The Bering Sea was unusually void of wind and wave. Under the spell our boat rocked gently upon the glassy waters as we lay on anchor off the rocks of Right Hand Point. The anchor chain made its presence known by occasionally coming up against the aluminum hull and birds of countless numbers and species contributed their songs to the peaceful afternoon. Glen and I with our shirts off lay on the deck reading while trying to benefit from the unusually warm sunny day. All of our preparations for the fishing season had been completed, and we were on anchor waiting for an announcement from the Fish and Game, as to when the herring season would open up. The radio had been silent for a few days and so with nothing else to do, we waited.
It seemed waiting was all we had been doing for weeks. First, when we had arrived at the boat yard in King Salmon towards the end of April, waiting three weeks for the river ice to break up so we could put our boat in the river. We had waited in the river for two days, for the tides to be right, so we could head out the Nakanek and waited another two tide cycles for enough water to lift us off a rock we had parked our boat on; which of course, was not on any charts that we could find. While anchored out in Kvichak Bay in the Ships Channel we waited for our oldest brother, Richard, who’s newly built Marco gillnetter was suppose to arrive on a barge from San Diego, California. Getting word that the barge was delayed, we prepared to pull anchor and start the 20 hour run to Togiak, but hearing on the radio that a storm was brewing, we waited some more. Three days later, seeing a clear window of weather, we headed out of Kvichak Bay heading towards Cape Constantine. Arriving that next morning at Right Hand Point, we set anchor to wait for our brother and his new boat to arrive. His boat had all our summer provisions on board that we had stowed prior to it being shipped north. So now we sat on anchor waiting for food, for a fish opening - for something to happen.
Hours stretched into days and our food was all but gone, except for a small sack of pancake mix and a salt and pepper shaker. It was decided to pull anchor and head over to the large processing ship, Alaska Star, which was anchored a few miles away out in front of Crescent Bay. We figured we had enough money to buy a few groceries from the ship store, to tide us over till my brother Dick arrived with our provisions. After using the shower facilities, we grabbed our small sack of groceries and headed back to our gillnetter tied up alongside the ship. While I was handing the food across the gap between the boats to Glen, both he and I heard the announcement over the deck speaker that the Fish and Game were giving the fisherman an opening at 6 am the following morning. “Finally” I exclaimed as I jumped across to our boat. Glen grabbed my hand to steady my landing and added his own version of excitement with a broad grin. “No more sitting around!”
Morning came early with us positioned to set our gear 2 hours prior to the 6 am opening. In studying the bottom charts, it was determined that we should set our sunken gillnets just south of Right Hand Point in about 50 feet of water. Anchored at both ends with 75 pound anchors and connected with buoy lines to the surface buoys, the nets rested on the bottom weighted down by a lead line and having a special cork line that stretched the gillnet up off the bottom. As herring made their way to spawn their eggs on the rocks, our nets would hopefully intercept them prior to them completing their instinctive run to their spawning grounds.
The herring fishery in the Bering Sea was mostly harvesting herring roe to be sold to the Japanese market. There was a demand for a high roe count up over 12 and it was always a question wither a fisherman’s catch would be accepted by the buyers. On our first day of fishing we brought in over 6 tons of herring that could not produce a roe count of over 10, so the buyer offered to pump them overboard for us. The herring were large with some weighing over 2 pounds and I thought we could pickle them or save them in some other way, but with no market to sell them and no other way to dispose of them, we reluctantly allowed the processor crew to pump them overboard for us. I was not happy about this waste, to say the least.
