Perfect Storm II

This is a link to a article about a gale on the Georges Banks that decimated the fleet of schooners that were anchored there. This happened in 1862, but the whole episode reminded me of a bit of Enge family history from the same time period, in Norway. (Maybe some of the family still back there can fill me in on the details, mainly the exact date of the storm in question.)

This is about Rasmus Enge, my great-grandfather, who had built a 62 foot schooner he called the 'Socrates.' He would fish cod in the Lofoten Islands in N. Norway and then sail the product to Spain to trade for oranges. Norwegians were a little short on oranges as you can imagine and they were highly valued as stocking stuffers at Christmas. (It would also be interesting to know what a Spanish orange at Christmas in Norway would have been worth in today's dollars.)

The storm that hit the Norwegian cod fishermen was characterized to me as a '100 year storm,' their version of the 'Perfect Storm.' It seems that 200 fishermen lost their lives in that storm. Maybe there would have been more immigrants to Petersburg had it not been for that storm. Many of the Norwegian immigrants to Petersburg were from that area of Norway. I've heard that a cemetary on one of the islands there my family came from looks like the one in Petersburg with all the many same family names.

Of course Rasmus survived the storm and went on shore after that. He tried farming and then immigrated with his wife, Anna, right before the turn of the century. They hit Minnesota first, but I guess the lure of the sea was too great, so they ended up in Seattle where they met Peter Buschmann. Buschmann was from the same area of Norway and was building up a string of fish processing plants in S.E. Alaska, the chief one being in Petersburg. Rasmus signed on.

It wasn't until a shirt-tail relative of ours, Reidar Enge, settled in Petersburg in the early 1960s that we heard more of the storm story. It seems that Rasmus had tied himself to the wheel and headed out to sea when it got real bad. How you do that in a sailing vessel of that size is beyond me. The bulk of the rest of the fleet were these little dorys that looked like miniature Viking ships, with elongated stem and stern posts. We have a picture of the 'Socrates' anchored in a cove with another schooner and a smattering of these dorys. The dorys capsized as they made their way to shore to get out of the storm. The waves just built up near shore.

Like all those schooners that were lost in the storm of 1862 on the Georges Banks, you wonder what it was like out there for those that made it back and those that didn't. And you wonder how big the seas were , and in comparison to those of the regular big storms in the Bering Sea. A captain of a king crab vessel related running before a storm in the early days of that fishery when he was a green captain. The boat was nearing the shores of Western Alaska in 78 foot seas, by his account. He was able to turn around when the seas moderated to 65 feet. During WWII that colorful cannery manager and a former boss of mine, Larry Freeburn, said he was in Military Intelligence on a Naval vessel and they had to run with the seas for three days in the Bering Sea toward Russia.

The bulk of the sinkings in the Bering Sea have been in the area just north of Unimak Pass. That key passageway from the Gulf of Alaska into the Bering Sea. Whether that area's tidal currents, increased wind speeds or freezing spray or a combination of those were the cause, every individual situation was undoubtedly unique. Just like the Graveyard of the Atlantic, that area off the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I visited the Maritime Museum near Hatteras, N.C. last year. The museum has architectural features resembling the skeleton of a sailing ship. The Labrador Current meets the Gulf Stream in this area, generating confused seas, and has additionally created shoals from the north and southbound drifting sand reaching twenty miles out to sea.

These days there is not much excuse for a ship large enough to sport all the modern electronics to blunder into a storm. There are even animations of wind speed and direction at any point in the world. And there is an effort afoot that has successfully tracked big rogue waves. Gone are the days, in the beginning of the king crab fishery in the Bering Sea, when Peggy Dyson in Kodiak volunteered for years to give the fleet weather warnings by single side band radio. But as every mariner knows, the weather can change very fast. And if maritime commerce is to continue normally, a strong Coast Guard presence is essential for saving lives. And maybe they need to take a more proactive approach in situations like in the grounding of the Shell oil drill rig on an island off Kodiak Island. Or, I should say, the cavalier attempt to cross the upper Gulf of Alaska in late fall under tow at, slow speed, with a bad weather forecast, and without adult supervision. Now, that's the real 'Perfect Storm.'

I tend toward analysis somewhere in a tale, so to conclude, in my mind is the the real possibility of collision of cavalier resource extractors with an increasingly angry mother nature. And the larger the operation, the more cavalier, meaning more lives at risk in one incident. Not to mention the certain environmental collateral damage that seems to increase proportionally by size of the operation. There are many regulations that reflect these truisms, but often politics trumps all considerations, adding to the peril of 'Perfect Storm II.'