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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2017
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THIS NEST OF DANGERS
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PITILESS PERILS PROWL OFF
PACIFIC NORTHWEST COAST
Columbia bar nearly
springs a trap on
adventurous gillnetter
By NANCY LLOYD
For The Daily Astorian
L
ONG BEACH, Wash. — In the win-
ter of 1978-79 when I was new to the
Long Beach Peninsula, friends told me
how wild our weather could be and how rough
the Columbia River sometimes was; how in
winter the Washington state highway depart-
ment sometimes parked a road-grader along
Highway 101 near the Astoria-Megler Bridge
to clear off storm-thrown driftwood; how one
year the newspaper ran a photo of a 55-gallon
drum perched in mid-highway courtesy of the
river’s wild waves; even how the Peninsula
needed its own hospital because sometimes
it became an island, cut off from the Astoria
bridge by a ﬁ erce winter storm.
Wow …
It wasn’t until I moved to the north bank of
the Columbia two blocks west of that bridge
and experienced a roadside so ﬂ ooded that at
times I couldn’t tell where driveway or ditch
was, and was thrilled and stunned to have
the tops of those wild winter waves soar over
roadside boulders and slam my car windows,
that I began to understand a little about this
ﬁ erce and magniﬁ cent river near its mouth.
As I drove to Chinook to pick up my mail, I
sometimes watched the white line of breakers
out there at the bar deﬁ ne the entire division
between river and sky.
I began to read about the Columbia River
bar and the northeastern Paciﬁ c Ocean near the
Oregon and Washington coasts.
Bud Cuffel/Submitted Photo
The mouth of the Columbia River looked beautiful at the end of January, but offshore conditions often challenge even the
bravest of mariners. Accounts over the past two centuries tell of harrowing deaths and near-misses for sailors and fishermen
in this vicinity. Cape Disappointment Lighthouse was built in 1856 in an effort to help ships find the Columbia River’s entrance.
What it’s like out there
In 1930, historian Frederick C. Matthews
quoted a sailing ship captain about the chaos
of the North Paciﬁ c Ocean: “In February 1902
Capt. Zaccheus Allen said that his passage of
eight days [in a sailing ship] down the coast
from British Columbia to San Francisco was
the hardest he had ever experienced during
his career of over a quarter of a century as a
[ship’s] master. Throughout the whole run
very heavy gales were met with, the ship being
ﬂ ooded most of the time. Sails were blown
away and most of the passage was made under
lower topsails.”
From the Oregon Statesman in 1949 I read,
“The listing freighter Calmar limped into port
here [Seattle, Washington] today [in 1949]
with the body of her ﬁ rst mate, fatally injured
during a North Paciﬁ c gale that swept another
crewman overboard. The mate, Clarence Hut-
ton, 50, Valley Stream, N.Y., [was crushed
and] died a short time before the 3,586-ton
freighter docked. …
“The Calmar’s master, Capt. Richard B.
Hughes, Brooklyn, [NY] said a mountainous
wave caused the death of the two men. They
were attempting to secure a lifeboat that had
broken loose after the big deck load of lumber
shifted early Saturday in heavy seas 40 miles
southwest of the Columbia river lightship [off
the mouth of the Columbia River]. Movement
of the 5,800,000 board feet of lumber tipped
the freighter seven degrees to port.
“Roberts [the other crewmember] was
washed overboard as the towering wave
foamed across the slanting deck. Hutton was
crushed between the lifeboat and the wheel-
house. The Calmar searched for the miss-
ing crewman 2-1/2 hours, aided by the Coast
Guard cutter Balsam. Then Roberts was given
up for dead.
“‘There is no question but that he drowned,’
Hughes said on his arrival here. ‘No one could
have lived in that water. The waves were the
worst I’ve ever seen in the Atlantic or Paciﬁ c,
and I’ve been at sea since 1912.’ ” …
‘Neptune’s Apprentice’
In 1980, as I was learning about the region,
I read a book from the Ocean Park Timberland
Library that spoke brieﬂ y of the ﬁ erceness of
the Columbia River bar and its neighboring
waters. Marie De Santis’s “Neptune’s Appren-
tice” showed readers how a good boat could
save your life, why sixth sense at sea was so
important, and how a mistake or poor judg-
ment could be fatal.
By late spring 1969 University of Chicago
chemistry major Marie De Santis had com-
pleted her course work and was looking for-
ward to earning her doctorate. At the end of
that term she decided to leave hot Chicago for
the summer and sail to Mexico with a friend
on his ﬁ shing boat. They left from San Fran-
cisco Bay, and by the time she returned she’d
fallen in love with the sea. When she thought
about returning to Chicago, it felt like going
to jail.
