Coming back alive : the true story of the most harrowing search and rescue mission ever attempted on Alaska's high seas

216 Pages·2001·1.08 MB·English

by  Walker

This book is dedicated to Lynette Bishop.
Table of Contents Title Page
Preface
Book I - Flyboys and Fishermen
Prologue
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
Book II - Into the Storm
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
Acknowledgments
ALSO BY SPIKE WALKER
Stunning reviews for Coming Back Alive
Copyright Page
Preface
In the fall of 1998, I moved to Alaska and began the research for this book.
From the outset, my intent, as a nonfiction writer, was to present a vivid,
unflinching portrait of the legendary exploits of Sitka’s elite, handpicked search
and rescue helicopter squads, as well as the lives and experiences of the
commercial fishermen they encountered along the way.
To come to know the Coast Guard commanders and pilots and their crews
over the months I spent, tape recorder in hand, dogging their trails out at the base
on the tip of Japonski Island, was a pleasure I will not soon forget. Drawing me
into the warm camaraderie of their fellowship, they helped me sweep out the
cobwebs of bitterness and suspicion that had crept in, and replace them, I am
told, with a bit of the same graciousness that had been so generously granted me.
Then, as the months of interviewing slipped past, and the exceptional nature
of the material gleaned from both Coast Guard crewmen and fishermen began to
surface, I felt a growing sense of responsibility to try to honor the robust way
these passionate people lived and, far too often, died.
In an effort to remain loyal to the spirit of the adventures undertaken, I
decided to relate several key events by telling them through the eyes of those
who were there, re-creating them just as they happened.
While some of the material herein is quite graphic in nature, it is my fervid
hope that by writing about these events, similar predicaments in which young
men die may be avoided altogether in the future, and that the soul-shaking grief
and sense of utter aloneness felt by those left behind may one day be
transcended.
Book I
Flyboys and Fishermen
Prologue
As he steered his speeding twenty-six-foot gillnet boat Marlene out across the
Copper River Delta in Alaska’s Prince William Sound on a gray, windblown
afternoon in 1981, Skip Holden could not have known that within hours he
would be engaged in a hellish struggle just to survive, nor could he have
imagined how many lives would be so profoundly affected by the outcome.
Bold and enterprising, but never reckless, “Holden,” as his friends like to call
him, was looking forward to doing what he did best, and that was to net salmon.
Eight years earlier, Skip Holden and his wife, Marlene, had set out from San
Leandro, California, to hitchhike to Alaska. They headed north, holding a sign
that read ALASKA OR BUST! They arrived in Cordova nearly broke, found
work together in a local cannery, and, in a month, managed to save twelve
hundred dollars. They bought a twenty-foot boat for exactly that amount. They
lived on it, fished off of it, and used a bucket for a toilet.
It was a romantic, albeit bare-bones, beginning in the rugged little fishing
village located in a wind, sprawling land bursting with boomtown opportunity
and colorful characters. There was a local stripper named Tequilla, whose
writhing style of dancing naked was known to cause almost a riot as lonely,
affection-starved fishermen trampled one another for a closer look.
Then there was Machine Gun Betty. She was a large Indian woman who
worked as a bartender at a local watering hole. Her way of dealing with a rowdy
crowd of drunken fishermen (who refused to leave at quitting time) was to pull
out a Thompson submachine gun, level it on her rambunctious patrons, and order
them off the premises. “It’s closing time! Get the hell out!” she’d say as the bar
emptied.
During those eight years of hard work as a commercial fisherman, Skip
Holden had seen some sights—such as the time the Fish and Game Department
opened the season up in the fjord near Coghill Point, and he and his fishing pals
had netted one million sockeye salmon in a single week of red-hot fishing.
Named after Skip’s wife, the F/V Marlene was known in fishing circles as a
Snowball bow-picker. She had a six-foot-high reel mounted in the center of her
foredeck. This spool-like contraption was designed to feed the one-thousand-
foot-long gillnet off her bow and reel it back aboard via the same route.
Along the way, Skip had learned a few things about the nature of successful
fishermen, too. Foremost, he had learned not to try to be like anybody else: The
best fishermen fished according to the dictates of their own personalities.
As a rule, Holden worked alone. More of a hunter-type person himself, he
liked to motor past the main sandbars (where most of his more conservative
fellow gillnetters chose to make their “drifts”) and out through the surf. He
enjoyed fishing the deep waters of the open ocean. When possible, he liked to
