All right larry jackson back here for part two of risk assessment going to go into a little bit more detail about your capsizing what year was this has been about 96 i think it was summer southeast sane season on a boat called the baronoff queen which is still has been brought back and still fishes out of catch can how do you bring something back well you know it didn't sink.
So you know what happens is it gets totaled and the bank sells it as a salvaged hustle and somebody else but i don't know who the current owner is but i do see it here in the harbors how do you recover so the state it was in after it yeah well let's go back to the actual rollover so we had there we had done a bunch of work to that boat it was the second season the first season we kind of We made it through with that in 95, I believe. In the 96, we come around.
And at the time, people were going to what they call a trolley system on the booms so that you could move the net around as you're piling the net back. And then you could reduce your need for another crew member. So that's what we were doing. We were running a three-man crew. So that's two people in the net, the captain running the person, and then one guy in the skipsy up, four people. So what that does is reduce your already. Everybody gets another percentage
or two. So, so anyway, we're running that. That's to say why, what had happened was he'd put new rigging on the boat. No, this is known in the crab world, but as you add more weight higher on a boat, you change the center of gravity.
And so we don't know if this is the cause of the rollover, but the boat was dry, meaning no water in the tank, you know, no. And the skiff was on the back deck and you're traveling on calm water and the calm nav autopilot rudder feedback arm came off of its connection. Therefore, the autopilot has no control.
It has no feedback of where the rudder is so it does this hard over oh deal and so that it just went hard over so where was full speed where was this connection it's in the lazarette which is in the stern of the boat and so it's often on saners covered by the access is covered by the net and we dealt with it the last time because it had been it had come off the last time we had the same problem and we stopped and fixed it thought it had it fixed but then it came off again and so
then the boat goes hard over i'm in the wheelhouse with dan there's two other guys in the down in the kind of folks area engine room the boat goes hard over and there's just an intuitive knowledge as a person wow this boat is not coming back you know you've been in rough water you know the boat's point where it gets to a point where you're like, I don't think this thing is going to come back.
And you, so both Dan and I, you imagine the boat and the wheelhouse is at, let's say 80 degrees or something, 75 degrees. We crawled out the opposite side, upper side window of the wheelhouse. He and I together. And we slowly, as the boat came.
Got gained water and started going sinking or house down or whatever capsizing we just walked straight up to the keel so how fast was this this is going hang for a second it hung at the water line and then you felt it go past its point of no return and you're like okay it's not returning okay now we're talking minutes maybe one two three minutes where the cabin's now going under We noticed the other guys get out, so we're happy about that.
And we walked up to the keel. Now, the keel cooler is the keel. So it's actually, we're sitting on the steel keel. And it's a box shape, and it's warm. And you hear the engine running upside down, crazy. And you're listening to this engine run. But now we got the other guys in the water. But you got to imagine you're probably 10 feet above them because they're in the water. And it's a slippery hole. So you're all the way over at this point.
Yeah. Now, you know, so the slowly keel up, completely capsized. Did you stay on it as it was rolling? So you just like. I never got wet. Like I walked around the week. Yeah, exactly.
Dan and I both walked straight to the keel or, you know, clamored, shall we say, to the keel as it's slowly filling with water and going turtle up, you know, the other guys too, Daryl and Paul are in the water, but now they can't get up on the keel because of kind of the slimy kind of camber of the, but they had gotten the life ring off and they throw the life ring up to us and the line up to us. And then we were able to pull them up.
So now we're all, all four on the keel and you're sitting there and then off towards land, which would be to the west. Most of the boats are further along closer to the shore there. And we, cause they're all, we're all going out to Hidden Falls to do a fishing opening. And so eventually somebody notices us, you know, we got nothing. We have no way to send a signal, whatever. It's a beautiful morning, mirror, calm day, not even a breath of wind.
And eventually somebody comes, sees us and comes over. It's the Molly, an old wooden saner. And we get off on, on the Molly. So do you have life jackets on this time? Nothing. We don't have survival suits. This is another fallacy about the survival suit and the raft thing, you know? So harkening back to the last episode, the raft never deploys because it's never gotten deep enough to deploy. The hydrostatic releases are set at a certain depth, you know, 20, 30 feet, whatever.
And so it never deploys and life jackets are all stored. You don't have time. So I can imagine somebody in the middle of the night in a storm, unless you've, you're sleeping in your survival suit, which most guys don't. You just don't, it's just too chaotic. We even, it wasn't even that chaotic. It was over so quick. You just don't have time. And so, you know, these are all idyllic kind of scenarios that you're going to get in your life jacket and jump or your survival suit.
We had survival suits and we had a raft and we had life jackets. None of that. Yeah. The thing that came into play was the life ring though. Well, I think the, you know, when you look at or watch some film or read about captains who know there could be a situation. So like, hey, just in case, let's get this stuff out. Let's get this stuff ready. And then you get toward that point of, this is a real big risk. Just get in the, get in the suits because it's better to be able to catch this.
I think where you find that is where you have flooding and things develop slower. Hey, we got a mayday call off. We have flooding. Hey, we're, but the biggest casualties in this America, in Alaska fishing were capsizings. And they're mostly capsizing and bearing seed or in crab seasons and, or in rough ocean conditions where just, there's no time. The boat just goes, goes up. We were in probably, if you're going to capsize, probably the most ideal situation you could ever be in to capsize.
