Stranded

by Aaron Saunders

  Throughout the afternoon, passengers continued to embark the ship. Many had been on pre-cruise land trips that had taken them through Alaska’s beautiful Denali National Park, while other guests had chosen to fly in to Anchorage on the day of the sailing. They would be making the long journey from Anchorage International Airport to the piers in Seward, roughly two and a half hours by car. By late evening they would all be on board, settling into their staterooms and ambling up to the pool deck for a cocktail to toast the “midnight sun,” which wouldn’t set until 11:42 p.m.

  By 8:00 p.m. 1,568 passengers were on board. On this voyage Star Princess carried with her 639 crew members, for a grand total of 2,207 souls on board. It was a relatively good passenger complement; full double-occupancy was 1,621 guests, meaning only a few staterooms would be sailing empty on the voyage south to Vancouver. That was good news for Princess; they would be making money on this voyage.

  The captain of the Star Princess held the mandatory lifeboat drill for all those on board. At fifty-four years of age in 1995, Captain Emanuele Chiesa had been at sea for over thirty years, and held both unlimited Italian and Liberian master’s licences — essentially the golden ticket on the path for mariners looking to obtain their own command. But while Captain Chiesa oversaw all aspects of the Star Princess’s every being during the lifeboat drill, many of the navigational choices while in Alaskan waters had to be deferred to two very important individuals, both of whom were already on board.

  Because the itinerary operated by Star Princess would remain exclusively in Alaska until after the ship departed Ketchikan for the Canadian waters off the coast of British Columbia, two Southeast Alaska Pilots Association marine pilots would share navigational duties while the Star Princess remained in waters designated as compulsory pilotage. They were there to assist the captain and his officers by offering up localized knowledge and expertise to ensure the safe navigation of the vessel in Alaskan waters.

  Pilot Ronald Kutz began his maritime career in the 1940s on tugboats, before graduating to the criss-crossing ferry network in Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands aboard the forest-green ships of Washington State Ferries.[1] In 1962 he took the next logical step and graduated to the role of master with the Alaska Marine Highway System; a network of ferries sailing year-round between Alaskan ports, British Columbia, and Washington State. Covering over 5,000 miles of routes and ports between Bellingham, Washington, and Dutch Harbor, Unalaska, it is one of the largest ferry networks in the world. Kutz was also fortunate to have gotten in on the ground floor of the newly formed ferry company, landing a plum appointment as master of the Taku before graduating to the Wikersham and the Columbia in 1974. Kutz spent the next twenty-four years of his life sailing through the often-treacherous waters of Alaska, finally becoming a marine pilot with the Southeast Alaska Marine Pilots Association upon his retirement from the Alaska Marine Highway System in 1987.

  Pilot Kutz hadn’t been aboard the Star Princess in four years, but it didn’t take him long to reacquaint himself with the ship’s navigation bridge. Like most cruise ships built in the late 1980s, the bridge of the Star Princess was comprised of an enclosed wheelhouse containing the ship’s main communications and manoeuvring consoles clustered around the forward-facing windows that look out over the ship’s bow. Slightly behind them were two additional consoles. The first was a safety console, displaying information relating to the ship’s watertight doorways, electrical systems, smoke detectors, and fire doors. The safety console was located on the port, or left, side of the bridge. The second console was located on the starboard, or right, side that consisted of a navigation table where charts showing the exact routes and waypoints of the Star Princess were placed. Pencils weren’t far from reach — and neither was a hot cup of coffee; the navigator’s secret weapon. An auto-pilot computer was placed on the left side of this navigation table, with an additional radar screen to the right of it.

  On either side of the enclosed wheelhouse were the ship’s bridge wings. Exposed to the elements, they were separated from the wheelhouse by a sliding wooden door that could be latched open or shut as needed. Extending out over the side of the ship, each wing had a console containing all the necessary rudder and propulsion controls to manoeuvre the ship. While the bridge wing isn’t commonly used to navigate unless a ship is coming into or going out of port, lookouts can be stationed on either wing to better see what lies ahead.