The Fish and Game kept the fishery open for the next couple of days, but we could not find a consistent roe count higher than 11. Making trips back and forth from our gear to the processor, we sold 7 ton and they kindly pumped overboard 37 ton. The previous year gillnetters were paid as much as eight-hundred dollars a ton and the roe count averaged up over 14. On the third day of fishing, the officials shut the fishery down due to the tremendous waste of resource. Everyone, including the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, the seiners, the gillnetters and the buyers were not pleased with the sickening sight of fish being pumped overboard. That third night, not saying much, Glen and I anchored the boat off Right Hand Point and hit the bunks with heavy hearts. The splendor of the calm seas and a sunset that would bring tears to the most calloused soul was lost to most that evening. If the visual show would have registered through my heavy heart, I would have surely given thanks for it.
In the early morning dark, we were woken by a crash that brought us up out of our bunks in an instant. We were met with high seas that were unimaginable. The white water and wind made our world hell and fear threatened to paralyze us. Weeks later we found out that a freak local storm developed over the area and maintained winds in excess of 104 miles per hour with gusts up over 114 miles per hour for three days.
“You’re on the rocks!” Glen screamed from the back deck. I could not hear most of what he was yelling at me, as most of it was lost in the wind. I looked over starboard and saw green water against the house windows. I had to get off the rocks somehow, praying, “Lord, get us off..,” Glen yelled something else and I lost sight of him under a wall of water across the deck. I floored the engine and could hear the jet impellor cavitate – grabbing air instead of water, which was a bad thing. It was like spinning your tires in the snow. No traction, but in this case-no thrust. “Go, go, GO-O-O!” I could hear Glen clearly that time. He must have come up for air after that last wave. The next thing he screamed sent a terror through my heart. “I’m going to push off the rock!” and he went over the stern of the boat!
The boat we were fishing was a Bristol Bay gillnetter named the Tern. All gillnetters in the Bay are limited to 32 feet and most of the newly built boats, such as this fishing vessel, were built out of aluminum. We thought of them as tin cans as they were tough and could bounce off a sand bar or rock and survive. Most of them that were lost sank due to a fire or swamping. I had not heard of any Bay boats being lost by a breach to the hull. I could believe that this time would be different.
When Glen went over the stern, I knew he was gone. But, emerging out of the receding wall of water in the grey light, I saw his head appear and then heard him yell, “G-“cough, “G-O-O!” as I saw him pushing against the stern from the black rock towering above. I had the controls pegged and prayed that the impellor would grab some water this time. I felt the boat give a larch and shoot off the rocks into the high seas. I turned just in time to see Glen disappear under another wall of water and thought for a second to turn the boat around and try to retrieve him. Impossible! I saw the mother of all waves raise 30 feet up, curling down upon me. I had already turned into it, but to no avail, as the steepness of the wave kept my boat broadside running along the base of it. It slowly rolled the Tern on its starboard side with green water visible in the windows. I expected the boat to capsize as it came closer to the shore, but it somehow slowly started to right itself as it rode the wave higher and higher up onto the beach. As choreographed as any miracle can be, the wave deposited the boat upright on an even keel 20 feet above the high tide mark. I sat in the pilot chair for several minutes gripping the steering wheel in a death grip, unwilling or unable to let go.
The fog cleared from my brain and I remembered Glen. “Glen!” I screamed and jumped from the cabin onto the deck. Searching the surf and not seeing him, I jumped from the deck to the tundra below and ran towards the beach. As I ran down the beach I suddenly saw Glen come out of the waves and be deposited on all fours on dry sand. Coughing out salt water with his head down, he came out of it quickly to manage to scream at me, “Why didn’t you keep going?!” “You could have made it!” Running, I came up on him fast and grabbing him, I asked, “Are you ok? I couldn’t go out.., the wave caught me” as I gestured at the sea. Getting to his feet slowly, he and I stood with our backs against the wind looking up at the boat for several minutes. The storm did not send another wave to touch the boat after the one that deposited it high above the beach. Looking around, we realized that we were thrown up on the only 70 yard stretch of sand dwarfed by several miles of 200 foot high cliffs jutting up out of the angry sea. We watched the storm rage for three days from the safety of the beach while the fleet and large ships battled to survive. There were 3 ships lost, 47 gillnetters either sunk or beached and several airplanes destroyed. While we were fairly rested by the third day, about two thousand others were exhausted from the thrashing they received.
