Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  Chuck Thompson, a tall chief warrant officer in a tan Carhartt coat, glasses, and a gray cowboy hat that’s actually an OSHA-approved hard hat, is waiting by his truck to take me to his loran station while they off-load the Durango. I climb up into the cab, and we drive off across the snowy island toward the 625-foot-tall long-range navigation radio antennae. A technological breakthrough during World War II, these days loran acts as a backup for GPS satellite navigation systems.

  Chuck’s is one of three isolated Coast Guard loran stations in Alaska. The others are at Port Clarence, near Nome, and on Attu, at the far end of the Aleutians. He tells me he has fifteen people working for him doing one-year tours because it’s considered arduous duty. We drive across fields of blowing snow with dead brown puff weeds sticking through the top till we reach the one-story white station downrange from the broadcast tower. He plugs in his truck to an electrical post so the battery doesn’t freeze and gives me a twelve-minute tour. They recently added a wing of simple, cleanly appointed rooms for the HH-60 crews to stay in when they forward deploy here. Snow is banked up against the windows. The place reminds me of Palmer Station, Antarctica, where I once spent seven weeks. My favorite touch is the tiki thatch overhangs and beach murals in the recreation room.

  We return to the airport in a tracked Ford F350 pickup truck. St. Paul is world famous for its colonies of fur seals, puffins, and reindeer, descendants of the small herd “Hell Roaring” Mike Healy brought back from Siberia in 1891. I wish I could stay a week to see the wildlife. I’d hate to stay a year.

  Back on the runway, the Hercules is ready and waiting for me, as the weather is closing in again. We take off into a sudden blowing snowstorm. I can barely make out the landing lights off to our right. Craig starts to accelerate, following his own tire tracks through the snow. “Here we go,” he says.

  “Nothing like taking off into a bowl of milk,” Steve responds.

  We lift off and keep climbing till we break out of the clouds at around three thousand feet.

  “With snow showers you never know if you’ll ice up and get stuck there,” Craig says, relaxing.

  I ask what determined that we could take off like we just did.

  “It was a real scoosh [as in “scoosh powder,” not good],” he explains, “but the lights are what, a hundred feet apart?”

  “Two hundred,” Steve says.

  “Right. So you need a quarter-mile visibility to take off, so if you can count eight lights you can take off.”

  “How many lights could you see?”

  “Eight,” he deadpans.

  “Hey, Craig, it’s going in a book.” Steve grins. “I’d’ve said ten.”

  Two hours later, we land back in Kodiak, taxiing past a few cars waiting by the runway crossing before rolling up to the hangars where big front-grader snowplows are scraping at the ice with their night-lights on. It’s 5:00 p.m., slippery and dark.

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  ’d arrived on the island four days earlier at 8:30 in the morning when it was twelve degrees Fahrenheit and pitch-black. Sunrise was expected by 9:45 and sunset at 4:30, though with winter solstice past, the days were getting longer.

  Kodiak is the second-largest island in the United States after Hawaii’s Big Island, but unlike the Big Island it’s still 98 percent wilderness, with a ruggedly stunning landscape of snow, ice, Sitka spruce forest, white-capped mountain ridges full of wild goats, ocean cliffs striated with frozen waterfalls, and dark sand driftwood beaches, some with good surfing breaks. Fourteen thousand people live here, including some thousand active duty Coast Guard personnel and their two thousand dependents. Three thousand is also the number of Kodiak brown bears [grizzlies] on the island.

  Along with the fishing town of Kodiak and the Coast Guard base, there are half a dozen villages with populations of between fifty and two hundred, a winter camp for Navy SEALs, a Star Wars rocket launch site for testing ways of shooting down incoming tax dollars, and cold North Pacific waters brimming with life. The main ways on and off Kodiak are by state ferry and airplane.

  A week earlier, a Piper Navajo Chieftain crashed after takeoff from the airport runway, killing six of ten people on board. The nose baggage door had come open just after takeoff, as had happened in two earlier Alaskan crashes involving this same make of aircraft. The pilot, Robin Starrett, was a retired Coast Guard helicopter pilot from the air station.