But, so as the story goes, we, we get off. Now. It just so happens that the Coast Guard in Petersburg is doing a family day on their cutter. And they're about 10 minutes behind us or from us getting off. And pretty soon this 110 footer shows up. Okay, the Molly, they are going to go fish. Hey, they dump us off on this Coast Guard. And the Coast Guard's got families on there. They got barbecued going because it's family day, you know.
And so now we're sitting on this 110 footer. And the one thing, if you think about, okay, this is a rescue vessel, okay, we kind of give them our story, blah, blah, blah. Well, this boat is idling next to this slowly sinking boat. And what happens is the boat eventually starts to fill up with water and goes stern up. And I have a picture of it with the stern poking out of the water by 10 feet
and the same skiff still strapped to the stern. And if I have any ego or anything to brag about in life is that the skiff man, I was a skiff man. Our job is to strap the skiff down. You secured it. So it was secured. Yeah. It did not come off. So, I mean, that's a minor point to brag about, but so anyway, eventually what happens is the Dan calls insurance. All this is going on. This is 96. Cell phones really aren't a thing yet, but they're kind of a thing.
And eventually there's Halverson scrap barge going by and they get permission to take this. Stern up boat capsized boat and strap it to this empty barge with big lines so we get on the barge we the crew get in the barge we take these big hawsers and we tie it off through the holes and or whatever we did, and they slowly inched this boat. Imagine it hanging vertical tied to a barge over to a big beach.
And it's, it's coincidentally is high tide and they just take this and they push it in as far as they can. And, and then they untie it and we untie it. They back the barge out. The tide goes out and the, the, it's a, you couldn't have picked a better beach. It's a big, flat, muddy, you know, beach in the boat is dry. I mean, laying on a big muddy beach on its side.
So the barge is like hey we got to go they call this tugboat out of petersburg art murphy is the name all i can remember and i think the name of the tug was a seahorse we're talking a 19 probably 40s 50s steel old thing and it's just him no crew member just art he probably weighs about 400 pounds and he ain't moving from the wheelhouse. So we, we move on to the, the seahorse. I hope that's the name of it. It's all still same day. Yeah. We're talking late evening now.
Cause we, we capsized probably, you know, eight, nine in the morning. So you're done with your coffee, had your breakfast. Yeah. We're just going out to the Hidden Falls. And it's a full day. Then you got the barbecue on the Coast Guard boat. Yeah. Yeah. This is a big day, you know. This is like a training run. This is a. So the, so then we get on the seahorse and then we start to formulate this plan. Okay, well, let's salvage this thing. Okay. Let's get it refloated, blah, blah, blah.
So it's laying on its side. Well, the idea is, okay, we'll go in and we'll kind of get it up on its shine and keel. So it's kind of semi upright. And then as the tide floats in, we'll give it a little tug and see if we can refloat. But we had to go in and pump all the cavities. So I don't remember. I think he had a skiff. So we're able to get in there at low tide with a trash pump, you know, a two inch gas pump. We go in all the cavities and suck all the water out.
Try to seal up things that might fill up with water as the tide comes in. But what you don't realize, one thing you don't think, don't think about when a boat sinks is that all the fuel comes out the vents. So everything is covered in diesel. So within minutes, everything you, everything you touch is just swimming in diesel. So you reek like diesel. So we do that. The tide comes in probably in the middle of night. I vaguely remember it being dark. And this is July.
Is the net still attached? Yeah, the net's still there. So the skiff is still attached and it's just hanging there precariously. So then we get a big line to it. They got hydraulics on the seawars. And as the tide comes in, we give it a tug and we pull it. It doesn't go vertical. It just lays over and sinks again. So this is the middle of the night. Now you're like, okay, now it's high tide. We got to wait. So the next day, same thing. Okay, we'll make a different plant.
We kind of get another plant, similar kind of thing going. We got to get a little bit, you know, so we do it again. And it sinks on the next high tide, which is like midday, the following day. But this time we're like, we got to get that net and skiff off there. Just so happened. So we, we were able to bust the skiff off, get it refloated during the high tide. And then we were able to take the skiff, interestingly enough, and via some, you know, shucking and jiving got the skiff running.
So now we have a decent power skiff. We get the net off there, which the net had slid and all the weight was to one side. That was making it hard to get it vertical. But we're sleeping on this boat. We're diesel covered. Art Murphy is up there, you know, 300 pounds. I'll take a hundred pounds off. He's 300 pounds. He's missing a lower jaw. So you got to remember because he had either chewed tobacco and lost his jaw. So he had, he's just this character of a guy in his wheelhouse.
I just have these memories of him. And he, he, I just remember him dying on a piece of ham with this no lower jaw as we're trying to salvage this boat we reek like diesel so somebody one of our friends comes along after the saint opener now it's the next day whatever late in the evening they come through and they take the sand the net away and now we have this skiff off there and on our third attempt two days of salvage attempts we get this thing refloated
and and we tow it back into petersburg we go up and we buy some new clothes because everything, we just take a shower or two because we smell like diesel. And eventually we tow it back to Ketchikan and the insurance basically totals it. Yeah. So, I mean, there's an addendum to this story and it's kind of an interesting addendum. We go, this is 1st of July. There's no boats available to kind of take over and try to finish out your season.
You know, sane seasons really don't get going until mid-July. Eventually, Dan rounds up this old wooden saner called the Veribus. And the Veribus was owned by Brett Claggett. He was a Metlacatla. Well, he grew up in Ketchikan, but he was, the boat was in Metlacatla. We go over and get this thing. We put our net on it. We're like, late July, we roll on down into the opening south of town here down on Cone Island and we start fishing.