Little did we know that our shipwreck was the beginning of a long and relentless fight to survive.
Something was wrong with the charging system and the large cat batteries were dead. After the initial shock of our being violently turned out of the sea, Glen and I climbed aboard our boat and took stock of our predicament. Surprisingly, there was no damage to the hull or the jet drive system under the stern. The two by three foot intake grill on the bottom of the hull was clear and void of any damage. I tried to put a call out on the VHF radio to our seiner friends, but it had no power. “The radio is dead” I said to Glen and he replied, “No wonders after all that water flying about, what now?” I turned my head taking in all the electronics configured in a cockpit like setting. It was more than likely a few fuses needed changed out and all the equipment needed flushed with electrical cleaner. Fortunately I had several spray cans of those. “Everything needs dried out and checked and.., oh, and check out the batteries.” We both went at it and were occasionally reminded that a storm still raged outside by the sounds and the buffeting of the wind against the boat.
Hours later and into the night, we were still trouble shooting the electrical system. The two VHF radios had been disassembled, sprayed, cleaned and reassembled. The same had been done to the sideband radio, radar, bottom graph and depth sounder. Although the stereo sound system was not critical for operating the boat or for life safety issues, it was a morale booster, so Glen and I spent time affectionately cleaning and drying it out.
Days later, sticking his head up out of the engine compartment, my brother showed his frustration. “Jerry, we’ve been at this for…” He paused. We both were losing track of time. “Does the meter show a voltage increase?” Initially showing an 11 volt charge, we had managed to bring it up a quarter volt. Finding that the alternator was working, but there was not enough power to start the engine to charge the batteries to transmit on the radios, I had suggested we carve a pulley out of beach wood and hand crank the alternator to charge it. My brother and I had been taking turns for most the day, spinning the drift wood pulley and our hands were bloodied by the effort. The problem was we could not spin the pulley fast enough for the alternator to kick out enough of a positive charge, so by the third day of doing this we gave up on this endeavor.
By the second week after the storm we realized that things were not looking good for us. Climbing up the ravine directly behind the boat to survey the sea from atop the high cliffs, we could see that the ships and the fishing fleet were gone. With the closing of the herring season there was no reason for any of the boats to remain in the area.
Everyone was already turning their attentions to the salmon season ready to explode upon the Bristol Bay headwaters. The majority of the drift gillnet fleet would be arriving to the Bay in the next seven days. Coming from around the world, the fisherman were a traditional diverse crowd whose families most often had fished here for many generations. Many ethnic groups held close to their own and did not associate with other fisherman. There were the Russians, the Italians and the native Alaskans. A young independent group consisting of doctors, lawyers, accountants and an assortment of businessmen also came to fish the bay. Few lived here in the sparsely populated villages year round so they arrived by large passenger jet to Dillingham and King Salmon from places like Anchorage, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and abroad. From there they would fly out on local charter planes to remote villages with names like Togiak, Kvichak, North or South Nakanek, Nushagak, Pilot Point, Egegik and Ugashik, whose populations would swell from a few people to hundreds or even thousands. It was said that for every pilot that flew in the military over two hundred ground personal supported them and it was similar here in the bay for the fishermen. Hundreds of shore base and off shore facilities would man up over night to participate in the fisheries. But the increase of the fishing fleet did not help us; fore we were located 20 hours by boat to the West and in an area where drifters did not fish.
