Deadliest Sea (12 page)

Gwen examined the decal and then the life rafts: They had to hold everyone on board and have up-to-date inspection stickers. Many of the other items on her list were discretionary. Technically, an observer has a right to refuse to get on any boat, though it rarely happens. If an observer rejects a boat for anything other than no-go reasons, the company has to scramble to find a replacement. Meanwhile, the ship can’t leave port, which is a situation that’s bound to make many people extremely unhappy.

As she walked the ship with Captain Pete, Gwen noticed that some of the seals on the
Ranger
’s watertight doors looked like they were in poor repair. A couple were frayed, and it was a struggle to get the doors closed correctly. The ship was dirtier than any other boat she’d been on. Still, the
Ranger
passed her checklist. As the ship got under way, she unpacked her bag in the cabin she’d share with her co-observer, Jayson Vallee.

J
AY WAS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD
and newer to the job. He wore round, wire-rimmed glasses and had a full beard and coarse red hair he tamped down with a Red Sox baseball cap. Three months earlier a friend had dropped Jay off at the Manchester, New Hampshire, airport for the flight to Anchorage. It was Christmas Eve, and Jay had managed to get a one-way ticket from New Hampshire to Alaska for just $400. He’d have multiple stop
overs, but the price was worth it. Saltwater would reimburse him $350, their estimate for the trip from Seattle to Alaska.

Jay had held a series of odd jobs since graduating with a four-year biology degree from the University of New Hampshire in 2005. He drove a bus and worked processing insurance claims. He saw Saltwater’s ad on Craigslist, interviewed over the phone, and was offered the position. It wasn’t a hard decision. He’d been out of college for almost two years and this was the first job offer he’d had that had anything to do with his major. He was on the flight a couple weeks later.

It was after 1:00
A.M
. when Jay stepped off the plane into Anchorage’s newly renamed Ted Stevens International Airport. He was expecting deep snow, but there’d been more accumulation in New Hampshire. He got in a cab. The driver already knew the way to the Saltwater bunkhouse.

In the early 1990s, when the federal observer program was just getting off the ground, Saltwater was among ten companies that formed to screen, hire, and manage new Alaskan observers. Since then, the number of contracting companies has been whittled down to five. Two of them, including Saltwater, have their headquarters in Anchorage. The other three are in Seattle. New observers can get their three-week orientation training in either city.

There were nineteen in Jay’s class, eight men and eleven women. Every weekday for three weeks, they reported to the second floor of an unadorned office building in downtown Anchorage. The classroom where the students met had windows facing south. They got there by 8:00
A.M
. It was after 10:00 by the time the sun rose behind the Chugach Range to the east of town, and long before they left the building at 5:00
P.M
. each day, all traces of light had already disappeared below the horizon. It was depressing, Jay thought. It felt like the whole city was draped in a permanent gloom.

The space wasn’t unlike the college science classrooms where most of the students had spent untold hours as undergraduates. Stuffed fish were hung on the wall. Crowded bookshelves held stained manuals and species-identification books. At the back of the room, the contents of a life raft’s survival kit had been broken open and arranged on a corkboard wall. There were flashlights, flares, and first-aid supplies. Water and food rations were displayed, along with a paddle, a rigid bag used for bailing out a raft in rough seas, a large rewarming sack, and a horseshoe-size plastic ring known as a quoit, which is attached to a rescue line and intended to be thrown to people outside the raft who need to be pulled in. Next to the survival display were tacked up dozens of press clippings about boats fined for various environmental infractions—and about sunken fishing vessels and their survivors and victims.

The primary focus of the course was to teach the students the types of fish they would be working with in Alaska and how to sample the catch. Many hours were also spent reviewing the different types of boats and fishing gear they might encounter, which would influence how often they would sample and in what manner. The students were exposed to an overview of the complex laws that govern the fisheries, and were spoken to by a NOAA enforcement officer who explained how to report environmental violations.

