Lost at Sea

A blip appeared on the green radar screen in the wheelhouse of the  Neptune Jade, a 750-foot Singapore-registered freighter en route to  the Orient. It was 12:15 P.M. on Monday, February 14, and the radar  indicated the source to be located about twenty-five nautical miles  northwest of Priest Rock and Dutch Harbor. Normal enough in this sea-lane,  the vessel's captain noted. Except that the blip was not moving. The  Neptune Jade was closing on the position, 24 nautical miles  away.

The helmsman switched to a general radio frequency to call the vessel. If  assistance was needed, they'd relay a call back to Dutch Harbor. There was  no answer. The helmsman set his course directly toward the position of  what might be a ship in distress. Since weather reports indicated a storm  descending on the area, any broken-down vessel caught in open water would  be in peril.

Three hours later, a crew member in the wheelhouse spotted an overturned  vessel. The Neptune Jade's skipper took charge, guiding the  cumbersome merchant ship within thirty yards--as close as he dared in a  sea building with increasing winds--then circling. The hull appeared to be  about eighty feet long. A red stripe ran horizontally along the bottom.  The rest of the hull was blue. Curiously, there was no indication that the  hull itself had been damaged. Aware that the Neptune Jade was too  large to safely maneuver alongside, the captain circled again, widening  the arc, and ordered his crew to look for survivors, or bodies, or debris.  None was spotted.

The captain circled a third time, making an even wider arc. Finding  nothing, he grabbed the radio and dialed the Coast Guard emergency channel  and described what he and his crew were seeing. There was no reply. He  switched radio frequencies, sending out a widespread alert to anyone  within range. The captain was following an unwritten "good Samaritan" code  at sea, which, because of distances and slow travel time, asked as many  vessels within range of a distress signal to converge on the position to  look for survivors.

The freighter Aleutian Developer was the first vessel to pick up  the call, but it was running six hundred miles to the southwest. Over his  own radio, the ship's captain relayed the Neptune Jade's alarm and  the reported position of the overturned hull to the U.S. Coast Guard  Communication Station in Kodiak: latitude 54 degrees 19.6 minutes  north, longitude 166 degrees 54 minutes west. The time was 2:40 P.M.

The Kodiak "Comstay," the oldest facility of its kind in the U.S., was  responsible for tracking the comings and goings of hundreds of vessels a  week along six thousand miles of crescent coastline from the Canadian  border in the southeast to Attu Island at the far western tip of the  Aleutians and the Russian border. Seventy officers and enlisted personnel  were stationed there in 1983, at least twelve on watch at all times,  monitoring dozens of radio channels in soundproof cubicles. They listened  for suspicious radio traffic that might expose the positions of possible  drug traffickers; they listened for trespassing foreign fishing vessels;  they listened for weather reports and bits of marine information they  might pass along; they listened for calls for assistance, often dispensing  advice, and they acted as 911 operators when situations arose. Nearly nine  hundred thousand square miles of open water fell within the station's  watch, nearly twice as much as the entire land mass of the continental  U.S. Add in tens of thousands of islands within the two-hundred-mile U.S.  coastal boundary, and the Coast Guard station's responsibility compared to  watching over a small galaxy.

Gary Howell, the skipper of the fishing vessel Alaska Invader,  overheard the Aleutian Developer's radio relay. He checked his  position: about fifty miles to the southwest of the overturned hull, or  more than four hours away. But there was no other radio traffic from  vessels small and maneuverable enough to come alongside for a possible  rescue. Howell swung the Alaska Invader north, then radioed a  sister vessel, the Pacific Invader, which he could see on the  horizon. Together, they headed full speed for the location.

Hearing that the Coast Guard Comstay had received his relayed message and  that the Alaska Invader and Pacific Invader were on the way,  the captain of the Neptune Jade circled one last time, still  finding nothing in the water. Then he made a decision that could later be  open to question. After reporting once again the position of the hull and  that it appeared to be drifting slowly south-southwest, he resumed his  route to the Orient, leaving the overturned hull behind. He had been on  the scene for just over thirty minutes.

About forty-five minutes later the merchant vessel Ocean Brother,  en route to Japan, called the Coast Guard Communication Station in  Honolulu. It, too, reported an overturned hull: latitude 54 degrees 17  minutes north, longitude 166 degrees 58 minutes west. That position  was about 3.5 nautical miles southwest of the first sighting. It would  have been unlikely for a large hull to have drifted that far in forty-five  minutes, but not impossible. The variables would include the current, the  direction and velocity of the wind, how much of the vessel was riding out  of the water. The latest sighting was relayed to Kodiak Comstay, which  sent the message along simultaneously to the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station  just down the road on Kodiak Island and to the Coast Guard North Pacific  Search and Rescue Coordinator in Juneau.

At 3:45 P.M., almost  two hours after the first reported sighting by the  Neptune Jade, the Coast Guard rescue coordinator in Juneau  transmitted an urgent priority call on the marine weather-advisory  station:

A fishing vessel has been reported overturned in position 54-19.6 N,  166-54 W. Vessel description: eighty feet, with blue hull, red below  waterline. The vessel Neptune Jade is on scene. It is unknown the  name of the fishing vessel or persons on board. Vessels with any  additional information and any vessels in vicinity are requested to keep a  sharp lookout, assist if possible, and advise Coast Guard Juneau or the  nearest Coast Guard station.

This report was one of several mistakes the Coast Guard made that  morning. The first was not verifying the initial position that had been  relayed from the Neptune Jade to a vessel six hundred miles away.  The second was not considering the more-than-3.5-mile discrepancy between  the two sightings forty-five minutes apart. The third was in transmitting  a priority call giving the position of the first sighting, not the latest,  by the Ocean Brother, which still had the hull in sight. Finally,  no consideration was given to the possibility that the sightings might be  of two...