Deadliest Sea (6 page)

“
A
LASKA
R
ANGER
,
THIS IS
COMMSTA.” It was 2:49
A.M
., just a couple minutes after the fishing trawler’s initial Mayday call. Inside the
Alaska Ranger
’s wheelhouse, First Mate David Silveira was handling communications with the Coast Guard, while Captain Pete Jacobsen consulted with the
Alaska Ranger
’s engineers. Meanwhile, the Japanese crew was sitting in a circle on the floor near the back of the wheelhouse, smoking cigarettes.

“Understand not able to keep up with the flooding and all your crew members have their survival suits on and are standing by at this time, over,” watchstander David Seidl confirmed with the mate.

“That’s a roger,” Silveira answered.

“
Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA. Request that you turn your EPIRB [emergency position-indicating radio beacon] on immediately and keep it with you, over.”

“Roger that. Roger that.”

“
Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA. Request to know what
type of survival gear and flotation devices you have on board, over.”

Silveira replied that the boat was equipped with immersion suits for everyone on board, and with three twenty-man life rafts.

“
Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA. Understand, twenty-man life rafts…. Request to know if you are able to give me on-scene weather, over?”

“On-scene weather is northwest winds about three, five knots, northwest about thirty-five knots,” Silveira reported to the Coastie: gale-force winds of just over 40 miles per hour. “We’ve lost our steering, uh, we don’t have any steering. We haven’t lost power yet, the engines are still on.”

At 2:55
A.M
. COMMSTA Kodiak issued the first Urgent Marine Broadcast alerting all Bering Sea traffic about the foundering ship. Like the standardized maritime distress call—the thrice repeated “Mayday,” which comes from the French
m’aidez,
or “help me”—at-sea alerts begin with an anglicized version of a French word,
panne,
or “breakdown.”

“Pan, pan. Pan, pan. Pan, pan. Hello all stations. This is United States Coast Guard, Kodiak, Alaska, Communications Station. United States Coast Guard, Kodiak, Alaska, Communications Station. The factory trawler
Alaska Ranger
is taking on water in position 5, 3, 5, 3.4 north, 1, 6, 9, 5, 8.4 west. There are forty-seven persons on board, and it is one hundred and eighty-four feet with black hull and white trim. All vessels in the vicinity are requested to retain a sharp lookout, assist if possible, and report all sightings to the United States Coast Guard. United States Coast Guard, Kodiak, Alaska Communications Station. Out.”

The officers in the
Ranger
’s own wheelhouse heard the chilling announcement over HF channel 2182. It was unlikely, they knew, that an unknown Good Samaritan vessel was close by.

The most likely “Good Sams” in the vicinity were the other Fishing Company of Alaska trawlers. The closest was the
Alaska Warrior,
which was more than forty miles away.

“
Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA Kodiak. At this time, we’d like to put you on a zero-five minute communication schedule,” Seidl radioed at 3:00
A.M
. “We’ll contact you every five minutes for updates on your status, over.”

“Roger,” First Mate David Silveira answered.

A few minutes later, Seidl called to ask for an update on the flooding.

“Well, it’s over our, uh, we call it the ramp room. Our rudder room was flooding, coming up the ramp room. We’ve shut the watertight doors,” Silveira reported. “We got out of the area.” Heavy static distorted the second half of the transmission, but it sounded like Silveira was saying that the
Alaska Ranger
’s chief engineer was recommending they abandon ship.

“
Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA,” Seidl radioed back to the boat. “Understand above the rudder room and to your ramp room. You shut the watertight doors, got out of the area, and donned your survival suits, over.”

“That’s a roger.”

“
Alaska Ranger,
this is COMMSTA. Nothing further. Talk to you in five minutes, over.”

“Roger,” Silveira answered.

O
UTSIDE ON THE DECK, SEVERAL PROCESSORS
were leaned up against the rail. Among them was David Hull, a twenty-six-year-old from Seattle who had been working on the
Ranger
on and off for the past five years. David was well known as the ship’s health nut. He kept a blender in his room, along with supplies to make smoothies, and a large collection of vitamins.