Jay had hours of homework most nights. There was a mid-term and a final and the students had to score at least 80 percent on each to pass the class, and get eight out of ten species on a fish identification test as well. In a separate classroom a floor below, the instructors pulled a few dozen frostbitten specimens from the freezer and laid them out on stainless steel tables. The samples were old and had scars from years of poking and prodding by nervous students. To Jay, the fish test was the hardest
part of the class. Each student had to use an identification key to pinpoint the exact species. It was harder than it sounded. Most of the samples looked very different from the pictures in Jay’s book, and even once you narrowed it down, there were so many varieties of each fish: five types of salmon, fifteen skates, sixteen sculpins, more than thirty kinds of rockfish.

In the last week of class, the students were split into two groups: men and women. The women gathered around a veteran female observer and were given a chance to ask questions about how to handle potential sexual harassment on a boat. They were drilled with some time-earned wisdom: You’ll be in rubber boots and a slimy sweatshirt, your hair pulled back in a ponytail, and smelling like fish guts. You won’t have looked in a mirror in weeks, but you’ll still be the most beautiful woman the fishermen have seen in months. They’ll probably let you know it. The women were advised to maintain professional boundaries and—above all—not to get sexually involved with a fisherman on a boat. It would damage their reputation and make it harder to do their jobs. Don’t kid yourself into thinking you’ll just keep it secret, the new observers were told. Gossip spreads fast on a fishing boat.

Meanwhile, the men got a lecture in how to avoid coming off as smart-ass college boys.

The last week of class, the entire group loaded into a bus for the ride to a local university’s indoor pool, where Jay and his classmates practiced getting into their survival suits. They were timed to do it in under a minute—considered the industry standard. They were taught a very specific method: Lay the suit out on the floor, unzip it, and sit down on top of the open torso to wiggle your feet into the neoprene legs. Once their legs were in, they were to kneel forward and pull on the upper half of the suit.
The weak arm went in first; then they should use their strong arm (the right for right-handed people) to secure the suit’s hood over their head
before
sliding in the second arm and zipping the suit up over their chins with the long string attached to the plastic zipper.

Back in the classroom, the instructors provided a few tips for getting on suits quickly and effectively. Plastic bags can be stored in the legs of the suit and slipped over the shoes to help the feet slide in more easily. Hats should be removed and long hair pulled back to be sure the seal between hood and face is watertight. If it’s time to put on the suit, it’s time to zip it up all the way. There were plenty of instances of bodies being pulled out of the water with a suit on and the zipper opened up to the sea.

The observers-in-training each shuffled up to the pool’s diving board, crossed one leg over the other, held one hand over their face to prevent their mouth flap from being forced open, placed the other on their head to hold the hood in place, and jumped into the water. They swam laps in the suits—always on their backs, to prevent water from leaking into the neck. And they practiced climbing into a life raft deployed in the pool. They were taught how to pull their upper body onto the edge of the raft, and then kick their feet hard to help lift their lower body up in the water. From that position, it was easier to be pulled into the protective structure. Each trainee took a turn at pulling and being pulled.

The observers practiced linking up in the water in small groups, rafting together head to feet, or in a chain, with each person’s legs wrapped around the torso of the person in front of them. Finally, the whole group linked arms to create a large, pinwheel-like circle. With their heads toward the center and their feet facing out, all the students could kick at once, a maneuver that would theoretically allow a group of people to be
more easily spotted in the water from an aircraft flying far overhead. There was some additional warmth to be gained from staying together; there was a definite benefit regarding visibility. Perhaps the greatest advantage, though, was to morale. Feeling like you’re helping someone else to survive can sometimes be the key to your own survival. The instructors repeated the same points again and again. Most of them had experienced a few close calls out there themselves. They tried their best to drive the safety lessons home.

After the pool day, back at the training center, the students picked out their own personal Gumby suits from several sizes and brands—eight different fits in all. Jay found a good match, then rolled the suit back up and stuffed it into its storage bag along with a couple pieces of hard wax he’d been given to keep his zipper working smoothly.

He completed the program on January 15. The next day he was on a plane. His first vessel was a small catcher boat out of Akutan, a village of eight hundred people thirty-five miles east of Dutch Harbor. The
Ranger
was his second ship. He’d been aboard for about three weeks now.

