This is the story of Tom Heavnor
(Tom Heavner, Heavenor)
Seattle, Washington, USA
(Point Bennet, Port Townsend, Tom Heavenor)Page title: United States Coast Guard Incompetence and Corruption, two divers drown in arctic, embolism, mystery.
USCG: Saviors...Or...Chickens of the Sea?The public seems to think the loss of two Coast Guard divers in the arctic, Lt. Jessica Hill and Boatswain's Mate Steven Duque, on August 17, 2006, working from the cutter Healy, was unusual, and that the conflicting, chaotic statements from the United States Coast Guard are also non-standard. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Word as of November, 2006 from the CG suggests the two were pulled suddenly from a depth of 20 feet to over 200 feet "almost instantly", and the descent was so powerful that the combined tender crews were unable to stop or even slow the descent by gripping their umbilical hoses. --But this most recent statement comes from the CG, and as you're about to learn, asking the USCG for an accurate, comprehensive explanation is rather like asking the chimps in the primate exhibit at the zoo to write a sequel to Star Wars. The fact that there were no independent witnesses on the Healy means the families will NEVER know what really happened.
The United States Coast Guard ----Our Saviors at Sea
This site includes my best recollections of events---and it includes my opinions.
Copyright © 2003 All Rights ReservedI should have posted this story years ago. I have so many Coast Guard horror-stories I could write a book. Oops---I did write a book.
I've not written or published this story in over twenty years because, honestly, I've tried to forget it. Every time I've entertained the notion of publishing it, or have been pressed by friends (or my attorney) to publish it, I've thought about what I would say, how I would word it, and how to remove enough emotionalism from it that the danged thing would even be readable. Finally my attorney asked me for an overview, a summary of how the story might be told. I emailed a few paragraphs to her. She replied that I no longer had to worry about how to write the story---I had just done so.
I've published countless commercial diving, tow-boating and aviation articles over the years, mostly in the US, and a few have been reprinted in France. Mostly they were "sea stories", non-fiction accounts of some of the more colorful rescues or salvage jobs I had helped my crews accomplish. Many, though, were boating safety articles or maritime related how-to's.
I remember once recommending that the number and capacity of fire fighting equipment mandated by the Coast Guard was far less than what was needed in real life. I backed up my pitch with facts and figures and an almost emotional plea to pleasure boaters to forget the Coast Guard requirements for fire extinguishers and opt for a capability about three or four times what the Coast Guard suggested. The article was eventually published in numerous boating rags around the country. One of the magazines who published it was co-owned by a man who owned a largish yacht. I remember he congratulated me on a fine piece, and said he was eager to see it come out in the next issue. That weekend he and his wife motored to a weekend destination, caught on fire en route, used up their Coast Guard quota of fire extinguishers in the first few minutes, and the man watched his wife burn to death from the comfort of the lifeboat---which only he had been fortunate enough to reach.
Ah well....you can lead a horse to water, etc. etc. etc.
I came to have just about no respect for pleasure boat skippers. I came to have slightly less respect for the United States Coast Guard. The yachtsmen were just incompetent and silly---but the Coast Guard was incompetent, silly, PLUS they had "authority" and liked to use it.
I can hear the Coast Guard Auxiliary screaming from here. And I can hear the shock and awe of those yachtsmen who've been "saved" by the Coast Guard---at least they thought they needed saving. I watched in horror once as the skipper of a 45 foot plastic sloop declared that he was out of gas---sailing along nicely, but out of gas---and there wasn't enough wind to get him to a dinner appointment on time. The United States Coast Guard dispatched a vessel to tow the boat in. I saw it with my own eyes. I could write a book. Oops---I already did. Just remember that, to the profoundly incompetent, the merely incompetent can seem like Gods.
I remember the time there was a man overboard off Port Townsend. It was a cold and stormy night (I KNEW I'd eventually find a legitimate use for that line). The tide was flooding (from north to south into Puget Sound). Our Saviors at Sea (the Coast Guard) dispatched a rickety Sikorski (rescue helicopter) out of Port Angeles to save the man. The bird went to the man's last known position, then set up a search sweep to the north. We listened to that crap for nearly an hour before, disgusted and enraged, we jumped aboard a tug, turned on the radar, spotted a tiny blip in the water a mile out and two miles south of the man's last known position, and simply drove out and picked him up. Since the man was severely hypothermic we asked the Coast Guard station in Port Townsend to have some EMTs standing by when we arrive twenty minutes later. As we entered our breakwater we found a two-man Coast Guard vessel which was supposed to be searching with the helicopter, high and dry, having run aground some time earlier as it tried to depart the marina. We left them there and proceeded to the Main Coast Guard dock at Port Townsend. Lights were out. It was deserted. No EMTs. No body at all. We arranged privately for medical care for the man, and never spoke of the matter again. Why would we? If we were going to make an issue out of that, we'd have to make an issue out of several hundred similar experiences with the United States Coast Guard, and mostly we just wanted to not think about them anymore.
I remember receiving a distress call about midnight on a dark and stormy night in January. It was blowing out of the north about a hundred (not quite---I sometimes exaggerate). The highest sustained wind as displayed on our recording anemometer was 88 knots. I remember it because it was the same as the length of our tug.
The casualty was a King Crabber which had run aground in the storm. She was something like 130 feet in length, with a crew of about six, a steel boat tanked down with live crab. She had rolled onto her side in the surf and was lying perfectly on her starboard beam, her decks exactly perpendicular to the horizon, her bottom toward the open sea, and the surf was completely sweeping her with every sea.. Her engineer had flooded the hull to stop her pounding to pieces on the bottom. Some of the crew had positioned themselves at the highest point of the ship, which was the port rail. As the wind screamed and the seas swept them they entwined themselves in the bars of the rail so as to keep from being swept away in the night. It was from that position that they made their Mayday call.
A Coast Guard helo or two arrived from Port Angeles and tried to hover down to pick the men off the wreck, but the spray from the seas that were crashing over the wreck was freezing on the helicopters and they were forced to abandon the men. Faced with what seemed the certain demise of the crewmen on the wreck, there were other rescue methods which I certainly would have attempted before turning tail. We'll never know if they would have worked or not, since none were tried.
A Coast Guard 82 footer was dispatched, and it did proceed onward about five miles into the teeth of the storm before turning tail and running home. I'll never forget the very heated argument between the cutter and the Seattle SAR (search and rescue desk). The cutter insisted that it would surely perish if it continued on to the casualty. The SAR desk insisted at least as vehemently that it would NOT sink. The cutter reiterated its fears. The SAR desk grew angrier and more pointed. The SAR desk couldn't quite..... "order" the cutter back to sea, but it could insist in every way just short of a direct order. In the end the cutter returned to her warm, snug berth, and I went out and did the job aboard our 88 foot tug. We had the vessel safely moored in port, all crew accounted for and healthy, by sun-up. We had passed the 82 foot Coast Guard cutter beam to beam, she coming in, we going out. By this time my respect and regard for the United States Coast Guard was pretty low. Like a gas tank so low on gas its gauge needle had stopped bouncing, and was buried somewhere under the little lighted "E". But this experience broke my heart. I was so ashamed of the cutter crew that I didn't even razz them about it over the following weeks. I never even brought it up. I do recall seeing the newspaper headline the following day though: "Coast Guard Rescues Grounded Vessel on Dungeness Spit". The CG never contacted the paper to correct the story. And neither did we..
By 1981 or so, my company had cleaned up many of the Coast Guard's messes from Coos bay to Alaska. We'd ungrounded them twice. We'd hauled eight or ten vessels off the bottom which they had sunk by towing too fast in inappropriate sea conditions. We'd endured their smarmy insults on rare occasion, and been embarrassed by their sugary praise on countless occasions, both of which were inappropriate (those of average competence can often appear to those of substandard competence as Gods). We'd watched them botch case after case after case after case. We'd watched them ceaselessly harass the pleasure boaters, always seemingly eager to pester and annoy and alienate folks who were just out trying to find some peace and be left alone.
And we had watched the United States Coast Guard do some very good work. Occasionally. Certainly not often, and certainly in no more than about 15% of the cases they undertook to complete. Too often their successes seemed little more than luck.
I remember the frantic, panicked voice of the skipper of the Coast Guard 41 out of Shilshole, telling the SAR desk in Seattle that he had never encountered sea conditions like this, and was in danger of losing his boat. He was almost crying. Seas were rough, 6-8 feet, close together, a few miles north of Elliot Bay. But my God, take a look at a chart. It can only GET so rough in there.
I remember responding to a mayday one winter evening. A large steel vessel had run up onto a pinnacle rock and was in a precarious position indeed. If the tide went out even a few feet, the vessel would almost certainly roll over off the rock and capsize. We were still half a mile away when the skipper called in the blind and asked if anyone knew what the tide was doing. We were about to reply when Coast Guard station Seattle piped up and said it was falling. The skipper of the casualty then panicked and began thrashing his vessel back and forth on the rocks, figuring that no matter how much damage he did trying to get off, it would be less than a capsizing. When we heard the Coast Guard respond with the tide information we looked at each other in the wheel house and raised our eyebrows. We had known from the moment we got the call that the tide was rising---but, well, maybe it WASN'T. I mean, here was the UNITED STATES COAST GUARD announcing over a public frequency that the tide was falling, so....well.....it MUST BE TRUE, right? We snatched up a tide book and confirmed that it was rising---but STILL we were afraid to speak up. Maybe we had the wrong tide book. Maybe we were all experiencing a mass hallucination. Maybe we were in Denver and we just didn't know it. Turns out, of course, we were right, and the casualty had inflicted tens of thousands of dollars of needless damage to his vessel due to MORE Coast Guard incompetence. We stabilized the boat with anchors and cables until the tide came back in, and he floated away. We don't know if the guy ever sued. We hope he did, and we hope he won big.