  I head over to the base that sprawls under the white bulk of Old Woman Mountain. At twenty-one thousand acres, it’s the largest Coast Guard facility in the United States. About half the property is inside its fence line, including the air station, cutter pier, fish school, housing units, commissary, clinic, gym, pool, and two main roads, one of which crosses the runway/taxiway. Big tractors are blowing snow off the runway as I arrive at the hangars. One huge hangar houses four C-130 Hercules transport planes, the other four Jayhawk and four Dolphin helicopters.

  The cargo pier on Womens Bay is homeport to the 225-foot buoy tender Spar, the 282-foot cutter Alex Haley, and the recently arrived 378-foot High Endurance Cutter Munro. On Christmas Eve, eighty-five-knot winds pushed the Munro hard into the pier, breaking some stanchions and camels (giant ship bumpers), so the pier and cutter are now undergoing minor repairs.

  Lt. Steve Bonn from the air station invites me on an HH-60 flight. Another 60 pilot, Lt. Brian McLaughlin, tells me how he recently rescued three men, a woman, and their small dog after they abandoned a sinking fishing boat between Kodiak and the mainland.

  Two weeks before that, he flew to Hinchinbrook Island with some state troopers to recover the body parts of a fisherman who’d fallen off his boat and drowned. When the body came ashore, a bear had eaten it. Hunters found what was left.

  The body of one of the fishermen lost in Alaska’s famous La Conte SAR case had also washed ashore and been eaten by a bear.

  We fly out over the fishing harbor, where dozens of boats are getting ready for the local tanner crab season.

  Our 60 and a smaller 65 will be doing a flyby past the local high school at the end of this afternoon’s memorial service for the dead Piper pilot, Robin Starrett. Some five hundred people from the community are at the service, including a Coast Guard lieutenant who’s coordinating the flyby with the station command center by cell phone. He reports it’s going to go on a half hour longer than expected.

  While waiting, our helicopter practices touch-and-go landings on the gravel airstrip at the small native village of Ouzinkie on Spruce Island. Both Steve Bonn and second pilot Scott Jackson used to fly for the Army’s 82nd Airborne aviation brigade. I ask how things are different for them now.

  “Different missions, different kinds of flying,” Scott says from the right front seat. “We fly in worse weather, but we don’t get shot at or fly in sandstorms.”

  As we take a steep turn above the ocean, I look down and see a fishing boat stacked with crab pots, heading out to sea (on my next flight I’ll spot a couple of gray whales). We get word the service will be delayed another half hour.

  “Gotta take the boring with the terrifying,” Steve notes philosophically.

  We fly over Anton Larsen Bay, above a broken trail in its white frozen surface where a 50-foot boat tried to break through the ice a few days ago and holed its bottom. A helicopter put a swimmer down on the ice with a water pump, and they’d managed to keep the boat afloat and get it in to shore. The memorial service is now finishing up.

  We circle land’s end just north of town and begin parade flying with the 65 one and a half rotor widths behind us and to our right. We fly low past the school, where several hundred mourners have gathered outside the main doors. We circle around for a second flyby before breaking off into “loose screws,” regular formation flying about five rotor widths apart.

  We head inland over spectacular snow-sheathed spruce forests and deep mountain canyons that give meaning to the term “God’s country,” then back to the station over the harbor’s large commercial fishing fleet.

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  eeping the fishing fleet safe and everyone obeying the rules is a big part of what the Coast Guard does on the last frontier, where good fisheries management has helped maintain seemingly healthy stocks of edible marine wildlife including pollock, salmon, halibut, herring, mackerel, and crab. Pollock, however, the largest fishery left in North America, has been in an unexplained decline for several years.

  “Fisheries in Alaska is a major part of law enforcement up here. Down in the lower forty-eight it’s mostly homeland security, and fish unfortunately are put aside,” says Lt. Doug Watson, the executive officer of the North Pacific Regional Fisheries Training Center, the largest of the Coast Guard’s five fish schools, located around the third and fourth floors of the commissary building’s atrium. Its staff of fourteen trains six hundred to eight hundred students a year on how to do effective boardings and inspections, including boarding of catcher-processor ships—floating fish factories that can turn hundreds of thousands of pounds of living wildlife into frozen fish sticks each day and often stay at sea for years on end, changing out fuel, crews, and product. The day I visit the school, they’re finishing a three-day course for a class of fourteen.

