A Tale of Two Crossings – Gulf of Alaska
Among the storied bodies of water of the world is the Gulf of Alaska. Essentially the Northeastern-most corner of the Pacific Ocean tucked under the swooping glacial-fjord laced southern coast of Alaska, it’s a deepwater expanse for hardy souls that’s rich with world famous fisheries, like the king crab featured on the ongoing TV show Deadliest Catch, but also home to infamously intense storms and biting cold. Crossing the Gulf of Alaska is somewhat like traversing an exposed face of a mountain during a technical climb. I’ve crossed the gulf twice thus far in my life and the two trips were almost complete opposite experiences. However, they were both successes thanks to sound foundational practices.
First Crossing – Northbound on a Yacht
Sea Star, a stately 85-foot aluminum Burger motoryacht built in 1965, cruises at an easy 10-knots. Sitka, Alaska, fades aft into the nebulous gray. The twin Caterpillar D343s purr-growl just right, Sea Star’s way of telling us all is well. Seward beckons 500 miles off our bow. For many, especially recreational craft, this is the optimal Gulf of Alaska crossing route with protected and equipped ports on both ends and minimal nautical miles of exposure. If a truly horrendous weather system does develop in the gulf, a northly dash into Yakutat Bay or Icy Bay can provide shelter in a pinch. Both are remote glacial fjords and essentially wilderness, but anything is better than being nailed out in the open.
“OK crew, this is how the crossing is going to work,” captain Erik Teevin said as he brings us into the wheelhouse. He is the owner and operator of Sea Star and the charter company North Pacific Expeditions for which we are delivering Sea Star to Alaskan cruising grounds for the season. He is also a Boeing engineer with a curriculum vitae that includes Telluride Film Festival projector operator and commercial captain gigs for 200-ton rated salmon tenders. Summer 2021 represents the company’s first fully booked season and I’m a member of the crew. The post-lockdown tourism boom is a welcome relief after the 2020 season kept Sea Star collecting bills while resting on her Seattle mooring.
At Erik’s side is first mate Tracy Meyer, a former US Navy officer, licensed mariner, and North Pacific Expeditions co-manager. Also aboard is chef Steve Carter and deckhand trainee Mila Lassuy. Chef Steve is an Iraq vet (with the scars to prove it) turned Art Institute of Seattle alum and traveling cook. He’s had culinary stints ranging from kitchens on Martha’s Vineyard to a Bering Sea commercial trawler. Alaska-raised Mia just quit her lame Seattle office job in a bout of extreme restlessness and this is her first foray into a boat-based tourism gig/escape. None of us knew it at the time (including her), but she’d go on to work with larger expedition cruise lines that’d take her to both poles and tropical climes in between for years.
Captain Erik frames the stakes, “Crossing the Gulf is very dangerous.” He previously shared a Sea Star Gulf-crossing story of a crewmember who was thrown by foul seas and broke his leg. Another Gulf-crossing story includes 50-knot winds during a commercial fishing season. Erik and Tracy pick our weather window carefully.
He explains that we’re going to do half-hour engine checks and that there will always be two or more crew on watch. Breakable things like framed portraits are stowed. We don ear protection and go below for the engine check tutorial. The Cats purr magnificently. We record parameters in a logbook, including water and fuel tank levels. We shine a small flashlight into the dark recesses of the bilge, looking for oil leaks or suspicious water. We listen for abnormal sounds. Hisses. Whistles. Groans.
Days pass as a series of wheel watches and egg-timer-prompted engine checks. Gentle yet massive rollers give us a 1- or 2-knot boost. Sea and sky are a windless gray. We’re sometimes visited by fellow northward migrants like albatross and humpback whales. They are seasonal visitors the descend upon the North Pacific to feed upon the vast bounty of summer spoils. In a way, our charter yacht is doing the same migration. Alaska pulls us all northward.
A typical day underway passes lazily by with plenty of small talk and coffee. Thanks to the favorable conditions, we arrive to Seward after about four days and without any crazy stories under our belts. That’s the irony of an experience where all goes to plan—better lives, but fewer yarns. Despite the lack of harrowing experiences, I had crossed the Gulf of Alaska for the first time and that counted for something.
Trip #2 – Southbound on a Tugboat
Later that summer, I arrived in Kodiak by airplane and was departing via a tugboat. For privacy sake to the company and due to my hazy memory on whether or not I signed an NDA, let’s call her Sara VII. I’m also tweaking the names of these crew just to be safe.
