast Guard pilots Steve Bonn and Shawn Tripp were sprawled out in the tiny pilots’ lounge on St. Paul Island, locked in a late-night Xbox battle of Call of Duty 4. The men were on a barren, five-by-seven-mile speck of rock in the middle of the Bering Sea, the largest of five tiny islands collectively known as the Pribilofs. Outside, the wind whipped across the tundra, building a wall of snow against the room’s single, narrow window.

During the winter crab fishing season, the Coast Guard pre-deploys helicopter rescue teams—two four-man crews comprised of a pilot, a copilot, a flight mechanic, and a rescue swimmer—to the island for two weeks at a stretch. Coast Guard command implemented the predeployment program more than a decade ago in response to a sky-high fatality rate among crab fishermen. The
rescuers are on standby to respond to emergencies in the fleet, which plies the 32°F waters near the islands in search of opilio crab, a spindly, pale orange crustacean whose sweet meat is often marketed with the restaurant-friendly name “snow crab.”

Commercial fishing is the most dangerous job in the United States. In 2008 the annual fatality rate among all U.S. fishermen was thirty-six times higher than for all U.S workers (128.9 and 3.6 deaths per 100,000 workers, respectively, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health). In the 1990s, the rate was even higher for Bering Sea crab fishermen. Between 1990 and 1999, seventy-three people died in the crab fishery, a number that translates to 768 annual fatalities per 100,000 full-time workers.

The gear is a major culprit: The crab are caught in rectangular metal traps, or pots, which are baited with herring and left to soak for up to two days at a time. Each pot can weigh 800 pounds and is launched into the ocean attached to a long line that connects the trap, which rests on the ocean floor, to a buoy on the surface. It’s not unusual for a crewman—especially a newbie, or greenhorn—to be pulled overboard after getting an ankle or a loose piece of clothing wrapped up in a line.

When not in use, the pots are piled high atop slippery decks. Crewmen climb on the unstable stacks to tie down the pots and can easily fall several stories to the deck, or worse, into the ocean. The piled pots also diminish a boat’s stability. Crab pots on deck make a ship top-heavy, which makes it roll more easily and right itself more slowly—if it rights itself at all. During the 1990s, twelve crab boats capsized and sank in the Bering, at least eight of them while traveling to or from the crab grounds with pots loaded high on deck.

Location also adds to the danger. The Pribilof Islands hug the 57th parallel, more than two hundred miles north of Dutch
Harbor and seven hundred miles west from the Coast Guard air station in Kodiak, one of two Alaskan bases equipped with HH-60 rescue helicopters. The Coast Guard’s second air station is in Sitka, six hundred miles south in the Gulf of Alaska. Together, the two stations cover an area half the size of the continental United States. Even if the Coast Guard instantly got the call for vessel in distress or man overboard, it would take at least six hours for a helicopter to reach St. Paul from Kodiak. The HH-60 (also called the Jayhawk) is the Coast Guard’s long-range helicopter, but it still wouldn’t be able to make the trip without stopping to refuel at Cold Bay or Dutch Harbor, or some other Bering Sea outpost almost as far-flung as St. Paul. Six hours is too long in the Bering Sea. And so, from January through March, Coast Guard rescuers rotate through winter duty on St. Paul, sleeping, eating, and, often, looking for ways to pass the time in the barracks of the Coast Guard’s LORAN station.

LORAN
IS AN ACRONYM
for “long range navigation.” Like the Coast Guard’s manned, high-frequency radio communication station, the LORAN facility was a relic of an earlier age. To most modern ocean-going vessels, it operated a technology that was as outdated as the sextant. The St. Paul LORAN station was built in the 1940s and was in 2008 one of about fifty remaining LORAN stations worldwide, each supporting a massive antenna that broadcasted a low-frequency radio signal hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles in every direction. It takes at least three stations to provide the triangulated data needed to determine an exact position in the open ocean. The technology also requires a LORAN box, a piece of electronics that was ripped out of most vessels at least a decade ago.

St. Paul’s LORAN station was the largest of six in Alaska,
the state’s “master” station. Like all the LORAN stations in the United States, Alaska’s facilities were run at considerable cost by the Coast Guard. The military justified the expense by arguing that LORAN was a backup to GPS. If the United States’ entire system of orbiting satellites were shot out of the sky, LORAN would be the fallback. In the meantime, the remote, multimillion-dollar facilities were kept operating to serve the odd old-time fisherman who avoided dropping a few hundred dollars on a GPS in favor of antiquated electronics that served him just as well.

