Deadliest Sea (3 page)

The crew had been told that their numbers were lower than
on the other trawlers, that they were catching fewer fish and processing it more slowly. The fish master was angry with the totals and would take it out on the captain. Meanwhile, Slotvig would complain to anyone who would listen that Konno was going to get him fired.

Cook Eric Haynes was sick of it. Both Slotvig and Konno would come to him, complaining about the other. The captain would be whining about how the fish master had yelled at him or thrown something at him. Konno, meanwhile, would tell Eric that the captain was
baka
—stupid, or, his English translation: “small head.” The fish master had been on the boat for a few years longer than Slotvig, and Eric had seen him interact with previous captains. Konno wasn’t easy to get along with, period. The guy who had been captain before Slotvig left the company after a blowup with him. A hydraulic line broke and oil got all over the fish in the fish bin. The fish master wanted to pack it anyway. The captain at the time made the crew throw the contaminated fish overboard. He got his way, but he and Konno almost got into a fistfight over it. When they got back to port, that captain was gone. He left the ship and the company. Eric hadn’t seen him since.

Konno was just so damn competitive about their numbers, Eric thought. It killed him when the other boats were doing better. And his personality and Slotvig’s clashed. They were both short-tempered, and neither was the type to let anything go. To Eric, some of it was pretty immature. One time the previous year, the ship’s steward had come to Eric to tell him about something the captain had just written on a dry erase board in the galley.

“Look, Steve just came down and wrote this big thing out there, that he’s fired. That Konno fired him,” the steward said.

Eric went out and erased it all. Then he went to talk to Slotvig. The man was in tears. The ship’s cook ended up mediating
the conflict between the two men, going back and forth between them to settle things down. It blew over, but the captain and the fish master hated each other to the point that Konno wouldn’t even talk to Slotvig anymore. Eric had seen Konno get up and leave when the captain entered the galley. It was ugly, and it was playing out in front of the whole crew.

One night in late February, a handful of crew members were in the galley when they heard a commotion in the hallway one level up. Through the open stairway, the men could see the captain and the fish master standing chest to chest, huffing and puffing at each other. The men in the galley grew quiet. It was an argument about the ice. The captain had evidently been asleep, and had woken to find the fish master had increased the ship’s speed—even though they were still inside the ice pack. Slotvig ran up to the wheelhouse and reduced the speed. The men in the galley had noticed the boat slow down. Moments before, it had been difficult to stand up without holding on to something. It felt like the ship was almost at full speed, the hull beating into the ice pack with a noise like a pounding drum. Now, the captain was screaming at the fish master, hollering that plowing through the ice that way could damage the boat. The captain was fuming.

“It’s
my
fucking boat,” several crew members heard him yell at Konno. “I’m the one that drives it!”

The fish master was cussing back at the captain in Japanese. The men didn’t understand a word he was saying, but he was obviously enraged. They could see the two men shoving at each other in the narrow hallway.

A couple more crew members had stuck their heads out of their staterooms before the fish master spit right in the captain’s face.

The next time the
Ranger
arrived back in Dutch Harbor was the day Julio Morales boarded the ship for the first time. Julio’s
first job had been to keep an eye on the vent on one of the fuel tanks as the ship was pumped full of diesel. He was posted on the deck on the port side when he heard screaming from inside the wheelhouse.

“Get the fuck out of here, motherfucker!” Julio heard someone yell. He had no idea who it was, or what was going on, but the words were clear and angry: “Get the hell out, you motherfucker. Go home!” Whoever was yelling had a strong accent. Julio could hear slamming from inside the ship. About five minutes later, he saw Captain Steve Slotvig emerge, carrying a garbage bag stuffed with clothes. The older man looked pissed as he stormed down the pier. Julio heard the crew talking. They were saying that the fish master had gotten the captain fired.