It was after the muster, and things seemed pretty quiet. David looked around. He was thinking about the valuables he’d left behind in his room. He felt like things were calm enough that no one would notice if he was gone for a few minutes. He ran as fast as he could in his suit, down two flights to his bunk room, where he grabbed his laptop bag and started stuffing a bunch of vitamins inside. Before long, boatswain Chris Cossich—who was in charge of David’s muster group—was at the door. “Heh! Get out of here,” he yelled. Chris was furious.

“Fuck you! You’re fired!” he yelled at David when the two men got safely back up on deck. “What the hell were you thinking? You are off this boat!” David felt terrible. He realized he’d made a stupid move. He tried to apologize, but Chris wasn’t having it. It was pretty obvious to everyone who heard the commotion that descending into a sinking ship to get a computer bag was about as smart as running into a burning building.

P
ILOT
S
HAWN
T
RIPP WAS TIRED
. He had landed back in St. Paul just a few hours before, after a four-and-a-half-hour medevac flight to Dutch Harbor and back. A forty-nine-year-old man in Dutch had needed an emergency blood transfusion. The simplest thing would have been to put him on a plane directly to Anchorage, which has the state’s best-equipped hospital. But Dutch Harbor’s tiny airport was completely socked in. A plane couldn’t land. But a helicopter could. The helo in St. Paul—Coasties prefer the shortened term to “chopper” or “copter”—was the closest available aircraft.

In the Lower 48, the Coast Guard rarely performs medevacs, except in civic emergencies, like Hurricane Katrina, when the Coast Guard transferred more than nine thousand patients out of battered New Orleans hospitals and nursing homes. An additional
twenty-four thousand civilians were rescued by the Coast Guard from rooftops, floating debris, and even tree branches in the days following the storm. The Katrina tragedy was a shining moment for the Coast Guard. It showcased the strength and flexibility of the service’s real-time planning and response capabilities, and allowed the Coast Guard to demonstrate its willingness to step up and deal with problems that technically fall under other agencies’ purviews. In Alaska, that sort of stepping up happens every day.

Alaska is bigger than four Californias put together—and has a population of just 650,000 people—less than the city of Columbus, Ohio. It’s unsurprising, then, that so many of Alaska’s communities are cut off from the rest of the world. Only in the heart of the state, branching out from Anchorage, where half the population lives, do maintained roads connect communities on a year-round basis. In many areas the only way to move between towns is by boat or plane. Many remote towns don’t have a real hospital. And even those that do often aren’t equipped to handle high-risk procedures. Or even low-risk ones: There’s only been one baby born on St. Paul Island in twenty years, a little girl who arrived prematurely. At eight months, expectant mothers are ordered to Anchorage.

The isolation means that medevacs are high on the Coast Guard’s list of calls. In the summertime, it’s cruise-ship passengers from the massive boats that trace the Kenai Peninsula, or the smaller vessels that come into Kodiak and very occasionally visit the Aleutian Chain. Hunters, hikers, four-wheelers, and snowmobilers routinely get themselves into trouble in Alaska’s unforgiving mountains. The massive shipping fleet whose routes ply the Bering Sea are regular customers as well. It isn’t unusual for a rescue crew to be sent out beyond Adak, a former military base two thousand miles west of Kodiak, to lift an injured worker off a four- or five-hundred-foot container ship.

This medevac had been fairly routine, even though the bad weather and treacherous flying left Tripp wired as he arrived back at the LORAN station. The night vision goggles he and his crew wore in the helo made the Bering look like the opening credits of
Star Trek
—the snowflakes were like a universe of stars hurtling toward him at light speed. Tripp had sixteen hours left on his shift. He’d pass a couple hours with Call of Duty. He’d had an ongoing competition with pilot Steve Bonn. They were well matched in the game: equally terrible.

The phone rang a couple minutes before 3:00
A.M
., just after the men had finished a final face-off. Tripp figured it was the on-duty officer at the operations center in Kodiak, Todd Troup, calling to point out some mistake Tripp had made in his medevac paperwork. It was the ops center, all right, but Troup wasn’t concerned about paperwork. A fishing trawler was taking on water, some two hundred miles south of the island. The 60 Jayhawk in the St. Paul hangar was the Coast Guard’s closest asset.

Tripp did the calculations. The ship was at least an hour-and-a-half flight away. His crew had already had four and a half hours of flying time. A crew is “bagged,” or grounded, after six hours in the air. Of course, if they were in the middle of a rescue, they would keep going until it was over, but in this case, Tripp’s crew would have close to six hours on them before they even reached the troubled ship. Tripp knew it didn’t make sense for his crew to respond, and Troup had reached the same conclusion.