intercept the fish well before they reached the main branch of the river,
something at which he was quite adept, now having the self-assurance of a
seasoned fisherman, one who had paid his dues and acquired a fair amount of
fishing savvy along the way.
Armed with little more than a compass and a Fathometer, he roamed as far as
ten miles out from the wild and ever-changing sixty-mile-wide delta of sandbars
and tidelands known as the Copper River Flats, fishing the salmon-rich waters as
far out as Cape Hinchinbrook.
Some fishermen didn’t like the stress of making “sets,” laying out their
gillnets and fishing out in the open ocean. They generally fished the inside
waters. They didn’t seem to mind fighting the crowds, or having to pull their
gillnets back aboard every few minutes, then run back up the line, lay them out
again, and start from scratch. By contrast, Skip Holden liked to fish the deep,
outside waters. He liked the sight of free, open spaces and uncluttered horizons.
He’d been raised that way. When he was a boy, sailing off the California coast,
his father had taught him the art of navigation, as well as how to keep a ship in
good repair and how to tie the rope knots that were essential to life at sea. Most
important, his father instilled in his son the belief that shallow water is a
fisherman’s worst enemy.
It was the going out and coming back in over the sandbars at entrance
channels, especially those at Softuk, and Strawberry, and Egg Island, that local
fishermen feared most. Let an outrushing tide confront a strong flow of onshore
wind, and the waves can really stack up.
Even for Skip Holden, getting trapped out on the open sea in a sudden blow
was something to be avoided if at all possible. Let him receive a warning over
the local CB fishing channel announcing that the sandbar was closing, and
Holden would rush his net aboard and make a mad scramble in over the building
breakers before they closed him out. Once inside the punishing surf line, he
would wait out the storm in the shelter of one of the tideland coves carved out of
tens of miles of sandbars by the thirteen-foot tides that flooded in over the area
several times each day.
Miss the closing, get cut off by a sudden storm, and a fisherman would have
few options, all of them dangerous. Left unprotected by island or berm, caught
tens of miles from Cordova, a fisherman could either jog into the storm and
weather (which might last for several days and nights) or make the near-
impossible journey around the thirty-mile length of Hinchinbrook Island,
running broadside to the storm winds and waves crashing ashore the entire way.
Lose an engine, throw a prop, and you would be history.
Regardless, Holden was always hanging it out there, working on the edge.
Unlike some wanna-be fishermen, however, Holden had the touch. And during
the season, it wasn’t unusual for him to intercept as much as four thousand
dollars’ worth of the migrating fish in a single week.
On that gray day in 1981, Holden had already gone for two days and nights
without sleep, standing anchor watch, waiting out the past few days of blustery
weather in a featureless, godforsaken reach inside Softuk Bar. It was no big deal,
really. Gillnetting the flats had always been a young man’s sport. And Holden
could go for days without sleep. But when the winds finally did calm down, he
thought, That’s it. Time to go fishing, and, pulling anchor, he fled out across the
bar.
Once at sea, however, Holden soon found himself idling up the high, sloping
faces of the unusually large swells lumbering in toward shore. Enormous as they
were, the swells weren’t breaking, and he drifted over them one by one, the
bulging waters passing smoothly underneath him. It was the air around him,
however, that spooked him. The enveloping air had turned “eerie calm, like out
of breath,” as he put it. It was a little like entering into the eye of a hurricane.
Skip Holden had never experienced anything quite like it.
Shortly, the sky grew dark, and as the unexpected storm intensified, strong
winds burst up the scene. Blowing directly in against the outrushing tide, the
winds soon whipped the sea into a cresting frenzy. In only minutes, thunderous
breakers began collapsing across the entire width of the bar, effectively closing
off any possible retreat.
Still, Holden was determined to give it a try, and so he maneuvered into the
roiling waters of the bar. He had managed to weave his way past several rows of
breakers, when, in the gray-black of the dim evening light, he spotted a single
white lightbulb mounted atop the mast of another salmon boat. Having learned
of Holden’s plight, a fellow fisherman had apparently left the safety of his snug
anchorage and was now motoring back and forth just inside the breakers, trying
to guide Holden into the deeper waters of the main channel, through at least five
thousand feet of breaking waves and lathering foam.
Maybe I can make it through this, thought Holden, focusing on the challenge
at hand. Now, should I go around this breaker and through that one? he asked
himself as he pushed ahead. Is it deeper there? What’s my Fathometer reading?