By the time the
Ranger
left Dutch the next day, a temporary solution had been found: Eric Peter Jacobsen, a twenty-plus-year FCA employee who’d been serving as first mate under Slotvig, would fill in as captain. Most of the crew was relieved. Unlike Slotvig, Jacobsen, whom the crew called “Captain Pete,” was well liked and mild-mannered. His first mate would be David Silveira, a fifty-year-old former tuna man from San Diego who was the captain of one of the FCA’s long-liners, the
Pioneer
. Silveira wasn’t happy about the assignment, but he was willing to step in temporarily. Pete was a friend. Both men were used to sailing on long-liners, and Silveira didn’t want to leave Pete to deal with the trawler and its crew on his own. He agreed to go—but just for a few trips, just until they found someone else.

O
N
M
ARCH
5,
THE
A
LASKA
R
ANGER
left Dutch Harbor with Pete Jacobsen as her new captain, and David Silveira as mate. It took less than a day to reach the fishing grounds. They were targeting yellowfin sole, but a half dozen species were piled
up around Julio’s new knee-high rubber boots: pollack, rock sole, cod, halibut. Not that Julio could tell what was what. He quickly realized there wouldn’t be any formal training in this job. No apprenticing like his work at the marinas in Southern California. He had to watch what everyone else was doing and figure it out, quick.

Julio’s job was to wade into the fish bin, which had been loaded up through a big hatch on deck, and push the fish out onto the conveyer belt on the ship’s port side. The fish ran over a flow scale that recorded the total weight of the catch, and then were herded into a hopper where the bycatch and “prohibs” were sorted out. A stream of salt water kept the fish wet and slippery. Dry fish were too hard to move around. The water soaked the whole factory; sometimes there would be several inches of standing water on the factory floor.

From the hopper, the fish were fed out onto two conveyer belts, and a couple guys stood on the belts and kicked the fish into the right direction so they’d be lined up head first when they reached the circular saws at the ends. Those guys were called the “kickers.” The “headers” manned the saws that decapitated each fish. The fish needed to be lined up neatly to keep as much of the flesh as possible. After the heads were off, a mini-vacuum attached to the saw sucked the guts from the body cavity. The detritus was fed out a discard chute back into the ocean; the “shit chute,” the guys called it. Then the fish were sorted by species and size, packed into metal pans, and stacked into a plate freezer that squeezed the pans together and compressed the fish into compact blocks.

It was exhausting work. It was cold in the factory, and loud, with all the noise from the conveyor belt gears added to the constant grumble of the
Ranger
’s massive 7,000-horsepower engines. Julio didn’t know too many names, and no one had
learned his, either. People just yelled “Hey, hey!” to get his attention. He was learning some of the common language though, like the “hubba, hubba” urged by the Japanese techs. It meant hurry up.

There were video cameras in the factory. That was so the fish master could keep an eye on production from up in the wheelhouse, Julio was told. Sometimes the Japanese boss came down and walked the processing deck. He’d grab smaller fish off the line and throw them out. It seemed to Julio like a lot of the men were nervous in the fish master’s presence. He could be ruthless in chewing out an incompetent factory worker and no one wanted to piss him off, or look lazy in front of him. When the fish master got close, Julio could smell alcohol on his breath.

From the end of Julio’s first six-hour shift his back hurt and his arms were sore. He didn’t complain. Don’t think about it, he told himself. Just keep working. When the men went up to the galley for lunch, they stripped off the rain gear they wore in the factory, which was covered with little bits of fish, scales, and slime. They hung it on hooks, wiped their hands on the sweatshirts they wore underneath, and went to eat.

After thirteen days, the boat was full with thirty-two thousand cases of fish. When they got back to Dutch Harbor, Julio was happy to see his younger cousin Byron Carrillo at the dock. Byron had gotten a call just a few days after Julio. He was originally assigned to a different FCA boat, the
Juris,
but when Byron got to Dutch Harbor he asked if he could be put on the same ship with his cousins.

