As ‘Storm Gods’ Lash Out, Men Feel Their Fury

Jesse Evans spotted it first through the scope of his dad’s Winchester rifle. Something small, red, about 100 yards down the bear trail. A dead fox, maybe.

Jesse and his best friend, George Conners, crept through the black spruce forest for a closer look. In the moss, beside bear scat and paw prints, lay a neoprene mitten, teeth gouges on the cuff.

Jesse picked it up. It felt heavy. With his hunting knife, he slit an “X” across the palm and peeled the mitten open.

Out tumbled sand--and five fingers. A shiver ran up Jesse’s back.

“There’s . . . there’s a dead body around here somewhere,” George stammered.

On Shuyak Island? The northernmost isle of Alaska’s Kodiak archipelago was inhabited by bears, deer, wolves and varmints. Not humans. As far as the boys remembered, Jesse said later, there hadn’t been any storms or reports of overboard fisherman in these waters all summer.

Where had this mitten come from?

Jesse poked inside it with his knife. He removed a thumbnail and three dime-sized bits of skin, dropping each one inside an empty tobacco tin.

Jesse, 17, and George, 16, had always dreamed of becoming detectives. Now, on this August hunting trip, they had stumbled onto a clue to a baffling six-month mystery in the Gulf of Alaska. It was the last piece of a tale of danger and struggle, of desperation and courage, of great heroics in the face of nature’s remorseless power.

The seas are twice as high as the ship. They rise in huge gray walls, their faces nearly vertical, their crests sheared off and slung for miles by wicked gusts.

The ship labors up the waves, teeters at the top and plunges down the backsides. On the steeper swells, when she can’t get her bow up in time, she plunges straight through the crests, launching out the far side, water shooting out her scuppers.

The average wind speed is 60 knots, spiking to twice that. Visibility is 50 feet in blowing snow and sleet. The wind-chill factor is 18 below zero; spray freezes the moment it’s airborne. The barometric pressure is plunging a millibar an hour.

The air is so highly charged with electricity that radios and navigational equipment are useless.

It is 6 p.m., Jan. 30, 1998, on the Fairweather Grounds in the Gulf of Alaska. For the skipper and four-man crew of the La Conte, a fishing vessel, it’s the maw of meteorological hell.

All afternoon, the La Conte has pounded into headwinds and building seas trying to make the nearest land, 80 miles eastward. In six hours, crew members will remember later, she manages three miles.

And the ship is leaking. Every hour, 2,200 gallons are pumped from her bilge, but the water keeps rising, sloshing now just below the engine.

In the wheelhouse, Mark Morley, a burly skipper who is to celebrate his 36th birthday in 11 days, wrestles the spoked helm and fights to keep his feet on the heaving deck. Every few minutes, he leans forward to peer out at the storm gods through half-inch Lexan windows caking with ice.

Wind is screaming through the wire stays. Hail hammers the decks. Geysers of spray explode off the bow, coating the mast and rigging a ghostly white.

Morley can’t see them, but rogue waves are prowling out there, merging, pulling apart, piling up on themselves. Some are as high as 10-story buildings.

Technology vs. the Storm Gods

In fishermen’s lingo, the La Conte is a soft-chinned, western rig. That means she has a rounded stern, a wide cross section and a wheelhouse in front of a raised midships section.

Built in 1919, she’s 77 feet long and weighs 66 tons. Her hull is double-planked oak. In her belly sits a 365-horsepower diesel engine, which gives the La Conte speeds up to 12 knots.

Her wheelhouse is outfitted with state-of-the-art electronics: a Loran plotter, Global Positioning System for navigation, radar, VHF-FM short-range radio, and float switches that sound when the lower deck takes on too much water.

For emergencies she’s equipped with five neoprene survival suits, seven lifejackets and an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, an EPIRB. About the size of a bowling pin, the EPIRB sits in a plastic holster on the foredeck. It has a water-sensitive switch that sends out a radio signal if the ship goes down. EPIRB signals are automatically relayed by satellite to the U.S. Mission Control Center in Suitland, Md.

The La Conte is also equipped with the best electric bilge pumps, Morley told the crew a week earlier as they set sail from Sitka for the 150-mile trip north to the Fairweather Grounds. That’s why the skipper didn’t pay much mind to the loose plank on the stern’s hull, close to the water line, that rattled to the touch of a mallet. The pumps can handle a slow leak just fine.

The La Conte arrived at the grounds shortly after 3 a.m. on Sunday, Jan. 25. Beneath an icy sky and aurora borealis, the crew--Robert Doyle, William Mork, Mike Decapua and David Hanlon--lowered their longlines and got to work.

They’d pulled up only a few hundred pounds of yellow eye when the seas began to build and the wind sheared ominously in the rigging. At noon Monday, Morley decided to leave the fishing gear in the water and make for Graves Harbor, 80 miles southeast.