Tripp held out the phone for Bonn: “It’s for you.”

Minutes later, Bonn was knocking on doors to wake the rest of his crew: pilot Brian McLaughlin, flight mechanic Rob DeBolt, and rescue swimmer O’Brien Starr-Hollow. Though at thirty-nine, Bonn was older than McLaughlin and had more years of flying experience, McLaughlin outranked him in the Coast Guard.

The younger pilot was tall, six foot four, and lanky, with pale skin and sharp features. He had enrolled in the Coast Guard Academy right out of high school in Hanson, Massachusetts. As a kid, McLaughlin had been in the Civil Air Patrol, a sort of military Boy Scouts. In eighth grade, he attended a Civil Air Patrol camp that included a visit to the Coast Guard Air Station on Cape Cod. He left with a new goal in life: to become a Coast Guard pilot. He decided his best route was the Coast Guard Academy. It was one of the most difficult schools to get into in the country. The tuition was free, and the academic standards were high. McLaughlin was a trumpet player, a self-declared band geek, and the Academy had a band, of course. The school wasn’t far from his home, just a couple of hours away in New London, Connecticut. He applied, and got in.

It wasn’t a typical college experience. McLaughlin reported to New London in July 1995, for Swab Summer, a six-week basic training program for new cadets. There, he learned to sprint through obstacle courses, to fire an M-16, and to recite the Academy’s cadet mission statement: “To graduate young men and women with sound bodies, stout hearts, and alert minds, with a liking for the sea and its lore, and with that high sense of honor, loyalty, and obedience which goes with trained initiative and leadership; well grounded in seamanship, the sciences, and amenities, and strong in the resolve to be worthy of the traditions of commissioned officers in the United States Coast Guard in the service of their country and humanity.”

Along with about 240 other first-year cadets, McLaughlin spent his freshman year in New London walking silently in the hallways and greeting any upperclassman he encountered by name. In the embarrassing instances when he couldn’t recall a name, he had to greet the older student with “sir” or “ma’am.” Glancing down at the name tags embroidered on the upperclass
men’s uniforms was forbidden—new cadets were required to keep their chins up and their gaze straight ahead at all times. At meals, the freshmen sat together under strict silence in the cafeteria—the “ward room” they called it, just like the officer’s dining room on a ship. McLaughlin was instructed to sit straight up, with a fist’s distance between his back and the back of his chair. He was taught to “square his meals,” by raising a fork straight up from the plate to a few inches in front of his face before bringing it forward into his mouth.

The students were forbidden from closing their dorm-room door any time there was a cadet of a different year, or of the opposite sex, in their room. Freshmen were allowed to date only within their own class, and upperclassmen could date only one year in either direction (no senior/sophomore relationships allowed). Romance rules weren’t relevant to McLaughlin, who had started dating Amy Lundrigan, from the neighboring town of Whitman, at the end of high school. They went together to their senior prom and decided they’d stay together when McLaughlin left for the Academy that summer.

There were no phones in the dorm rooms, but the couple scheduled pay phone calls. Amy would sometimes drive down on weekends and stay with a friend nearby. McLaughlin could spend weekends with her, but he had to be back for curfew: 10:00
P.M
. on Saturday and 6:00
P.M
. on Sunday. They stayed together for four years and got married a few months after McLaughlin graduated from the Academy. After the requisite year and a half afloat on the 270-foot Coast Guard cutter
Tahoma
(he and Amy called it the
Tahoma Neverhoma
), McLaughlin was accepted to flight school in Pensacola, Florida.

All Academy graduates are committed to at least five years of Coast Guard service and they are an elite group among the ranks. There are currently just over forty thousand active-duty
Coast Guard members. Of those, 11 percent are Academy graduates. Among pilots, the number is close to 39 percent. Upon graduation, a twenty-one-year-old Coastie is already a junior-grade lieutenant, outranking enlisted officers who’ve been in the Coast Guard for decades. McLaughlin got his wings at twenty-four and became an aircraft commander at twenty-six. He’d been stationed in Kodiak since July 2006. It was his second assignment as a pilot after Clearwater, Florida.