Marie De Santis/Submitted Photo
Marie De Santis/Submitted Photo
Small fishing boats are especially subject to the wild caprices of the Northeast Pa-
cific, but also usually are tough little craft, well designed to survive the region’s
waves and weather.
A memoir authored by former gillnetter
Marie De Santis contains vivid descrip-
tions of horrifying ocean conditions off
the Columbia River’s mouth.
MORE ABOUT
MARIE DE SANTIS
Marie De Santis logged more than 50,000
hours as a commercial fishing captain between
1971 and 1980, later working on landside
fisheries projects. In 1991, she became a victim
advocate with Women Against Rape in Sonoma
County, California. In 2012 she was honored as
a California Woman of the Year in recognition of
her directorship of the Women’s Justice Center.
Natalie St. John/EO Media Group
Debris-filled waves sometimes crash over the sea wall east of Chinook, covering
Highway 101 with rocks and driftwood.
She’d experienced wonders — the stunning
beauty of sunrise at sea, the constant move-
ment of the ocean, soft dark gentle nights with
nothing in sight but stars, water softly slough-
ing against the hull, the diesel engine murmur-
ing companionably. She learned about run-
ning a boat, and all of a sudden she desperately
wanted to ﬁ sh for a living. Chemistry faded
away.
Back in San Francisco, De Santis looked
for a ﬁ shing boat to lease. She found one and
also found a ﬁ sherman who helped her in the
beginning steps of a profession entirely unlike
anything she’d ever have imagined. She met
rowdy, humble, fearless, effervescent ﬁ sher-
men who took her in. She loved it.
Several years later, De Santis agreed to run
a Canadian salmon gillnetter from Vancou-
ver, B.C., back down to the bay for a man who
would lease it to her to ﬁ sh. De Santis and a
friend, Molly, arrived in Vancouver to meet the
Golden Hawk, a trim and ship-shape 36-foot
gillnetter. On a lovely morning they set off into
a glassy calm North Paciﬁ c Ocean.
The women were charmed by the sea’s
beauty. All the while De Santis warned her
greenhorn crew member about the truth of the
North Paciﬁ c: it was foggy, it stormed, it threw
big ships hither and yon, it was merciless. But
the surroundings were so stunning that her
words rang hollow. They loafed along south-
ward in this other-worldly scene. Several days
later, they put up in Westport, Washington, for
fuel and to pick up another crew member, Mol-
ly’s ﬁ sherman friend David, down from Seattle
for the weekend.
Swelling tide of unease
High tide slack water that evening was at
midnight. The weather forecast was reason-
able, and they set out, getting bounced around
a bit on the Westport bar. Golden Hawk took
the swells well, her stern perfectly shaped to
deﬂ ect following seas — waves that came at
the boat from behind.
The night was velvet black, no moon, no
reﬂ ections, only the occasional star showing
brieﬂ y. The swells were such that it was hard to
see the buoy lights directing the way out of the
channel. De Santis began to be uneasy. There
was nothing alarming about the way the boat
worked in the water, there was no wind, there
was no noise, but she, Molly and David hud-
dled in the ﬂ ying bridge, alert, not talking much.
As Golden Hawk made her way south, De
Santis’s discomfort grew. This analytical stu-
dent of science could determine no reason for
her unease, but ﬁ nally it overwhelmed her.
(“… No amount of determination on my part
could repress that eerie something that was
rising like a noxious vapor from the sea.”)
On a whim, she turned the vessel around
and found herself and the bow of the Golden
Hawk facing into an enormous wave — a
wall of black water so tall that when De San-
tis threw her head all the way back to see the
top of the wave, she only saw the mast light
reﬂ ecting from the underside of the curl.
As the boat began to climb the wave, for
a moment De Santis feared they would go
over backward. Somehow, Golden Hawk rose
to the wave, then dropped into the bottom-
less trough on the back side, landing on her
side awkwardly, the kind of hard fall that in
humans breaks ribs. The gillnetter righted her-
self, meeting two more terrible mountains of
water, after which De Santis handed the wheel
off to David and went below.
There she found the radio wrenched off
its wall mounting and smashed on the ﬂ oor.
Golden Hawk fell into another trough. De San-
tis pulled herself together and tore up ﬂ oor-
boards to look down into the engine compart-
ment. Water seeped in between planks whose
paint bond with their neighbors had been bro-
ken by the beating. The sump pump was work-
ing, and when De Santis supplemented it with
another high volume pump the water level
See PERILS, Page 2C