I remember the time I was operating a wood-plank fishing vessel out of Port Angeles. I was loaded heavy with fish one dark and stormy night, and started taking on water. Just couldn't figure out where the water was coming from. It got worse, and my pumps couldn't stay ahead of it (I once published an article which suggested huge capacity pumps be required on all vessels---my vessel had enough pumps to keep the Titanic afloat). Still, vexingly, the water in the bilges continued to rise. I finally realized that I probably wasn't going to make Port Angeles, so, loath though I was to do so, I called for help. I didn't call the Coast Guard for help---I just called for help. The CG out of Port Angeles responded by sending a Sikorsky with a sealed pump. They dropped it to me, but, wonder of wonders, it wouldn't run. It simply wouldn't run. So they dropped another. It wouldn't run either. A 41 or a 44 finally came along side as I wallowed on autopilot toward the harbor, and rather than hand me over the pump, they were determined to get it running on their vessel, and then transfer a running pump over---which was fine with me. But they couldn't get that pump to run either. By this time I was entering the more protected waters of the harbor, and my pumps began to catch up. I was forced to moor at the CG dock, and as I came in to their little marina I was astounded to see what must have been every crewman from the station, on the floats, all working over half a dozen or more pumps and parts of pumps---not a single one of which would run. Finally, disgusted, a non-government contractor walked up to his car, pulled an old, rusty Briggs and Stratton pump out of the trunk, brought it down to me, gave it one yank, and thirty minutes later my bilges were dry. Turns out a shipwright who'd done a major repaid job on my vessel had left the bilges full of wood chips which clogged all my pumps.
The Coast Guard then proceeded to do a formal boarding, running me through the humiliation wringer, which is apparently the only technique they have truly mastered. I wasn't cited for anything, and departed in disgust. About six months later I received a letter on Coast Guard letterhead. I figured, "Oh Boy, here we go." The form asked me how many passengers had drowned when my ferry boat sank off of Port Townsend. I replied, "33", and never heard back from them. Good f*cking grief.
We were called out to a capsized vessel near Victoria, B.C. was day. The vessel was about 35 feet in length, obviously in poor repair. We immediately put a diver inside of it to see if there were any survivors. The CG had "thought" it heard knocking from inside the hull, and we had thought so too. But the weather was just bad enough to make entry into the capsized hull dangerous. The CG initiated a search for survivors, and we set about to tow the wreck to shallow water so that in case it went down, we could still get to it. I put a diver as far into the wreck as he could safely be and still hope to get out if it rolled again and went down, and so we towed the wreck like this for the next eight hours or so, with my diver continually pumping fresh air into the hull so that any survivors inside wouldn't suffocate en route.
Once in calmer, shallower waters, my diver was able to get fully into the hull, and announced that there were no bodies, living or dead. We were then left to wonder if there had never been anyone inside, or if there had been, and they had somehow slipped out of the wreck while it was being towed, and weren't seen. The CG had found no bodies either.
We righted the boat and put it in dry-dock. Next morning we got a call from a guy in a motel in Friday Harbor. He said he and his wife and two small children had been able to get off the boat just fine before it rolled completely over. They'd gotten food and blankets and the biggest cache of emergency flares I'd ever heard of on any vessel. Once in their canoe, they'd started paddling for a shoreline on the horizon. He related to me in detail how they watched the CG aerial search effort begin and expand. Since they had what seemed like an unlimited supply of flares they began firing them even when the helicopters were barely visible on the horizon, and they continued to fire them over the next hour or two as the search approached them. At one point the man said a helicopter flew nearly directly over them. It had its cargo door open and a crewman was sitting in the doorway. He said he was so angry by this time that he decided to try to put a flare directly into the cargo door, just to see if that would wake them up. He said he fired, and although it may have been an optical illusion, the flare seem to pass within three feet of the open cargo door, just below the helicopter. The helicopter continued onward.
After the Coast Guard search moved on to other areas, the man and his family managed to flag down a passing purse seiner who hauled them in to Friday Harbor, and put them up in a motel. He was calling us to find out the bill, and to know when he could retrieve his boat. The Coast Guard had never once spotted them.
I remember the time a diver was trapped inside a wreck over by Camano Island and was running out of air---his buddy had come up to report it, but didn't have enough air in his own tank to go back down again. The Coast Guard has---at least had in those days---no divers (not even a snorkeler for Christ's sake). A helicopter was dispatched from Port Angeles. It had to pass directly over our bay enroute the casualty. We informed the pilot that we had a Navy Master diver suited and sitting in the middle of a barge in the middle of the bay. Just stop and pick him up. The helo arrogantly continued onward, right over the barge. It circled the poor kid trapped in the wreck until the bubbles stopped. Later the sheriff's divers came and recovered the body. I remember that kid's parents sobbing on TV. We never contacted them. F*ck the Coast Guard.
I could go on, and on, and on..... Hell, I could write a book. But then I already have.
Before proceeding with the main event the non-diving reader needs to know a few things, so sayeth my attorney.
First, you need to understand what happens to a diver when he descends and spends time underwater. Without getting technical (at all), just realize that the longer you stay underwater, the longer it takes you to surface. If you spend an hour at a depth of 100 feet, you can swim right on up to the surface well enough---but within an hour after that you'll either be in extreme pain, or you'll be dead due to the bends. Suffice it to say that being underwater compresses a bunch of gasses into your blood and tissues, and when you come up, you need to do it slowly so as to allow that gas to bleed off safely. If you don't, you blow up like a shaken can of coke. Well, not literally like a baked potato in the microwave, but each cell in your body will do a mini-version of that. And if it's severe enough, your whole body will sort of fizzle and fizz, and all sorts of bad things will happen to you, not the least of which is an excruciating death. So you gotta come up slowly in almost all circumstances, and the science of how slowly to come up is highly evolved. My number 1 diver was one of the team who created the very first decompression table issued by the Navy. The ascent rate must be accurately measured if you're to avoid problems, and you must also stop at various points along the way, all of which is also highly regulated, down to inches, minutes and seconds. Most divers who get the bends survive if they're taken to a hospital which has a recompression chamber. That's a chamber that you climb into (if you're still able), and you just relax in there while the thing is filled with pressurized air. This has the same effect as if you got back in the water and went down to the bottom again. Then you come back up slowly, like you were supposed to in the first place. You can get the bends from staying at 60 feet for 70 minutes, for instance. Chances are you will experience at least a minor "hit" (of the bends). Stay at 60 feet for, say, 90 minutes, then come back up without spending some time at various points along the way, and you will almost certainly get a significant hit---maybe a real eye opener. Let's say you go to 100 feet and stay two hours, then come up with no stops. You'll need to go to a recompression chamber as quickly as you can possibly get there, because your very life is in danger. And even if you make it to the chamber, you still might die, or you might be crippled, or you might be an idiot (no, I mean REALLY, not just figuratively---you might actually take a hit to your spinal column, or even to your brain). I've personally seen it happen. Not pretty. This is a serious, life-and-death issue for divers.
There's a way to trick this whole cascade of unpleasant effects, however. See, if you stay at a hundred feet for 2 hours like our idiot above, and then you come straight to the surface, you'll be perfectly fine. But WAIT, you say---! Yes, yes. Let me finish. I mean you'll be perfectly fine for a few minutes. Like, maybe, 6 or 7 minutes. I was never sure exactly how long a person would live if they did this. Now I know. But I digress.
The deal is that for the first roughly three minutes after you pull this bone-head stunt, nothing much really happens to you at all. And if any tiny little thing HAS happened to your body, it's still perfectly reversible if you get back down to depth within those first three minutes. And divers exploits this all the time. If our idiot diver comes up to the surface after an hour at 100 feet and just lounges about the deck in the sun, he'll feel perfectly fine for three minutes. Then he won't feel perfectly fine. Within about 4 minutes he'll begin to experience pain. Real pain. Within five minutes he'll be bleeding internally---lots of bleeding from lots of places, as the cells, one by one, literally explode inside your body. After about six minutes, you are probably in Disneyland, mentally---or at least well on your way. At this point none of this really matters, because you're dead anyway. Nothing can save you. If they popped you straight back to depth, you'd still die. If they popped you straight into a chamber at five, six, or seven minutes, you'd still die. I remember watching a training video in which two hard-hat divers had fallen off the platform underwater, and had inadvertently been brought immediately to the surface. I don't remember how they got to the surface, if they had inflated their suits and come up, or if the winching machinery had accidentally brought them up. And for some reason that also escapes me, they couldn't go back down. They'd been deep, for a long time, and they were screwed, and they knew it. In the video they laughed and joked and patted each other on the back. They knew the physics better than anyone. And a few minutes later they were both dead as doornails.
