Witness tells panel Katmai lacked backup systems

ANCHORAGE — At the end of the fall cod season, with a weary crew eager for home, the Katmai's skipper made a fateful decision to try to push through a storm rather duck to an island's lee to wait for better weather.

Capt. Henry Blake III figured that there was enough time to navigate through a treacherous island pass, where the Bering Sea meets the North Pacific, before the worst of the storm hit.

Instead, the stage was set for disaster as the 93-foot Katmai sank last Wednesday, claiming the lives of seven of 11 crew.

"We understood that it was going to blow only 70, but that didn't happen. It blew 100 miles an hour going into that pass," said deckboss Guy Schroder during testimony Tuesday in a Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation hearing. "The waves got big 30 to 35 feet. There were whirlpools ... and queer seas."

In a Katmai crew with plenty of greenhorns, Schroder was a leader, a 50-year-old veteran of dozens of Alaska fishing boats who — after too many close calls — always slept with a survival suit at his side.

Schroder, of Anchorage, was troubled by shortcomings of the Katmai, which he said included a lack of backup steering and the absence of a gasoline-powered pump that could be used if electric pumps failed to do the job.

"When the lights go and you lose power, you still have a way to pump the boat," Schroder said of the need for such backups. "This is a situation I have been in before, and it's saved my life."

Despite these shortcomings, the outspoken Schroder still signed on this summer to crew aboard the Katmai, and emerged as a key player in the tense hours before the sinking, and during an the epic fight for life in a 20-year-old life raft that kept flipping over.

Schroder testified Tuesday in the second day of the investigation. The hearings are expected to resume next week in Seattle as investigators search for clues as to how water was able to flood into three below-deck areas — a stern compartment, engine room and fish factory — as the boat lost steering and eventually sank.

The board will hear from a Dutch Harbor welder who says he worked on the deck in the stern areas of the boat this past summer, but walked off the job because he was not paid, according to Cmdr. Malcolm McLellan, the chair of the Marine Board of Investigation.

A spokesman for Katmai Fisheries said that welding was completed by the ship's engineer, and that the repair was unlikely to have had any bearing on the disaster.

Another former crewman, Alex Vigil of South Carolina, told The Seattle Times that during a storm last winter he saw water seeping into the fish factory through what appeared to be a weak spot several feet long in the hull. He noted the problem to other crew, then quit when the vessel docked at Adak Island.

"It wasn't just that," Vigil said. "I saw all the experienced guys getting of the boat and said, 'The heck with that.' "

Company officials say they were not aware of any such fault in the fish-factory hull, and none of the survivors noted any such faults during testimony this week.

Schroder crewed aboard the Katmai this summer in Dutch Habor, and helped prepare it for a fall trapping cod off the Aleutian Islands. Schroder said he thought the boat was a stable vessel that rode well in rough seas.

When the Katmai appeared doomed, Schroder took charge of deploying a life raft that had seven members initially, with four eventually surviving as the raft lost its canopy, flipped repeatedly in big seas, had a hole slashed in the floor and filled up with water during a daylong ordeal.

One of the victims, Cedric Smith, had been laboring to try to tie down the canopy, and even took off his gloves and rolled down his survival suit to try to accomplish that task, according to survivors. He was tossed from the raft, and labored mightily to swim back to it, but failed.

For some 15 to 17 hours — much of it in darkness — the four survivors were exposed to the big seas, which filled up the life raft like a bathtub and repeatedly flipped it over, according to Schroder and other survivors.

While still approved for use, the 20-year-old life raft lacked improvements that became part of the international life-raft standard by 1990. Those improvements include deeper ballast pockets to improve buoyancy and stability. Newer models, present on most fishing vessels, likely would not have flipped over as much, said Jerry Dzugan, executive director of the Alaska Marine Safety Education Association.

As the daylight finally broke Wednesday, the four survivors saw a C-130 aircraft flying overhead. For a moment, their spirits leapt, then faded as they realized the search pilots did not see them.

"I knew right there that we were going to be hurting," said Harold Appling, of Anchorage, another survivor who testified Tuesday. "We figured were going to have to just ride it out and spend another night out there."

But sometime after 5 p.m., a Jayhawk helicopter made a fortunate spotting of the raft, which with the orange canopy ripped away, was just a black slit on a steel-blue sea.

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com