Two gillnet boat captains credited with rescuing commercial fisherman Woody Pahl said luck – including a piece of floating debris and the presence of an extra crewman – was critical to Pahl’s survival, despite the proximity of their boats to Pahl’s as it sank in storm-tossed seas Sunday night.
“I can’t explain it. I’m just glad everything worked out,” said Chris Olsen, skipper of the fishing boat Gabriella, whose deckhand Blake Ward helped fish Pahl out of the water just after 9 p.m. about a mile west of William Henry Bay, 40 miles south of Haines.
On a black night with swells reaching six feet and higher, Olsen and Brad Badger, captain of the Osprey, followed the green, underwater glow from the still-operating deck lights on the sinking Kyra Dawn to locate Pahl clinging to a section of plywood roofing nearby.
The rescue occurred as the three vessels were running for the protection of William Henry Bay in the face of a storm that brought winds up to 71 knots, according to the National Weather Service.
Badger kept a hand-held spotlight on Pahl as Ward and Olsen pulled him aboard after the second throw of a life ring.
“When it’s rough, it’s hard to grab your net in the middle of the day,” said Badger, a gillnet captain here for 19 years. “I was trying to steer and spotlight (Pahl) and it was really difficult.”
Seas were so rough that approaching Pahl risked running him over, Badger said. “You’d kill him with your boat.” Yet a boat needed to pull close enough to reach Pahl with the toss of a life ring.
Even after locating Pahl in the water, bringing him aboard in the storm without the help of a deckhand would have been difficult, at best, Olsen and Badger said. Many gillnet boat captains – like Badger on Sunday night – operate their boats with no crew.
Badger said he was relieved when Olsen’s boat arrived. “I thought, ‘Oh God, thank God.’ I had (Pahl) spotlighted and Chris got in a good spot. As young as (Olsen and Ward) are, they really stepped up. Nobody could have done that better than they did.”
Olsen, 19, is only in his second year running a boat. Ward is 20. “I was so lucky to have Blake with me,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been able to pull (Pahl) out of the water by myself. I was able to operate the boat while Blake pulled him in.” Pahl spent an estimated eight minutes in the water.
Pahl, fishing at Point Saint Mary, had radioed Badger and Olsen that he was listing and taking on water while running for the bay, about five miles away. Badger – closest to Pahl’s vessel – followed from behind while Olsen approached from the north. Each skipper saw the Kyra Dawn go down.
“It was pitch black,” Olsen said. “You couldn’t see, but you could see the deck lights still on underwater. The water stayed lit for about two minutes. When we got to him, the lights flickered and went out.”
Badger, who at 100 yards away was closest to the sinking boat, said there was such a brief span between Pahl’s 8:57 p.m. mayday and the vessel’s submersion he assumed Pahl was trapped inside. “I heard him hollering my name before I saw him,” Badger said.
Pahl, a 25-year-old resident who returned to town Monday morning, said he jumped off the 40-foot Kyra Dawn at the last minute, when water was nearly to the top of its cabin door. He had just enough time to grab a survival suit – but not put it on – and was swimming frantically away from the sinking vessel, afraid of being caught up in its rigging, when he came across the torn-off roof of the boat’s bait shed. “I found that and that was my savior.”
Badger said besides keeping Pahl out of the frigid water, the chunk of roof gave him a higher profile amid the swells.
When the Gabriella approached within 30 feet, Pahl swam for it. He grabbed the life ring thrown by Ward, which landed about 15 feet away. “Once (Pahl) left that roof top, he was moving pretty fast. He had the urge to live,” Badger said.
Pahl said he was hauling about 3,500 pounds of fish when he started toward St. James Bay. “We knew the storm was coming in. It was on the radio; they were calling for gale-force winds. We all made the same move. That’s why boats were all around me, which was lucky.”
Going across the canal, parallel to the chop, was “doable but nasty,” Badger said.
Pahl said the recessed deck of his vessel – compared to flush decks on the Osprey and Gabriella that don’t catch water – may explain the difficulty he was having. By turning the Kyra Dawn into the waves, he tried to drain water from the boat through its rear scuppers.
“Once a wave filled the back deck, that’s what did me in. I was able to clear the decks once, but that was it. Trust me, my next boat is going to have a flush deck,” Pahl said.
Winds blew out of the north Sunday, and fishermen were making good catches. A lull came about 8 p.m. as winds shifted from the south. Fishermen were expecting the storm, but its sudden arrival was surprising, Badger said.
“I’ve seen weather kick up real quick like that before, but you could see it coming like a black curtain. You couldn’t really see much of a front on this one,” Badger said.
Pahl, who has skippered boats five years and worked aboard them for 11, estimated he was less than two miles from the bay when the vessel sunk. The difference, he said, he may have made up had he not taken time to sear a roast during the lull. “It was close. That’s why I told the Coast Guard I thought I was going to make it.”
The boat sank in about 900 feet of water. The Coast Guard will conduct an investigation. Pahl said he was in the process of buying the vessel, which is insured.
The ordeal has inspired Badger to buy LED floodlights for his vessel, he said. He’d previously found the ultra-bright lights obnoxious, he said. “If I had those I’d have been able to get so much closer to (Pahl). I’m a believer in them now.”