In any case, all this death and exploding of cells can be completely avoided if you either get back to depth within three minutes, or you get into a recompression (decompression) chamber within three minutes. Same same. Pressure is pressure, whether you're being pressurized by air in the chamber, or by water back at your diving depth.
So. What do we have in the end? In the end, we have a diver who has been working hard at a hundred feet for two hours. He's tired, he's cold, he doesn't want to make a whole bunch of little stops on the way to the surface to decompress. He just wants to get the hell out of the water. So he comes straight to the surface from a hundred feet. Then he climbs squirrel-like aboard the boat, and jumps into the decompression chamber. His faithful crew and dive tender then pump a bunch of air into the chamber (like a pressure-cooker except they're not roasting him with heat or steam). And they let off the pressure slowly, maybe over hours, maybe even over days; then the diver is fine. All he has to do is relax, read a book, take a snooze, and when his decompression time is up, he jumps out of the chamber, ready for a night on the town. They have let the pressure out of the chamber very, very slowly, so as to allow all these built up gasses in the diver's system to bleed off (gas-off) slowly without exploding any cells or tearing any tissue. And it didn't hurt a bit.
In extreme cases though, a diver couldn't use this cheater's method of popping up and getting into a cozy chamber. If he had been down long enough, deep enough, he would STILL have to make a stop for a few minutes at, say, 60 feet or whatever (I don't remember the tables and I'm not going to look them up). Once that initial, extreme exposure stop had been made, then and only then could the diver go ahead and use his three minute trick to pop up and get into the chamber.
That's mostly what decompression chambers are used for on diving jobs. On very deep jobs, a diver may (and often does) have to actually live in the chamber for days at a time in order to get the gasses out of his system. A diving company might keep a diver in a chamber for 30 days, in the course of a long job requiring multiple dives.
There's another phenomenon you need to be aware of to understand this story---it's called nitrogen narcosis. It's very simple. It means that the deeper you dive, the more "drunk" you get. There are some special gas mixes you can breath that will spare you from this drunkenness at depth, and different companies have different rules as to what depths they will begin using mixed gas diving. Gasses are evolving all the time, and there are some cool ones on the market today (2003). Many companies won't let a diver go deeper than 100 feet without switching to a breathable mix of special gasses. Almost no companies will let their people work deeper than 150 feet without switching to gas. Dives to 200 feet without switching to gas, and while breathing nothing more than the plain old air that is pumped down to you on the bottom, are nearly unheard of except for extreme Navy training sessions (let's see how much you can take before you DIE), and for a few really reckless, hard-core, not overly bright tough guys. We used to know a diver who we dubbed "Frankenberry". Figure out for yourselves why we called him this. He was always mildly bent, and would make the most unbelievable dives on straight air. He's almost certainly dead by now, so I don't worry about him suing me for calling him stupid.
Narcosis is, as one might imagine, fun. It affects different people differently, and some people don't like its effects. Most do. I do. It's a little cleaner high than alcohol, and, well, it's just plain fun. The trouble is, if you've consumed half a dozen shots of whiskey in ten minutes, you're not going to get a lot of technical work done. Same with narcosis. You might see things. You might have imaginary friends. You might have imaginary conversations. I heard of a guy who, when really narced, talked to the Queen of England. Below 200 feet I used to think I was a ninja warrior. Who the hell knows where this stuff comes from. If you begin to come up, narcosis wears off foot by foot. Spend all day at 200 feet breathing air (not recommended), then come up to 150, and there will be no lasting effects, and no hangover. You'll just be as narced as you normally would be at 150, which probably isn't much, if at all. Come back to 100 feet and you'll be as clear-headed as you were in fourth grade (well before puberty, which most of us never really survived, cerebrally speaking). The point is that if you're narced, you might do, think, say, see, and imagine all sorts of crazy things. Some people are more resistant to narcosis, and some are less resistant to it. Many divers can successfully build up a resistance to it by pushing their boundaries day after day on deep dives. But with the new and improved gasses available, why mess with narcosis at all.
Since you now know how critical is this whole process of resurfacing at just the right rate, with stops at various depths to allow the gasses to purge out of your system, you might think that it's important to be able to accurately know what depth you're at at any given moment. SCUBA divers carry little wrist-mounted things that look like large watches. There are various types of mechanisms, but none are REALLY accurate for displaying your depth. Within a couple of feet is the best most will do (many are off by 6 or 8 or even 10 feet). When you REALLY have to know your depth commercial divers use a thing called a pneumo system (short for pneumatic). It's just a little hose, usually tied in with the commercial diver's umbilical line which supplies him with air, communications, electricity, etc. etc., which runs from the boat on the surface, to the diver. The open end of this little pneumo hose is tied off in the diver's gear preferably right at his heart level. The dive tender on the surface periodically blows a bit of air down this tube from the diver's compressor on the boat, and then shuts the air flow off. Then he reads the gauge (the pneumo gauge) to see how much the air in the hose is pushing back toward the surface. This gives him an exact and precise measurement of the diver's depth---down to inches, or even millimeters. The diver doesn't know what his own depth is unless he asks the tender to tell him. Some hard hat divers wear a SCUBA type depth gauge just to get a ballpark idea of where they are, but there's not much point if your tender is at all on the ball. You'll hear a pneumo gauge mentioned in this story.
So, with only some minor tweaking from the original email, here's my accounting of the death of a commercial diver and his tender in approximately 1981, a few miles north of my home port. This is nothing more than the original email to my attorney. I really can't stomach to write more about it, even after nearly 25 years:
The Tale
In 1981 I still owned the offshore rescue company. We had some tugs, lots of hard hat gear. We'd raised around a hundred boats by then, and had performed around 300 rescues in the NE Pacific. We were in the papers every week. Well respected. The Coast Guard had nothing but praise for us. We were called out about midnight the winter of '81 to save two hard hat divers, from a rival company, who were stuck at 245 feet, on the wreck of a fuel barge, with the currents running 5-6 knots. One diver was a hard-hat man who was being fed air from a compressor on a supply vessel on the surface. Early in the dive he called the dive shack on the surface to report that he was tangled in some wreckage and couldn't surface. The supply vessel sent a second diver in SCUBA gear down to save the hard hat diver. Their rescue diver had gone into the water an hour before, with a half-full steel 72 (a light-duty sport tank filled with air), and had not been seen since. The men had been down about 2 hours, breathing straight air. There was a com to the hard hat diver, and he was narced almost out of his mind, and was also severely hypothermic. So.....no problem....This is what we do.....I responded a tug.
As we hit the dock to board the tug, the Coast Guard gave us another tidbit of information: Their (the diver's) surface compressor had just run out of gas, and there was about 20 minutes of air left in the reserve tank. It was a 40 minute run from us to them, so we weren't going to make it in time and it looked like we were going to let them down before we even got a whack at it..
As we got underway it happened that a CG 82 footer was 300 yards from the support vessel when they got the call. Just cruising by. Imagine the luck. --Assuming you think it's lucky to have the Coast Guard in your vicinity. In any case they (the CG) put a can of gas in a rubber boat and drove it over (to the dive vessel). Just as the last of the reserve air was being used, they got the compressor going again. We got a reprieve.
We raced to the scene at nine knots, readying gear as we went. We got some professors out of bed at Duke University back east (3 a.m. there) and had them start extrapolating the tables (the decompression tables, because no tables existed for men who had been at this depth for this long). They (the doctors) did this grudgingly for some reason and it pissed us off.
We found some hot water suits in San Francisco and got them on a Lear headed for Sea-Tac (we needed hot water suits because we felt the men couldn't survive the cold they would have to endure in their regular dry suits while making their extreme exposure stops and working upwards over a period of hours). We were arranging a helicopter to bring them (the hot-water suits) from Sea-Tac to the scene. The support vessel had a chamber, but we didn't trust it, and Duke U was telling us that we had to keep the divers at a whopping 160 feet for awhile before we could bring them into the chamber. We planned to cut their suits off them at 160 feet, and put the hot water suits on them (Duke was saying as much as ten hours at 160 before a chamber treatment, but they weren't done computing).
We also rigged up a bunch of various fittings so we could plug our compressors into their system, and thus be assured of keeping things going---their dive compressor was running in fits and starts by this time, because they believed they had gotten dirty gas from the Coast Guard.
There were by now only two men left aboard the support vessel. One was virtually comatose from shock, and the other, the skipper, was raving almost incoherently. We weren't sure we blamed him.
As we came alongside I was reminded of that scene in Apocalypse Now---where they are going up-river and they come upon this horrific nightmare where a battle had been raging for days. It's now night time, there is no order, soldiers are shooting everywhere indiscriminately, rockets are flying around---that's how I remember it. There were three or four CG helicopters circling overhead, causing more commotion than doing good. By this time three more CG 41's (as I recall) were there, and a host of small craft. A freighter on its way to Seattle had hove to, either to spectate or to offer help, we never knew which. The support vessel had anchors running every which way to hold it over the wreck. There were buoys in the water around the scene that didn't seem to be connected to anything. No one could tell us which ones to run between and which ones might foul us as we approached. The choppers had their night-suns on us, and of course they had to keep moving, so we were alternately cast in deep shadows, then illuminated like subjects in a camera flash. The radios were berserk. Utterly and totally berserk.
