UPDATE:
LAPUSH — A Coast Guard helicopter crew saw no sheen in the water this morning after an 80-foot fishing vessel carrying 3,800 gallons of diesel fuel sank Thursday night in the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.
The captain of the boat, Vicious Fisher, managed to cap the vents, trapping the fuel on board, before the vessel sank 13 miles west of LaPush at 7:30 p.m.
Thursday, said Mike Allen, operation unit controller for the Coast Guard in Seattle today.
But officials with the national marine sanctuary still want to get the boat out of the water.
It sank deep — 360 feet — and retrieving it may not be possible, said Liam Antrim, resource protection specialist with the sanctuary.
It’s good news that no sheen was spotted and that the vents are capped, Antrim said today. That means there is no large accumulation of fuel in the sanctuary to immediately endanger birds and marine mammals.
But a boat rusting in salt water eventually will leak, he said.
“The next step is to evaluate the possibility of salvaging the vessel,” working with the owner and — if the owner has insurance — the insurance company, Antrim said.
The Coast Guard safely rescued the five crew members aboard the boat Thursday. It isn’t known why the boat sank.
The results of this morning’s Coast Guard fly-over resulted in the Jeffrey Foss, which had left Neah Bay at 7 a.m. this morning with a salvage team, being called back, Allen said.
The Coast Guard may attempt another fly-over this afternoon, if the rainy weather — which closed visibility to one-mile with a 300-foot ceiling this morning — permits, he added.
The boat was out of Bellingham, said Curt Hart, state Department of Ecology spokesman, today.
Neither Hart nor Allen nor Antrim knew the boat owner’s name.
Although the boat sank in federal waters, outside of Ecology’s three-mile marine jurisdiction, Ecology is working with the Coast Guard to monitor the area in which the boat sank, Hart said.
“If we hear that there has been a release of pollution, we will be involved in making sure that the source is contained as it can be, that everything is done to get it out of the water and that it doesn’t reach beaches,” Hart said.
Also involved in salvage efforts are Global Diving & Salvage and NRC -Environmental Services.
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PREVIOUS STORY:
LAPUSH — Coast Guard helicopter crew members and a swimmer battled eight-foot seas to rescue five people from a sinking fishing boat off LaPush on Thursday.
The people were taken safely off the Bellingham-based, 80-foot fishing vessel, Vicious Fisher, before it sank about 13 miles west of LaPush, said Lt. Courtney Higgins, command duty officer.
She did not know the identities of the people on board, or where they, or the boat, was from.
“They still don’t know what the cause of the flooding was,” Higgins said, adding that the water poured in quickly, at a rate of three feet every 30 minutes.
“They attempted to pump the water out with the pump the Coast Guard provided and it couldn’t keep up with it,” she said.
The boat sank completely at about 7:30 p.m., about an hour and a half after the last man on the boat, the master, was removed.
A team will go out this morning to evaluate any petroleum spill from the boat, Higgins said.
“It’s too dark to tell if there is pollution,” she said Thursday night.
[The Coast Guard late Thursday night released a 42-second video of the incident 13 miles off LaPush. Click here (some users might find a delay in buffering the video): http://tinyurl.com/offcoast ]
The crew of the vessel contacted Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound in Seattle, at about 2 p.m., via VHF Channel 16, reporting that the vessel was taking on water and asking for help.
Air Station/Sector Field Office Port Angeles immediately launched an MH-65C Dolphin rescue helicopter crew while Coast Guard Station Quillayute River sent out a 47-foot motor lifeboat rescue crew with dewatering equipment.
The rescue helicopter crew lowered a rescue swimmer to the boat at 2:40 p.m. to see if the water could be pumped out of the boat.
After that proved fruitless, at about 4 p.m., those aboard the fishing boat were told to get into the water so that they could be picked up by the lifeboat.
Four of the five crew members complied at that time.
“The master refused to leave until the boat sank,” Higgins said. “He finally agreed to be removed when the owner said it’s not worth it” at about 6 p.m.
All those aboard were wearing survival suits, Higgins said, and suffered no hypothermia or injuries.
The Coast Guard, and the boat’s crew members, remained near the boat until it sank.
The weather “got progressively worse all day,” Higgins said, with seas rising to 12-feet and fog rolling in as crew members waited in the dark for the boat to completely sink.