We're talking three, four weeks later from the debacle capsizing. And, and I mean, there's lots of fish and we start loading this boat up and we, we, we loaded up. And one day it was 30,000. Well, at this point, I don't know, remember what that boat hauled, maybe 40,000 pounds. It was an old boat, dry tank, meaning that was like a 1930s era boat. You know, we load this boat up. I'm like, all right, we're back in the game. And we're finished. We're driving, driving back into Ketchikan to unload.
We get to about mountain point here and we're all up on the wheelhouse, beautiful summer evening, you know, kind of basking in the glory of coming back from this capsizing and the boat takes this, unnerving lurch to the left and we look back and the whole stern is underwater and we're like oh shit we're sinking again you know and so i run i literally jump off the wheelhouse i run across the net jump in the skiff i said just let me go i'll pull the skiff
off here i'll pull the net off with the skiff but it's it's dusk and dark and there's boats going by and dan's like hold on, hold on, let's just not set this net in the middle of everywhere here. And so. Through some cooler heads, another boat, the North Cape comes up, Gary, and we reel the net off onto him, which allows the boat to come up a foot or two out of the water. And we waddle in precariously to the tender, pitch all our fish off.
And the next morning we investigate what had happened with this boat is that it had never been fished with any kind of regularity. So all the planks above the waterline and shrunk. You see what I mean? And so then as we added all this weight and fish and net and everything to it, it started leaking and filled up the lazarette with water. And there was no drain from the laz, which is the stern of the boat into the main bilge. So no, no way to pump the water out.
And it most likely wouldn't have sunk just by filling up the lazarette, but it was not stable.
So anyway that said we fished out the rest of the season with that boat at daryl welk at the pump almost continually whenever we left the harbor is that riley's dad yes okay yeah rally in class i think she's still playing south full down south yep it's her dad and he's a charter he's been a successful charter fisherman as a matter of fact he's the one that got me into charter fishing you know but it's a shared trauma that he and i yeah so how long after that did you continue to commercial fish?
Oh, I fished there for, I fished for Dan for another two or three years. We, he got a different boat. We were very successful on the Little Lady, which he owned just until a few years later. And so I, I per se into the late nineties and then I got some IFQ and got my own boat, uh, in a Dungeness permit and a commercial fish Dungey for about 10 years and cute dove. And, you know, I have a whole series of stories of accidents on that boat, you know, that are, once again, I was solo.
Most of these stories don't, you know, when guys are fishing alone in the winter time, you just don't talk them out of amongst friends. But not like in podcast form you know so lessons learned in all of that you know yeah so do you.
It goes back to the risk assessment thing you obviously know there's an inherent risk like when these sort of things happen do you take it as a i need to get out of this i need to not do it anymore like or this is just part of the there's a lot of people who come up they hate it It's miserable and they're done after one or two years. Well, I think it's part of it is if it scares you and if it scares you and you don't feel in control.
And part of the, I don't think I ever felt scared in that, in that capsize. And I knew I was safe almost from the minute it happened because I never felt. Now, Daryl and Paul had a different experience. They were in the V birth and had to scramble as on the sides of things and stuff's falling on them.
They said it's scary yeah oh am i going to get out yeah and and i never felt particularly scared i felt almost and then i i i capsized one other time in a saint skiff off of noise island and once again it happened so fast i jumped in the water and never felt scared and then there are times the times i felt more scared is when i'm in really rough water in at night and you can't see what's coming at you and you know that what happens is that your margin of error.
Is i think that was the right term decreases so you have less margin of error if it's rough water it's dark and you're depending on this particular engine and vessel to keep you safe so if one thing goes wrong then another thing goes wrong and then you have the cascading effect of of a disaster and in the cases of the where i've had disasters or you know accidents. It's never cascaded too far down, down the chain of events.
And I don't know if that's, I don't want to say luck because it's not luck. It's, it's maybe some of it's preparedness. Some of it's being, having a, like I said in the last, having a secondary plan. If this goes, then I do X, you know, there's a little bit of that playing out in your head. Yeah. So back to the whole thing. Well, no, I don't think I ever wanted to get out. because I thought it was unsafe, but there is a little bit of anxiety that worked on me as you assess weather.
And do I want to go now? And if you do that continually, it wears on you. Like, I'm always wondering, should I go? Should I go? When do I go?
You're making these assessments. And I think that's why I never really wanted to fly because the speed and the development of the disaster so much faster and the assessment of whether okay i sometimes fantasize well if i was in a plane and i had to make a decision to turn here and leave or change my course or whatever i you don't have time you have to know ahead it's not a lot of time and so and the boat you know it can happen fast too i don't know
so i never really thought about getting out i just thought about changing how i did things yes well you talked about growing up here and so you've had experiences where when you're leaving pennock island and you're trying to get the seventh wave yeah been in the water before and you've had experiences so it's not the first time you've ever really been on a boat there's an emergency you've had these gradual sort of things
that make you a little bit not desensitized to it but a little bit used to that so the cascade for someone else is just a, the next element of a problem to you. So that, that sort of experience I think can be probably pretty important in allowing you to kind of know what, what to do and not to be scared off by. Yeah, I don't know. I, I, I think that the, the, maybe the, you know, there was this phenomena that I noticed in college when I was per seining and
it was be, you're excited. We're going to go do this season. You're doing all your preseason work. You have this potential to make this money and, and it's youthful. It's exciting. It's an adventure, you know, Hey, we're on this boat where we don't know what we're going to catch. We don't know what we're going to see whales, fish. And there's a little bit of a, I would call it a like gold rush mentality to commercial fishing. Yeah.