On Wednesday, March 19, the
Ranger
headed back to the yellowfin grounds. They were up near the Pribilof Islands, a couple hundred miles north of Dutch Harbor, when the first haul came up. Byron had been assigned to a different work squad than
Julio and Marco. When their shifts overlapped, Julio could see him from across the processing space. His cousin had thick, shoulder-length black hair that was flapping all over his face. He had brought way too much stuff to Alaska: three bags in all, with a bunch of nice clothes and shoes he’d never need in Dutch Harbor. “This isn’t a cruise,” Julio told Byron when he saw the bags. Even with all that gear, Byron hadn’t brought a hat. Julio had an extra knit beanie. He gave it to his cousin to hold back his hair.

After only a couple of shifts, Byron was exhausted. It seemed lucky when it turned out his first trip was an unusually short one. The ice had shifted when they had been back in town and now solid pack covered the intended fishing ground. They dropped the net, but the water was too deep and they weren’t hauling up the fish they wanted. On Friday, March 21, the FCA decided to cut its losses, and ordered all the trawlers to return to Dutch.

The weather was terrible back in town. Twenty-five-mile-an-hour winds chapped the men’s exposed faces as they secured the ship to the pier. They would be going right back out, but there was still time to make a few phone calls. It was after midnight as Julio and Byron shuffled down the icy pier to a bank of pay phones. There was an arctic fox digging into a nearby trash can, and a few guys lined up to make calls. They both talked to Julio’s brother, who was about to be deployed to Iraq. Then Julio waited in the snow while Byron called his wife and young daughters in Los Angeles.

B
ACK ON THE SHIP, THERE WAS
still plenty of work to be done. Pallets of groceries were delivered to the dock, and steward Jeremy Freitag helped load the food onto the boat and unpack it
into the
Ranger
’s walk-in freezer. Julio and Byron were part of a group of crew members tasked with loading on a month’s worth of “fiber,” the bags used to hold the frozen fish. The crew formed a chain from the dock to a storage space next to the wheelhouse, handing bundles of the sacks along like men on a fire brigade. After just a few loads, Byron bent over and asked Julio to pile the bags on his back. His arms were too tired, he couldn’t hold them up anymore. In Los Angeles, Byron had been working as a cashier at a gas station, and at a pizza restaurant. He wasn’t used to hard physical labor. He was a little overweight. And he really didn’t like the cold. After the first day in the factory, Julio had asked his cousin if he thought he would come back for the summer B season. “Hell no, I’m not coming back,” Byron said. The work was miserable.

While most of the crew were busy getting the ship loaded up for the next trip, the deckhands concentrated on changing the fishing gear. They would need the bigger net. Everyone had heard that all of the FCA’s trawlers were heading out to fish for Atka mackerel, a foot-long, bumblebee-colored fish that schools near the edge of the continental shelf and is popular in Asian cuisine (most Americans have never tasted the fish).

The targeted fishing ground was four hundred miles west, halfway to Russia, in an area known as Petrel Bank. On Saturday morning, March 22, the ship’s engineers fueled the
Ranger
with almost 150,000 gallons of diesel. It was noon by the time the ship pulled back out into Captains Bay and began the long steam out the Aleutian Island Chain.

M
att Duben could see the air station’s runway from his living room window. It was Saturday afternoon, March 22, and the snowplow was out there, slowly clearing the strip.

Duben flew the Coast Guard’s fixed-wing airplane, the Hercules C-130, or “Herc.” He was forty-five and this was his second Kodiak tour. He and his wife had been stationed on the island in the mid-1990s. They loved it so much they had come back on vacation almost every year since. The town was custom-made for their lifestyle: hiking, fishing, hunting. And the flying was spectacular—arguably the most challenging flying any pilot could ever do. The environment was harsh and there were endless logistics associated with the long distances and violent weather. All the cold, snow, and ice made mechanical problems
common. But it was so beautiful. On prettier days it couldn’t get any prettier, and on nasty days you couldn’t imagine anything nastier. It was his kind of place.