We tied to their support vessel and stepped aboard. My main diver was a Navy Master Diver of some repute. He stepped to the skipper of the support boat and asked, "What do we have here?" The guy threw both arms in the air, and answered, "Beats the hell out of me." He walked away without another word. I never saw him again after that.
We went into the coms shack and called into the diver's coms. There were two divers down---a hard-hat diver and his rescue diver, dressed out mostly in SCUBA type gear. The hard-hat diver answered right away, but he was narced. My Master Diver talked to him for awhile, trying to calm him, and to talk him out of the problem---whatever the problem was. I talked to the diver a few minutes later. He asked us to save him. We told him, "No problem. we'll take care of you." He thanked us, then wanted to know if he was on the surface. His pneumo was rock-steady at 245.
We finally determined that the hard hat diver's umbilical was caught on something, and that he was in no shape to figure out what it was. We'd have to clear it by hand, by sending someone down to him. By this time he'd been at 245 for 2 hours and 40 minutes. They hadn't even brought any breathing gas with them even though they knew the depth of the job months in advance, and we didn't have any either, having hit the tug at a dead run.
According to the hard-hat diver, the rescue diver had never even made it down to him (at least the hard hat diver didn't remember seeing him). We figured the rescue diver hadn't had enough pressure dialed in to his first stage to even get him to 245 in the first place, and that he had probably run out of air around 180, had let go of the down line, and had either dropped his weights and surfaced, or had panicked or passed out, and sunk. We pretty much wrote him off, but the choppers kept looking---but then we'd watched the CG choppers search before.
I put Ron in the water at about 1 a.m.. He was to follow one of the anchor lines from the support vessel, which seemed to lead right to the wreck, though no one on the support vessel knew for sure. Currents were running 5-6 knots still. It's a bloody river in that area. There is no slack there---it floods at 5-6 knots, then a minute later it ebbs at 5-6 knots. I had personally recorded currents right there at 9.9 knots in years past. I'll try to attach a picture of that very thing.
My diver started down, working off the stern of my tug. By the time he reached 50 feet the roaring of his breath had blown out one of the diver's com deck speakers. I started asking him to abort, but he kept going down. At about 100 feet he said he could see that the stricken diver's hose was wrapped around the anchor cable several times. We surmised that the hard-hat diver had unknowingly wound himself around the anchor wire as he went down hours before, probably during the one minute that the currents were fluky and changing, and that the steady currents thereafter had snugged up a knot near the bottom, and that was preventing him from surfacing. Ron couldn't take any more, and he wouldn't come back, so I put four crew on his hose and yanked him back aboard. We were still telling the stuck diver, "No problem. we're taking care of you." He was lucid enough to thank us. This is what we DID for God's sake. I really didn't have any question of at least getting the hard-hat diver aboard and into the chamber alive. I had no idea what kind of life he'd lead after that, but there was no question but that we could at least do our jobs. The doctors would then have to do theirs.
We figured the rescue diver who'd gone in the water before we got there would be picked up by one of the choppers. But of course we remembered the incident with the man overboard a year or two earlier. Hell, the rescue diver might drift to freaking Cuba before the Coast Guard found him. I was too preoccupied to look into the matter of the rescue diver. But about this time one of the Coast Guard boats announced that they had located the rescue diver (who was, remember, in SCUBA gear and a wetsuit). We thought, "well, that's something." They announced he was dead, and they were bringing him aboard the rubber boat for transport back to the cutter or to us or to wherever. With this news the search for the SCUBA diver was called off. At this point my people were still talking to the hard-hat diver through the coms on the stern of the dive vessel, and he was saying, "Am I on the surface? I think I'm on the surface. You got me out of this, didn't you? I'm on the surface." We were telling him, "No, Tom, you're still on the bottom---then we looked at his pneumo gauge and thought "Oh shit."
The hard hat diver's pneumo gauge read ZERO. We thought, "What the F*CK?!". He was JUST at 245! We called him up again and asked him if he was on the surface. He said that sure enough, he was, and he wanted to get in the chamber RIGHT NOW. I called the CG boat that had found the scuba diver, and told them that the hard hat diver was also floating around out there somewhere, probably a few hundred yards downstream of us, and that they needed to find him NOW and bring him to us so we could get him in the chamber. I told them they had three minutes tops. Three minutes. Three bloody minutes. No more. Not four minutes. Three minutes. They would have to actually move their asses, no mistakes, no fumbling, no lines in the screw, no arguing, no disagreements, just do the f_cking job and do it now, do it as quickly as humanly possible, because this man's life is in their hands. They said they understood, and they dispatched another rubber boat to look for him while the first boat fiddled with the "dead" rescue diver.
Apparently the current had been pulling the hard hat diver downstream since the fiasco began. He had not even been on the barge for some time, as we had thought. He might have been swept off the barge hours before by the current, and had not even known it, due to the narcosis. Remember that this is exactly the middle of the night, and his light had failed hours before, and visibility in this area even with a light might not exceed three or four feet. His umbilical was originally knotted and wound around the anchor cable at 245 feet, which was the depth of the barge, or at least the depth of the bottom in the vicinity of the sunken barge, but the relentless pull from the current had been working the hose through the knot inch by inch all this time, until the diver was 500 or 600 feet downstream of the wreck, and for who knows how long he had been on the bottom, just flailing in this horrendous current like a lure on a line. Somehow it had just occurred to him to inflate his suit to ascend---something he could have done at any time probably in the past two hours, had he been clear-headed enough to simply push the button on his suit.. He had popped from a depth of 245, having been there for hours, to a depth of 0 in perhaps 60 seconds---not the three or six or ten hours that might have been required by the guys at Duke University.
The choppers put their night suns on the area where the hard hat diver should be, and little boats raced around with spotlights. We figured it was only a matter of time before one of the Coast Guard small boats ran over him and that would solve everyone's problems. Goddamned Coast Guard.
By this time the wind was picking up and it was choppy and white-capped. Our tug and the support vessel were beginning to slam together, then a freighter went by at full speed even though we had called for a slow-down of heavy traffic, and nearly tore our boats to bits. I made Seattle Traffic SLOW THEM THE F_CK DOWN. They seemed to get it after that.
We kept talking to the hard hat diver, who was pretty lucid by now. He was yelling something---it was hard to make out. It sounded like a lover's fight heard through the walls of the adjoining apartment. He was yelling at someone to let go of him, that he would just do it himself. There was a lot of clacking, clicking, and the muffled sounds of a struggle coming through the com. We tried to intercede, but couldn't. We assumed one of the CG boats had finally, finally found him. We were counting the seconds. By this time he'd been on the surface (just a guess) about two minutes. Time was really, really getting short---but at least there was a chance. We had the decom chamber all pumped down and ready for him. We had tied one of our own compressors into the dive vessel's systems so at least the chamber would stay livable.
Right then the CG boat that had a hold of the rescue diver announced that the hard hat diver was trying to surface in their vicinity, but that the body of the rescue diver was wrapped and tangled in his hose, and that was somehow preventing the hard hat diver from surfacing. I had been yelling at them through our radio link to the CG small boats, counting down the seconds left with which to get the hard hat diver into the chamber. When there was only 60 seconds or less left and he wasn't even on his way, and it was clear that it would take them at least another three or four minutes to get the hard-hat diver untangled and into the chamber, I told them to forget about the chamber and just send him back down. The chamber was no longer an option. Just send him the f_ck back down. We would send a diver to meet him and bring him to 160 feet. My guy was already pulling on a Kirby and our compressors were ramped back up from idle and we were really pumping air for this whole messy thing..
Right then the CG boat that had a hold of the rescue diver announced that since the rescue diver was somehow fouling the hard hat diver (they just couldn't communicate to us how or why this was the case, but they were adamant that it was), they were going to just throw the rescue diver back over the side of their zodiac, and hope that the hard hat diver could get himself untangled and come to the surface. The CG judged this was the most intelligent thing to do. We were still aboard our tug, tied alongside the support vessel. We were a hundred yards away and couldn't really see them through the swells.
I told them that the hard hat diver was already at the surface, and that another boat had him, so there was no point in dumping the rescue diver's body over the side, as we'd just have to go get it again. They said, "Too late", meaning that they had already dumped the body of the rescue diver. We figured, "Jesus f_cking H Christ", but said nothing. We found ourselves just looking at each other, shaking our heads, wishing they'd JUST. GO. HOME.
We got a spotlight on the CG small boat which claimed they had dumped the body of the rescue diver overboard, and between the swells we saw this huge, red form in the water next to the CG rubber boat---like a way-too-fat Santa Clause, and it didn't really register at the moment why this guy was SO freaking huge. It was a guy in a dry suit, his suit bloated to the bursting point, but the suit was slowly deflating, and as it did so, the body slowly sank. In a few seconds the huge red suit was gone and an umbilical hose on the surface was snaking down toward it as it sank. This was a piece of information which we couldn't immediately resolve, because the crew of the CG small boat had just informed us they had thrown the body of the SCUBA diver over the side---so what was this huge, bloated drysuit bobbing around out there in the spray?. Like when you wake up in the morning and you think it's Sunday but the mailman just dropped off your mail---what do you do with this information? It takes a second because you're not sure if the polar caps have shifted and the mail is now delivered on Sunday, or if, in fact you have suffered a small cerebral incident and it's really Tuesday and you're four hours later for work.