And then you get to about three quarter point. You're tired of these people that you're on this boat with. You're irritated by some of them. You're annoyed. You don't like the decisions the captain's made. You haven't made as much money as you thought. I mean, all these little effects. So you're, you, you get done with the season. You're like, God, I'm never going to do that again. That sucks. But then about January, you're like, God, wouldn't it be cool?
It's like i think it's like what mothers must go through with birth oh it's horrible it's traumatic they hate it and then like three years later they have this fuzzy memory of the misery ebby's already kind of getting there like you know a second sucker you know it's like man what are you we don't even have teeth yet she's crying and she's maybe teething and just can't reason with them but you know those the cute moments and when she's happy oh yeah it's blissful it's just like fishing.
When you roll that 10,000 fish set on board and you just made $2,000 in an hour and you're like, what could be better? And it's the same kind of delusional memory loss, I'd call it or something to that effect. So I think that happens with all fishermen.
They're slightly traumatized probably every time they go out and then they either get to the point where they are numbed by their trauma or they just don't you know that it's just a way of life for them yeah you know maybe for me it became a way of life and and i you don't you don't think of it like i don't think any airline pilot gets in their plane thinking yeah i may not come back today you know they just don't operate that way you know no and that's the amount of the sophisticated.
The autopilots and the the gear and the every the technology has improved so much the training yeah the training and technology is so good but this is not so much that on um, it's not so much that on sorry it's all right, With commercial fishermen, we're kind of these one man shows. There's nothing telling us you can't go on this weather. You can go in the worst weather you want. Nobody's there to stop you.
And, you know, you have maybe better navigational stuff with the GPS now and chart program. But I think what that does is just maybe even leads to where I see that stuff helping is as a, as a commercial fisherman and you're have a new crew on board.
What that technology allows you to do is give your crew a little bit of educational advantage they don't have to actually use an actual physical chart and plot out a yeah yeah a course and if there's fog they still got to know how to read a radar you know they but they still got to know where they are i don't know if i told you that story of my first outing on the alsec under larry painter stark memory when i was about 16 i went around the island here with him on a
crab and shrimp trip i just wanted to go and experience it and they put me at the wheel at night as they the rest of the crew had dinner and the boat's cruising up beam canal and the radar's going and i could see the radar you know i could see the land and and larry comes back up to the wheelhouse out after dinner and he says well where are we at and i'm like i don't know where we're at, we're behind cats again and he's like wrong answer you know it's still burned in my soul.
You always know where you're at when you're running a boat because you know the next thing is you hit something because you don't know where you're at yeah so so let's go to the technology a little bit there princess sophia was that in 1923 or 1913 boat coming back from fair bit i thought it was 20s but but i don't know it's it's a charted rock a reef outside of juno right but everybody dies i think yeah they're up on the rock and they can't get them off the
weather's too bad and people are able to write notes and letters and whatnot but then as the tide comes up the storm the boat falls off it falls off and you know most people aren't even found so that was a known reef but your navigation was way way different so you can think that there's or know that there's a reef out there the charts are pretty primitive but it wasn't until 1940s that the military started to have low frequency radio systems that
you could get some sort of understanding where you're at within like a mile. The Loran system. Yeah, you have...
Within a mile or so ish so you have these charts that are again still fairly primitive and then you have that and then it improves what what in the when you first remember the navigation tech well i started out with maybe we start with dead reckoning what is the what is dead reckoning people are using that well dead reckoning is just using you know your compass in relationship to the chart and then you may have a visual reference so you can say okay you know like so my
first crewing was between here and tree point on a gill net tender and it was all in the summer and daylight and i didn't do any navigating i was just a deck hand held on the so i but the next year it's done about 87 my.
First year standing i went to ballard and then we came up and so you're doing all debt reckoning and what that meant was you're basically traveling point to point on a known courses with land references every few miles Canada is extremely well documented so you could say okay and we had an allowed logbook and so you would write okay we just went past xyz point and now we're heading in this course to the next point and once you got to that you would
log and if it was nighttime there'd be lights okay the light would flash xyz you would you would note that or we're going past so and so point and so you're using a combination of visual reference chart reference and your navigational aids and it's all well and good when you're within you know islands in the inland passage here where the loran.
Becomes important is when you get offshore out of visual reference anything visually you can cite so So they had a Loran station here in Shoal Cove, in Curl Inlet. I think there was one, there were three or four around the Gulf of Alaska, and those signals would go out there and would create a crosshatch. So then you could, but so I never did much offshore fishing then, so I never had to use Loran.
By the time I got into, did start doing long lining in the, in the early nineties, that's when the GPS system started to come in because the, the military took a military technology and allowed civilian use. So GPS was developed by the military for locating, you know, military operations and they did not want civilians to have it cause then our adversaries would have it.
It was the same thing with rants too. I think the early stuff from the forties that ended up being, then it became ubiquitous in the late seventies, early eighties. And then it ends up being a lot cheaper. And then same thing in the early nineties. Yeah. Now GPS, you know, you got them on your phone, you go out, huh? You kind of know where you're at, you know? It tracks you whether or not you want it to. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so, but that came in early to mid nineties.