Safe in port, the crew spent two days cleaning the engine and overhauling the bilge pumps as Morley, the captain, fussed about the abandoned gear, the unused space in the fish holds, and his fiancee, Tamara Westcott, at home in Sitka expecting a baby in seven months.

He needed to put money away, not lose it on lousy fishing trips, he told the crew. With two or three good sets, he could break even.

By late Wednesday afternoon, the winds eased a bit, but the seas were still coughing up 10-foot swells. A low-pressure system was cranking up all the way down Alaska’s southeastern tail. The forecast: 40-knot winds and 30-foot breakers on the Fairweather Grounds within 24 hours.

Morley told the crew they were going back out to retrieve their gear. With luck, he said, they might get some more fishing in.

Crewman Shared His Trepidations

The crew appeared nonchalant--except for Hanlon, who had spent 34 years on the ocean and steered fishing vessels before he could drive.

Hanlon was quiet, self-assured, slow to judge. The sea had kept him simple. He let his sandy hair and mustache grow long, and he stuck to jeans, sweatshirts and XtraTufs rubber boots. He’d had a few girlfriends, never any kids. He had no car, no land address, not even a post-office box.

One thing he held tight was a deep respect for the sea. “She demands attention,” he once told his older brother, John. “She’s not judgmental, but she has no forgiveness in her either.”

In commercial fishing, one of the most dangerous of professions, it’s not uncommon for mariners to leave ship suddenly after getting a bad feeling about the sea, a vessel, the storm gods.

On Wednesday evening, Jan. 28, hours before the La Conte left Graves Harbor, Hanlon got one of those premonitions and rang up his brother, John, in Juneau. He wasn’t home, but a nephew, James Hudson Jr., answered.

“She’s not safe, Jimmy,” Hudson remembers Hanlon saying. “I don’t like her. This is going to be the last time I sail the La Conte.”

Now it’s 6:15 Friday evening, and Morley is staring into the teeth of the storm gods. So far, so good. The high-water alarm below decks hasn’t flashed.

Then one of those rogue waves hits.

It avalanches over them, burying the decks under tons of flashing white broth. The ship hesitates; then slowly, heavily, the La Conte rears out of the water like a submarine surfacing.

“Skipper!”

Morley pulls himself up off the no-skids and focuses. The battery-powered emergency lights flicker. Someone’s standing in the doorway, panting, dripping. It’s Decapua, his deckhand.

“We got jeopardy,” Decapua says. Water is rising fast in the engine room.

“Pumps?”

“Both out.”

Below decks, Robert Doyle is up to his shins in bone-numbing water. Both electric bilge pumps have shorted out. The backup gas-powered pump is too wet to start. Half the engine is underwater. Doyle hears it gag, gurgle, cough.

The ship is losing her center of gravity and rocking wildly, crew members will say later. Doyle gets tossed about and slammed against a bulkhead.

Decapua bangs down the stairs, takes one look at the dead engine, the water showering through the seams of the deck, then sees Doyle, dazed, sitting in the water.

“Bobby, get up! We gotta bail!”

Mork and Hanlon arrive and the four of them start a bucket brigade. It comes in faster than they can bail. Within minutes it’s up to their thighs, then their chests. It’s sloshing around their necks when Morley appears in the hatch.

Wild-eyed.

“Get outta there! We’re going down!”

“Mayday! Mayday!”

Morley huddles on the floor of the bridge, now a dark igloo. His ship is powerless and drifting in the dark, taking huge seas over her decks in the center of a powerful arctic storm. Below him, in the galley, the crew is pulling on survival suits, preparing to abandon ship.

Morley clutches the microphone, searching for a signal, a voice, anything but the static coming over the VHF speaker.

“Mayday! Mayday! This the F-V La Conte!”

Static.

His only link to the world is the EPIRB, the transmitter that emits a satellite signal. Morley scrambles out on deck and shoves it inside his suit.

Just then, a mountain of water rises over the stern. It hangs there, then folds forward and crashes against the wheelhouse, blowing out windows with the boom of shotguns.

In the galley, dishes, coffee mugs and spoons fly. Canned food rockets across counters. The refrigerator rips out of the wall and skids across the floor. The men go tumbling.

Doyle rolls over and sees whitewater bursting through the split doors like a blast from a fire hose.

“Up to the deck! Up to the deck!”

But how? The walls have become the floor; the ceiling is now a wall. The La Conte is on her side, mast in the water.

Another lurch. The floor leaps up and everything is in free-fall again, somersaulting end over end. The La Conte is righting herself, lifting out of the sea like a prizefighter after a knockdown.

“Move! Move! Move!”