Duben and his wife had five-year-old triplets, a girl and two boys. He’d taught them to fish on a local river. They lived right on base. When he was on duty—typically one or two twenty-four-hour shifts a week—he could wait at home for the call. The goal was to be airborne within half an hour of when a search and rescue (SAR) case came in. From his house, Duben could jump in his truck and be at the hangar in less than five minutes.

The weather report at that morning’s air station briefing wasn’t alarming but Duben knew well that the weather in Kodiak often doesn’t align with the forecast. He’d learned to look out the window and gauge the conditions on an hour-by-hour basis. By midafternoon, it was snowing pretty heavily, with serious wind gusts.

The runway at Kodiak is short, and the wind direction makes even a routine takeoff difficult. In the winter, Kodiak C-130 crews regularly predeploy to Elmendorf Air Force base in Anchorage, where they will be better positioned to respond to a search and rescue call. The weather tends to be clearer there, and the runway is far easier to take off from and to approach than the stubby strip in Kodiak.

If we’re gonna go, we better get out of here now, Duben thought as he watched the plow chug up the asphalt. We should take advantage of the clear runway. Duben’s copilot that day, thirty-one-year-old Tommy Wallin, was thinking the same thing. By late afternoon they were consulting with the day’s operations officer. Everyone agreed: Duben, Wallin, and their five-man crew would fly the Herc to Anchorage.

First, though, they had to defuel the plane. The C-130’s standard load of fuel is 45,000 pounds (6,600 gallons)—enough for
nine hours of flying, or maybe more if the pilots take extreme measures to preserve gas. But the heavier the plane, the longer the runway needed for a safe takeoff. A wet, slippery airstrip makes things worse, which was another reason to head to Elmendorf. If they got a SAR case, the pilots would try to take off in almost any conditions. But from Kodiak in bad weather, it would be impossible to take off with enough fuel to reach an emergency far out in the Bering Sea. It was better to preemptively head to Anchorage.

It was dusk by the time the plane lifted off above the snow-shrouded island. The flight east took just over an hour. As usual, the weather in Anchorage was far better, and after prepping the plane and refueling, the crew loaded into a van to a hotel on base. Elmendorf didn’t have much room for the Coast Guard. The base didn’t have an extra hangar for them, so the crew left the plane on the taxiway. There were beds, though. Thirty bucks a night in Air Force billeting. Before midnight, the entire seven-man crew was asleep.

E
MPTY FOOD TRAYS WERE LINED UP
in the
Alaska Ranger
’s galley, a few holding cold pizza slices hardened with congealed cheese. Every Saturday was pizza night. That was the one constant in Eric Haynes’ weekly menu. It was 2:00 in the morning, but four or five guys were still clustered around one of the galley’s tables—among them boatswain Chris Cossich and factory manager Evan Holmes. They were watching an old boxing video on the galley’s TV, killing time while there was plenty of time to kill.

The ship had been under way for almost fourteen hours, steaming west toward the fishing grounds. There wouldn’t be any factory work until the first haul came up. In the meantime, the crew cherished the downtime. They watched movies and TV shows:
DVDs of
South Park, Family Guy,
and
King of the Hill.
Between meals, some played poker, a few read. Mostly they just slept.

The
Ranger
was already more than one hundred miles from Dutch Harbor. Every FCA trawler was headed to the Atka grounds. The
Ranger
had left Dutch hours ahead of the others, though. Fish master Satoshi Konno was eager to get going. As the ship steamed out of Captains Bay just after noontime on Saturday, March 22, the other FCA trawlers—
Alaska Juris, Alaska Spirit, Alaska Victory,
and
Alaska Warrior
—were still tied up at the pier.