And then we started on Saners. I remember being with Dan the first time when they had, you know, you got a little laptop and you could put the, you could get a secondary GPS signal, integrate it to your laptop with, with different charting program.
Program and you essentially now had all the charts and your location on a laptop and we thought we thought we'd died and gone to heaven i mean i really thought this is and in a way it made so much navigating so much easier especially in bad weather like fog and nighttime you can see where you're at you know before that you're using a chart with a flashlight in your mouth or some red light in the wheelhouse so you're not blinding yourself to exterior input and
then you know you're using the compass rows on the chart and you're saying okay here's the compass here we are okay and you're doing using your parallels to find okay am i here where am i okay i'm here and you know there's just way more error built into that especially for a new person that's just walked off the dock and is now helping you run this boat when we when I first started we never took wheel watch alone.
That would have been like 86 era by 96, I'm working on a short crew and we're taking four hour wheel watches alone. And that because of this technology, you know, you could do that and, and experience, but there's, you know, so that's kind of the, the progression I saw. What about tech? As far as the survival stuff goes, we've talked a little bit about that, but when those two guys went over, did they just have regular clothes on?
Were they worried about hypothermia because summer temperatures the water is upper 40s low 50s but you can still get hypothermia oh yeah and they were probably only in the water for you know 10 minutes max before we got them out of there so you know i don't think we did do survival suit donning drill before the season every year and you had to go get your survival suits out, and but those those haven't changed there's still these we call them the gumby suits you know they're just a
neoprene suit that you can get in in your shoes and any kind of clothing you have on but they're somewhat cumbersome and then zipping them up is cumbersome you got to get it all the way up yeah it has to seal around your face and that's a real challenge because they're kind of a one size fits all type deal you don't have like a medium long no yeah no and so you know they're they're they're made for guys like us i mean there are small there are child sizes and probably oversized
ones i never never saw those but but anyway you had to do you had to make sure the lights worked on the strobes worked and you usually we would wax the zippers to make sure they're working and so forth.
The actually the most times we use survival suits was to do something where we had to get in the water and needed a repair and we didn't have a real supreme suit on so you jump in that and, maybe go around and do something with it but so i mean there was i don't think there's been much advanced there are these now dry suits like that these survival guys or the rescue swimmers work you know they're basically a seal dry suit that i don't know of anybody that even has those on a So,
you know, like a kayaker might use or whatever, you know, they seal around your neck and around your wrists and so forth, but I don't think any commercial guys use those. I think one thing that has happened to technology is the AIS system. So now all commercial boats have an AIS signal, which is a automated signal that the boat puts out that basically you and I can go on and if we have the right program and we can like all the, you You know, where all commercial boats are.
That you can track the trawlers and just see where you're decimating the, uh, yeah, you can do that. You can track all the cruise ships, but any commercial vessel is supposed to have that AIS system. Now, some people turn them off. I mean, I've heard of them being turned off and so forth, but that, that's kind of a peace of mind thing. Hey, I know where our boat is. I know where, what's going on with it.
And, and I think if it disappears there, somebody could, you know, and then the, the other thing that's improved is the 406 EFURBS. That said, like when we capsized, we had a, I think we had a 406 E-perb, but I don't think it went off. I don't think it deployed. They were hydrostatic release. So like all my pleasure boats have those and it's just a device that sits in a cradle and it's designed to deploy if the boat sinks.
Is it on the outside? Yeah, it's on the outside, like mounted on a, you know, a bulkhead or somewhere. And these are fairly affordable. They're, you know, a couple hundred bucks and you register them.
Um you can i tell all my clients hey if you have to abandon ship just grab this thing, take it with you and you can manually deploy it and it's going to tell the coast guard this is where someone is or this is what the device is there's a person there but i had an interesting episode with one of those at one time i had one on my crab boat and i was going out for my weekly crab circuit and it had snowed like four or five inches and so i'm cleaning
all the snow off the boat before i left bar harbor and i inadvertently swept the on button and so is it that easy to yeah it's a trigger there's well this particular model i don't think now it's as simple but it had a little on off switch you know and i when i brushed the snow off it i turned it on inadvertently and didn't know it so i got out to about loring and there wasn't like a light Whenever I think of the E-perb, I think of like a flashing light plus.
Yeah, it might have, but I'm driving inside. I'm not really seeing it. So you brushed it off, didn't notice it. Didn't notice it, didn't even think about it. And then I'm cruising along, you know, an hour and a half, two hours later. And I see this Jayhawk helicopter go over the top of me. I'm like, what the hell is that guy doing around? You know, this is nah.
And he's like, he's, he's on the radio eventually. Hey, we're, we had a signal from this area of, you know, 406 EPIRB and the wheels are turning slow in my head. I don't know. I haven't seen, I haven't heard a distress call, nothing. And then, you know, the wheels grind as they grind and I'm like, well, why would they be here? I'm the only commercial boat I've seen all day. Something's not right. You know, that's how it played out in my head.
I, I scrambled back, look at it and go, oh, my bad, my bad. Click, turn it off. And I called them on the VHF and I said, hey, you guys, I got to apologize. I had to really turn mine on when I was cleaning the snow off. And they were really good about it. They're like, hey, thank you. You saved us a lot of time because we would have been searching for hours. And they went, and they were back to Sitka, you know, 40 minutes or whatever.
