Oregon town mourns those who died on fishing boat
Garibaldi, Ore., is a town where folks have fishing gear in the yard and boats in the grass; the pastor at God's Lighthouse fishes to make ends meet and uses a tide chart for a book mark in his Bible. Motel rooms have cards warning of sneaker waves that swipe beachcombers into the deep and beach logs that kill.
So the wreck Saturday of the fishing charter Taki-Tooo, with nine passengers dead and two others presumed dead, bit down hard, especially after such a precious run of good luck.
"If there was a spiritual shock, it was this: We were so thankful.... And now this," said Pastor Bill Creech of Christ Victory Fellowship church, one of three Garibaldi churches to pray for the victims and eight survivors in a combined memorial service yesterday.
A 14-member team from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), including marine-accident experts from Seattle and Alaska, will focus on the operation of the Taki-Tooo, survival factors and crew performance, lead investigator John Goglia said yesterday as he stood next to the wreck.
"It may not look like much, but when things break, they leave a message behind, and just like airplane accidents, when we reconstruct this, it will tell a story."
So far, NTSB inspectors have examined the vessel's hydraulic systems, steering, rudders and engine but found nothing out of the ordinary, Goglia said.
The NTSB rarely investigates small passenger-vessel accidents, he said, but the number of fatalities this time made the difference.
Goglia questioned the boat's size — 32 feet — and the number of people aboard for Saturday's turbulent conditions.
"If the surf was worse yesterday than it is today, I would have some issues going out in a boat this size," he said. "But that may be my personal fear."
He added that his expertise is in aviation accidents, not marine accidents, and that it was too early to draw conclusions.
Conditions at the entrance of Tillamook Bay were particularly rough Saturday morning as Taki-Tooo, operated by Garibaldi Charters owner Mitchell "Mick" Buell, followed three other charters — the 42-foot Norwester, another Buell boat; the 44-foot Oakland Pilot; and the D&D, the third boat in Buell's fleet and about the same length as the Taki-Tooo.
Five rivers sluice through the jaws of the jetty, and the tide was exceptionally low, forcing a screaming ebb current into an 11-foot Pacific swell.
Big swells are one thing; swells combined with a very low tide can cause violent, stacking waves.
Tamara Buell, Mick Buell's daughter who was on the Taki-Tooo and survived, told NTSB inspectors that the boat's skipper and owner, Doug Davis of Garibaldi, gave a safety briefing to the passengers before departing, pointing out the location of life vests and emergency equipment.
She said Davis gave the passengers the option of wearing life vests, which none or few accepted, Goglia said. Passengers rarely do, Tamara Buell told the inspectors. Passengers 13 and older are not required to wear life vests by Oregon law.
Goglia did not know if Davis had warned passengers about the conditions, which were well known to charter skippers. The Coast Guard that day had issued a small-craft advisory and barred pleasure craft from the bar.
Although the skippers waited for slack water before heading out, the waves at the bar were still stacked up, Oakland Pilot skipper Steve Dana said. A fifth boat, a 19-footer, turned back, Goglia said.
The skippers shot radio messages back and forth as they slogged through the rough swells, Goglia said.
"All the captains expressed concerns," he said.
Dana deliberately had left his shorter, 37-foot boat tied up because of the conditions, venturing over the bar in the Pilot, which weighs 43 tons and has a 7-foot draft — much larger and heavier than the Taki-Tooo.
Once across the bar, he said, he became alarmed that the Taki-Tooo couldn't handle what he had just hammered through at 7:15 a.m.
"I was just getting ready to call him ... to say not to go," Dana said. "I have a way bigger boat, and there were conditions off the bar that you couldn't see from the inside.
"I was going to tell him it wasn't worth it, but it was too late."
Brian Craven, 35, deckhand on the D&D, crossed the bar ahead of the Taki-Tooo and crashed through a 15-foot wave that reached customers' thighs as it rinsed over the boat.
"We had everyone sit down and hang on," Craven said.
The D&D made the crossing safely. But when the Taki-Tooo's turn came, the boat, for some reason, was broadside to the waves instead of slicing into them with its bow, Craven said.
Tamara Buell and Davis were on the flying bridge as they entered the choppy surf, she told inspectors.