It was at this moment the shock began to hit my bruised and assaulted brain. In the dive shack, the hard hat diver's pneumo was showing a slow but steady descent. We got the hard had diver on the com and asked him where he was. He mumbled and was hard to understand. If he said anything coherent at all, he said he was going down and he couldn't stop it. That's what I took from it.
I called the CG rubber boat and asked them to describe the rescue diver to me. They said he was wearing a dry suit, and had a "weird kind of face mask on".
Of course they were describing the hard hat diver in his Kirby Morgan Band Mask. The fact was they had never even seen the rescue diver. The hard hat diver had surfaced, they had grabbed him pulled him aboard, then thought he was the SCUBA diver, and had, for God knows whatever reason, thought this SCUBA diver was preventing the hard-hat diver from surfacing. His suit was bloated because when he popped up from the depths so dramatically, the air in it had expanded grossly. I'd had no idea a drysuit could take that much distortion without bursting. But the crew in the CG small boat still thought this guy was the rescue diver, and in order to save the hard hat diver, they cut open his suit to make it sink, and they rolled him over the side. And then told us he had been dead all along.
I instantly put Ron back in the water, and he headed down the anchor wire again. Over the next couple of minutes, as Ron struggled down the wire, we listened to the hard hat diver die. When he reached 245 again, his breathing stopped (it probably stopped on the way down, but we could no longer hear it at this point), and all we could hear was the sound of little clicks and clacks as his bandmask bumped against the gravelly bottom. I called Ron back to the surface. It had been, by our best calculations (later confirmed by tapes of the radio transmissions), 9 minutes and 52 seconds from the time the CG small boat first announced they had found the rescue diver. Now we knew exactly how long it took for a man to die of the bends.
At this point, knowing more about what I was facing, and figuring there wasn't much left to lose anyway, I had them pull the anchor that the hard hat diver was wrapped around. Once aboard, we simply got ahold of the diver's umbilical as it streamed down-current. After a minute he surfaced out there on the end of it, like a hunk of tuna bait being trolled, twisting in the current. It took, as I recall, eight men working hard to pull him upstream to the dive vessel (it's a miracle his umbilical didn't part), and several more to hoist his body aboard over the stern rail. Of course it was probably the most profound case of explosive bends on record.
At this point, well, I won't go into the psychological turmoil I was going through, having never lost in a situation like this before. Lots of times the people died before we could get to them, and that was fair. But to have been given the opportunity to save this guy, and to have it so stupidly plucked from us by people we had virtually no respect for in the first place, was too much. This is the closest I ever came to swearing over the radio at the Coast Guard, but to my credit, or not.....I didn't.
We wrapped everything up and brought the whole mess back into port, where we were met by the coroner and some EMTs and God knows who else. Taking the diver up the dock on a gurney the coroner dropped him, and we had to salvage his body from the marina bottom. Took five minutes.
As I write this from the vantage point of 25 years later, and I watch the American government virtually terrorize its citizenry with terrifying tales of terrorists, I can't help wishing we could ask one question of the two divers who died that night: Who has done more to harm you? Who do you fear most, Osama bin Laden, or the United States Coast Guard?
When we were alone on the dock that night, just my crew and I, a tall, lanky CG crewman (as I remember him) emerged from the shadows and said, "You know, that diver wasn't dead. He was fighting like hell to get away from us. They just cut his suit and rolled him over the rail. They all panicked." ...or words to this effect.
We said we knew.
Once or twice more CG crewmen approached us with the same revelation (it may have been the same guy but I wasn't paying attention by now). On one of these occasions a senior officer snapped at the crewman to "Get back over here." The crewman meekly obeyed. We figured it would all get sorted out in court.
Bright and early next morning I was at the CG station in Seattle. I had many times retrieved tapes from their VHF transceivers and repeaters to document some rescue or other. This was no different. I showed the proper papers at the front desk, paid the twenty or thirty dollar fee, and was escorted back to the radio room, where the radioman began rewinding and playing the tapes from the antenna sites most likely to have captured the entire incident. A main site was located only two miles from the scene. And the incident had occurred in such a central place that it would have been clearly picked up by at least half a dozen other sites, and poor recordings would be available from half a dozen more sites still. But after ten minutes of fiddling, the radioman was genuinely perplexed. Every single track of every single tape---and there were 28 possibilities in all, as I recall---was utterly and totally blank. Utterly, completely, totally blank. Blank as if professionally erased. No other conversations, no traffic, no static, no nothing. Blank and clean. Well, as Gomer Pyle would say: Surprahse, surprahse, surprahse. This was exactly, precisely the kind of low-down behavior we had witnessed by the CG on many occasions, but I was still sickened by it.
The radioman fortunately wasn't in on the gag, and he persisted, and persisted---saw it after awhile as a personal challenge. Until after what seemed like hours of scrounging, he came up with a track on which none of the radio transmissions SHOULD have been captured. Yet they were. Just a fluke. In this way I was able to extract 70% of the previous evening's fiasco and make a copy of it. The only copy in existence.
I took it home and immediately set about to clone several more copies, but for one reason or another, a comedy of errors, I couldn't get it done. Still, I guarded the tape with my life, and made plans to have it professionally duped, while I stood in the room and watched.
The day before that was to occur, I got a call from my attorneys in Seattle, XXXXXXXX, XXXXXXXX. They had been incredibly good attorneys through the years, winning me huge awards for jobs that I'd only wanted to charge a small fraction of those sums for. I had used them for years. They specialized in maritime (Admiralty) law and were well entrenched with the local maritime scene. They knew or were involved with, it seemed, just about anyone who'd ever been or still was in the Coast Guard, so they had been useful on many occasions over the years. They called and said they'd heard about the incident a few days before with the divers and the Coast Guard, and they had a client who had some obscure connection to the case, and he was going to be in some kind of minor jam if he couldn't document what had happened that night. They had heard.....that I had "a tape of some kind...."
I said sure---I considered it quite a coup. Did they want a copy? They said they'd LOVE to have a copy (I imagined warm yellow urine running down their pants legs as they said this), and how soon could I get it to them? I explained the problem with making a copy, and told them I could have one for them in a few days. Well, they said, that wouldn't do at all. Nope. This was something of a minor emergency, and they'd be happy to send a courier to pick it up. I explained that this was the ONLY copy, and that I really couldn't let it go. They countered that they did this kind of thing all the time, they were "professionals", and that I could utterly and totally trust them with this tape.
So I did.
A few weeks later I asked for its return. I received no reply. I asked again. No reply. Tried registered mail. No reply. They wouldn't take my calls (no one was in at the moment). The weeks dragged into months, and the tape never surfaced again.
There was an official maritime inquiry (may not be the proper term for the proceeding) into the deaths (the rescue diver was, of course, never found---well surprahse, surprahse---). We weren't invited to the inquiry. We insisted. We were ignored. In fact we were never so much as asked for a statement. By anyone. Ever. Even though we offered. Repeatedly. The CG specifically did NOT want to hear from us regarding these fatalities. The inquiry was wrapped up quickly (I think it lasted all of an hour). I got a copy of the transcript through the freedom of information act, or maybe an anonymous friend in the CG sent it after I filed, I'm not sure). The entire issue of any CG culpability had been very neatly glossed over, no embarrassing questions asked. It was, in my view, sickeningly obvious. The CG was exonerated of any and all wrong-doing, like it almost always is. And it was shortly after this I sold my company and left town. I went as far inland, as far from water---and the Coast Guard---as you can get. At least, I thought, I would never again in this lifetime have to lay eyes upon those miserable, incompetent, amoral sons of bloody bitches.
I made one last attempt to get the tape back from my attorneys. There was no reply. However, in their final billing to me upon the sale of my company, a curious entry was found: "$141 for "tape search". I went ballistic, and made it known to them that things were going to get "very ugly" if my tape didn't magically reappear. I was ignored. I didn't have the patience or the energy in those days to take on a prominent crooked law firm whose offices took up an entire floor of a downtown Seattle skyscraper. In the end I even had to pay the lousy $141 for the theft of my tape.
Years later I turned an accounting in to "Unsolved Mysteries". I never heard back from them. My hunch was that even this powerful medium was scared of taking on the United States Coast Guard. Who could blame them.
The Fun Never Ends
I left the water for many years. Just didn't have the stomach for it anymore, not in any commercial sense, anyway. Eventually I moved back home and played around with some yuppy sailboats, made a bunch of trips from Seattle to Alaska, but it seemed everywhere I went, there was the United States Coast Guard, pestering someone for something. I didn't get pestered in Alaska or Canada though. I lived in Canada for some years, and have probably 3 times the respect for the Canadian Coast Guard as I do for the yanks. I have probably 13 times more respect for the Alaskan Coast Guard personnel than for the Washington stations---partly because the Coast Guard in Alaska has never pestered me once, and I've seen them do good work. In fact, I can't remember ever seeing them do bad work up there, though I've no doubt they do.