Evan and Chris were two of five men on the
Ranger
’s e-squad, or emergency squad. A couple years before, they had each gone to a week of basic safety training in Seattle. The company had suggested it and paid for it. The class covered everything: firefighting, man overboard, abandon ship. They jumped off a pier into Puget Sound and practiced climbing in and out of life rafts. They learned CPR. Evan thought it was a really good class.

He was twenty-five years old and from Sonora, California. He’d been working on the
Ranger
for just two years, but had moved up fast. As a new processor, he’d tried hard to impress people, and his effort had paid off. Just a few days before, Evan had been promoted to factory manager, one of the more important jobs on the ship. It didn’t hurt that there was such a high turnover. The previous summer B season there’d been at least a dozen brand-new guys all starting at once on a forty-five-man crew. This year they’d had about an equal number, though spread out over the season. Four or five new guys had started in just the past week. If they were hard workers and stuck around, they’d move up quickly, too.

Evan was pretty sure that the fish master had played a role in his promotion to factory manager. Konno wasn’t friendly with many Americans, but he seemed to like Evan. He was one of the
only nonofficers whom Konno knew by name. “Holmes!” he’d yell. Some guys had been on the boat for two or three times as long as Evan and still weren’t even a shift leader. The fish master liked to give people like that a hard time. One time Evan had been sitting with another crew member when Konno pointed at the guy.

“How long on boat? How long fishing?” the Japanese man asked.

“Eight years,” he answered.

Konno turned to Evan: “How long?”

“Two years.”

“Ha, ha! Nice,” the fish master mocked.

“Dipshit,” the other guy said.

Konno wasn’t an easy person to like, but Evan figured getting along with him was basically a matter of doing his job well. The man was all about getting the fish, and he was no hypocrite. In freezing weather, when everyone else was bundled up and moving slowly, the fish master would be sprinting around handling the net with bare hands. He was faster than anyone else. Konno was a bust-ass, no-bullshit worker and he expected the same of the people working under him. That was something to respect.

E
VAN WAS RECLINING ON A BENCH
across from the TV when the galley’s A-phone rang. The A-phone system allowed the crew to communicate between the galley, the bridge, the engine room, and many of the officers’ staterooms. Evan got up.

“Hello?” he said into the plastic receiver.

Nothing.

He hung up, but as soon as he did, the phone rang again.

“Hello?” He waited. “Hello?”

Still, no one.

“What the hell’s going on?” Evan said aloud, but the other guys only shrugged. He left the receiver off the hook and started up toward the wheelhouse.

The ship’s top officers worked twelve-hour shifts, with the captain and chief engineer on days, and the first mate and assistant engineer on duty at night. First Mate David Silveira was in the wheelhouse.

Silveira saw Evan approach the door with boatswain Chris Cossich right behind him.

“We’re taking on water in the ramp room,” Silveira said. “Go down there and do your jobs.”

Evan and Chris looked at each other, then ran two flights back down to the galley.

“Hey, we’re flooding!” Evan yelled at the rest of the guys in the dining area. They were still watching the old boxing tape. Evan and Chris kept moving deeper into the ship, one more deck down to the
Ranger
’s ramp room, at the stern of the boat. The room was basically the ship’s shop, where the crew kept tools and supplies for repairs. It was called the ramp room because of the platform at the rear, where the
Ranger
’s massive trawl nets were pulled up.

Evan opened the door.

Holy shit, there was a foot of standing water in there.

He felt the breath sucked out of him.

Evan knew there should absolutely never be water in the ramp room. The space was on the second level of the ship, a full floor above the engine room, and rudder room. If you left a hatch open maybe a little bit of water could have splashed in from the factory, which was in the middle of the ship on the same level. But Evan had never seen it happen. Besides, the factory was shut down right now. Everything should have been sealed up and all the water lines turned off.

Evan could hear another A-phone ringing. Maybe several phones were ringing. He didn’t hear an alarm going off, though. What the hell, Evan thought. It must have taken a while for the water to get this high. Where was it coming from? Evan had no idea, but as he stared at the far wall, he thought he could see the waterline slowly rising.