  Five days earlier, just before five in the morning, Pilot Kutz had jumped from the pilot boat through the open shell door of the Star Princess as she neared the Point McCartey Pilot Station near Ketchikan. He was beginning a multi-week stint on board with a colleague who had joined the ship in Ketchikan. But Kutz’s colleague would only be on board for a few more days. In just two days’ time, on June 21, 1995, Pilot Kutz would be paired with a new colleague who would help him guide Star Princess on her journey through Lynn Canal. That decision would have significant consequences.

  —————

  THURSDAY, JUNE 22, 1995

  SKAGWAY, ALASKA

  Fifty-seven-year-old Alaska State Pilot Robert K. Nerup was a captain in his own right. Beginning his career in the United States Navy in 1956, Nerup served in active duty at sea for nearly two decades. By the time he retired from the navy in 1980 he was a commanding officer aboard a tugboat. He went on to a civilian career as a marine pilot, joining the Southeast Alaska Marine Pilots Association. His qualifications didn’t end there. Nerup also held a U.S. Coast Guard master’s licence that he had just renewed the previous January, and an Alaska State Pilot’s licence that he renewed in December of 1994.[2]

  Just the day before, June 21, at quarter to eleven in the morning, Pilot Nerup had boarded the Star Princess as she cruised through Glacier Bay, Alaska. While her guests were on-deck admiring the splendour of their surroundings and waiting with baited breath for their first glimpse of the towering face of Margerie Glacier, Pilot Nerup made his way through the myriad of corridors and public rooms up to the ship’s navigation bridge. There he met his colleague and fellow pilot, Ronald Kutz.

  Having been on board for several days already, Kutz brought Nerup up to speed on what had, up to that point, been a rather uneventful voyage. Both men agreed that it would be prudent to split their shifts evenly down the middle for the remainder of the voyage, with a six-hour-on, six-hour-off rotating schedule. Pilot Nerup got to work immediately, taking the 12:30 to 18:30 shift, followed by the 00:30 to 06:30 watch. Pilot Kutz would handle the hours between 18:30 and 00:30, and 06:30 to 12:30 — as he had for his entire duration on board.

  During this brief introduction period, Pilot Nerup also met Captain Emanuele Chiesa. At least, he should have. Captain Chiesa would later testify that he and Nerup talked about what would “happen” during the voyage; a vague description that probably entailed going over arrival and departure times and other crucial navigation concerns. Robert Nerup, however, would later claim the meeting had never taken place.

  Like most men who have lived for nearly six decades on this planet, Nerup was not without his faults. For the previous eight years he had been treated for depression; an affliction that had snuck up on the experienced pilot in his late forties. It wasn’t entirely without cause, either. For Nerup, 1987 had been a disastrous year, which he would likely rather forget.

  His problems had begun on March 21, 1987, when a small vessel he was piloting collided with a log raft in Hobart Bay, just north of Petersburg. A little over a month later, on April 28, Hobart Bay would once again play a crucial role in Robert Nerup’s life, as another vessel under his pilotage ran aground there.

  The knock-on effect of these two accidents was a defining moment for Nerup. Prohibited from piloting a vessel in the state of Alaska until 1989, he was required to attend additional training and skills classes in order to reinstate his licence. He fulfilled all the requirements and was granted his licence. He returned to the waters of Alaska ever so briefly, from 1989 to 1990. But trouble had a way of findin
g Robert Nerup. Just two years after having his marine pilot’s licence reinstated, he was involved in another, much higher profile, accident involving a ship under his command.

  On May 27, 1991, just before seven o’clock in the morning, Nerup was piloting Princess Cruises’ 553-foot Island Princess as she came into Skagway Bay. Except for the strong winds racing down Lynn Canal — which weren’t so unusual — it was shaping up to be a brilliant morning. Not a trace of cloud could be seen in the sky and plenty of sunshine was already bathing the ship’s open decks.

