Does anyone know where the love of God goes…
When I was a small child, in the Summer when the hot Santa Ana winds would blow the sea flat, my mother would take me down to the beach and she’d swim me out to look down through the clear water at the fish. I still remember how much I dreaded the sting of the windblown sand, and how much more I loved clinging to her back as she swam away from the beach; and seeing the leopard sharks, shovel nosed guitar fish, and schools of silvery green grunion.
A few years later, I started to learn to fish from my grandfather, and to surf from his son. I learned to row and to sail. When I was about ten I read The Boy who Sailed Around the World Alone, and began to dream about making journeys past the horizon and learned to navigate out of sight of land.
I still love to surf and sail and fish, and the last several years I’ve even taught myself a little carpentry and built a few simple boats. I love the beach and the ocean, and all things maritime. Partly because of this, Peggy and I are engrossed in another season of The Deadliest Catch, a Discovery Channel serial documentary.
The first season chronicled the last Alaskan King crab derby, a system of fisheries management that compels boats and their crews to work almost non-stop for days on end, in an effort to catch as much of the fleet’s total quota as they can. In the first season of the show, The Big Valley (a boat that did not have a camera crew on it) sank in the hours before the opening of Opie season, with the loss of five of her six crewmen. An investigation suggests the Big Valley was carrying more crab pots on deck than she was rated for, and that this was a key factor in her sinking.
This second season of the show is the first year of a per-boat quota system. Based on their previous years’ catches, the Alaskan Department of Fisheries allocated each boat in the fleet a portion of the total quota. The thought is that having a guaranteed portion of the catch will encourage captains and crews to be more measured in their calculus of risk and returns. Compared to the first season, the pace of the fishing in this second season of the show seems to have been slower and safer.
But this season the weather’s been worse. In a fierce storm during red crab season, one boat was hit broadside by an immense rogue wave that put her on beam ends. She came back to her feet, but both engines had shut down. For long minutes she was helpless in the face of the storm while her crew raced to restart the engines and regain control of the boat, all while the Discovery Channel’s camera rolls. The end of the derby system has lowered the incentive to fish as hard, or in the most marginal conditions, but it hasn’t tamed the sea.
The same year I got my first sailboat, the laker the Edmund Fitzgerald, an ore carrier over 700 feet long was lost with all hands in a late Autumn storm on Lake Superior. For someone who grew up on the ocean, it’s hard for me to imagine that conditions on an inland lake could ever become so severe that a 700 foot ship could disappear suddenly and without warning, yet it happened.
Of the several theories surrounding the sinking of the Fitzgerald, one is that when she lost her radar earlier in the storm made it impossible for her navigator determine their position with sufficient accuracy to avoid the Six Fathom Shoal north of Caribou Island, and that in the violence of the storm she scraped bottom and began to take water, which ultimately combined with the heavy seas to deadly effect.
So much has changed since then, making navigation easier, and boating safer. GPS can tell you your position within feet, anywhere in the word, and it’s inexpensive. I routinely carry a waterproof GPS and waterproof VHF radio, even when just rowing a few hundred yards off shore to fish. If I somehow ended up in the water or lost an oar and started to blow out to sea, I could could determine my position within feet, day or night, whatever the conditions, and call for help. Total cost for both units, less than $200. How different from the Fitzgerald. At night, in a fierce storm, their radar carried off by the wind, they were utterly blind; and the lake had become as vast and unforgiving as any ocean.
There’s no way to know if modern technology would have saved the crew of Edmund Fitzgerald. Some theories place the blame squarely on the crew’s failure to properly secure her cargo hatches, and that the gradual accumulation of water combined with the unexpectedly bad conditions to cause a sudden, catastrophic loss of buoyancy. At sea, like anywhere else, casual negligence kills more people that pure bad luck.
Where ever the blame lies, whether on the Big Valley or the Fitzgerald, it doesn’t lessen the shock or the sorrow.