Being resigned that no one was going to find us, we set to work on moving the boat. As a boy I had read the novel Sitka, written by Louis L’Amour, where a trapped American fur trader had been aided by a local native village, to ferry his vessel upon logs across a stretch of land in order to escape from a Russian Imperial war ship. I figured we could use the same idea and hopefully with the help of anyone who ventured by. It would have been an impossible task except for the fact that the boat for no known reason to Glen and me had two come-a-long hoists on board. We fastened these to ropes that we had doubled up and attached from the forward cleats to rocks out in the surf both to our starboard and port. We spent several days putting down beach logs, digging under the twin keels every couple feet and greasing the contact points with rotten herring we had gathered up from the beach. Our first efforts were wrought with ropes snapping and stretching to become useless, but by trial and error we were eventually rewarded with seeing the boat move. I leaned all my weight into the arm of the hoist this time and Glen did the same on his side. The ropes were holding now and with our final pull the tundra relinquished her grip on the boat and it slid toward the beach several inches. “Yah!” I yelled out and Glen echoing “It’s working!” We both cranked the hoists a couple more turns to see the boat advance yet again! Given new hope, we put our energy into several more days of moving the boat from 20 feet above the high tide line to easing her over a 5 foot cut bank to the beach below. The cut bank was where the high tides ate at the edge of the tundra. “Do you think the drop is too high?” Glen thought the boat could be damaged by the bow hitting the gravel beach. I looked up at the boat towering above us, perched precariously on the brink of the cut bank. “She weights fourteen ton so should crush the edge and ease down when she goes.” “The beach is soft too, so I say we give it a go.” Glen wasn’t so sure. With no other options, we turned to the hoists and brought her forward till she started to tip over the edge. Stepping back quickly, we watched as the Tern eased over the edge, crushing it and the bow coming to a sliding stop on the beach below. We stood back and laughed. “Nice” Glen growled. Whereas before we were blessed with a boat on an even keel, now with the bow down on the gravel and the stern caught up on the tundra, it would be very uncomfortable at a 40 degree pitch.
The small sack of pancake mix was long gone and we were hungry. The work on moving the boat and taking short hikes up on the tundra back beyond the cliffs was exhausting. As one day slipped into another, we found ourselves taking longer and longer naps. Water was no problem as we had a small creek coming down through a gap in the cliffs behind where we were beached. It was cold, clear and tasted good, but we needed food. People, who survived out in the wilderness did so by eating anything that could be considered food in the loose meaning of the word and they were not too picky. We, on the other hand, still had some sense of delicacy and where not mentally prepared to eat things of questionable condition. In the first week after the storm, we tried herring that were washing up on the beach, but they were bloated and rotten. Also, we spent a lot of energy gathering Cormorant eggs from their nests on the cliffs, only to decide that we were not starving enough to eat them. Glen would lower me over the cliff with a rope and I would carefully take eggs and put them in my nap sack. Then I would yell out to him to pull and I would be pulled up to the safety of the tundra above. It was difficult especially for Glen and we stopped doing it after he almost did not have strength enough to retrieve me. “Up, I said up” I screamed louder. “I can’t..,” I heard a determined grunt and felt myself drop a few inches down. What! Swallowing the fear I steadied my voice, “Hey, you can do it! Up, UP” and seeing myself rise a foot I was able to grab the top of the rocks and scramble up and over the edge. With both him and I lying on our backs breathing hard, I managed to softly say “Let’s not do that again, ok?” He agreed.
The first eggs we gathered from the cliffs did not seem right. They cracked and looked normal, but when they hit the hot frying pan, the whites would stay clear and bubble like corn syrup. While standing over the pan in anticipation of a emanate feast, barely able to contain our drool, we would be overcome by a foul nauseating smell driving us from the cabin to retreat to the back deck. Figuring that we must have accidentally plucked some rotten eggs from an abandoned nest, we tried several times to find fresher ones. After the third attempt of repeating the process and coming up with the same results, we gladly agreed to abandon the eggs as a possible food source.