I bought a jet ski awhile back, just so I could at least hobble on over to Brainless Island once in awhile and see some friends. PWC, of course, are fully floating hulls (unsinkable), and mine also sports two floatation seats. I always wear a good quality Sterns myself, and my son has an assortment of SOSpender products and ski-jackets. He also wears a shorty 3mm wet suit under his clothes when jet skiing, as do I---a far more effective floatation device and hypothermia barrier than any traditional life jacket, from the standpoint that it can NOT be ripped from your body by a high-speed dunking, as most life jackets can, even those supposedly "tested at 100 mph". Still, my floatation seats are not CG approved, and any kind of wetsuit (even a full dry diving suit) is not "CG Approved", and to not wear something that's CG approved is against the law. Well, that's okay. The law is clear, and to break it earns one a fine regardless of the sense of it. Fair enough.
We went jet-skiing today, me and my son. Had a nice time poking around Elliot Bay. We went over to Eagle harbor, then, on the way back, decided to play around with the ski out in the middle.
I heard a rumor a few weeks ago that since we now live under the constant threat of terrorism, someone---the CG one presumes---has instituted some new regulations with regard to how close pleasure craft may pass to other vessels, like ferries, cruise ships and the like. After hearing this I cornered the SPD police boat in my home marina and asked them to fill me in on all the new regs. There were a bunch of them---not a single one of which will ever, ever prevent a terrorist attack, of course, but because this is what bureaucrats do (write regulations) we should have expected a bunch of new ones post 911. And so we're not disappointed.
I was told by the police boat that you couldn't exceed 7 knots while within 200 yards of cruise ships. Silly, but.....whatever. It's usually not a hardship to comply. Since in Alaska we often stay close behind large cargo ships in order to cross rough pieces of water, I asked the officer if this 200 yard reg applied to cargo ships. He replied, "Oh, no, no---just cruise ships, ferries..." Well, that was a relief---at least the world hadn't gone totally paranoid and insane. I said, "Yeah, just common sense things, right? Public vessels, passengers and like that?" "Yeah," he replied. We talked another few minutes and that was that.
While playing around in the middle of the sound today we spied a freighter southbound for Elliot bay. We figured we'd get in behind him and have a smooth trip back to Seattle. So he passed, and we moved in astern, perhaps 100 yards from him. We were playing around in his wake, having a nice time. There was a crewman on the stern. We waved. He waved, but not politely---he frantically waved us OFF. We thought, "Christ---there's no regs about passing close to freighters. What the hell is this guy's problem?" Still, there was no particular reason to be so close to him, so we powered off a few hundred yards and played around in his wake. Within about a mile he started slowing to turn east into Elliot Bay, so we passed him at a hundred yards or so, and headed home, about two miles away across the bay.
It was choppy, so we could only do about 25-30 mph. From the ship we took up a course heading straight for our marina. To miss traffic we altered course no more than about five degrees in either direction from our course, but just kept on, anxious to get home and be dry.
About a mile from our marina a red-hull CG boat came straight at us then cut across our bow, little blue light flashing, and made us stop. Since I don't like the Coast Guard I was irritated instantly, but resolved to be neutral and polite. It's amazing the things mega-doses of Zoloft will allow you to ignore.
We asked what the problem was. No one knew. No one knew? Huh? Then why were we being "pulled over"? I flashed back to the freighter whose wake we'd been playing in five minutes before. Couldn't be that. No regs on a separation zone from cargo ships. SPD said so. So what's the deal? How can the vessel that stopped you not know why they stopped you? Typical Coast Guard! My irritation was growing.
Pretty soon a CG 41 comes alongside the little red boat. The skipper introduces himself and informs us that we had been stopped because we had been operating too close to a freighter. And, also, at this point, we're being detained because we had tried to outrun the Coast Guard.
HUH?
Isn't it just astounding how quickly old angers can resurface? I had forgotten just how much I hated these guys. Now, here we were, trying to find a little relaxation in the middle of the freaking Sound, and it didn't seem to matter how much a person wanted to be left alone and unmolested, it was an impossible thing to attain.
The skipper of the 41 proceeded to tell us how he knew we had seen his blue flashing light and he knew we had heard his siren. The truth, the fact of the matter is that we had seen or heard NO such thing. Yet here is a man whom I automatically do not respect, right in my face telling me what I have and have not heard or seen. And he's dead wrong. And he won't give it up. He just won't let it rest.
Freighter we got too close to.I informed him that we had been fine with the stop up until that point. Now we're angry. Typically government employee--he informs us that we don't "have" to like it. As far as I was concerned, he had no tokens in his "respect account" to begin with---and he's going deeper in debt with every outrageous comment. To back him off and get him out of my face I informed him that I didn't like the Coast Guard, that I had personally witnessed them kill people and weasel out of the blame, that I didn't respect the man or his organization, and that he needed to back away from me and stop telling me what I had or had not seen or heard. Of course, typical bureaucrat, this made him angry. Well, that's just too bad.
So let's say I block this man's car at a traffic light. I surround it and prevent it from moving. I then stick my face into his space, and INFORM him that I know it is a FACT that he just robbed a bank and is trying to run from the cops, but now I have caught him. He argues, but I insist---I get right in his face and tell him it is a FACT that he robbed a bank and is running to get away. If he's done no such thing, he's going to be angry as all Goddamned hell, and he has a right to his anger. The Coast Guard simply does not realize how they make enemies in this way. Of course I was an enemy from 25 years ago---but he's re-cemented my resolve to be his enemy in 20 short seconds, simply through arrogance and belligerence and being wrong. I have no tolerance for this kind of behavior from people I respect. I have a thousand times less tolerance for this kind of childish power-play from people I do not respect. How in the Hell do people like this think they can behave in this manner with no retribution or consequence?!
We talked about what the "charges" were going to be for a few minutes, me being rude and insulting, he being bureaucratic. At this point I realized it was time to make a few of my experiences with the United States Coast Guard public.
In the end the skipper could come up with only one valid argument; that was that my son wasn't wearing an "approved" life jacket. I was. He wasn't. The reason he wasn't is that he forgot his at the house. I had asked him several times on the way to the jet ski to go back for it. He said he would be fine. After all, he reasoned---he had his shorty wetsuit. We had the two floatation cushions on the PWC (not CG approved). And of course we had the PWC itself, which will not sink, even if flooded, even if you cut it in half with a chainsaw. Still my son should have had a lifejacket ON, and, it should have been CG approved. Why? Because, testing gear is one thing bureaucrats do well. They haven't really got the common sense God gave a crowbar, but they understand academic things, and we should take advantage of their propensity for the anal in matters where we can benefit from it. If a PFD is CG approved, it's "probably" reasonably safe. It could be that the flotation seats on the jet ski had some unknown flaw and they would sink---we wouldn't know this because no recognized agency had tested them. If we hit a log, a person without a lifejacket could be knocked out and could slip under the surface before I could get to them. My son's shorty suit would keep his body afloat, but wouldn't keep his face out of the water. But a CG approved jacket would, and he should have been wearing one. A good deal of my rescue business involved body recovery. It was so bad that in later years I would close my eyes when I knew I was near a body. It was bad enough to feel around and grab them with my hands, but I didn't want to see them anymore if I could avoid it. With this kind of experience under my belt, I should have simply insisted on going back to get the spare lifejacket. It's a cut-and-dried case, and I won't contest it as long as the fine is fair and in-line. And therein lies the rub.
The skipper of the 41 made this statement, or a similar statement, between 4 and 7 times while we were aboard his vessel:
"Your attitude has been antagonistic since you stepped aboard. The District doesn't like this. If I write in my report that you were disrespectful, and I intend to do just that, the District will make a major case out of this, and they'll come down on you as hard as they possibly can. The district will hit you hard for this."
This skipper also told us flatly that he had, just previous to stopping us, stopped another small craft for playing in the wake of another freighter. He said that they had given that vessel a verbal warning and sent it on its way, but that since my attitude was bad, I would be cited for the same activity. And the United States Coast Guard persists in wondering why, as Rodney Dangerfield would say, they "can't get no respect."
Would I take a polygraph regarding this? Of course---polygraphs I've already taken in situations like this are viewable throughout this site.
So here we have a situation wherein a CG skipper is so intent on making sure he punishes me because I don't respect the United States Coast Guard, that he has admitted, repeatedly, for the record, in public, in front of his crew, that SINCE I don't respect the CG, my fine(s) will be much higher, and I will be possibly punished in other ways by the District. --Not because I am "extra guilty", but because I am "extra disrespectful".
So what does he mean by "disrespectful"? I mean, did I spit on him or something, or call him names, or swear or use abusive language. No sir. Of course not. I merely informed him that I would not tolerate being told what I did or did not see, or what I did or did not hear by ANYONE, and especially by someone I do not respect. That's it. That's the sum of my disrespect.
So, ladies and germs, what the Coast Guard has admitted to is that if IT doesn't like YOU, because YOU don't like IT----you're screwed. The District will nail you to the wall because of that, and no other thing.
How many legal definitions of discrimination and intimidation can our attorneys come up with here?
