KMXT - Kodiak

A 93-foot fishing trawler has reportedly broken into pieces and spilled thousands of gallons of diesel, days after ending up on the rocks off Sitkalidak Island near Black Point. That’s according to a Tuesday update from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation’s spill response team that’s been monitoring the situation.

No one was hurt when the fishing vessel Laura ran aground the morning of Nov. 1. All four crew members were picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard, and an 8-month old puppy named Grace was rescued 36 hours later.

It’s not known exactly when the Kodiak-based vessel broke up, but nearby residents in Old Harbor traveled to the beach nearest to Black Point to clean up and salvage debris. They also recovered several five-gallon buckets of oil, the DEC said.

State environmental officials say the 3,000 gallons of diesel and several hundred gallons of lubricants won’t have a significant environmental impact. Salvage efforts to recover fishing gear and debris are being coordinated by state responders.

The trawler is owned by Kodiak commercial fisherman Michael O’Callaghan, who is listed as the potential responsible party.

Federal investigators are heading to Kodiak after a small plane crashed Sunday afternoon shortly after takeoff.

Authorities have released few details on the 2 p.m. crash except to confirm that a 39-year-old Soldotna man piloting the plane was killed, a few hundred yards from the runway near Kodiak’s East Elementary School.

Kodiak police named the deceased pilot as Derek Leichliter. He was reportedly en route to Saltery Cove for a hunting trip.

The aircraft was not carrying any passengers and there’s been little information gathered so far by crash investigators, according to Clint Johnson, National Transportation Safety Board’s Alaska office chief.

“We do have two investigators en route to Kodiak as we speak right now. And that’ll be the first order of business, is trying to figure out what the intent of the flight was, where it was headed, what the load was on board and to gain those details.”

Johnson confirmed that the plane Leichliter was flying was a Wag-Aero 2+2, a single-engine kit aircraft that resembles a Piper Super Cub.

The fishing vessel Laura, a 93-foot trawler based out of Kodiak, capsized Monday morning after striking rocks near Sitkalidak Island. The four-person crew safely boarded a life raft. But their puppy, Grace — an eight-month-old, 80-pound lab mix — jumped into the freezing water and was presumed lost.

A Coast Guard UH-60 swept a five-mile area with no luck before turning back to nearby Air Station Kodiak to return the crew to dry land.

The next day, another Coast Guard helicopter crew searched the area for evidence of a fuel spill from the F/V Laura — but they still held a shred of hope that Grace might still be alive. And there she was, on a nearby beach.

Petty Officer Rafael Aguero, a Coast Guard rescue swimmer, went and got her. He says Grace was on “a narrow beach with about 20- to 40-foot cliffs all around her.”

“I was able to find a way to sort of scramble down that cliff to grab her,” Aguero said. “She was definitely in a little bit of a shock. Definitely hypothermic. So I looked up to her, and I knew she was going to be okay. She wagged her tail a little bit. And then I went, picked her up and scrambled back up the cliffs back to the helicopter.”

Aguero and his crew were amazed to find her unharmed.

“To go through those conditions and spend 36 hours alone in the wilderness like that on the beach with the cold, and she was otherwise okay, from what I can tell. But it’s absolutely incredible that we found that dog,” he said.

Grace was reunited with her owner at Air Station Kodiak around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday. And she’s doing just fine.

The ship hasn’t fared as well. The wreck is still on the rocks, and according to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, a five-mile oil sheen has been sighted about a mile from where it hit the rocks.

Spill responders say they are monitoring the situation. The vessel’s owner estimates there were about 3,000 gallons of diesel aboard.

The U.S. Coast Guard reports intermittent VHF outages on the emergency Channel 16 but says the situation has improved in the past two years. That’s according to Commander Lyle Kessler, a Coast Guard spokesman.

“I think it was, in 2019. In January, we had our worst that we had had, I believe was 19 sites that we had down at one time. And, like, right now, there’s only three sites down. It’s been getting better and better. We switched contractors a couple years ago, and we also made some improvements to the contract that allowed the contractors to do maintenance while they were doing repairs at the same time. So enable them to do more work essentially, than what the old contract had,” Kessler said.

Relay towers near Mt. McArthur, Cape Fanshaw and Bede Island are at best semi-functional, and at the worst completely inoperable. The affected areas include the inland waters north of Afognak Island, the coast near Mt. McArthur west of Wrangell, and the area of Stephens Passage and Frederick Sound east of Kake.

The Coast Guard says that these outages are expected to continue for the time being. Kessler says the remoteness of the locations and extreme weather of late have made repairs difficult.

“The Coast Guard over the past couple years have been going through a process of upgrading all of the power generation and microwave links up to more current technology, the microwaves are, I think, like 1960s 1970s technology or something,” Kessler said. “So next summer, all the sites should have new power generation capabilities and new microwave links. And that’s been the majority of the reason that sites have been down.”

Kessler advises mariners to keep a secondary means of communications onboard their vessels such as a cell phone or satellite phone. And to file a float plan and carry emergency equipment onboard.

The Alutiiq language has lost four speakers in the last year. Tribal leaders say it’s a big loss — out of the 30 remaining speakers, there are just a handful of people left who are able to teach Alutiiq.

Candace Branson, the Sun’aq tribe’s program services director, says there’s plenty of interest in learning the language, but there aren’t enough people qualified to teach it.

“That’s a great problem to have. Everybody wants to learn — what a problem, right? But right now, we’re not able to fill those roles. We’re struggling to keep the programs running because we don’t have enough teachers,” Branson said.

Branson says the Sun’aq tribe’s new master-apprentice language program’s goal is to train Alutiiq teachers.

“We submitted an application to the Administration for Native Americans to fund a three-year language, Alutiiq preservation and maintenance grant. And the grant includes developing a master-apprentice program that would teach adults how to speak Alutiiq fluently, as fluently as second language speakers could,” Branson said.

Branson says the tribe plans to start accepting applicants from potential apprentices in December after the tribe’s annual meeting. Applications would be reviewed in January, and the first two apprentices would begin their full-time program in March.

The program includes a stipend, so language learners can focus on Alutiiq.

Branson says one long-term goal is to create what she calls an immersion house — a live-in setting where apprentices and masters would study and speak Alutiiq all day long.

“The end goal is for Alutiiq to be a language that is used in Safeway,” Branson said. “Used at the coffee shop, used between mother and daughter and grandchild. And we have to start with teaching adults who can teach their families and teach other kids and teach other parents. We have to get some people fluent.”

The objective for the three-year program is to produce five speakers who will be fluent enough to teach the language in school.

The Coast Guard encountered a flotilla of Chinese warships 46 miles off the Aleutian Islands at the end of August, inside of the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone, according to a news release Monday evening.

The exclusive economic zone extends off the country’s coastline, including off the coast of Alaska. The U.S. has jurisdiction over natural resources in the waters.

The Coast Guard said the four Chinese warships included a guided missile cruiser, a guided missile destroyer, a general intelligence vessel and an auxiliary vessel.

No interaction occurred between Chinese vessels and American Coast Guard or American fishing vessels, according to the Coast Guard’s release. It said the Chinese vessels have right of passage through the economic exclusion zone and were in full compliance with international maritime law.

Scott McCann, a Coast Guard spokesperson, would not speculate on the reason for the Chinese warships’ visit when asked Tuesday morning. He said it’s been several years since Chinese warships last entered the economic zone off Alaska.

The Coast Guard encountered the vessels with the Bertholf and Kimball legend-Class national security cutters and Healy, a medium icebreaker.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.