The staff of thirteen full-time Coast Guard personnel on St. Paul called themselves the “permanent party,” and they didn’t dwell on who was or wasn’t using their broadcast. Their mission was simply to keep the one-megawatt signal always on air, day and night. The conditions sometimes made it difficult. In the summer, St. Paul sees highs in the low sixties. But in the winter, sub-zero temperatures are the norm. Thirty-five-mile-per-hour winds are nothing special and once or twice a season gusts in the sixties are virtually guaranteed. It’s easy to get snowed in for days at a time. The LORAN crew was responsible for keeping the station and, most important, the 625-foot LORAN tower clear of snow. They had a full-size backhoe, some smaller snow-movers, and an eight-man snowcat to assist with the job.

The tower rose a few hundred yards behind the single-story building where the permanent party lived during the year-long assignment. St. Paul was a hardship post; each Coastie came alone—no spouses, no kids. For each month of the tour, a Coast Guard member earned an extra 2.5 days of vacation time and a $150 hardship bonus. The single best thing about the billet was that after a year at St. Paul, Coasties were virtually guaranteed their number-one choice for their next assignment. In the meantime, they lived like college students: working, sleeping, and eating at set mealtimes. The rooms were dorm-size, the
furniture straight out of a 1990s-style freshman suite. Signs in the communal bathrooms reminded people to wipe the stainless steel sink after brushing their teeth.

There had been efforts to make the LORAN station a friendly place. There was a pool table and a foosball game, a TV room decorated with palm fronds known as the “Tundra Dome” where Coasties could pay 40 cents for a Coke or 89 cents for a Bud Light and watch a movie selected from one of dozens of new releases provided through the military’s “morale” program. The adjacent building had a gym with treadmills and weights and a couple of old mountain bikes that staff might use to ride into town in warmer weather. The port’s there, as well as a small museum, and the island’s only store, which sells groceries and bathroom supplies and knock-off
Deadliest Catch
sweatshirts. You can buy an ATV there, or a bunk bed, or a $9 bag of Doritos. Sometimes the Coasties went there just to look, just for somewhere to go.

Despite their shared isolation, the LORAN staff usually didn’t get to know many of St. Paul’s full-time residents. In 2001, the commanding officer of the station was brutally beaten in his room with the butt of a gun, and then dragged outside the station and shot to death. The crime was the result of an apparent love-triangle—the murderer was the estranged husband of a local woman who was allegedly involved with the senior-level Coastie. The lurid details of the murder were among the very few facts new arrivals to the station might know about the place. The event didn’t improve the already-cool relationship between the Coast Guard and the local community.

Z
ACHAROF
. L
ESTENKOF
. M
ERCULIEF
. M
ELOVIDOV
. Like in many of Alaska’s native communities, the surnames on St. Paul are Russian, even though 85 percent of the island’s residents
have Aleutian ancestry. With a population of 450, St. Paul is the largest Aleut village in the state. Russian traders first “discovered” the Pribilof Islands in 1786. Aleut history holds that the foreign sailors were led to the chain by a native hunter. For centuries, the most striking thing about the place has been its fecund population of northern fur seals: Each summer, hundreds of thousands of the sweet-faced mammals gather on the islands’ shores. The number used to be in the millions.

The Russians already had established settlements in Dutch Harbor and on Kodiak Island in the 1790s when they began forcibly relocating Aleut people from the Aleutian Chain north to St. Paul and the nearby island of St. George. On the Pribilofs, the Aleuts were forced to hunt and skin seals for the Chinese market. Over the years, many of the Aleut women married Russian men, and virtually all of the native Alaskans joined the Russian Orthodox religion, whose onion-domed churches remain the most distinctive buildings in St. Paul, St. George, and many other small Alaskan communities.

St. Paul residents still hunt fur seal. The “harvest” is for subsistence only, and is subject to strict government regulation. About sixteen hundred sub-adult males can be taken each summer. Only Aleuts can participate in the hunt, and only they can eat the meat. Not only it is illegal to sell the lean, bloody steaks, it’s against the law for hunters to share the seal meat with outsiders, even over their own dinner tables.