The chain of events that led me here went something like this; a captain in a Seward bar knew a tugboat guy who needed crew for an end-of-season transit towing a barge to Seattle. This deckhand would then possibly work on an Antarctica job. The tugboat company was negotiating a contract with the National Science Foundation to deliver materials to rebuild the Palmer Station science pier. The five-or-so-month gig would be a wild one, something a real sea salt could point to for bona fides and draw tall tales from for the rest of his life.
I was in!
Me, a few drinks down and positively seething with a repressed masculine-flavored urge to get off the pandemic-ridden planet in the summer of 2021, heard Antarctica and a piece of my soul committed instantly to the idea. In my daydreamy delusions, I was answering Shackleton’s infamous “Men Wanted for hazardous journey” advertisement. In reality, I was committing to eight days of pulling several tons of polluted “dirty dirt” from a Superfund site (more on this later).
“It’s going to be pretty rough,” warned captain John Enfield when we met aboard. The middle-aged blonde gent took to wearing bright Hawaiian shirts and a straw hat when in the wheelhouse. Barefoot. He was friendly and patient with me despite his dock talk reputation as a demanding taskmaster. His manners were probably in part due to how desperate the entire maritime industry was for low-level labor. This was during the pandemic when suddenly all the semi-abused grunts who could tie a cleat knot, who keep the industry afloat, disappeared. However, a perk for the germophobes was life at sea is essentially quarantine procedure by default.
The mate, also a licensed captain, was Jenny—a middle aged brunette with glasses who nonchalantly referred to herself as a “sea hag” on a regular basis. The recipes from the cookbooks we used were mostly hers, or at the very least had comments from her penciled throughout.
“I just sort of fell into it,” she later told me of how she got into the tugboat game. “Antarctica would be my last big, real deal adventure before retirement.” Once she fixed up her property in rural Washington and squirreled enough away, she was out of there like a shrewd poker player who’s up at the casino. If you met her on the street, you’d have pegged her for your buddy’s friendly cookie baking aunt. Sea hag camouflage I suppose. She and John had been working all summer out of Nome loading up the rusty junk cars and giant bags of dirty dirt onto the Taholah barge. The two had that end-of-season, captain-first mate telepathic bond going, moving around each other to keep the operation going with barely a word. No subtle tone inflections or body language went unnoticed.
“Nice to m-meet you,” the only other deckhand and I shook hands. Lanky, 21-year-old Oregonian Ian had a slight speech impediment and dark, tightly curled hair that was almost an afro. We “kids” got on right away and hardly a serious word was uttered between us. He was a rated Able-Bodied Seaman (AB), meaning at least a documented year working at sea and a suite of paperwork, exams, and classwork under his belt more than me. He’d been tugging for a few years and liked it just fine.
“I’ve got so much more money than my friends, it’s ridonkulous,” he told me, and was probably the only American 21-year-old I’ve talked to thinking about buying a house. He did have a hard time being away from everyone, he confessed. AB’s were in hot demand at the time. Pressure from the company to work nonstop, hopping from boat to boat as needed, was heavy. He had a few polite but exacerbated conversations with Jenny and John over time off he needed to attend a family member’s “celebration of life” a la funeral. Apparently such an accommodation was a tough ask.
The final member of the crew was Ned, a short but lean, vascular sixtyish guy with silver mustache and faded ballcap perpetually on his head. He was also a licensed captain acting as a mate to John alongside Jenny. The three of them would do the skippering.
“Imma take us to Italia, the Mother Country,” Ned affected an Italian accent as he finished making us all a pizza and popping it into the oven. His vibe was definitely of the wisecracking uncle variety, but there was an intellectual soul under the winks and Ian teasing. I dubbed him Ned the Wise in my head. He later confessed to me that he was a footloose hippy before falling into the tugboat life for the last forty years.
“I just think this whole society thing is going to come crashing down someday,” he posited. “The way we do things, treat each other and the environment… it’s deeply suicidal. It’s like a death cult for The Man, man.” Well-read and somehow abreast of current events despite being isolated at sea for months, you could chat or spar intelligently with Ned the Wise for hours if you wanted to. He was always game.
Back to the aforementioned Superfund dirty dirt, our precious cargo. Turns out, the United States Military and various corporate industrial waste schemes have poisoned chunks of the wild north in a variety of creative, profitable ways. You’ve got a veritable buffet of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), heavy metals (notably lead), chlorinated solvents, explosive ordinance, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), white phosphorous, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), dioxins, furan, pesticides, BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene) compounds, asbestos, polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, and more, more, more smeared and scattered, smooshed and dumped into the soil and groundwater of Alaska’s listed Superfund sites. Adak Naval Air Station. Elmendorf Air Force Base. Fort Richardson and Standard Steel & Metals Salvage Yard. Alaska Battery Enterprisers and Eielson Air Force Base; Fort Wainwright and the Salt Chuck Mine. These officially listed locations range from the far north of Fairbanks to the westernmost tip of the Aleutians to the easternmost SE panhandle.