Let's get clear on this issue before we proceed: The United States Coast Guard is telling me that I am about to be run through the ringer by the District, to a far greater degree than people who "like" the Coast Guard, simply because I DON'T like the Coast Guard. I don't like the Coast Guard because I think it is petty and stupid and far too often utterly incompetent, even dangerously so. I am being penalized for this belief in a manner that is, by any standard any where, petty and stupid---not to mention illegal, actionable, and backwoods. So the Coast Guard seems to think it can make me respect it by acting petty and stupid all the more. Sorry---all it earned today was my renewed sense of fear.
Ahhhh---I get it now! This is Planet of the Apes!
The 41 decided that it wasn't going to allow us to proceed to our harbor under our own power after all, even though they had indicated that would be the case a few moments prior, and had actually given my son a lifejacket to wear during our brief ride that last half mile to our berth. We were apparently "in custody". We were not allowed to disembark the 41.
At this point the crew was ordered to take the PWC in tow. I asked to be handed a towline so I could splice it onto the bowline of the PWC. This request was refused. Instead, I was made to give the bowline to a crewman, when then tried to figure out how to do the splice. In the end, he built two loops, one in my bowline, and one in his towline, one loop through the other. If you wanted to saw two lines in half on a long tow, of course, this would be about the most efficient setup for doing so. The PWC was strung out about fifty feet astern, and the helmsman slipped the engines in gear for a few seconds to stretch out the tow. It then required the cumulative brainpower of four (4) crewmen for a full three minutes (perhaps more, but no less), to figure out how to tie this towline to the bollard of the 41. My son and I simply leaned against the rail with our mouths open. Every bad memory I had of watching this very same level of incompetence over the years came back to me, and I experienced a strange, unsettling mix of emotions that wavered from sadness to irritation to outright anger to supreme depression. To be at the bureaucratic mercy of people of this caliber was simply unacceptable. To be actually imprisoned on their vessel was unbearable. It was like a little whiff of Hell.
The tow was finally arranged and we set off for the marina, little more than a half mile distant. I was perplexed that we were only making about three knots. Here's a vessel on the end of the towline capable of 70 mph, certainly capable of being towed at 10, or 20, or 30 knots or more, especially since the towing eye in the bow of the jet ski is at or below the waterline, which means that there is virtually no danger of this hard-chine little boat shearing. So why three knots? We were told the crew would do a "boarding" when we reached the marina. So.....let's GET TO THE MARINA. The Coast Guard has been utterly famous for towing vessels far too fast for their design. They've often made displacement hulls plane, and I can't count the number of vessels we were hired to raise from the bottom, or to tow in capsized, because the Coast Guard had towed them far too hard and fast for their design or for current conditions. But here we had the opposite dilemma---it seems these people will simply never get it right, and I submit that you can never train seamanship into any individual. Either they've got it, or they're a landlubbing pencil pusher. The Coast Guard needs to stop putting pencil-pushers on its boats. A poodle ain't a hound, and no amount of training will make him one.
So we're towed to the marina forcibly---not allowed to get aboard our vessel and simply travel there under our own power. We arrive at a point, finally, a hundred yards off the marina entrance, and the crew of the 41 decides to take our PWC alongside. Now, folks, let's understand what's happening here for a moment: You have a CG 41 footer---a heavy vessel, 41 feet long and built like a tank. You have a 700 pound, relatively fragile jet ski, which bobs daintily on every little ripplet that comes along like a lightbulb. You're 100 yards offshore in Elliot Bay, in the middle of 4th of July weekend. You have ferries coming and going, wide-eyed yachtsmen roaring back and forth in front of Seattle, trying to impress someone, somewhere. The bay is sloppy as hell---we used to call it "charter chop" when I was crabbing out of Westport as a kid. And the Coast Guard wants to bring the PWC alongside with not a fender in sight.
Sloppy conditions for bringing a PWC alongside with no fenders(!)---this was BEFORE the ferry wake.
Who gave these people GUNS, anyhow?Well, what can I even say.
I made the comment that maybe this wasn't such a good idea. I wouldn't even have brought a yacht alongside in this sloppy place. But who am I beside the mighty Coast Guard---
As the crew brought the PWC alongside, a ferry passed. Its wake came roiling and hissing toward us. I began making polite suggestions regarding the wake early on, trying to give them a chance to see the situation for themselves, but knowing they would not. Only when the wake was right upon us, and there were only seconds to spare did I make a move to fend off the PWC. But this was apparently seen as some kind of terrorist act. Perhaps, they must have thought, I was going to pull a bomb out of my Stearns vest, or maybe I was going to make a break for it. I thought the entire crew was going to tackle me and wrestle me to the deck. I hate to use foul language, and I didn't then, but I will here and now because I'm pretty sure I won't be imprisoned or shot for it: Jesus H Christ.
With the PWC alongside one of the crewmen opened up a compartment and extracted the PWC's fire extinguisher. It was perhaps three weeks old, and clearly stamped "Coast Guard Approved". Yet this wasn't good enough for the crewman. He brought the offending unit to his skipper and asked over and over if this was a legal extinguisher. The skipper showed him the "CG Approved" stamp on the bottle itself, but the crewman obviously didn't want to let the issue go. He just wouldn't let it go.
His argument was that even though it was clearly stamped "Coast Guard Approved", there was no way, he thought, to check the charge in the bottle. Of course there was a way---the extinguisher features a little color-coded plastic stem which clearly shows whether or not the unit is charged. Neither the crewman or the skipper could figure this out, however, and the crewman continued to argue to the skipper that even though the unit was clearly stamped "CG Approved", it still must be illegal if it didn't have a gauge, and that I should be cited. The skipper him-hawed around the issue, and just kept saying that it was stamped "CG Approved" so the crewman should let it go. But the crewman STILL wouldn't let it go. At this point, as a means of entertainment, I took the side of Devil's Advocate and sided with the crewman, and I asked the skipper how it could possibly be legal if there was no gauge. He finally replied that you could tell the unit was charged by shaking it and feeling the powder inside the bottle. Finally the skipper advised me in a fatherly tone that even though this unit was approved, I would be better off replacing it with a unit with a gauge so I could tell if it was charged or not.
At this point I was too saddened to continue the charade. What the skipper didn't seem to understand was (1) the unit features a color-coded plastic stem which shows its charge and pressure, and (2) it does absolutely NO GOOD WHATSOEVER to shake a fire extinguisher as a means of determining its charge, because it may well be perfectly full of powder, but have no pressure at all with which to propel that powder to a fire. In other words, you can shake it all you want, and it might feel full, but it can still be dead as a doornail. I concluded that this skipper's head was also full of powder but utterly devoid of pressure. Once again, I was left shaking my head and I let the matter go. I'd had my fun, but these guys weren't even bright enough to comprehend that. "Yep", I thought--- "Same old Coast Guard. Nothing changes." The extinguisher was eventually returned to us, but the crewman in question seemed genuinely, well, deflated. He'd wanted so very badly to cite us for this brand new fire extinguisher which was clearly marked "Coast Guard Approved". And to think....these guys are miffed when they're not respected.
One of the crewmen tried to repeatedly argue that my new Stearns life vest (prominently marked "CG Approved" on the label, wasn't CG approved, and so I should be cited for that as well. The skipper backed him off. What a pack of jackals!
I not only do not respect these people, I by God fear them. Meeting up with the Coast Guard is a little like falling asleep and waking up in a mental institution---where the patients are the guards.
The wake disaster had been averted and the jet ski saved. Somehow the 41 managed to get into the marina and get moored. At this point, I was handed the bowline to the PWC, and told I could go. I have no idea what became of their grand plans for a "formal boarding". Why were we held in custody for half an hour to an hour under the guise of being detained so a formal boarding could be accomplished at the marina, only to be kicked loose without so much as an explanation when we arrived? This seemed little more than a brief kidnapping to us, with nothing gained and no purpose fulfilled. I was simply handed the bowline and told I could go. I did so with nary a goodbye, except to thank the one crewman aboard who had shown us respect and courtesy.
Nice kid, just doing his job and being courteous.We wouldn't give you a plug-nickel for the rest of the crew.
How much did the government spend on this charade today? $5000? I'll bet it was closer to ten or twelve grand, all told.
Is there something wrong with this picture? Of course there is. Everything is wrong with this picture. And we should all be downright scared because of it.
How many times have I been bothered by a terrorist? None to date. How many times have I been bothered by overzealous, out of control law enforcement? A few.
I was cited for the lifejacket issue. The fine has not yet been set. As long as the fine is in-line with all other first offenses of this type and category, I won't contest it. I still believe that regardless of how much other flotation we had aboard, my son should have been actually wearing an approved design. It's not as if there are not enough approved designs to choose from. It also doesn't matter that he was wearing a shorty suit. It wasn't approved. We knew it wasn't approved. We knew it was against the law to be doing what we were doing. So even if an argument could be made for common sense and logic, and that fact that he was protected, we knew it was illegal and that we were subject to being fined. End of story.
If, however, the District tries to, as the skipper told us repeatedly, "come down hard" because he didn't like my lack of respect for the CG, then things will get very interesting indeed.