Traditionally, Aleut men hunted fur seals with a harpoon, from a kayak. The animals rarely come ashore near their Aleutian Chain villages. In the Pribilofs, a more efficient method was, and still is, used: The animals are herded from the beach into a pen, much like cattle. Then, one hunter clubs the seal on the head to stun it, while a second hunter stabs the animal through the heart. The process was designed to avoid damaging
the seals’ valuable fur. Today, that fur is discarded—it, too, is illegal to sell, and both the equipment and skills that St. Paul hunters once used to dry and preserve the pelts have been lost.

Most of the money that comes into the St. Paul community comes through fishing. Aleut fishermen spend a good part of the summer trolling for halibut, a high-value white fish whose harvest is managed through quotas that are largely reserved for native communities. There are two fish processing plants in town: the Trident Seafoods factory on St. Paul Harbor, and the
Arctic Star,
a floating processor owned by Icicle Seafoods. In the warmer months, the island supports a small tourist trade of extreme bird watchers. More than 240 avian species have been spotted on the island, including some exotic Asian specimens.

In the winter there isn’t any tourism and almost no activity in town. For many Coasties, the best thing about the place is the caribou (reindeer, technically) that were imported as an alternative food source when the seal population plummeted in the early 1900s. Today, a herd of about five hundred roams the island, which is more than the land can comfortably support. The local tribal council happily allowed the Coasties to buy a $50 tag and do some culling. They dressed and packaged the meat in an old metal storage container behind the LORAN station, then packed it in coolers for the flight back to Kodiak.

When hunting season was over, there was still hiking. Many of the “airdales” would pack snowshoes and trekking poles and walk along the ice at the edge of the beach. Inside, they played poker, Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, and Xbox games. They tried to stay out of the way of the full-time LORAN staff.

The air crews’ shifts were twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off, from 5:00
P.M
. to 5:00
P.M
. One crew was always ready to go should a call come in. In recent years, there’d been an average of half a dozen search and rescue cases each winter.

The crews flew training missions when they could. The Coast Guard has strict safety standards for training: a five-hundred-foot ceiling and two miles of visibility at takeoff, and maximum winds of 35 knots. When the weather was clear, they’d take familiarization flights around the islands or work on stick and rudder skills over the runway, practicing takeoffs and landings. There was no crash crew at the airport in St. Paul, and no second Coast Guard aircraft. Without the backup, the crew couldn’t practice many of the drills that filled much of their time in Kodiak: simulating engine or systems failures, or practicing hoisting their rescue swimmer and rescue basket out of the ocean.

But like cops on a beat, the air crews could fly fisheries patrols. Sometimes, they’d use Coast Guard intel or a tip from the National Marine Fisheries Service to target a specific vessel suspected of fishing in a closed area or using illegal gear. More often, they were just checking up on ships from above, letting them know the Coast Guard was there if needed.

Occasionally, the crews conducted drills with a Coast Guard cutter. Earlier in the week, both Shawn Tripp’s and Steve Bonn’s helicopter crews had been scheduled to practice a maneuver known as HIFR (helicopter in-flight refueling) with the
Munro,
a 378-foot cutter on winter patrol in the Bering Sea. The ship is big enough to carry its own search and rescue aircraft, the French-made HH-65 Dolphin, which is stored in a snug hangar on the stern of the ship. The day Tripp and his crew were scheduled to train with the
Munro,
the weather was crummy. The next day, though, was clear and calm, a perfect training day for Bonn’s helicopter crew.

They came into a hover forty feet over the
Munro
’s deck. Thirty-year-old lieutenant Brian McLaughlin was at the controls; Bonn, a former Army pilot from Northampton, Pennsylvania, who’d been in Alaska for four years, was his copilot. The
ship’s seamen had laid out a fuel hose in a wide S-like shape. The flight mechanic in the rear of the Jayhawk lowered the helicopter’s external hoist line—a steel cable one-fifth of an inch in diameter with a talon hook on the end—and the ship’s crew attached their hose to the hook. The line was raised, and the pilots backed the bird off the side of the ship. The flight mechanic inserted the gas nozzle into their internal fuel tank and began refueling. The seas were calm and the winds were low, and Bonn could see the shadow of the helicopter on the cutter’s deck. Each member of the crew had studied every step in an HIFR, but neither of the pilots had ever actually practiced the skill. It was satisfying to drill with the
Munro
and they were grateful for the opportunity to do it.