I did, I don't know if I told you, I had an old DeLorme in reach. It was before DeLorme was bought by Garmin. Garmin, right. And it just has a slider switch at the bottom. Okay. It's a pretty tough switch to inadvertently switch over because it's like a slide, which doesn't have like a knob or anything on it.
Just always take it always take it's always in my pocket never turn it on so is that registered, so your garmin like if you hit distress i'm a little bit confused by that does this go to garmin or does it go to the coast guard how does it where does it go so here's here's here's what happened so i i do i never i don't i never turn the thing on okay so but if you slide it over, and then you hit the button then it goes oh so it's a two two part thing so i had i think
i'd turned it on to send a message or something like that and then i left it on and the slider went all the way over engaged the sos and then the battery died so i'm up with abby okay we're hunting and then we just get a weird pocket cell phone reception and just get like five or six text messages and so panera was my emergency contact which is oh so he had gotten a call from the.
Garmin headquarters whatever in texas so as soon as there's an alert or whatever it goes there then they call the emergency contacts and in that person okay so said hey you know we got a distressed signal for jack and you try to reach him troopers were also employed i think the the technician or whoever in texas contacted the troopers yeah okay so they are all they go near where the thing is which is where abby and i used to live at buckingham's so troopers show up and panera
shows up and Rob is panicked. He's where, he knows that we've gone up, up the mountain to hunt. Okay. He just starts running up the hill. Okay. To get to this spot. Cause it was like 200 yards from where we took off. So it was like right up from the house. And you almost see it. So it was like, Hey, maybe somebody's cut. He's starting to yell, starting to yell and, and just going through devil's club and whatnot, but we're already up on the top shelf. We're already way up
there. We'll finally get to the text message. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I, I, I had no idea. And I, I don't have enough cell phone reset or to tell them. Oh, that's even worse. Yeah. So I, I come back down there and they were worried multiple things. A, that the thing went off and then they weren't sure if Abby was with me because maybe she had it, maybe it'd gone off for her and maybe we'd split. So. Yeah. A lot of different scenarios could have played out there. Yeah.
So A, Padere is trustworthy because he, he, he, he, he showed up. Yeah. Garmin called the, the people in Texas and the technician followed through with stuff. So there's a trooper there, but Panera didn't go up the mountain searching for me. Uh, Rob did. So he hung, hung out there and was talking with the trooper. Uh, so I got the new ones that are made by Garmin. Like I said, I bought the DeLorme one maybe close to eight, nine years ago. It was right before.
So the new, the unit is much better, not easier to use and more difficult to accidentally And at least send the, send the distress. But same, it's going to still play out the same way. Still say the same way. So while the unit was old, the new technology after it was bought by Garmin, the whole process was still the same thing. So that was like two years ago. You know what? You're making me now think I need to have that schematic. Yeah.
It on my wall for my particular boat. So let's say one does have a distress. I know it's going to go X, Y, Z, and these people will be contacted. Because the 406, I assume EPIRB goes to the Coast Guard, and that may be, probably is how it's played out. But would they then contact, would there be a false alarm sequence? Yeah. I'm not sure with the, cause if you do have that on a boat. Yeah. The immediate thing is going to be, they're going to go to the media response.
I would say. Yeah. So I'm at, yeah. So I think the technician might locate or might contact either coast guard or troopers, depending on where. So I have two on each boat. I have the 406 E-PIRB. And then I also have the Zolio, which is kind of a different version of a Garmin in reach or whatever. It's a satellite-based device that has an emergency response deal. But then there's a third one that we haven't talked about, and that's on the VHF radios in the boats.
There's a distress on a lot of modern VHFs. There's an emergency button on there, which I've never utilized or even investigated. I've seen them more as an annoyance than anything. What's the difference between that and being on 16? Well, it, it probably does go to the Coast Guard. Yeah. I mean, I think it's just something that you can push quickly and not
make a distress, a verbal distress call. You can be on your secret fishing channel and go right to, rather than have to dial it back down to 16? I don't, I don't know. It's just on a lot of VHFs now. And here we are talking about safety and kind of, you know, showing my ignorance on that. That might be something we can come back on another episode. So whenever I'm on the, I just use the radio. I just have it on 16. I don't even do anything else. 16 is what we always said, healing and distress.
That's the nature of that channel, which a lot of people get wrong. Yeah. It's to hail somebody and then change to a working channel, they call it, if you want to converse. Or, hey, I'm in trouble, X, Y, Z. Or to talk trash about non-locals. Yeah. It's always funny. You hear the people trolling by the time August comes around. There's, well, I can't wait till all these people are getting out of here, this or that. And they're like, hey, Charlie, did you have fun at the... Yeah,
and they don't realize... You need to go up one, go down somewhere. Yeah, go to 10, 67, whatever, yeah. And... Yeah. I mean, so there, there's a lot of stuff, you're right, that is now more available for safety that wasn't around 30 to 40 years ago. And, you know, it, it probably needs to be detailed more explicitly how that, how it all works. I'm familiar with the 406 EPIRBs, but not like these in reaches.
So it's good to know that. Once the infrastructure was made, people are making products that don't revolutionize the infrastructure. They do new ways to utilize it. Like on your phone, no one's reinventing the phone. They're just creating apps for the phone. These new features are so different than what the initial thing was made for. It's like, oh, it utilizes this technology to do this.
