From where the razor clams were dug from the vast sand beaches on the west shore of Alaska's Cook Inlet, it was a hike of two hours back to the Pacific Alaska Shellfish camp near Polly Creek, and for that reason Noel Garcia could not talk anyone into walking with him.
"They said they don't want to," he remembered Wednesday during a phone interview from his home in Aberdeen, Wash. "They said they wanted to go there in the boat. When they were ready to take off, it was not that bad, but it was not that good."
Five men headed back to camp in what Garcia described as an outboard-powered, 22-foot, flat-bottom boat loaded with what might have been as much as 3,500 pounds in clams. Most flat bottom boats like this--what are commonly called "jon boats"--have a certified load capacity of a ton or slightly more. The U.S. Coast Guard would later describe this boat as "overloaded."
It sank for reasons unknown. All of the passengers died.
"Why didn't I get in the boat?" the 42-year-old Garcia asked. "I can tell you that it was too full, too ugly. What's that mean? Too windy."
Robert Ramirez, 42; Avelino Garcia, 36 and Noel's cousin; Jose A. Sandoval, 34; Ramon Valdiva, 31; and Jose Revera, 24, decided otherwise. They were veteran Polly Creek diggers. Garcia said most of them had spent a decade or more on the beaches. They had experience around boats. They knew how quickly storms can blow up in the Inlet.
No one can know why they chose to take a risk by making the run to camp in the boat, but Jeff Johnson, director of the state Office of Boating Safety has an idea. Experienced people, he said, get to the point where they assess the risk but then ignore the consequences. In this case, the risks were really not that great. If the weather had stayed the way it was when the five men parted ways with Noel Garcia, every thing would likely have been fine. The 90-horsepower motor on the boat would have sped them back to camp in minutes. But the weather did not stay the same.
"When I was walking, that wind was (blowing) pretty fast," Noel said. "It was starting to get worse."
He plodded on, not overly worried but figuring that his friends were likely having a rough go of it. He expected everyone would be reunited soon.
A good-natured bunch of diggers
Twenty to 25 diggers gather at Polly Creek for three months a year to chase clams. Most of them are Mexican or have Mexican roots. They are a generally happy and friendly bunch. Noel has been in camp every year since the mid-1990s. "First time, one of my brothers, he go up in 1990, he told me about it," Noel said. "He told me good deal, make some money. So I decide to come to and try to make some money."
"I liked it," Garcia added. "I made pretty good money."
Digging clams is hard, but the diggers work out in the clean, pure air of Alaska with magnificent mountains rising all around. The Polly Creek beaches are just east of 2.6 million Lake Clark National Park, and just south of Big River Lakes where Alaska's last governor went to view bears for the television show "Sarah Palin's Alaska." The area is so spectacular that tourists like the Palins are willing to spend thousands of dollars simply to experience it.
For the clammers, on the other hand, this is a work site, and they must labor to make it pay. Seasonal workers primarily from Oregon and California, they dig through a spring-summer season and are paid by the pound for the clams they unearth. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has banned mechanical clam diggers, so the men go armed with shovels. They look for dimples in the sand. When they spot one, they dig furiously in pursuit of the strong-footed razor clams tunneling to get away. The work day is, fortunately, limited by Mother Nature. Clams can only be dug near the bottom of the low tides, which come twice a day, but there are only several hours when the tide is far enough out to make digging worthwhile.
May 17 offered a good tide for clamming. An hour or so before noon, the water bottomed out near minus 5 feet. The tidal conditions for clamming don't get much better than that, and the clammers did well. The U.S. Coast Guard now estimates their boat contained more than 100 buckets of clams weighing about 35 pounds each when the tide came in, signaling that it was time to leave the beach and head for camp. Such a load would be worth more than $60,000 at retail, but the diggers get only a fraction of the retail price.
Still it was a very good day until it ended tragically.
No one knows for sure exactly what happened to the boat on the relatively short journey to the Polly Creek camp. The Coast Guard is investigating, said Petty Officer David Mosley, a Coast Guard spokesman. It will likely be months, however, before the agency reaches a conclusion as to why the boat sank and what caused the deaths of the five men aboard, he added.
