Boat's woes detailed: Arctic Rose plagued by problems before sinking, panel told
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Todd Wheeler was the factory foreman on the fishing vessel Tenacity when, in the winter of 1995, a net bulging with cod was hauled aboard while fishing in Alaska.
The seas were rough and, when the tons of fish were hauled up, the rear of the boat sank.
"Basically, the whole stern was under the water," Wheeler said. The sea began to leak through the watertight door of a processing factory, a good 10 feet from the stern. "You could feel us going down."
The only thing that saved the boat, he said, was cutting the net loose and turning the vessel away from the following sea that threatened to swamp it.
Wheeler left the Tenacity not long after. "I felt unsafe in it."
And not too long after that, the Tenacity got another name: the Arctic Rose.
Wheeler testified yesterday during the first day of Coast Guard hearings into the April 2 sinking of the boat, which killed 15 seamen in the worst U.S. fishing casualty in half a century. He was one of several witnesses who testified about the hard-luck boat, which was plagued with mechanical and financial problems virtually since it was built in 1988.
The hearings in Seattle are expected to last about two weeks and then will move to Anchorage next month for additional testimony. The Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which is also participating, will issue separate reports regarding the sinking.
Dave Olney, president of Arctic Sole Seafoods, which owns the boat, was present yesterday with two attorneys. He has declined to talk publicly about the accident, which killed his brother Mike, the Arctic Rose's engineer.
Much of yesterday's testimony focused on the boat's stability and how it could have been affected by alterations undertaken by its several owners. The boat was built in Mississippi as a shrimper but, over the years, was converted to fish for scallops and eventually became a "head and gut" factory trawler.
The most substantial conversion, in 1991, involved fitting the rear deck with a water-tight processing factory, where the day's catch was beheaded, gutted, frozen and then stored in the ship's freezer hold below deck.
Not everyone who testified felt the boat was unsafe.
Tom Neikes, an Astoria, Ore., fisherman and captain, oversaw that work and later fished the boat - then called Sea Power - off Oregon and Alaska in 1993 with few problems. "There was never any concern about stability," he said.
Neikes said he worked closely with longtime Tacoma naval architect Bruce Culver, who testified that he performed extensive tests after the boat was retrofitted with the factory and accompanying equipment, including a large refrigeration unit.
In some ways, he said, adding the factory actually aided the stability of the boat. But it also posed a significant problem: If the factory were flooded, even with a few inches of water, the ship's rolling motion would slosh that water back and forth and generate a powerful force that would drastically impair its ability to right itself.
Robert Ford, the NTSB member of the panel, likened it to hammering the ship with a powerful wave. "Only the wave would be on the inside," he said.
Culver, in a document given to the boat's owner at the time, said the factory must remain free of water.
Wheeler, however, testified that there were routinely a few and sometimes several inches of water in the factory while fish were being processed. A series of sump pumps intended to pump the water overboard routinely got clogged with fish guts.
And Wheeler talked about another problem: Seawater once leaked through the packing around the propeller shaft and partly flooded the refrigeration hold.
Investigators are scrutinizing flooding in the processing factory as well as issues with the shaft. In the three months before the boat sank, overheated bearings on the shaft posed a continual problem. And, just hours before it sank, its captain, Dave Rundall, complained to a nearby sister ship about a clogged sump pump in the factory.
Also testifying was Kevin Ward, who captained the boat on a fishing expedition to India in 1994. He said the boat had an "unnatural roll, almost like a shimmy."
Ward testified that he deployed stabilizing outriggers at all times and recalled one instance when he hung up a net on the bottom and the boat almost rolled over: "It heeled very hard, so hard that I was thrown out of the chair and onto the deck."
Mike Carter can be reached at 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com.