Davis maneuvered the boat to ride out the wave, and passengers began putting on life vests, when the swell hit and the boat rolled, Goglia said, recalling Tamara Buell's account.
Goglia said the maneuver appeared to be normal procedure for riding through the swells.
"We have heard this individual captain was very experienced in riding through there," Goglia said.
Craven said waves caught and flipped the Taki-Tooo over, then flipped it back up.
The Coast Guard channel came alive with the news of the capsize.
"We did a 180 (turn), and I started clearing the deck," for a rescue, Craven said. But the D&D was too far from the shore — about a mile off — to help.
No one aboard the D&D put on a life jacket, including the kids, until after the accident.
"I was never worried," Craven said. "We didn't have the customers put on the life jackets because if the situation warranted it, we wouldn't have gone (out). You have to be able to trust your skipper."
The Taki-Tooo reportedly had 20 life vests aboard. At least four of the eight survivors had life vests, the Coast Guard said.
Life jackets wouldn't have helped the victims he pulled from the water, said charter-boat operator Ray Dana, 22. The violence of the waves would have torn them off, he said.
"This one man I pulled out, he had no clothing left on him; you could even see where his watch had been ripped away."
Richard Hiscock, an expert on marine safety in Orleans, Mass., said that weight on board a vessel and how it is distributed can affect stability.
"There is so much unknown in this, but it sounds to me like this guy made a very bad decision to go out in 15-foot breaking surf in a 32-foot boat," Hiscock said.
The nine recovered dead are Dennis Tipton and Kathy Corley, both of Ukiah, Ore.; Steve Albus, Ephrata; Sigmund Bohnet, Collinsville, Ill.; Edward Loll, Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Larry Frick, Spokane; Terry Galloway, Portland; Richard Hidalgo, Green Bay, Wis.; and Davis.
Coast Guard helicopters yesterday morning stopped searching for Tim Albus of Ephrata and Barry Sundberg of Cheney, Spokane County. Officials said they couldn't have survived in the 50-degree water.
The survivors were listed as Tyler Bohnet of Canby, Ore.; Mark, Daniel and Chris Hamlett of Portland; Brian Loll of Vancouver, Wash.; Richard Forsman of Vancouver, Wash.; Dale Brown of Portland; and Tamara Buell.
Frick, 61, and Sundberg, 52, longtime friends and co-workers at the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe Railroad, had been joined by other friends from the railroad, including Galloway and the Albuses, who were brothers.
Their annual fishing trips, a June tradition, dominated their conversations, and they would hash out plans — Alaska this year or the Oregon coast? — over cribbage and at work.
One year, they all slept in a small camper, their wives remembered yesterday. Another year, Frick's wife, Marianne, agreed to go on the trip and suffered seasickness — officially making the weekend trip a men's-only event from then on.
Their deaths, said Sundberg's wife of 26 years, Marsha, are "not something you think about. They go out and have fun and end up dying."
Mick Buell and a half-dozen helpers shoveled sand from inside the vessel yesterday morning as a salvage crew prepared to haul it off the beach.
"I feel sorry for their families," he said of the victims, declining further comment because of the NTSB investigation.
Tall and slender with a graying beard, Mick Buell bought the charter business from Doug Davis about a year ago and would have been piloting the Taki-Tooo on Saturday, he said. But some of the passengers who had arranged the charter requested that Davis, with whom they had fished several times before, skipper the boat. Davis and Buell agreed, Buell said.
Soon after the wreck, Pastor Creech, a Garibaldi native, saw the Coast Guard rescue ship blast through the surf and knew someone needed help.
He rushed to the beach and worked with other townspeople pulling the dead from the sea.
"Our hearts became very heavy, knowing the families that had been broken," he said.
"This Father's Day will never be forgotten. When my adult son called and said, 'Hi, Dad, I love you, happy Father's Day,' I knew there would be boys that wouldn't get to say that to their fathers. And I knew it yesterday, and it wasn't a time to be manly; we grieved for the families who did not yet know what we knew."
Some wiped at tears as Creech led them in "Amazing Grace" during yesterday's memorial, their song floating out open windows to the spring sunshine.
Seattle Times staff reporters Hal Bernton, Maureen O'Hagan, Emily Heffter and Marc Ramirez contributed to this report.