Search & Rescue

A 98-foot fishing boat ran aground in the Eastern Aleutians on June 17 will be scuttled.

Four people were on board the F/V Pacific Sounder when it got stuck along the western shore of Unimak Island, between Unalaska and the Alaska Peninsula.

The Pacific Sounder hailed a mayday call at 10:43 Friday morning, but the crew waited three hours before they were rescued. Eventually a good Samaritan boat, the Polar Sea, arrived and found the crew unharmed.

“They were still on the boat when they ran aground,” said Nate Littlejohn, a spokesperson for the U.S. Coast Guard. “By the time the Polar Sea arrived on scene, they were wearing their survival suits.”

Littlejohn says the boat owner has hired Resolve Marine, a salvage and wreck removal company out of Dutch Harbor, to recover the boat. The first thing they will do is make sure the diesel on board doesn’t spill into the ocean. And there’s a lot of it: 21,000 gallons, to be exact.

“We sent out a Coast Guard helicopter crew Saturday who did not observe any pollution,” Littlejohn said. “That’s not to say there hasn’t been any diesel that has escaped, but we don’t know of any at this time.”

Resolve said the Pacific Sounder is too stuck for them to be able to tow it. Instead, they’ll have to scuttle it. In other words, they’ll sink it, and Littlejohn said he doesn’t know how long that will take.

“It cannot be understated how complex this operation is,” Littlejohn said, “and to make a prediction about how long it’s going to take is just not a good idea. It’s just very unpredictable how long it’ll take based on the weather.”

No reason has been given for what caused the boat to run aground. The Coast Guard is investigating.

Three people were critically injured in a small airplane crash near Yakutat on Tuesday, May 24. A fourth was treated for minor injuries.

At about 3:15 p.m., Coast Guard headquarters in Juneau received an emergency locator transmitter alert as well as a phone call from a good Samaritan reporting that a single engine DeHavilland Otter had crashed.

The plane went down some 30 miles outside Yakutat, in the woods near the Dry Bay airstrip. Photos by the Coast Guard show the Otter’s crumpled fuselage with its wings broken off.

The rescue was a joint effort between Air Station Sitka, Air Station Kodiak and local emergency responders. According to Lieutenant Erik Oredson at Air Station Sitka, it took about an hour and 20 minutes from takeoff for Coast Guard to reach the scene just after 5 p.m.

Oredson said local responders from Yakutat were first to arrive and had already begun administering medical aid.

“There was already another aircraft that had brought emergency medical personnel from Yakutat and had landed at the airstrip,” Oredson said. “Two of the people had already been extracted from the aircraft, and they had them on backboards at the airstrip there. And there was a third person that was still in the plane.”

A fourth person with minor injuries had already been taken to Yakutat by a good Samaritan when the Coast Guard arrived. The three victims with serious injuries were medevaced aboard an Air Station Kodiak C-130 to Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage and transported by EMS to Providence Alaska Medical Center and the Alaska Native Medical Center.

The cause of the crash is under investigation.

Updated Post — May 21, 7:06 p.m.

Divers found the body of William Anthony Rodriguez, 32, of Miami, Florida on Sat., May 21, according to Alaska State Troopers. The man reportedly was swimming in front of a docked cruise ship on Friday afternoon when he began to have trouble and sank.

Divers from Juneau and search dogs from Southeast Alaska Dogs Organized for Ground Search arrived in Skagway on Saturday and found Rodriguez’s body, trooper say.

Original Post — May 20, 4:21 p.m.

A missing person search is underway in the waters around a docked cruise ship in Skagway. 

Friday afternoon, City Manager Brad Ryan said an eyewitness saw a man in the water near the inland-end of Skagway’s Broadway Dock.  

“And they saw him sink away into the water, and that’s as far as we know right now,” Ryan said. “So the individual’s missing, and we don’t know — we’re presuming he’s drowned, but we don’t know that for certain right now.” 

Ryan said vessels from the Skagway’s harbor department and the Norwegian Jewel cruise ship are participating in the search. The U.S. Coast Guard also sent a response boat from Juneau to help. 

There’s no word yet from the authorities about who the missing person may be. 

The U.S. Coast Guard has suspended its search for a 40-year-old woman who reportedly fell overboard from the Celebrity Solstice cruise ship early Tuesday morning near Eldred Rock in the upper Lynn Canal.

Petty Officer Ally Blackburn said the captain of the ship reported the incident after a cruise ship camera showed the woman going overboard at approximately 3 a.m. Tuesday as the ship sailed from Juneau to Skagway.

The search included a helicopter from Sitka, a response boat from Juneau and the crew aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Chandeleur based in Valdez.

“Because of the searching that we’ve done, it has yielded negative results,” Blackburn told the Associated Press. Survival time in the cold waters of Lynn Canal is a little over 6 hours according to Blackburn.

The missing woman has not been publicly identified. The Celebrity Solstice is operated by Celebrity Cruises, can carry up to 3,400 passengers and 1,000 crew. It was on the fourth day of a week-long round-trip cruise from Seattle.