Though the Coast Guard has already declared the boat was overloaded, Noel, a veteran of at least 15 years on the beach, doesn't believe the boat was that overloaded. The load in the boat made him nervous, but he didn't think it deadly.
One man's arrival sparks search
Noel Garcia is not sure when he left the beach for camp, but it was likely on the rising tide between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. He would have arrived, by his estimation, back there between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. When he walked in, he fully expected to rejoin the other clammers, but they weren't around and concerns for their safety were already growing.
"You know when I come back and ask them if they're there, they said, 'they're not here yet'," Noel said. "Some guy named Juan had already been looking around." Juan had found nothing. Noel's arrival back in camp intensified concerns and search efforts.
"Another little boat go and search for people, and they find Roberto Ramirez floating up in the water," Noel said.
Almost immediately after that, he added, a radio call was placed from Polly Creek to the Pacific Alaska plant across the Inlet at Nikiski on the Kenai Peninsula. The plant called the Coast Guard by telephone at 3:46 p.m. Coast Guard helicopters were promptly launched from the Coast Guard Air Station in Kodiak, almost 200 miles to the southwest. They found two bodies that Tuesday evening. The other two were found the next day.
Only one of the dead was wearing a personal floatation device (PFD). Pacific Alaska, a subsidiary of the Oregon-based Pacific Seafood Group, has said in press statements that it provided PFDs and whistles for signaling to all of the "contractors" it had working at Polly Creek. The clammers are all state-licensed commercial fishermen selling to a processor, much as salmon fishermen do in Alaska.
Noel said he saw only one PFD in the skiff the clammers were using. By law, the skiff was supposed to contain a PFD for everyone, but Johnson noted many in Alaska are dismissive of PFDs.
The paddlesport crowd has caught on, he said, but a lot of power boaters and commercial fishermen tend to do without. Most doubt they'll ever end up in the water. Some refuse to accept the advice of those like Johnson who say that a lifejacket "will at least keep you alive until you die of hypothermia."
Death by hypothermia, even in the 42-degree water of Cook Inlet in May, is a slow process. People have been known to survive for hours in such conditions -- if they live through the first seconds. Possibly the best reason to to wear a PFD, as Johnson noted, is what is called "cold shock." Cold shock can trigger an almost involuntary gasp. People who suffer cold-shock gasp, inhale water, start coughing, inhale more water and drown.
It is not known if that is what happened to the dead clammers. A cause of death has yet to be determined. They could have suffered cold shock and drowned. They could simply have drowned. They could also have died of hypothermia. It is even possible some or all might have been physically injured or killed if a wave hit the boat and rolled it.
One man ponders what to do
While Pacific Alaska begins a program at Polly Creek to teach its contractors about cold-water safety, prepares to outfit all skiffs with waterproof radios, and ponders how it can encourage the clam diggers to start wearing their PFDs, Noel Garcia is back home with his family wondering what he does next. He thinks of returning to the beaches, but the accident has left him nervous.
"I'd like to come back, but it's a little dangerous, too," he said. "I don't have a regular job back home. I just do all I can for a living, do odd jobs, landscaping, whatever they have."
Aberdeen is in Grays County, which has an unemployment rate of 12.6 percent. Only four of Washington state's 39 counties have a worse job market. The economy forces Noel Garcia to think seriously about returning to the beaches even after what happened.
The Polly Creek accident was a first for Pacific Alaska, but it was the worst boating accident in the Inlet in at least a quarter century. The company says it has a good safety record. Mosley said safety is one of the focuses of the Coast Guard investigation. Johnson noted that just because someone, or a company, has gone for years without an accident doesn't necessarily mean it has been operating safely.
One of the big dangers of boating, he noted, is that people get away with taking risks for so long they start to believe they are operating safely even if they are not. It is a danger common to a lot of outdoor Alaska activities, snowmachining and climbing among them. Noel Garcia survived because he made the right decision, but now he has regrets he couldn't talk the others into going along with him.
"I told the other guys to come with me," he said. "Nobody wanted to."
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com.