Alaska, Day 12

We are in a few days of rain and cool blustery weather. You can see the gray of rain in the background. My local friends had a conference about whether to chance conditions out there and decided to abandon their original plan in favor of the sheltered side of a close island. We had a decent day of fishing. Along with catching some salmon we saw a pod of Orcas and a few Dahl porpoises. With the rest of what happened (see below) the day was anything but boring.

Late morning we heard a "Mayday" over the radio. Such a call grabs the attention. At first I wondered if the call was a prank. But the person's voice sounded sincere. They said they were going down. Distances out there are great and everyone in proximity is ready to respond. The Coast Guard came on the radio and gathered information and location. There were seven souls aboard. Rich pulled a chart and tried to figure out distance from us. Our time to get to the vessel in rough seas would be about 30 minutes. Rich said at these water temps if anyone was in the water longer than about five minutes they were not going to survive. Several boats closer to the distressed vessel immediately responded their vicinity and headed for the sinking boat, so we stayed put. A commercial fishing boat was the first to reach the scene. We heard their second rescue communication about ten minutes after the mayday. They had picked up five people. A second boat extracted one. Coast Guard kept requesting updates and said the initial report was seven aboard. Survivors confirmed one was missing. The sinking boat had capsized in the waves. More vessels arrived and rescuers managed to turn the skiff over. There they found the seventh person, an elderly man from Orange County, California. He had been in the water a critical amount of time. A State fish and game boat arrived about the same time and began CPR and used their fast boat to ferry the man to a waiting medical response team at the closest harbor. The victim did not survive. This was only the second or third mayday call my two friends have heard in their 20+ years of fishing these waters. I love the ruggedness of Alaska, but conditions can be unforgiving to those who make mistakes. We learned the seven were in a skiff trying to cross a channel abeam of rough seas and think they traversed close behind a small island to avoid the wind generated waves. Consequently they hit a reef. Having seven aboard a skiff seems somewhat overload to me, (we all winced when we heard it was a skiff on the marine radio) especially for those weather conditions. Someone was probably in a hurry to get home and the cost was steep.