On one of our food finding hikes across the tundra, we startled a Ptarmigan into flight. They are small chicken-like birds which live year round in the northern lands, and are found most commonly on tundra hiding in rocks or bushes. “You’re the better shot with a shotgun,” I told Glen as we retrieved my Thompson Contender from the boat. It was not a shotgun, but had a 45 colt 14 inch bull barrel that would shoot 410 shotgun shells. I only had one shell left. “Don’t miss” I said as I handed him the hand gun. After chasing that stupid bird all over the place for two days, Glen did finally get a shot off, but sadly for our bellies, he missed.
And then we discovered we had a neighbor in our midst. Slowly making our way back to the boat one day, we saw the arctic ground squirrel standing prone above his den. When he saw us, he darted down his hole and was gone. This time, considering myself to be the best pistol shot, I offered to be the shooter. The Thompson Contender being out of ammo left me with only my 22 caliber pistol. I only had one shell left. “Don’t miss” my brother said as we settled down to wait. Our strength was gone, so waiting for the varmint to show itself for the next two days did not seem like such a hardship, as we took frequent naps and enjoyed the warmth of the sun. By the end of the second day of our epic rodent hunt, the critter came up out of his hole slowly with his nose sniffing this way and that for any potential danger. From ten yards away I drew a bead on him and his image seemed to morph into the shape of a hearty steak. Shaking the illusion off, I steadied the pistol and slowly pulled the trigger. With the explosion out of the barrel of the gun, I lost sight of dinner.
“You got him” Glen yelled, jumping up and running to the hole. The ground squirrel when hit had jumped back down the entry to its den. “You did hit him and he has to be close to the surface” my brother assured me, as we both started to dig. Our hands were not in too good of shape. With skinning our knuckles trying to charge the boat batteries, climbing the cliffs for eggs and the days of cranking on the come-a-longs our hands were beat up and sore. With our prize so near, despite the condition of our hands, we went at it and gained considerable progress. Several hours later, we were rewarded by our efforts and returned to the boat in victory.
I have had many great meals over the years, but none compare to the memory of eating that little squirrel that gave up his life for our benefit. That night, with our stomachs feeling stuffed as never before, Glen with a smile said “I wonder what the President ate for dinner?” Meaning that our meal was grander and more delicious than anything he could have eaten that night. For the next two days we boiled the bones into a broth, until they were reduced to stark white remnants unable to give out any more flavor. Reluctantly, we then threw them out.
A few days later the benefits from our rodent meal were long gone and we were weak. We felt not just good, but great after a long sleep or a nap, but that feeling would soon be replaced by a need to sit down and rest after an hour or two. We were now willing to eat anything if we could find it, but because of our weakness our excursions were becoming shorter and shorter. I had read that before the government had stopped the Alaskan nomads from following their food sources, and had set them up in established villages so that their children could be in school, some of the tribes when food became scarce, would just perish due to starvation. Glen and I talked about this and understood that this could happen to us. Although the fish and game was plentiful, it required one to be healthy and resourceful to go out and catch it. We were young and had only a limited amount of knowledge and experience to aid in our survival.
Twenty-one days after being shipwrecked and having nothing to eat but an Arctic ground squirrel, my brother and I slept under the afternoon sun. The boat’s stern had been pulled off the tundra, so that the Tern now completely rested on the beach with its bow nearly touching the surf at high tide. Being much more comfortable now with the lessened pitch of the boat, we spent most of our time onboard cranking away at the alternator pulley. Rather than periodically trying to call out on the radio, we decided to trust the meters and keep cranking till a good charge was indicated.
Glen lifted his head from where he was laying down, “Do you hear that?” I turned to see him tilting his head towards the sea, listening. “No.., yes, I hear it!” We both jumped up and peered through the wheel house windows and saw it at the same time. “A skiff!” we both exclaimed simultaneously. Moving faster than we had moved for weeks, we scrambled off the boat and stood at the water’s edge, waiting for the fast approaching skiff to arrive. We could tell that it was a seiner’s skiff, but it was still far enough out that we did not recognize who was at the controls. The surf was heavy so we knew that the skiff would not be able to reach shore. The wait seemed very long to us, but we were beyond excitement and never moved from where we were standing. As the skiff slowed down out beyond the breakers we now knew what we had suspected earlier. It was our friend’s skiff from the seiner Debbie Jean and they had been searching for us for weeks.