I’m not 100% sure which Superfund site, or sites, our dear dirty dirt came from, but John and Jenny spent the summer loading it in Nome. Where were we taking it? To my childhood state of Oregon. Apparently there are epic, probably Hanford Reach-Manhattan Project related, extremely hazardous waste facilities near Arlington, a dot on the map along the southern bank of the Columbia River and near the historic Oregon Trail route that’s home to about 500 folks. Those hills off the John Day Highway hold some secrets.
Our route was a straight line from Kodiak to Dixon Entrance of British Columbia, a gateway into the sheltered waters of the Inside Passage that’d beam us downhill (south) right to Seattle. This was a more exposed but no-nonsense route that tough-as-nails commercial tugboats are more likely to run, about 700 nautical miles of open Gulf of Alaska exposure.
The experienced hands all went into motion on the aft working deck, rearranging the tow setup with Taholah. The towering barge full of industrial sized bags of toxic dirt was alongside Sara VII for the Kodiak docking to pick me up, but now that we were in open water the barge was to be towed behind for an open water voyage. The massive rusty deck winch of towing wire was supersized in that real-deal maritime way, a thing so outlandishly huge that you feel like a rat exploring a human kitchen for the first time. The wire was the diameter of my thigh and made all manner of exotic metallic noises when reeled in and out. After a flurry of activity, Taholah was towed many hundreds of yards safely behind us. I, clueless as to tugboat life, handled line, caught line, pulled on chain, punched levers, wrestled heavy things, or whatever else was asked of me.
There was a palpable buzz in the air as we left Kodiak due to a nasty weather forecast. Hurricanes aren’t called hurricanes in the Gulf of Alaska and typhoons are for the Northwest Pacific over by Asia. We’re left with unofficial terms for the exact wind conditions, probably because they are so common in the North-Northeast Pacific. “Bomb cyclone” is jargon I hear sometimes. “Just Thursday” another.
“We’re going to run hard and hopefully get ahead of it,” said captain John of the horrible weather forecast in the Gulf of Alaska.
We did not.
Sara VII almost immediately fell upon vile seas, winds north of 50 knots with what I was later told were 25-foot “or more” seas. Me, hardly oriented to the vessel and a complete tugboat newbie, earnestly set about my menial tasks as best I could while digesting Ned the Wise’s pizza. As an Ordinary Seaman—bottom of the pecking order—a central part of my job was custodial. I gave the ship interior a total mop down every shift, right off the bat. Gathered wastebin trash, replaced bags. With a crew of only five total—captain John, sea hag Jenny, Ian, Ned the Wise, and myself—I felt my cleans were overkill. Oh well, captain’s orders.
We were on eights, so eight hours on, eight hours off. I immediately grew to love eights. For whatever dammed reason, all other boat jobs I’ve had are addicted to fours, sixes, or a we-just-wing-it sleep regimen. This has never been enough time for a deep sleep for me—and not for anyone else I’ve ever worked with, even if they refused to admit it. In fact, there is a completely unnecessary sadomasochist relationship of the maritime workplace to sleep that I will never understand. Everyone seems to get a kick out of living in a half-sleep deprived state, perpetually sipping lukewarm old coffee from a thermos and gazing out at nothing in particular from the wheelhouse or galley. But hallelujah, the tugboaters get it, probably because they creep along at three or four knots—roughly the speed of a jog—for months on end. Staying comfortable and sane is of paramount importance to these truckers of the sea. The food is fantastic. The work consistent but mostly languid. The rare failure? Probably catastrophic.
My first few eights would’ve been pretty banal if the seas didn’t turn the stout tugboat into a damned astronaut training module. There must’ve been other weather patterns at play as well, for we didn’t just roll over big swells. There was a short wiggle motion one way. A sharp, medium spaced slap the other. I was tossed this way and that with my wet mop like some recipient of an abusive Three Stooges bit until the skipper took some mercy, pausing normal operations. We could wait on that cleaning stuff. Not worth twisting an ankle over.
In these seas, crew were not to leave the enclosed cabin for any reason whatsoever. You could peer through the portholes and see the work deck completely swamped. We were truly in a bomb shelter, doomsday raging outside our steel bunker. The heavy doors resembling something on a submarine reinforced the feeling.
