Only 18 feet long, the small watercraft is a guppy compared to the larger 40- or 50-foot vessels that most professional fishermen at Pillar Point Harbor employ.
“It’s definitely the smallest crab boat in the harbor,” owner Marc Alley said. “If not the whole state.”
 on the dock at Pillar Point harbor Friday afternoon preparing to set out with a friend Saturday morning to look for his boat which capsized while he was out crabbing the previous weekend. He was rescued by a passing tanker ship which brought him to the port of Oakland. |
But now, after 35 years of fishing, Alley has become a member of a group of Pillar Point fishermen that he would rather not join: During a spate of tough luck, he capsized his boat last month.
“I’ve been initiated in the club,” he said. “Just about everyone I meet on the docks now is telling me a story about capsizing their boats.”
Professional fishing consistently ranks among the most dangerous jobs in the country. Today, Alley is very fortunate to be alive.
With salmon fishing shut down for the year and tuna season still a few months away, fishermen are in a rush to harvest the most crab possible during the final days of the season, which ends this month.
And Alley was no exception on June 21 when he ventured out about 8 1/2 miles northwest of the harbor, the spot where he left his crab pots. On a day when the weather was forecast to be mild and seemed serene on shore, Alley recalled the wind picking up just before noon.
“All the wrong things happened at the same time,” Alley said. “Out of nowhere, a wave went right into the boat, and now I had an extra 1,000 pounds of water to deal with.”
And once it started, it didn’t let up. He remembers getting pounded by wave after wave with no end in sight. With freezing water already up to his chest, Alley decided to get out of the ship.
He already had his life jacket on, and he grabbed an extra orange weather coat, and jumped out of the boat. Not long afterward, the Ronna Lynn was tossed completely under, overturning the boat and sinking all of Alley’s crab catch.
Pillar Point Harbormaster Dan Temko says the bulk of Alley’s catch must have weighed down his little boat, making it slow to maneuver the waves. Temko estimates that the Ronna Lynn carried about 1,500 pounds of added weight from having more than a dozen heavy crab pots on the deck.
“There’s a reason why people use bigger boats for crab fishing,” Temko said. “He was taking a chance, and the odds caught up to him.”
Alley climbed onto the hull of his boat, and waited for help Among the flotsam from his boat, he was able to snag his emergency kit with several orange-smoke day signals.
He says many fishing boats passed by less than a quarter mile away, but they didn’t notice him even though he was frantically waving his bright orange jacket and shooting off emergency smoke signals.
He didn’t get help for more than three hours, and when he did, it was from a leviathan. The “Hanjin Dallas,” a gigantic Korean cargo ship measuring the length of several football fields and standing 15 stories high, spotted Alley as it was moving north along the shipping channel. Returning from Japan, the ship had stopped off in Southern California where it was incidentally delayed for a few hours.
The mega ship dispatched a special bullet-shaped “survival pod,” with four crew members to rescue Alley. On the huge boat, Alley remembers being treated hospitably by the crew, which consisted mainly of Germans and Filipinos.
“They brought me to the captain and offered me anything I wanted,” Alley said. “At that point I was ready for some calories.”
He was given dry clothes, a cup of coffee and a cut of tri-tip.
The cargo ship brought Alley to Oakland where he was given a ride home by the U.S. Coast Guard.
“The ocean waves make it very difficult to actually see a person,” Temko said. “When a boat sinks, you’re no bigger than a piece of seaweed.”
Temko says it was a streak of amazing luck that the huge freighter came by when it did. With its high vantage over the ocean, the Hanjin Dallas may have been the only vessel whose crew could’ve seen Alley.
The following day, Alley and another fisherman, Bob Barry, set out early in the morning to locate the Ronna Lynn, which was still derelict but somewhat anchored in place with its heavy crab pots still underwater.
After some searching, Alley says they found his overturned boat. Lacking the power to right the boat, they attached some buoys to the hull. Alley dove under the vessel and grabbed his wallet and a few other valuables from his lockbox.
“It was eerie how things looked so much the same,” Alley said. “Most of my tools were still there, minus some containers and about $1,000 of crab.”
Barry and Alley decided to catch as much crab as they could while they were out. Going to a spot a few miles offshore from Mavericks, they joined a handful of other fishing boats making the most of the remaining days of crab season.
In the early afternoon, Barry noticed another boat, a small aluminum skiff with three fishermen inside, rocking in some heavy waves.
“I said to Marc, ‘that’s probably what you looked like,’” Barry recalled. “But then I started to see those guys were in trouble.”
From their hazy vantage, Barry and Alley realized that the other boat was out of control. The three occupants of the boat had fallen into the cold water without any life vests.
Barry says he steered his boat toward them as quickly as he could and helped the three men climb aboard his vessel.
The three of them were all shivering, and two were so cold they had blue lips, Barry said.
“I told them, ‘I know exactly what you’ve been through,’” Alley recalled.
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