  At the same time that the Island Princess was gliding along the sunlit sea, Regency Cruises’ Regent Sea was also steaming slowly across Skagway Bay. At 631 feet in length, the rugged ex-ocean liner had nearly one hundred feet of length on the Island Princess. But having been built in 1957, and lacking the built-in thruster propulsion added to the bows of newer ships, she was being guided into port with the assistance of a tug boat. The Island Princess, built in 1971, was able to manoeuvre into port on her own thanks to a bow thruster that made lateral movements possible.

  Without warning, everything went haywire. “We saw curtains and sparks and a puff of smoke. We didn’t know what the hell happened,” passenger Lynn Biller would later tell the Associated Press.[3] Biller was standing at the stern of the Regent Sea when the Island Princess seemingly drifted straight toward their ship. Instead of stopping, both ships remained on a collision course, and passengers standing at the rail braced themselves for impact. When the two vessels finally hit, the force of the collision ripped the steel hull plating from the Regent Sea and tore a fifty-foot gash in the side of the Island Princess. Located thirty feet or so above the waterline, the tear literally ripped the outer steel hull from eleven staterooms, exposing them to the elements. Three of the six hundred passengers aboard Island Princess suffered minor injuries from broken glass, while no injuries were reported on the larger Regent Sea.

  Of the two ships in Skagway Bay that morning, the Island Princess bore the brunt of the accident. Although her structure and sea-keeping abilities weren’t affected by the collision, the loss of eleven staterooms during the start of the Alaska cruise season ensured that she would have to go into dry dock for repairs. After both Princess Cruises and the Coast Guard had assessed the situation, the Island Princess sailed from Skagway bound for the Todd Shipyards in Seattle. Her passengers — and Pilot Nerup — were not on board for the journey.[4]

  Regency Cruises fared far better. The accident didn’t impact the Regent Sea’s schedule, and repairs were made to her bent stern plating and railings as she was underway in Lynn Canal, en route to Juneau. While Regency Cruises stated in a press release that “The minor damage sustained to an aft section of the Regent Sea’s mooring deck [did] not affect passenger facilities nor the ship’s structural integrity,” the event did make the news.[5] Once again, Robert Nerup found himself without a licence to act as a marine pilot; this time for a duration of six months, effectively ending his Alaska cruise pilotage season before it had even begun.

  In order to have his licence reinstated, Nerup was required to complete a one-day course in shipboard radar, coupled with a two-week course on ship handling and navigation — including tests on “navigation management,” a term for how members of the ship’s crew interact with each other when on duty on the bridge. Nerup would also be forced to take another test governing the “rules of the road” at sea, and would remain on probation for a full year after that.

  Juneau, Alaska, appears today much as it did in 1918. Ships still dock here, though they bring mainly travellers taking an Alaska cruise vacation.

  For every one of the requirements that the State of Alaska and the Transportation Safety Board had set forth for him, Robert Nerup fulfilled each. With his courses once again passed and his licence reinstated, he returned to piloting cruise ships in Alaska in the spring of 1993. But the accidents had left him shaken.

  To combat his long-standing depression, he had been taking Effexor at 18:00 each evening since 1992. The antidepressant seems to have alleviated the worst of his symptoms, leaving Pilot Nerup with only a handful of physical side effects that he was able to easily deal with. As he ate his dinner on the evening of June 22, 1995, while Star Princess was still docked in Skagway, Nerup took his daily dose of the drug. He hadn’t told anyone that he was taking Effexor, and no one — including the Southeast Alaska Marine Pilots Association — ever thought to ask. He rubbed his eyes and looked out at the imposing mountains surrounding the ship. He hadn’t slept well during the past twenty-four hours, partly due to the demands of the job and partly because of the altered scheduling for this next leg of the cruise.

  The railroad dock in Skagway, shown here in September 1949. The docks were configured so that trains could pull up on the full length of the pier, thus avoiding the need to walk from the main WP&YR station, which was situated at the end of Broadway. Although heavily modernized, this docking location is still used by cruise ships.

  City of Vancouver Archives AM1545-S3-: CVA 586-30.85.

