This story was originally published on LincolnChronicle.org and is used with permission.
The Coast Guard’s search for a man lost at sea after Newport-based fishing vessel Das Bug capsized Sunday afternoon ended without success Monday.
“We did first-light search patterns with a helicopter and we’ve had no results so far,” petty officer boatswain mate second class Derek Knight said Monday morning.
Knight piloted one of the two 47-foot rescue boats stationed at Coast Guard Station Yaquina Bay dispatched after the 40-foot Das Bug capsized and sank about 4 p.m. Sunday. Two Coast Guard helicopters from North Bend joined in the search Sunday and one continued to look early Monday until the search was suspended at 10:15 a.m.
The Coast Guard will now begin a marine casualty investigation.
Two crew members and Das Bug captain Perry Bordeaux were rescued within a half hour of the boat sinking, a Seattle-based Coast Guard information officer said. But rescuers ended their search at dark Sunday for a fourth man who was not a crew member but had asked to tag along.
Bordeaux, who lives outside Philomath, and the two crew members were taken to Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital for treatment of hypothermia and released around midnight Monday.
Bordeaux and his boat are well-known in the Newport fishing community as an outspoken advocate for small boats and their operators. Mostly a crabber, Bordeaux is also active in the state’s derelict pot retrieval program.
“Yesterday we searched the wreckage for about five to six hours,” said Knight, who was piloting the boat that was first on the scene and plucked the men from the ocean. “One of the (helicopters) was spotting for wreckage and lifejackets and the other was checking on things (the first helicopter) might have seen. And we did not find anything.”
The Das Bug was one to two miles offshore and just beginning to angle toward the Yaquina Bay bar when disaster struck, Bordeaux told the Lincoln Chronicle on Monday. The boat had been headed north after pulling crab pots near Yachats. The commercial crabbing season ends Friday.
“It happened insanely fast,” Bordeaux said. “We are talking maybe 30 seconds between knowing there was an issue and the boat being gone.”
Bordeaux said when he began to make the turn toward the bar something didn’t feel right.
“It felt like a slack tank but I looked back and the fish hold was still pumping water out of the top so it wasn’t slack,” Bordeaux said.
A slack tank means the tank is not full of water and can create a dangerous side-to-side sloshing that can capsize a boat. A full tank means good stability and ballast.
“I had just enough time to check my high water alarms and look at my bilge pumps and both the engine room and the lazarette were still just doing their occasional cycling thing that they do,” Bordeaux said.
Knight said conditions at the bar were building but that seas where they began their search for the men — one to two miles offshore and a half mile to a mile south of the mouth of the Yaquina Bay bar — was worse.
“We were seeing six-to-eight-foot swells with the occasional 10-foot swell,” Knight said. “And it was the 20- to 25-knot winds that were really kicking everything up. And they went down pretty close to the reef so the water shallows up, which was making everything stand up.”
The forecast definitely understated the weather, Bordeaux said. In normal weather the Das Bug’s load of pots may be 50 or 60 and in bad weather about 40.
“But when the weather started running above what was forecast, I was like ‘Screw it, we’ve got 21 pots on let’s just go in’,” Bordeaux said. “It wasn’t bad weather but it wasn’t great weather and I had 20 miles to travel so I was like ‘We’ll just make a third trip for what was left and just play it safe’.”
Bordeaux said there was only a couple thousand pounds of gear and it was stacked low so there was no issue of load height and center of gravity.
“It had to be water in the back fish hold,” Bordeaux told the Chronicle. “But before we could even investigate, the (expletive) boat just leaned over (to port) and kept going. I tried to steer into the turn and compensate for it until we could figure out what was going on or get safety equipment or something but the boat had a mind of its own at that point.”
Victim along for the ride
The two crew members – Landon Robinson, 24, and Andy Tierney, 37 – are Bordeaux’s lifelong friends and were at the back of the boat while the fourth man who had expressed interest in fishing and asked to tag along was inside the wheelhouse with Bordeaux when the boat began to roll.
The Coast Guard has not released the man’s name and the Chronicle is not naming him at the family’s request.
“So I threw him out the back door, picked him up and threw him,” Bordeaux said. “And I went in and grabbed two life jackets with my two hands and chucked them out the back door. And I went in to get two more and the wheelhouse was going underwater by then. So I went out and one of the guys had thrown a life jacket on and swam off on his own and the other two guys were clinging to the hull and not grabbing the life jacket.
“So I threw the life jacket on and bear-hugged the two of them and tried to keep them above water. I basically tried to keep them from panicking and tried to keep them working together. They were both a little panicky.”
The boat went down bow first and the men began to drift south with the current.
“We were getting hit by buffalo,” Bordeaux said, referring to large wind-raked whitecaps. “For the most part I was able to hang onto the guys but all three of us, our heads were going underwater because we had one life jacket between us. I was trying my best to keep the both of them up and not drown myself in the process. And try to keep them calm.”
Bordeaux said he encouraged the men to lay on their backs and rest their heads on the life jacket so the three men could kick together in search of a buoy or some debris they could hold onto. But he couldn’t keep them calm enough.
“And then basically we got hit by a series of three or four or five buffalo in a row that were pretty big ones,” he said. “I lost hold of the both of them. And by the time we cleared on the backside of that I saw Landon right in front of me. He was eight or 10 feet away from me and I slammed and got ahold of him.
“And by the time I turned around and tried to look for (the missing man) he was just nowhere to be seen,” Bordeaux said. “So initially I had hope that on the backside of one of those buffaloes, because he was kind of on the weather side, and I was kind of down weather from him, I had hoped that maybe he just took the opportunity and made a break for some of the floating (debris) that wasn’t that far away.”
Knight said one of the crew told rescuers that the missing man had begun to seize from the cold before disappearing. Even with a life jacket, Knight said, a person could not survive long in the cold ocean water.
“We were on scene and the people we did recover were already hypothermic,” Knight said. “And they had only been in the water for about 20 minutes.”
The missing man is from the San Francisco Bay Area. Bordeaux spoke with his mother Monday. The man, who a cousin said was 28 years old, was living near Portland.
Bordeaux said the man told him he was working in the Willamette Valley as a technician with a civil engineering firm.
“I met him the day before,” Bordeaux said. “He came up to the boat and said, ‘I really want to try fishing. Can I come out for a boat ride?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I guess.’ And this was his boat ride.”
- Garret Jaros covers the communities of Yachats, Waldport, south Lincoln County and natural resources issues for Lincoln Chronicle and can be reached at GJaros@YachatsNews.com