Oh, that's a new thing. I didn't know if we needed it. But also, yeah, the way, the way that Zoloil works is that it's just a communication device with a satellite, but you interface with it, not with, you interface with an app on your phone. Yeah. Same thing with the Garmin. Yeah. The Garmin's didn't used to be there. They used to be, you had to have a physical device.
So now they're doing that. But the problem with that somewhat is that you need to have your phone with you, say you go on a hike, you need to have the phone and the device together. And then phones' batteries go dead. And they just get dropped in the water. That's exactly what they're meant to do. They're meant to be very brittle and fragile, and the battery, so they can go out. So yeah, the problem with the all-in-one device is that if you lose that one
thing, then you're screwed. Yeah, we've talked about that before. If you have another device that relies on the cell phone, then everything's fine as long as your cell phone, which is the most fragile of technological things.
If that thing goes out, then you're in trouble. i would think of the cell phone not as a primary safety device because that's the way you interface with everything then it becomes your mode of communication but those like i have the in-reach mini i don't have the one where you i think you can send preset stuff i've never set the preset stuff because i just have the app on my phone so i can send very specific things but would you say that in most
especially in alaska most of your outdoor hunting fishing when you say you have, cell service 50% of the time, 70% of the time? I'd probably say less. Less? Yeah. Yeah, so it doesn't take much to be out of cell range in this country. No, the AT&T signal, you lose it pretty quick. You get some, like around Mountain Point, you start going south of town, like you don't. You go around Point Alba, you don't get it. Which is fine. Like I would rather not really have, it's kind of nice to be
not reached. Like you're not going to be tempted to do anything else. But I guess there is a level of comfort just in case You can update when I did the fly out for a caribou a couple of years ago. It was awesome to not, there's no need to be on the phone. It's like we track some stuff, look at the maps on there, but we weren't on it. So I think we were out there for five days and I think we recharged it once or twice.
Have you heard about the Starlink now going to be able to interface with your phone? You're shaking your head. I don't want it. You don't want it. I think it's, I think it's a potentially a great convenience, but there's something about knowing that you have to be on top of your game.
It's like hey we're at a cell phone service right here so everything like you think it'll make people sloppier is that kind of what you think i think it might make me a little sloppier i think it also there's a level of maybe distraction or convenience like i don't need to be setting stuff yeah i just need i need to be here you don't need to see the baby picture no you know i don't i don't i don't want to be reached in the group chats or however
many group chats i just want to be you know rick collins is off hella skiing somewhere or on some nice warm beach like Did you have to really sully the podcast with Rick's name? I mean, really. Yeah, he was also, he was saying, oh, I'm really happy if you guys worked hard this year and have a really good resting break. And then picture of him on a beach. I was like, Pennick looks really different this time of year. Yeah, right. Yeah, well, that's an interesting take on Starlink.
I think it's going to become ubiquitous, meaning that these phones, especially with that low-Earth Starlink system, I think we're going to see that become more and more, you're going to have a universal calling from everywhere you can get a signal. Yeah. And if it's a satellite signal, that's a lot of places. There are places you can't get satellite, but it's going to be everywhere. I don't, I don't particularly, I don't, I guess I'm not against it.
But I think that people, you will start hearing stories of people that think that's going to save them and they'll die. A buddy of mine is working for a wildlife rescue, or not wildlife rescue, outdoor rescue and volunteer rescue squad down in Wyoming and said that people, when they're rescuing people, they tend to go up mountains to try to get self-inreception rather than like down a drainage, knowing that this drainage leads to this road.
Oh, they don't use regular survival skills. No, because their impulse is I need to get cell phone. This is the only way that I can be saved is to go up. And that makes sense. So the people who are trying to attempt to make the rescues have to keep that in mind, that the logical person who used to go down the drainage because it intersects with the road, just that basic sort of geography of the area. Or to a river and another bigger river. Yeah, something like that.
It's just go up for cell phone reception. Wow, yeah. That is a different idea. I do like potentially the idea of like somewhere to take your boat around the, around Ravilla and head Starlink. Like you could work from, you could work remote or you could, if you wanted to, you could also turn it off. But I mean, that'd be. Nobody will. No, you're just going to have it on and you'll spend a couple extra hours getting upset about whatever news is going on.
Well, I have just an anecdote about that. This is back, when did Al Gore run against. 2000? 2000. 2000, I'm Dungey Crabbin. And, and the election happens on a Tuesday. I leave out, you know, it's on the, the results are unresolved when I leave. I'm gone for three days. I'm thinking, oh, I'm going to come back and I'm going to find out who's the president. Four days, three days later, come back. Nothing's resolved because it's that long thing.
And it just became a thing in my life. I'm like, man, I'm gone for three or four days and really not much has really happened to make a difference in my life. The extra anxiety that we get from the day, the minute by minute.
Yeah. and you just oh that's not natural like that's too much anxiety for us to it's good to be informed and informed on your like whatever you read you know used to be the paper and the nightly news and now it's minute by minute hot takes from who knows who i love the term breaking they use this term breaking it has your news guy it's no meaning it's so ubiquitous that nothing's really breaking breaking anymore it's just so i think that that
not having the cell phone reception out there it's nice because you're forced to like you can't. Just, I'm going to spend a couple of minutes. I'm in a forest service cabin. I'm going to spend, you know, just a half hour online. Like, no, just like when I was a kid and we'd go to the Sweetwater lawn or Stany Creek over on Prince of Wales, we'd roll up the pieces of tinfoil and then have a home run contest. Yeah. Oh, that's what we did. So we're like sharpened sticks or hit rocks into that.