Both we and the skiff operator yelled back and forth greetings, with wide grins on our faces. After letting the crew member, Joe, know that we were ok, but extremely hungry; he relayed our location and condition back to the Debbie Jean on his VHF radio. We said our goodbyes and the skiff headed off into the distance. Standing there in the afternoon sun, dwarfed by the black cliffs that held us captive, we could not speak but watched as the skiff disappeared out on the horizon. We were thinking the same thing. “Will they be back?”
Hours later the Debbie Jean arrived with the skiff hanging off the stern. We could see someone getting into the skiff and releasing the lines. Moments later, the small craft approached the surf and Joe threw a blue bucket with a rope attached into the water. The surf caught the bucket and washed it in towards shore. I waded out into the surf and retrieved it and came back in to where Glen was standing. We were excited to see what the contents of the bucket held, so did not waste any time peeling the lid off. Standing there and looking down into the bucket we saw what our next meal would be. A large can of chili! We would have run back to the boat to prepare the food, if we had the strength.
With no food our stomachs had shrunk and we knew that we would have to go easy on the chili. With no more than a quarter of the can’s contents devoured we lay there stuffed beyond our imaginations. Later, with Joe relaying information back and forth between the Debbie Jean and us, it was decided that we would wait for morning to try to get the Tern off the beach. I think they realized that Glen and I needed time to digest the chili. On a minor note, Glen was a chubby young lad until our beaching and to this day he has remained skinny.
In preparation of the day when our boat would be pulled off the beach, we had already rigged some lines on the bow with two attached buoys. Early in the morning my brother and I were already at work stretching the lines off the bow and getting ready to throw the buoys out into the surf.
“The surf’s down a little,” I said, as Glen and I held lines in our hands waiting for the approaching skiff. “He’s going to have to come in past the outer breakers” Glen observed. Twenty minutes later the skiff had managed to snag the lines and bring them out to the waiting seiner.
With the lines attached to the stern of the Debbie Jean, there was nothing left to do but give her a try. “Go!” I yelled as Glen and I waved our arms toward the sea. The ropes tightened and began to stretch. First one broke with a loud snap and another began to fail. The seiner backed off and maneuvered its stern closer to shore as Joe and us restrung lines back into place. This time we doubled up the lines to consist of six five-eighths polypropylene ropes. Some fishermen referred to these ropes as ‘crab lines’. Not the best for pulling a boat off the beach, but they were all we had. Giving the Debbie Jean a signal to pull again, we stepped back onto the stern to hide from any snapping lines. The lines stretched tight out across the surf and this time they held. With a jerking motion felt under our feet, the Tern began to slide into the sea. When the skipper, Dan, saw that we were moving, he added more power to the Debbie Jean’s engines and our boat took off out through the surf and into deep water.
The seiner skiff came up along our port side after all the tow lines had been released and put onboard. Joe could not contain the grin from spilling across his seasoned face. “You guys are lucky; we were just about ready to stop searching for you.” Securing lines he handed me, to the mid cleat, I disagreed. “Not lucky – just blessed to have good friends.”
It was just a few minutes longer and Joe used his skiff to bring our boat alongside the Debbie Jean where Dan and the rest of his crew were waiting to tie us up. I stepped across to Dan’s boat and gripping his hand, I thanked him profusely.
On anchor that night with Glen and me enjoying the company and food of our friends, I thanked the Lord for our rescue. Although it has been a life time since my brother and I were shipwrecked, the experience and the lessons learned have never been forgotten. My faith in the Lords provisions and protection on my family grew from those days I spent on a remote lonely beach and recognized that I was in His hands. When our strength failed, He was there to pick us up.
