Coast Guard Casts a Wary Radar Eye on S.F. Shipping : Airport-Like Control Center Tries to Keep Order Among Big ‘Merchies,’ Smaller Boats

Sailors and fishermen still chill when asked to recall Jack Favaloro’s terror-choked voice, recorded as he watched a 721-foot tanker burst through the fog off San Francisco Bay and close in on his fishing boat.

“Change your course!” he radioed to the tanker, warning that he could not move his own vessel while his engine was engaged in hauling in a net. “What are you doing, man? You’re going to hit right over me! . . . Oh, my God! Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!”

Favaloro’s boat, the Jack Jr., was splintered and sank in that collision near Point Reyes last Memorial Day and the tanker crew to this day contends that they never realized that they had hit anything. Favaloro and his two crew members were killed.

Like Skies Near Airport

The loss of the Jack Jr. was poignant, well-publicized evidence of the dangers of the crowded seas in and around San Francisco Bay. With a profusion of tankers and freighters, fishermen and ferries, sailboats and even windsurfers, the waters can sometimes resemble the busy skies around a major airport.

Such a comparison has not been lost on the Coast Guard, which on Dec. 1 launched a first-in-the-nation nautical equivalent of an airport control tower for oceangoing ships approaching or departing from San Francisco Bay.

From a small, dimly lit operations center on Yerba Buena Island in the middle of the bay, Coast Guard ship traffic controllers use radar and radio to locate and identify approaching ships, plot their courses, then relay that information to other vessels in the area.

Both the goal and the participants are similar to those in air traffic control: to assure “adequate separation” among vessels. They focus on large commercial craft. Smaller vessels--those under 300 tons, or about the size of a 60-foot fishing boat--work under a maritime version of the “see-and-be-seen” rule.

The Coast Guard operations center resembles a small air traffic control room, with banks of electronic gear, wall-sized maps and sharp-eyed controllers illuminated only by the dull, gray-green glow of their radar screens.

Watch for ‘Merchies’

Unlike air traffic controllers, however, the Coast Guard controllers cannot order anyone anywhere. They simply keep other traffic aware of the location of “the big boys” or “merchies”--the giant merchant ships heading to or from one of the five large ports located in the bay.

“The easiest way I can describe the system,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Mike Shidle, “is to compare it to air traffic control on the seas--only we don’t control. Let’s face it, things are moving a lot slower out there than they are at an airport.”

The work is done in voluntary cooperation with the ships’ mates and masters, who are now expected to check in by radio with Coast Guard officials when they reach a certain point on one of the three main shipping lanes into the bay--from the north, west or south.

Crew members continue talking to radio controllers at designated checkpoints while staying within predetermined lanes. When the skipper of a smaller vessel hears on the radio that a merchant ship is approaching, he or she then contacts the ship directly.

In the case of the Jack Jr., Coast Guard officials said, the system could have alerted skipper Favaloro to the tanker’s presence long before he could see or hear it. With extra time, he could have pulled his nets up sooner, moved out of the area, or broadcast his location to the tanker in time for the lumbering merchant ship to steer a safe course.

“The idea is to avoid surprises,” said Shidle, executive officer of the Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Service in San Francisco. “We cannot steer their ships for them, but we can tell them who else is out there--and, more important, where he is going.”

‘Chockablock Full’

There is the potential for surprises aplenty in the area, which Shidle said is “chockablock full” of sea traffic.

At any given time, waters off the bay can be filled with oil tankers headed for refineries in the north bay, grain ships on their way to Sacramento, coal vessels steaming toward Stockton, or container ships and vehicle carriers destined for San Francisco or Oakland. Navy warships also routinely go in and out of the bay.

Last year, the Coast Guard logged 76,073 trips--both in and out of the bay--by these big ships.

In the middle of all this are fishing boats, a growing flotilla of passenger ferries shuttling commuters between San Francisco and its suburbs and thousands of pleasure boats that can carpet the bay with white sails during sunny summer weekends.

Fog a Complication

Complicating things further is San Francisco’s trademark fog--the same fog that contributed to the Jack Jr. tragedy. Fog makes it particularly difficult to spot fishing trawlers, Shidle said, because they ride low in the water and present a poor radar target.

Indeed, Shidle said, the sinking of the Jack Jr. was the primary motivation for the new service.

Although the traffic-watch program is voluntary--in part because much of the territory being watched is in international waters outside the bay, thus not under U.S. jurisdiction--fully 81% of the big merchant ships approaching or departing the bay cooperated in the program in the first nine days of December. Most of the vessels that did not cooperate were simply unaware of the new program and did cooperate when they learned of it, Shidle said.

The program has grown out of the “vessel traffic service” that the Coast Guard began operating informally within San Francisco Bay in 1968. The program was formally funded after a 1970 collision involving a tanker under the Golden Gate Bridge. Using old air traffic radar, it monitored traffic and broadcast ship movements. (The air traffic radar was replaced with standard Navy shipboard equipment when the service was expanded to start monitoring traffic in the open seas.)

Those earlier efforts to guide traffic in the San Francisco area were so successful that the idea has since been copied at five other busy or environmentally sensitive ports: New York, Seattle, Houston, New Orleans and Valdez, Alaska.

Not in All Ports

The Coast Guard does not control traffic in the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach or San Diego.

Although San Francisco Bay no longer is among the nation’s busiest ports--it saw only about one-fifth the number of merchant ships as did first-place New Orleans last year--it presents a unique safety problem because the best fishing areas are in the middle of the main shipping lanes.

“If there was no need to fish where the big boys are,” Shidle said, “we would not be here.”

Shidle said that the new open-seas system starting off San Francisco is the first to extend beyond U.S. territorial waters. “This is the only location where we’re trying to coordinate an unrestricted waterway,” he said.

The Coast Guard refers to San Francisco Bay as “the birthplace of modern vessel traffic systems.”