More important than the menial custodial duties were the engine checks, which were far more dignified and proper mariner feeling than cleaning. Oceangoing tugboats are curious craft due to their mission, i.e. pulling and pushing heavy loads forever. Designers want enough accommodations for a crew to be comfortable, which doesn’t take much, and you slap that house on top an invincible metal hull. You don’t need a huge, cavernous hold for fish nor massive deck for cargo or operations. No, you need horsepower and fuel. Not just horses and gallons, but as many that you can possibly accommodate. So, most of a tugboat are these two things: fuel tanks and probably the largest engine room square footage-to-vessel length ratio in the biz.
The steel, 90-foot Sara VII was built in Anacortes, Washington’s Dakota Creek Industries in the nineties. Steel hull. Twin screws, rated to 3,000 horsepower. As a tugboat newbie, I was not prepared for the raw epic nature of the engine room, which was a multistory shiny chrome cathedral. Cue angel choir.
I examined these two ladies every hour, ear protection on always. My findings went into the engine logbook: rpms, fluid levels, and the like. It was warm in there, not quite hot but not quite comfortable either. This was essentially what I was doing on Sea Star but super-sized. Engine checks during the storm were extra important. If something happened to these ladies, we were in a truly emergent situation. Also, if something was going to happen to them, it would be in rough conditions. I swaggered about in the astronaut training simulator, fulfilling my duties in sweltering, loud chrome heaven. They were as happy as can be every time.
We soldiered on through the storm. I was proud of myself for only barfing once and only because I got too cocky and wolfed down a full pasta meal. After a few seconds it came right up en masse. I could’ve replated the whole meal and nobody would be the wiser. A cold compress on the forehead during boring hours on my eight helped. I knew it was bad because even the captain had to stay down through one of his shifts, Jenny taking up the slack. She was hunkered into a secure position in the wheelhouse, clearly holding the line as best she could. That I was keeping on with these pros gave me a boost of confidence. The fact that the three licensed tugboat captains were also shaky impressed upon me that these seas were objectively gnarly.
I had grabbed a horror short story anthology H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror by Dave Jones and Stephen Carson from a used book bin in Anchorage. The book opens with Lovecraft’s famous 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, probably a greater contribution to world literature than even the cosmic horror Cthulhu-verse. It opens: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” I read this with a cold compress on my head in the heart of a stormy, pitch-black night shift in the galley. It was a well-timed reminder because while I was a little freaked, Lovecraft was right—it wasn’t fear of the Gulf of Alaska itself, which had been benevolent to me before, but rather our unknown to-be-determined fate.
A few days passed and the seas came down. They always do. I went back to mopping and ate Jenny’s famous halibut enchiladas. Captain John burst into the galley one day fully dressed in a survival “gumby” drysuit, prompting a drill for everyone to scramble into theirs. I was kept busy with a greenhorn orientation packet, basically a scavenger hunt for all the important operational and safety components aboard. It was a pretty smart way to get a newbie up to speed. After finding and pointing out every fire alarm switch and the like, I got a sign off from the boss. The general alarm was fired up at some point, prompting a muster drill. Captain went down his checklist of training duties and that was that. We were compliant.
Ian and I, mostly idle, were sent on a never-ending chrome polishing mission of the engine room, mostly the deck plates. All that shine doesn’t happen by itself.
Another important job of an on-duty tugboat deckhand is to be a snoop. One should be methodically sticking his nose into just about every crevice from bow to stern most of the time. Eyes should be scanning places that may go amiss, like the pilothouse with its sensors from an angle the captain can’t see. In this way I felt a bit like a mall cop, encouraged to mindfully surveil the premises but without a strictly enforced mandate to deliver results. I’m sure if something conspicuous and avoidable failed, whichever deckhand on watch would be asked “Why didn’t you notice X?”
The days are both long and short on a tugboat. I always wore my ear protection in the engine room, but even when out of there the whole vessel shook and thrummed with vibrations. The thunder of those horses really was something. Those who work on tugboats get some serious decibel bombardment no matter what they do. My ears rang for several days after I disembarked.
Despite the horrible weather we safely entered Dixon Entrance and so concluded my second crossing of the Gulf of Alaska. The tugboat would pull into Seattle about a day later after shooting down the Inside Passage. While the Gulf of Alaska showed me its wild side this go around and a commercial tugboat may be the polar opposite kind of boat from a luxury charter motoryacht, the principles that got us across both times were the same. Take a proven and able vessel, maximize your odds for good weather for the crossing, be obsessive about those engine checks, and keep your working crew on the same page with an operations plan. If you do these things, crossing the Gulf of Alaska can not only be possible, but enjoyable.