The men crawl along the floor, pelted by plates and cans. They climb to the foredeck. The ship is lurching, listing hard to starboard. Deck planks are buckling and flying off. The mast is flailing wildly.

The boat keels on a swell and they throw themselves on the deck to keep the wind from yanking them off. Spray rakes them like grapeshot. Out of the blackness, Morley staggers over.

“No life raft!” he yells.

With all the high-tech equipment on board, the one thing they need most isn’t there. They look at each other.

Morley hands out pieces of rope. There’s no time to panic or complain. If they don’t jump ship now, they’ll be sucked down by the vacuum of a 66-ton tomb making for the deep.

They wrap the 3/4-inch rope around their waists, make a loop at the belt. A separate rope is fed through each loop. They’re a human chain now; their fates are tied. Doyle attaches two buoy floats, then the EPIRB, to the ends.

Like crabs, they claw up the icy, tilting deck to the gunwale on the port bow. Each man throws a leg over the railing, takes a deep breath . . .

And hesitates.

Below them is an ocean so dark they can’t tell the difference between a wave and a trough.

“We go in together!” Morley shouts. “On three!”

They could fall 15 feet or 100.

“One!”

They could jump in front of a breaking wave and be smashed against the hull.

“Two!”

The ship lists, begins to roll.

“Now!”

Into the abyss they leap.

Buried Under Avalanches of Water

At first, all Mork feels is the cold. It tightens on his temples like a vise grip.

Gradually the throbbing fades and it’s all right. He’s wrapped in darkness, falling without end, hearing only the bump-bump of his heart.

Mork doesn’t know when he stops falling through the sea. It seems a long time. But he remembers rising and bursting into a deafening world, gulping air, and then going down again.

When Mork comes up the second time, he kicks his legs and fights the water in a heavy-footed panic. Then he feels the collar on his survival suit inflating and knows he will not drown.

The first thing he sees is the red-and-white flashing of the strobe light on the EPIRB, illuminating flecks of flying, swirling ice.

Carcasses of frigate birds, pieces of wood, a buoy float past him. Several hundred yards off, he spots the La Conte.

Only the hull is visible. The seas are jumping up and down on it, stomping it mercilessly. Then the ship disappears behind a swell, and when the wave passes, she’s gone.

A head pops through the foam--spitting, gasping, hacking. It’s Hanlon. Morley, the skipper, pops out a few feet away, then Decapua and Doyle.

“Sound off!” Morley shouts.

There’s more water in the wind than air; it’s like trying to scream above the noise of a passing train while taking a shower.

Out of nowhere a landslide of water buries them, then another, and countless others, sending them tumbling as if they’re inside a washing machine. The ropes tying them together begin to slip.

At that moment, more than 4,000 miles away outside Washington, D.C., a computer inside the U.S. Mission Control Center is downloading an EPIRB signal from a COSPAS-SARSAT satellite.

It’s an urgent distress call from the Gulf of Alaska, latitude N58-13.8, longitude W138-19.4. The computer would identify the ship and its owner, except that this EPIRB was never registered with the Coast Guard. Automatically, the computer relays the data to the station closest to the emergency--the Coast Guard’s North Pacific Search and Rescue Coordination Center in Juneau.

It’s 7:02 on a Friday night in Juneau, and Lt. Steve Rutz and Quartermaster Blake Kilbourne have the watch. They’re sitting in front of computer terminals, a pot of coffee warming beside them, when the Teletype starts spitting.

Kilbourne rips off the bulletin and scans it. No ID on the ship. Maybe the computer is still working on it. He checks the coordinates. Fairweather Grounds. Checks the printer again. Nothing.

The Middleton Island weather station is reporting wind speeds greater than 50 knots, water temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. According to Coast Guard calculations, a 200-pound man in a survival suit has an 83% chance of surviving 2.6 hours in these waters. A 51% chance of lasting 4.7 hours.

That is, if wave heights remain below 25 feet. A data buoy outside Prince William Sound, 200 miles northwest of the Fairweather Grounds, is registering 30-foot seas.

At 7:15 p.m., Kilbourne issues an Urgent Marine Information Broadcast, asking any ship that’s accidentally tripped an EPIRB to radio the Coast Guard immediately.

Three minutes pass. Ten. A half hour. No response.

This one’s for real.

To be continued next week.

Editor’s note: This story is based on interviews with 11 Coast Guard helicopter flight crew members involved in the rescue; three members of the ground crew; Coast Guard spokesmen in Juneau, Alaska, and Martinsburg, W.Va.; the surviving crew members of the La Conte; Jesse Evans, who found the remains on Shuyak Island; the two Alaska state troopers who recovered the remains; and two forensics experts at the Alaska State Medical Examiner’s Office in Anchorage. The story also draws from the 523-page record of the Coast Guard’s inquest into the sinking of the La Conte.