The bottom line is pretty self-evident: Since 911 many agencies, maybe especially the CG, have been given a windfall of funding. Terrorists! Oh my God there are terrorists everywhere! Behind every woodpile, under every porch! The terrorist theme is being used on the American people like the boogey man is used to control the behavior of frightened children by unscrupulous parents. There ARE terrorists in the world, and they COULD attack right here in River City. But the actions being taken by the United States Coast Guard, at an added cost of millions upon millions upon countless millions of dollars right here in Puget Sound, will not stop one single vessel from being blown up by some uneducated idiot with a zodiac and a device. Not one. But the Coast Guard and the marine police departments have oh so much time and money now, and they have to do SOMETHING with it---so they feel justified in pestering the populace, harassing the living sh*t out of the boating public, and in dedicating the time and energy and expense of two rescue boats and a dozen or more crewmen for an hour or two, for something like this.
They could have pulled alongside us, told us to get to shore and get a lifejacket on the passenger or get cited, and then watched us travel the short distance to the marina. We would have apologized politely---and it would have been heartfelt and sincere, because we were wrong. It's possible such an approach might have actually earned them a little respect. It certainly wouldn't have cost them any, which is what their outrageous and counter-productive acts have done today. That would have left them all that time to go look for bad guys. But of course there just aren't enough bad guys to go around, so they have to justify their funding somehow.
We make the skipper's name out to be M. Haakensen. We'll ask for a complete crew roster as time allows. Location was nowhere close to that listed above, but was more like four miles S of Sierra Gulf. For some reason the responding vessel's numbers are not show on the cite. We'll supply them as they become available. Curiously, no address of any kind or description shows on the cite, front or back. Apparently they want to put us to the trouble of calling them up, being swapped around through a phone menu system for four minutes, and then having to ask them for their address so we can begin filing legal documents.
---Too much funding, too much authority, too little legitimate work to do, and a vacuum of natural ability. Well, it's a government agency, after all.
I've spent many hours flying over water in the lower forty eight---about 600 fixed-wing, and roughly 2200 turbine helicopter. In flying circles, at least in circles which fly over water alot, there's a lot of late night speculation about making a water landing---ditching, as it's called. Those of us concerned with our own safety try to think these things through, and so over a period of years we came up with an informal list of types of vessels we'd try to ditch closest to if we crapped an engine and had to go into the water. The basis for this list is that we want to ditch as close as possible to the type of vessel that is most likely to be able to render the quickest and most meaningful aid, because you (the pilot) might be unconscious or trapped, and you don't want to trust your life---what's left of it---to some incompetent bozo who could have saved you, but who just never quite got it done. If I survive the impact with the water and then die because some imbecile ran me down and chopped me up with his propeller, I'm going to be pissed. So here's the list we came up with over the years, and why. If you have to ditch an airplane or helicopter in the water, you want to look around on the way down and try to land as close as possible to these vessels, in this order. You always want to land well in the vessel's normal field of view, but never directly in front of them, as they might be on autopilot and reading a book or having sex and they will in that case run you down and kill you anyway. Never land off their beam or astern.
First choice: A tug boat without a tow.
A smaller tug may be more maneuverable and may get to you more quickly, but a larger tug has a better chance of having a larger crew, therefore you have the best chance of being spotted. The larger tug may be better equipped to save your ass as well---if you're trapped in the cockpit, for instance, and they can't readily get you out, a larger tug will think nothing of slipping a line around the prop hub or the rotor hub and then tying off to a cleat on the towing deck, which will keep you from sinking and give them more time to get you out, and it almost certainly won't take four or five crew members three full minutes or arguing to cleat off the wreckage and get on with things. Chances are one guy can do it in four seconds without being told how. There are lots of advantages to putting down near a larger tug, but any tug will do. This is by far your best chance of being saved..Second choice: A tug with a tow.
Most skippers wouldn't hesitate to drop a tow to come to your aid, or, if the skipper is confident and experienced, depending on what he's towing and where you are, he won't mind just altering course WITH his tow and coming straight to your aid. Still, he'll be a little slower than the tug without a tow.Third choice: A commercial fishing vessel.
There are lots of really stupid skippers driving commercial fish boats around the ocean. But virtually all are more competent than almost any yachtsman, and almost all at least have some Goddamned heart, which is a quality conspicuously lacking in most or many yachtsmen. All yachtsmen think they have guts, but I've seen it ten thousand times---when things start to go to hell, they quietly implode. This means that the fish boat skipper is more likely to give your rescue his all. He'll know what his boat can take, he'll be able to properly handle it in most cases, without running you down or chopping you up. Most of these guys can at least tie a knot that's appropriate to the task, and they know how to operate a freaking radio. Chances are they have been in at least a few tough scrapes themselves (not "out of gas and late for dinner" scrapes (another life saved by the Coast Guard), which constitute a life-and-death situation for the yachtsman), and most won't be prone to panic. There are some exceptions---like the mill-worker / school-teacher type of "commercial fisherman" who doesn't actually fish year round as a profession, but is just out and about in some shiny, go-fast boat of some kind, trying to make a few bucks on the side.Fourth choice: Navy vessel.
We rank them lower than a commercial fish boat because they tend not to be overly effective unless rescuing their own people. This isn't discrimination---it's a technology bottle-neck. If you aren't squawking on their private military frequencies, you sort of don't exist. If your aircraft isn't outfitted with lifting hooks like theirs, they won't have a clue what to do with your aircraft. They have the finest diving capabilities in the world, but they aren't geared to quick dunks on spur of the moment. And....they really, really hate dealing with civilians, and who can blame them. They don't integrate well with the Coast Guard (partly through an unspoken, low-level contempt), and who can blame them there either. Their vessels are generally large and unwieldy. They don't go anywhere unless they're engaged in a specific, coordinated operation (they might waste ten minutes trying to get permission to come and rescue you). The Navy takes care of the Navy, not us. They'll always give your rescue a shot if no other resources are available, but they won't like it, and they're kind of half-hearted about it. --Sort of the way I felt on those occasions "rescuing" the Coast Guard.Fifth choice: A pleasure craft, or Coast Guard vessel.
This is a tough call. We put them both at the same level of desirability because if you bank away from the CG vessel in preference for a yacht, you may well get lucky and draw a yachting skipper who is a retired or vacationing towboat skipper or has actual experience from some other duty. Of course you might also draw a stoopid yachtsman who will simply run you down, then spend the next ten minutes standing off, trying to figure out how to use his radio. If you opt for the Coast Guard vessel to ditch near, you might also draw a stoopid skipper who will abandon you because the weather is too rough, or it may take the vessel's crewmen three minutes of arguing to cleat off your sinking wreckage---and by that time it's moot because you've already sunk and drowned. Or....you might get lucky and draw a CG vessel down from Anchorage or Juneau on a training exercise, in which case you'll almost certainly be saved forthwith. An additional advantage of choosing the CG vessel over the yacht is that if you die, you can rest assured that the paperwork will be filled out in quadruplet form, so that your wife will have an easier time of collecting your insurance. The perk to choosing a yacht over a CG vessel is that the yachtsman, if he saves you, won't haul you in to the dock and insult you for two hours before cutting you loose. So, to us, it's a perfect toss-up: CG / Yachstman: Your odds are about the same either way.Sixth choice: Any type of charter vessel.
Charter skippers are a slight grade above the average yachtsman as far as experience, but remember that these guys sink all the time themselves. How many charter boats have we lost off the Washington Coast now? It's in the dozens, I'm sure. It happens almost exclusively because inexperienced skippers---skippers with no saltwater in their veins at all, regardless of the number of licenses they hold or academic degrees they've earned---take basically and inherently unsafe boats (slab-sided and top-heavy and un-seakindly in virtually every way) into unsafe conditions and operate them badly. It's just that simple. Still, if these guys are slightly better than the average yachtsman, why wouldn't you choose the charter boat over the CG vessel or a yacht? --Because no charter skipper will even CONSIDER endangering the safety of his passengers to save your sorry butt, nor should he be expected to do so. And neither would I. He'll call for help, which will bring the Coast Guard, or at least some yachtsmen to take your picture, but he won't even get near your sinking wreckage if he has passengers aboard, and that goes for the dumbest, and the smartest, among them.Seventh choice: A ship.
Any ship. Forget it. They can't stop (don't WANT to stop), can't turn, (don't WANT to turn), and are loathe, loathe I say, to put any of their small boats over the side for any reason. Ever. The best you'll get here, on average, is a skipper who feels badly about not reducing power, but who makes up for it by calling the Coast Guard in a rather timely manner. Don't crash near a ship. Not a ferry, not a tanker, not a cruise ship, not a freighter. Just say no to ships.Among the pleasure craft crowd the categories can be broken down even further. A sailor will almost certainly be more competent than a power boater, for instance. Given the choice between a ski boat and a yacht, go for the ski boat. Lots of machismo and excess testosterone rolling around the bilges of any ski boat. And there are usually girls aboard who need to be impressed. The ski boat operator will almost certainly run you down once or twice and chop your arms off with his prop(s), but by God he'll probably sacrifice his own life in the rescue attempt, and it's hard to fault enthusiasm.
C-Mar Industrial Diving
6-6-03
UPDATE 4-19-04 (case closed):
Final comment:
The waste of time, energy, resources and goodwill staggers the imagination.