You were self-sufficient. You were creative and you're entertaining. We had probably had one of the most memorable baseball games ever on the end of Pinnock Island. And we brought not anything we played with a cork we found on the beach yeah and a stick.
And it's 10 teenage boys playing baseball until the tide came in yeah and i mean epically fun everybody having a great time and and we didn't bring we didn't bring anything we used a cork and a stick yeah and it was it was lovely yeah i was in high school buddy lars and rob buckingham we took hatchets to some trees that have a dime or maybe a foot or so and we just notched them and made like a little cabin and then hung an old seine net in the trees about 10-15 feet up
and then like this isn't as cool so we put it up higher yeah all right and then we built a platform off that yeah and so we had like one person would have to run from one side of the forest to the other and they were up there with uh paintball guns and shooting at you oh okay and then we also set up a basketball hoop so you could jump out of the platform dunk and land in the net land in the net it would play two on two basketball in the net and in the up in the trees yeah and this
is this isn't even like little kid this is like sophomore in high school no this is exactly the age i'm talking but you know i think we do romanticize you know you see it with your kids at school i see it with my kids because it's like saying well should we be in the 1800s and everybody working on a farm i mean i don't think we need we had a great childhood we had these.
Spontaneous things we played in the woods we played it out in remote areas it may or may not be that for our kids or the in the future it doesn't mean that they won't find something else i don't think their lives are ruins because of technology i don't i really don't want to go down that road no it because it's the kind of old people oh the kids aren't what they used to be you know well in the old days they also worked on farms and died when they're 50 you
know yeah the life expectancy was 46 in 1900 and so do we really do we really long for another era that didn't have health care either i mean you know kids tired of childhood diseases yeah yeah it's like you said it romanticized that there was that sweet spot there in the 80s and 90s when loved it we didn't have that existential threat like you did in the 60s and 70s with the cold war cold war was ending and then there was just this sort of.
Oh, the first thunder and lightning storm I thought was a nuclear attack when I was in college. I'd never been in a thunder and lightning storm. I thought we were getting attacked by the Russians. But back to this whole romanticizing your childhood, I was talking to these people in Homer when I was up there with this boat sail thing last week and I was telling them how much I, you know, our Marine highway system is failing or is not as good as it used to be.
And i was telling you know when i used to go on a trip for basketball or cross country or whatever i would leave the house with 15 and see if i could come back with 15 because i would gamble the whole way to juno and then we're talking quarter games you know so it wasn't high stakes it was so bad in the mid 80s there that the finally alaska marine highway made a rule you can't have cash on the table because we would gamble almost
24 hours a day you use the sugar packets? We used the sugar packets. Well, we used the Chimney Rock sugar packet was like worth five bucks. And then, well, you're younger than me, but we were using matches. You know, that's how we eventually went to matches. But I loved traveling on the ferries because it was a confined...
Big party for teenagers but it was relatively safe relatively it was safe meaning meaning you know we're all it's a big slumber party for yeah yeah like there's some social bullying i remember some of that sort of stuff but yeah i don't remember anything but of course whatever i just remember having so much fun and the kids would get on from wrangle petersburg but whatever i'm romanticizing my childhood riding around on these ferries i thought it was
fantastic yeah it was It's like freedom. You're away from your house. You're going to another town. You know, you're, you're, you got some chaperones, but it's pretty much loosey goosey. Yeah. Great life. Yeah. I think now the, the technology that's available, kids aren't limited to their six hours at school. So if you have teachers that are underwhelming or if they happen to be gone or whatever it is, you don't have to limit your learning.
You can be online and you can learn so much stuff from podcasts. We used to have a tube from, there's a kid who hasn't been able to get into it.
To he wasn't able to get into shop his first three years of high school right but that's what he loved to do and he hasn't been able to get in the class which is horrible but he's been able to just use youtube to work on vehicles learn on stuff there you go yeah that's that's you're not limited again by it so that's a potentially great upside to technology the upside to technology is the kind of ubiquitous learning and
and it's such a resource and now we're way off the whole safety theme here But the whole idea that, I mean, I, I use YouTube to fix my washer and dryer at home, you know, and, and what could be better? Yeah. Well, one that works. Yeah. It doesn't have to be replaced every three years. It's more, less expensive to just replace the thing than it is to try to get someone.
Well, I think the principle I learned in college, and it holds true to this, is that what you learn in college is that you're not getting this huge set of information and knowledge, but what you're doing is you're getting the tools to learn how to learn. You're getting access to a way of accessing information. And if you could pass that on to kids, well, with the internet, you have this crazy depth that you can get to. Now, that said, I did a test when I was teaching wood shop.
I said, you know, because the kids believe this, that everything is accessible online. It's not. And I finally said to them one time, we have this sauna heater for this sauna we were building. I said, well, you guys find, tell me what city this sauna heater is built in. They never could find out. It was built in China somewhere. They just didn't know. They could never find the information where it was built. Yeah. We'll leave it at that. Yeah. About an hour here.
Jesus. Thanks for being on here again. They're still listening now. Their, their lives are loyal. You probably should give them a t-shirt or a discounted boat rental from Bear Boat Alaska. Definitely. Totally. Yeah. Call me up here. We'll, we'll set you up. Yeah. Thanks man. Thank you.