The pumps! There were two dewatering pumps on the far side of the shop. They’d have to wade through the water to get at them. Evan was wearing tennis shoes. Chris had on flip-flops. They looked at each other. Okay, this is serious, Evan thought. But how serious? He turned to Chris. “We gotta go,” he said. There was no time to go back upstairs to change into their boots.

As soon as Evan stepped into the standing water his feet and calves began to ache and cramp up. The freezing water felt like a million pinpricks over his skin. His heart raced as they waded through the salt water, pulled a pump from a far wall, and struggled with it back across the ramp room.

We gotta get this thing going, Evan thought as they placed the pump down by the ramp room door. It took just a minute for the two e-squad members to get the ship’s fire hose hooked up to the pump. Then Evan headed toward the stairway up to the deck, the long end of the hose looped around his arms.

Just as he was headed up the narrow metal staircase, Evan ran into Chief Engineer Dan Cook, who was coming down. Evan didn’t know Cook that well. The chief was a big man, six foot two and close to 280 pounds, with a shiny bald head and a Santa-like white beard. The fifty-eight-year-old engineer had only been on the
Ranger
for a couple of months, but Evan could tell he was a jokester from the few times they had talked. Now the older man was deadly serious.

He stopped Evan on the stairs. “No, go to the suits,” he said.

“What?” Evan said. He had the fire hose in his hand and was
prepared to bring it up to the deck where he’d run the end of the hose overboard.

The chief was breathing heavily and sweat was running down the sides of his bald head. “Get everybody up there, too, and get your suits on. We might have to abandon ship.”

J
ULIO
M
ORALES JOLTED AWAKE
. An alarm was going off, a loud, ringing sound like an old-fashioned telephone. He looked around the dark, eight-man bunk room. Most of the racks had men in them; only a couple of people were moving.

It must be a training drill, Julio thought. Then, he heard someone yell from lower in the boat: “The rudder room is flooding!”

Julio climbed down from the top bunk. Out in the narrow hallway, he saw one of his bosses, Evan Holmes, running toward him.

“Get ready to abandon ship!” Evan yelled.

“Are you serious?” Julio said. Evan was opening stateroom doors, yelling people’s names and shaking men awake.

“We got to get out,” he screamed. “The rudder room is full of water!”

E
RIC
H
AYNES WAS ALSO ASLEEP
in his bunk when he was startled awake by his cabinmate, Assistant Cook Mark Hagerman, knocking at the door. “Eric, I don’t know how bad it is, but we’re flooding,” Mark said. “We’re taking on water.”

Eric pulled on his sweats, grabbed his phone and wallet, and started for the wheelhouse. Captain Pete Jacobsen was up there, along with First Mate David Silveira, and Chief Dan Cook.

“What’s going on, Pete?” Eric asked.

“We’re taking on water in the rudder room,” the captain said. He looked at Eric. “We’re gonna go down. We’re gonna sink.”

What? Eric thought. What could have happened? The weather wasn’t that bad—certainly not bad enough for water to have flooded into the ship from above. They hadn’t hit anything. He hadn’t heard anything.

Captain Pete was serious, though, and there was no time to ask questions. Eric rushed back belowdecks. He had seen the
Ranger
’s crew ignore the general alarm before. In his time on the ship, they’d had more than one Freon leak. The gas is deadly, but some guys had stayed asleep in their bunks right through the emergency alarm. Eric started knocking on doors, waking guys up.

“It’s a real emergency!” he yelled. “Go up to the wheelhouse!”

The phones were ringing nonstop and the general alarm was broadcasting a single, loud ring throughout the ship. Plenty of people were still slow to get moving, though. One Japanese crewman was in his bunk with the curtain closed when Eric burst into the room.

“Everybody up top!” Eric yelled. “Right now. Move. Move!” The man pulled back the curtain and looked at Eric with a sleepy smile. “Let’s go! You gotta go,” Eric urged.