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A blip appeared on the green radar screen in the wheelhouse of the Neptune Jade, a 750-foot Singapore-registered freighter en route to the Orient. It was 12:15 P.M. on Monday, February 14, and the radar indicated the source to be located about twenty-five nautical miles northwest of Priest Rock and Dutch Harbor. Normal enough in this sea-lane, the vessel's captain noted. Except that the blip was not moving. The Neptune Jade was closing on the position, 24 nautical miles away.
The helmsman switched to a general radio frequency to call the vessel. If assistance was needed, they'd relay a call back to Dutch Harbor. There was no answer. The helmsman set his course directly toward the position of what might be a ship in distress. Since weather reports indicated a storm descending on the area, any broken-down vessel caught in open water would be in peril.
Three hours later, a crew member in the wheelhouse spotted an overturned vessel. The Neptune Jade's skipper took charge, guiding the cumbersome merchant ship within thirty yards--as close as he dared in a sea building with increasing winds--then circling. The hull appeared to be about eighty feet long. A red stripe ran horizontally along the bottom. The rest of the hull was blue. Curiously, there was no indication that the hull itself had been damaged. Aware that the Neptune Jade was too large to safely maneuver alongside, the captain circled again, widening the arc, and ordered his crew to look for survivors, or bodies, or debris. None was spotted.
The captain circled a third time, making an even wider arc. Finding nothing, he grabbed the radio and dialed the Coast Guard emergency channel and described what he and his crew were seeing. There was no reply. He switched radio frequencies, sending out a widespread alert to anyone within range. The captain was following an unwritten "good Samaritan" code at sea, which, because of distances and slow travel time, asked as many vessels within range of a distress signal to converge on the position to look for survivors.
The freighter Aleutian Developer was the first vessel to pick up the call, but it was running six hundred miles to the southwest. Over his own radio, the ship's captain relayed the Neptune Jade's alarm and the reported position of the overturned hull to the U.S. Coast Guard Communication Station in Kodiak: latitude 54 degrees 19.6 minutes north, longitude 166 degrees 54 minutes west. The time was 2:40 P.M.
The Kodiak "Comstay," the oldest facility of its kind in the U.S., was responsible for tracking the comings and goings of hundreds of vessels a week along six thousand miles of crescent coastline from the Canadian border in the southeast to Attu Island at the far western tip of the Aleutians and the Russian border. Seventy officers and enlisted personnel were stationed there in 1983, at least twelve on watch at all times, monitoring dozens of radio channels in soundproof cubicles. They listened for suspicious radio traffic that might expose the positions of possible drug traffickers; they listened for trespassing foreign fishing vessels; they listened for weather reports and bits of marine information they might pass along; they listened for calls for assistance, often dispensing advice, and they acted as 911 operators when situations arose. Nearly nine hundred thousand square miles of open water fell within the station's watch, nearly twice as much as the entire land mass of the continental U.S. Add in tens of thousands of islands within the two-hundred-mile U.S. coastal boundary, and the Coast Guard station's responsibility compared to watching over a small galaxy.
Gary Howell, the skipper of the fishing vessel Alaska Invader, overheard the Aleutian Developer's radio relay. He checked his position: about fifty miles to the southwest of the overturned hull, or more than four hours away. But there was no other radio traffic from vessels small and maneuverable enough to come alongside for a possible rescue. Howell swung the Alaska Invader north, then radioed a sister vessel, the Pacific Invader, which he could see on the horizon. Together, they headed full speed for the location.
Hearing that the Coast Guard Comstay had received his relayed message and that the Alaska Invader and Pacific Invader were on the way, the captain of the Neptune Jade circled one last time, still finding nothing in the water. Then he made a decision that could later be open to question. After reporting once again the position of the hull and that it appeared to be drifting slowly south-southwest, he resumed his route to the Orient, leaving the overturned hull behind. He had been on the scene for just over thirty minutes.
About forty-five minutes later the merchant vessel Ocean Brother, en route to Japan, called the Coast Guard Communication Station in Honolulu. It, too, reported an overturned hull: latitude 54 degrees 17 minutes north, longitude 166 degrees 58 minutes west. That position was about 3.5 nautical miles southwest of the first sighting. It would have been unlikely for a large hull to have drifted that far in forty-five minutes, but not impossible. The variables would include the current, the direction and velocity of the wind, how much of the vessel was riding out of the water. The latest sighting was relayed to Kodiak Comstay, which sent the message along simultaneously to the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station just down the road on Kodiak Island and to the Coast Guard North Pacific Search and Rescue Coordinator in Juneau.
At 3:45 P.M., almost two hours after the first reported sighting by the Neptune Jade, the Coast Guard rescue coordinator in Juneau transmitted an urgent priority call on the marine weather-advisory station:
A fishing vessel has been reported overturned in position 54-19.6 N, 166-54 W. Vessel description: eighty feet, with blue hull, red below waterline. The vessel Neptune Jade is on scene. It is unknown the name of the fishing vessel or persons on board. Vessels with any additional information and any vessels in vicinity are requested to keep a sharp lookout, assist if possible, and advise Coast Guard Juneau or the nearest Coast Guard station.
This report was one of several mistakes the Coast Guard made that morning. The first was not verifying the initial position that had been relayed from the Neptune Jade to a vessel six hundred miles away. The second was not considering the more-than-3.5-mile discrepancy between the two sightings forty-five minutes apart. The third was in transmitting a priority call giving the position of the first sighting, not the latest, by the Ocean Brother, which still had the hull in sight. Finally, no consideration was given to the possibility that the sightings might be of two separate hulls. Meanwhile, the Ocean Brother circled about half a mile from the overturned vessel and, finding no survivors or bodies, resumed its course eastward. Contrary to the Coast Guard advisory, there were now no vessels tracking the overturned hull.
There were also no Coast Guard cutters within five hundred miles of the position. Around 4:00 P.M., the Coast Guard launched a C-130 four-engine search plane from Kodiak. Flying west into the approaching darkness, the propeller-driven C-130 Hercules was designed for stability in foul weather, not speed. It would take the plane nearly three hours to reach the latest location given for the overturned hull.
At 6:00 P.M. on the same day, the crews of the Alyeska and Alliance had just finished transferring fuel to the Sea Alaska processor and had loaded all but the last few pots. Brian Melvin and Glenn Treadwell were standing together in the wheelhouse of the Alliance drinking coffee when suddenly the Coast Guard's "Urgent Marine Information Broadcast" interrupted the normal hourly weather report over the radio receiver.
The word around the dock was that the hull in question was probably one that had burned a week before out near Akutan Island, seventy-five miles to the northeast. There had been several sightings, and the charred hull had been reported drifting south-southwest toward Unalaska Island, the home of Dutch Harbor. Melvin and Treadwell reminded themselves of this and noted that the bulletin they had just heard reported the overturned hull to be about eighty feet--much smaller than any of the A-boats.
Around 7:00 P.M. Gary Howell checked in with the Coast Guard over the radio. The Alaska Invader had reached the Coast Guard's reported position of the overturned hull and found nothing in the dark. Two three-hundred-foot Soviet fish-processing vessels, the Svetlaya and the T...
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Book by Dillon Patrick
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