  Down on the fishing docks, I join Marine Science Technician Third Class Rob Davis and Marine Science Technician Second Class Allie Rogers from the Kodiak Marine Safety Office inspecting a couple of boats about to head out after tanner crab. A few boats not heading out are covered in six inches of ice or fouled with six-foot growths of seaweed.

  It’s cold and snowing as we climb aboard the Linnea, a 58-foot crab boat that’s seen better days. We head down a narrow plywood passage and wooden ladder to the engine room, where two mates are working on getting it ready.

  “Safety compliance is what we’re about,” Rob explains. “It includes inspecting fire extinguishers and the life raft to see it’s been serviced, is the right size for the crew, and has its hydrostatic [water contact] release up to date. We check for an EPIRB and make sure it’s NOAA registered and its battery and hydrostatic releases are good. We check the immersion [survival] suits to make sure they’re good, the high-water alarms, and flares, of course.”

  Capt. Nathan Clark, a slim but grizzled character with a gray beard who’s been fishing these waters for twenty-nine years, arrives and leads Rob up a couple of narrow steps from the main deck to the pilothouse. He wonders what good an inspection is if he keeps getting boarded at sea. “I got you guys and Fish and Game and the [state] trooper coming down, and then in Dutch Harbor I get boarded again when I’m pulling my pots.”

  “We’re trying to work it out,” Rob sympathizes. “If you have the inspection sticker in the window, even if they board you they shouldn’t have to do another inspection.”

  “Maybe there’s just something about me that attracts trouble.” Captain Nate grins wryly before going down to the engine room to pull a wire that sets off the high-water alarm and wheelhouse warning light that shows Rob they work.

  We retreat to the galley by the open deck, where the stove is turned up red hot and Allie has unrolled and is inspecting the last of four immersion suits. Rob hands the captain his paperwork—two pages, one confirming his voluntary compliance and one a list of contact numbers his wife can call if he goes missing.

  Back on the dock the snow’s picked up. Another boat, the New Dawn, is being inspected by another safety team from their seven-person shop.

  The safety inspections are all voluntary. Only the king crab boats are required to have a Coast Guard safety sticker, and that’s an Alaska state law, not a federal requirement.

  Although commercial fishing is the most dangerous profession in the United States, the industry has resisted mandatory safety standards like those required for cargo ships, cruise ships, and charter boats. As a result of industry pressure, Congress has failed to give the Coast Guard authority to impose new safety rules, at least since 1988, when survival suits, fire extinguishers, and life rafts became mandatory on fishing boats, resulting in hundreds of lives saved. The Coast Guard would like to require that fishing boats also be stable and seaworthy. It recently found a way to get around congressional inaction by reclassifying some large factory trawlers as seafood processors, thus subjecting them to their tougher commercial vessel standards. Unfortunately they had only inspected twelve out of sixty when one of the not-yet-inspected trawlers, the Seattle-based Alaska Ranger, suddenly flooded and sank on April 23, 2008, resulting in five more fishermen’s deaths.

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  here are bald eagles on the seawall by the docks as we leave, and one atop a light pole a block away, and more than a dozen hanging out like seagulls on the roof, crane, and big plastic totes of the fish processing plant down the street. I spot one eagle walking around on the ground below a sign reading FISH PARTS ONLY—NO NONFISH PROTEIN OR FOREIGN MATERIAL.

  When I start taking pictures, a guy comes out and tells me I’m on private property and have to leave. I know why he’s upset.

  A few days earlier, someone backed a big truckload of fish guts out of the Ocean Beauty Seafood processing plant without covering it up. Fifty bald eagles swarmed the truck, and twenty drowned in the offal. The remaining slimed birds were flown to Anchorage for cleaning, where most are now recovering.

  On the way back to base, I ask Public Affairs Specialist Third Class Richard Brahm, who’s giving me a ride, to stop so I can take a picture of a roadside tree with another nine eagles roosting in it. A raven on the other side of the road starts cawing, so I take his picture, too.