  Pilots Kutz and Nerup had decided that for the run from Skagway to Juneau through Lynn Canal they would modify their six-on, six-off schedule to better accommodate the shorter length of the journey. Both men agreed to stand watch for five hours and fifteen minutes apiece, with Pilot Kutz overseeing the 19:00 hrs departure of Star Princess from Skagway. Pilot Nerup would be officially on duty at forty minutes past midnight on the morning of June 23, 1995.

  Because Star Princess had been docked for much of the day, the services of both pilots hadn’t been needed. Hypothetically, this should have been a day of rest for both men, but sleep wasn’t coming easily to Pilot Nerup.

  That day he had stood watch from 00:30 until the Star Princess came alongside in Skagway at 06:00, at which point he retired to his stateroom to sleep. He awoke at noon, ate lunch, and remained awake until 14:00 that afternoon before returning to his stateroom. Nerup then managed to get three more hours of shut-eye before awaking at 17:00 to have dinner and take his Effexor. By the time he finished dinner and finally crawled back into his bunk at 19:00, Robert Nerup had woken up and gone to sleep four separate times in less than twenty-four hours.

  This lack of sleep likely didn’t give Nerup cause for concern; after all, he knew Star Princess inside and out, having last joined her for a two-week stint on May 17 as she began her Alaska season. This was just one of ten trips Nerup had made aboard the ship in the past few years — more than enough to know how she responded to helm commands and handled at various speeds.

  Alaska marine pilots aren’t exclusive to any one ship or cruise line, but it speaks to Nerup’s character that so much of his work involved the ships of Princess Cruises, even after the collision on board the Island Princess three years previously. If the line had any misgivings about his presence on board their ships, they certainly didn’t express them publicly.

  As the engines of the Star Princess rumbled to life, Captain Chiesa deftly guided his ship away from Skagway’s railroad dock and out into the open expanse of Lynn Canal. Her screws bit into the churning water, whipped up by Skagway’s trademark wind, as she came around to port. Being the middle of summer, passengers gathered on the open decks to admire this scenic departure. In the distance, the White Pass & Yukon Route trains slowly pulled away from the railroad dock, their work hauling tourists to the summit and back done for another day.

  Once the Star Princess was clear of the harbour and well on her way, Captain Chiesa gave control of his ship to Pilot Ronald Kutz. It was a little after seven thirty in the evening. In roughly five hours he would pass the torch to Pilot Nerup, who would guide the vessel the remainder of the way to Juneau.

  Their routine voyage was about to change dramatically.

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24, 1918

  TRANSITING LYNN CANAL, ALASKA

  ABOARD PRINCESS SOPHIA

  Like most great disasters, the seeds of this one were sewn innocuously. As the ship’s clocks on board the Princess Sophia hit mid
night and the date silently slipped over into the first seconds of Thursday, October 24, 1918, the men who stood on her navigation bridge were facing a series of minor annoyances.

  First, there was her late departure from Skagway — three hours in total — that would put Princess Sophia behind schedule for the remainder of her journey south unless they could make up time. Making up time, however, was beginning to look impossible: less than an hour after setting sail from Skagway a raging snowstorm kicked up as they passed the small town of Haines, Alaska, and entered into the widest stretch of Lynn Canal. Captain Leonard Locke, a stickler for adhering to published schedule times, kept her speed up in the hopes of making up time. With the fierce snow came winds that were bearing down from the north, hitting the Princess Sophia at her stern with gusts of up to fifty miles per hour. The high winds also kicked up heavy swells, and Princess Sophia began to pitch and roll heavily as she drove on through the growing storm, bound for Juneau.

  The nasty, hard-driving winter storm would surely result in an uncomfortable ride for the 278 passengers, but it was far from the worst storm that the men on the bridge that night had ever seen. Along with Captain Locke, First Officer Jerry Shaw strained to see much beyond the foredeck mast. Although all of the lights before the bridge and in the wheelhouse had been extinguished prior to setting sail from Skagway, Princess Sophia’s running and navigation lights were now acting as miniature spotlights against the snow, illuminating each flake as if it were a high-intensity light bulb as it zipped past.