The National Park Service is searching for a solo climber on Denali after he failed to check in with a friend by satellite phone for several days.

The search started Wednesday. According to the park service, 35-year-old Matthias Rimml left his camp at 14,000 feet altitude on Denali’s West Buttress late last week, intending to summit the mountain and return to camp in one day.

“Already acclimatized to altitude due to recent climbs, the soloist’s strategy was to climb alpine style, or travel fast with relatively light gear,” said a statement Thursday from the park service.

Park service spokesperson Maureen Gualtieri said Rimml was last heard from Saturday afternoon, when he called a friend on his satellite phone with about 2,000 feet left to climb. He said he was tired but not in distress.

“It sounds like, from his friend, he had at least a sleeping bag and a stove with him,” Gualtieri said. “He had listed other items he intended to take to the summit on his registration sheet like climbing, protection — a picket, an ice screw, some rope. I’m not sure what else beyond that he had with him but it does sound clear that he had not intended to overnight … He did not have a tent, for instance.”

Rimml had been periodically checking in with his friend on his climb, according to the statement. His friend alerted the park service on Tuesday after several days passed with no word from Rimml.

Gualtieri said temperatures on the upper mountain have been around 25 to 30 degrees below zero during the day. About five inches of snow has fallen on the upper mountain since Saturday.

A park service helicopter and mountaineering rangers conducted searches Wednesday and Thursday. The helicopter landed at Rimml’s tent site at 14,000 feet on Thursday and rangers confirmed he had not returned to camp.

Rimml is reportedly an experienced mountain guide from Austria with search and rescue experience. He is the first registered climber to attempt Denali this season, and is alone on the upper part of the mountain, according to the park service.

Gualtieri said searchers are hopeful Rimml is still alive.

“We’ve had a handful of remarkable survival stories in the Alaska Range, so we’re certainly not ruling that out at this point,” she said. “We are actively searching for him.”

Gualtieri said the park service planned to continue searching Thursday evening or Friday.

On April 29, 59-year-old Nicky Myers of Pilot Station fell through the ice on the Yukon River on his snowmachine and died. He was the mayor of Pilot Station, proto-deacon of the Russian Orthodox church, a crew boss for local wildfire firefighters, a member of search-and-rescue, and a family man.

It’s the first river death in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta this year.

Myers set out on the Yukon River from Pilot Station to St. Mary’s by snowmachine on the afternoon of April 26. His son, 30-year-old Nikiefer Myers, had just landed after a vacation. Nikiefer thought a friend was going to pick him up, but instead it was his dad.

“It was a surprise. I was surprised to see him there,” Nikiefer said.

The two headed upriver towards Pilot Station for what is normally about a 40-minute snowmachine ride. His dad told him that the ride downriver had been good. But by evening on the way back, it started to get bumpy.

“There was lots of dark spots, lots of water,” Nikiefer saud.

Then, suddenly, the ice turned needle-y. The snowmachine stopped and started to sink. They jumped off and started to swim.

“I looked back. I saw my dad struggling to swim. He had all his winter gear on. I grabbed him and helped him swim,” Nikiefer said.

Nikiefer was holding onto his dad and trying to find solid ice to hang onto. The first piece broke off, but he finally found a solid patch and pulled his dad onto it. His dad was weak and cold. He wanted his son to stay safe. His dad told him to leave.

“I heard my dad: ‘You gotta go, you gotta go, just go without me,’” Nikiefer said.

His dad was starting to slide back under the ice. Nikiefer pulled him out again.

“His eyes were closed. He wasn’t moving. I still stayed there for a little bit with him. And in my head I heard another time, ‘You gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta go without me.’ I really didn’t wanna leave,” Nikiefer said.

But he left to go get help. He made it to shore and shed his wet clothes. He was amazed when his phone still worked. But he had to walk, possibly a couple miles, until he found service.

He called for help and the local search and rescue mobilized. Someone called Nikiefer’s mother, Judy, and told her that her son and husband had fallen through the ice. They asked her to gather warm blankets for the rescue effort.

“So I got everything ready,” Judy said.

She prepared two of everything, but only her son walked through the door.

“And he came in and dropped to the floor crying and said he couldn’t wake up papa,” Judy said.

Myers was dead by the time search and rescue pulled him out of the river. The Alaska State Troopers came the next day to take his body to Anchorage for autopsy. Now his family will wait for his body to return so they can hold a funeral.

In the meantime, they’re spending time with one another, sharing memories.

Myers was born almost 60 years ago in Pilot Station on May 12. He was the third youngest of eight children in a big Russian Orthodox family.

“We had a real good childhood. It was fun. We didn’t have much toys. But we had food, we had shelter, clothes, we had each other. We lived a subsistence lifestyle. We would go out with our parents, or fishing or berry picking, logging,” Wassillie Myers said.

Wassillie was always close with his older brother.

“He was my best friend,” Wassillie said.

Wassilie followed Myers into firefighting. The two traveled all over Alaska and the lower 48 fighting fires together. Nicky was the crew boss, and Wassilie was the squad boss. The two looked and acted so alike that the other firefighters would get them confused.