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  long with SAR and fisheries enforcement, foundering ships is another huge challenge going back to when the revenue cutter Bear rescued a storm-tossed whaling fleet off Point Barrow in 1888. Today commercial shipping across the Pacific uses the Great Circle Route through Unimak Pass in the Aleutians.

  In July 2006, the giant car carrier Cougar Ace lost ballast control and rolled eighty degrees onto its side with 4,700 new 2007 Mazdas on board. The Coast Guard rescued its twenty-three crewmembers, although a salvage worker would later die while righting the vessel. It was then towed to the island of Unalaska and from there to Portland, Oregon.

  Earlier, in December 2004, the Malaysian cargo ship Selendang Ayu broke up and grounded on Unalaska.

  I remember the national news coverage and TV footage showing the ship split in two with close to four hundred thousand gallons of leaking bunker fuel and diesel and millions of pounds of soybeans washing onto the cold rocky shore, killing birds, fish, and otters.

  What was not as well reported was how, along with being an ecological disaster, the breakup of the Selendang Ayu was also a search and rescue disaster.

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  meet former helicopter mechanic turned truck driver Brian Lickfield at Henry’s restaurant in downtown Kodiak. After twenty years in the service he’s grown a closely trimmed retirement beard that, along with a high, curly mop of reddish hair and full face, gives him a somewhat monkish appearance. We sit down in a booth below a shadow box containing a red king crab roughly five feet across from claw tip to claw tip.

  I ask him about some of his service history, and he tells me of the time flying over Lake Erie one winter that his crew watched a guy on a four-wheeler go through the ice.

  “There are these ice fishers nearby who decide to help, and we’re right there hovering and trying to wave them away, but these guys have to form a chain lying flat on the ice, and then they go through, of course, so now we got four guys to save instead of one. The swimmer went down, and they were all recovered.”

  He gets a bit edgier when I ask about the Selendang Ayu case. The 738-foot cargo ship had lost its engine and drifted for thirteen hours before calling the Coast Guard. A tug had taken it under tow, but then the towline broke and the ship was adrift again. Brian’s Jayhawk flew from Cold Bay to Dutch Harbor at 7:00 A.M., where they met another 60 out of Kodiak.

  “We didn’t get [a full tank of] gas ’cause we wanted to stay light and pick up the crew, but we get out there and they
keep us on scene for two hours. This freighter is just not prepared. They’d set anchor, but it was dragging, and they were three or four miles from land when we started hoisting and maybe half that distance when we were done. Crewmen are wandering around with their luggage, and apparently they didn’t want them all to leave the ship. We finally pick up nine and take them to the Alex Haley in twenty- to thirty-foot seas and follow it into a trough and hoist these nine down in the basket, and the 6021 [the other Jayhawk] picked up another nine. We landed on the beach together and transferred the passengers and took them to Dutch Harbor and thought that was it for us.

  “Only a chip light went on in their helicopter that indicated there might be metal in the gear box, so Command Center says we have to go airborne again. We weren’t happy, but we sucked it up and took off around 5:30 that night.

  “We get back out, and now the freighter is aground and the hull is breached and there’s oil in the water and it’s sinking on a rocky shoal, and now they want to get off. There’s radio communications between the 65 [the cutter-deployed Dolphin] and the Haley about getting permission to start hoisting, but we’re bigger and can do it in one hoist, so they circle around to watch us and the ship, which is in a precarious position.

  “The waves are getting bigger and breaking on the bow, and we’re putting the basket on the deck, but they’re all huddled in this alcove under the bow and nobody will move to get in the basket with these thirty-foot waves breaking, so Aaron Bean, our swimmer, is sent down to get things moving.

  “He went in the basket and walked the first guy over and then the second. Then a big wave broke and washed Aaron down the side of the ship, and I watched him jump back up and get the next guy, and they’re now realizing how critical time is. Another wave knocks Aaron down, and it’s one wave after another. We got six hoists done, and I saw we were too close to the boom, and I told [pilot] Doug Watson to back out, ’cause I’m his eyes and ears.