W
HEN
G
WEN ARRIVED ON
M
ARCH
19, she and Jay decided she’d take over Chris’s noon-to-midnight shift. As the junior observer, Jay would stay on the midnight-to-noon. So far there hadn’t been much work. The day Gwen got on the
Ranger
for the first time, the ship left Dutch Harbor to fish for yellowfin sole. They’d barely done any fishing at all—just four hauls—before the fish master ordered the boat back to Dutch. Word was that the other FCA boats were doing the same. They’d given up on yellowfin fishing for now; instead they’d be steaming several hundred miles west to fish for Atka mackerel.

They set out at noon on Saturday, March 22. As always, Gwen recorded the time in her logbook. She spent much of the afternoon in the wheelhouse. She watched a movie in her cabin and was asleep by 10:00
P.M
. She woke up to the A-phone ringing.

Jay picked up.

“Hello? Hello?”

No answer.

As soon as he put the receiver down, the phone was ringing again.

Gwen worried that Silveira might be trying to reach them from the wheelhouse. Maybe he had a question about paperwork. Gwen knew both Silveira and Captain Pete were new to trawling. They’d been having trouble with some of the record-keeping required by recent changes in fishing laws. She got up.

The ship’s alarm went off just as Gwen climbed the last stairs to the wheelhouse. Silveira was inside.

“This is bad. It’s really, really bad,” he said.

“What’s going on?” Gwen asked.

“We’re flooding.”

Silveira was in the middle of a conversation with the ship’s assistant engineer, Rodney Lundy. Moments later, Rodney’s boss, Dan Cook, came through the door.

Gwen sat down and listened.

It was the rudder room, Rodney reported. The water was already thigh-high.

The engineer thought it was already too late to stop the flooding. They had to focus on blocking it, partitioning off the water and, above all, preventing it from spreading to the engine room.

G
WEN HAD A PERSONAL LOCATOR BEACON
, or PLB, essentially a hand-held EPIRB. Every Alaskan fisheries observer is issued
their own beacon. The several-hundred-dollar gadget is registered to a particular user. Once a beacon is transmitting, a NOAA station in Maryland picks up the signal instantly. They get a GPS hit that’s accurate within a few dozen yards and should immediately contact the observer’s employer and local rescue authorities.

Each time she got on a new boat, Gwen looked for the best place to store her survival suit and sandwich-size PLB. On the
Ranger,
she had her beacon on a hook in her cabin; her suit was stored in the wheelhouse, separate from the suits for the crew. Jay showed up in the wheelhouse soon after the general alarm started going off. When he realized it was a real emergency, he ran back down to the observer cabin to get his PLB and Gwen’s. Meanwhile, Gwen grabbed her survival suit and started pulling it on. She set off the beacon as soon as she was suited up. Jay set his off at about the same time.

Gwen was still in the wheelhouse when the satellite phone call came in. Silveira picked up. It was the representative at Saltwater, calling for Jay. Was there a real emergency?

“Yes, Jay did activate his PLB,” Silveira reported. “We’re flooding.”

Silveira was looking right at Gwen as he hung up. “Do you have yours activated?” he asked her.

“Yes, I turned it on!” Gwen replied. “They didn’t ask anything about me?”

“No,” Silveira said. “They didn’t.”

F
OR MORE THAN AN HOUR
, G
WEN LISTENED
as Silveira and Captain Pete consulted with the engineers, sent men down to try to control the flooding, and made calls to the other FCA trawlers and the Coast Guard. Everyone else had gotten into
their suits and had been ordered back out onto the deck. Gwen figured she could stay inside if she just stayed quiet and out of the way.

From the moment she walked into the wheelhouse, Gwen had known the situation was dire from the look on Silveira’s face and by his tone of voice. Based on what she overheard, she didn’t think the
Ranger
could be saved, but she did think it was possible to contain the flooding until another ship arrived. She imagined abandoning ship onto the
Warrior
or, better, onto a Coast Guard vessel.