Tausani Ieremia, of Sitka, was setting the net aboard the Petersburg seiner Odin on the morning of Sunday, July 26, when the boat’s own purse line snared his ankle and dragged him over the stern and into the water near Saint Joseph Island, west of Prince of Wales. In the minutes that followed, the 22-year-old fisherman was pulled under by the net, lost consciousness and stopped breathing. The Odin’s crew pulled him back, revived him with CPR. He was helicoptered by the Coast Guard to Sitka then life-flighted to Anchorage. He is now home recovering in Sitka.
The accident happened around 11:30 a.m., skiffman Trevor McKay said. Fishing has been slow so far this season, and it was slow again that morning as the Odin began its set. Ieremia had just fixed a lead line and walked to the stern to throw it clear when he stepped into a bight of the purse line. It caught him by the ankle and pulled him over the stern – a moment captured on the boat’s deck camera. Skipper Mark Severson was setting the net slowly, around two knots, and is glad he was, figuring that the low speed probably spared Ieremia much worse injury going over the stern.
McKay, running the power skiff, had been watching the net go out. “I usually look at the net go out for the first 10 to 15 fathoms before I give it any gas,” he said. The net was clear, so he turned and began to speed up toward the kelp line. “It wasn’t long before I felt a big jerk,” he said – usually the sign of a ring snarl. He looked back and saw “a body and a tangle of web flying over the rail.”
McKay released the pin as Severson immediately came over the radio – “Go get him!” – spun the skiff around and ran full throttle toward Ieremia. He watched him go down and surface once, then turned to ready his plunger pole. When he looked again, “all I could see was his hand, and it was sinking.” He reached the net, threw the skiff in reverse and landed just above a set of sunken corks. Ieremia was nowhere in sight, pulled into the dark water by the weight of the fishing gear. Corks sit low like that only when something is tangled in the purse line or rings, McKay said. He swirled his pole through the water, hoping Ieremia might grab it. Nothing. Minutes passed.
“I started to feel the reality that he isn’t going to come back up,” McKay said. Then there were bubbles, and a hand rose toward him through the sunlit water alongside the corks – “like an angel was guiding him up to me.”
Ieremia had managed to slip from his boots, freeing him from the net, said Severson.
McKay caught Ieremia’s hand and lifted him about halfway out of the water. “His eyes were as big as I’ve seen, lips blue and skin pale,” he said. Ieremia was too heavy to pull in, and everything on his raingear McKay grabbed with his free hand was tearing or breaking; he held tightly onto Ieremia’s hand. “I remember yelling, ‘Help! I need help,'” he said. He felt the grip in Ieremia’s hand fade to nothing; Ieremia’s head fell back as he lost consciousness. The Odin was right on top of them by then, McKay said, and the crew got Ieremia up onto the deck and immediately started CPR.
On the Odin’s deck, crew members Mike Doyle and Brent Birchell began chest compressions and rescue breaths – McKay soon joined them. Water came up from his lungs from the chest compressions, Severson said. After around ten minutes of continuous CPR, Ieremia began breathing on his own. He grew more responsive over the next 20 minutes and was on his feet roughly a half-hour after that.
“I was told to never stop CPR trying to save a life,” McKay said. “We weren’t going to stop.”
The F/V Reality, a nearby seiner with a crewmember trained as an EMT, reached the Odin soon after Ieremia had been revived and assisted with his care, the family told the Pilot.
A Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopter crew arrived and lowered a rescue swimmer to the deck, and Ieremia got into the rescue basket under his own power, Severson said. The Coast Guard flew him to Mt. Edgecumbe Medical Center in Sitka; a Coast Guard public affairs officer said he was in stable condition when he was delivered. Guardian Flight then flew Tausani and his father, Joe, to Providence hospital in Anchorage for ICU monitoring. He thankfully had no broken ribs and no brain damage, Severson said, but was very bruised from the chest compressions; the family said the water remaining in his lungs was cleared in Anchorage. He is now home.
Severson, who has fished for about 50 years, said he sets his net slowly by habit – so that if something goes wrong, the boat does less damage. In five decades, he said, he had never seen a crewman taken over the stern like that, “but always worried about it.” Just two days before the accident, he remembers warning the crew: “Don’t get close to the net and never turn your back on it.”
Severson said he hopes the near-miss pushes the whole seine fleet to tighten up around the net and to stay current on first aid. “Everybody needs to go do their CPR class every year,” he said. It had been years since his own last class, he acknowledged, and techniques change – but what his crew did worked. He shared the deck-camera footage which captured the entire incident with the Coast Guard and his insurer, who praised the Odin’s crew for their nonstop effort.
“It was the most horrifying, worst set of my life, and it turned out to be the best one,” Severson said. He knew Ieremia would be all right, he said, when the young fisherman got to his feet on deck. “He’s a great kid,” he said.
In their statement, the Ieremia family thanked McKay, Doyle, Birchell and Severson, the crew of the F/V Reality, the neighboring boats, the Coast Guard and the Guardian Flight crew that carried their son to Anchorage. They singled out “the incredible skill and herculean effort taken by Trevor to retrieve him and never let go,” Severson’s handling of the boat around the net “under intense pressure,” and Doyle and Birchell, “who performed CPR and didn’t stop.”
“Tausani is now home, surrounded by family and friends, as he recovers from the injuries and trauma of this near-tragic fishing accident,” the family wrote. “We all know how amazing it is that we have this incredible outcome of Tausani’s survival. It feels like a miracle.”