‘It’s a Miracle You’re Alive.’ I Nearly Drowned Alongside the Coast Guard in a Freak Storm

Our 16-foot skiff knifed out of Winchester Bay, on the Oregon coast 200 miles south of Astoria, an hour before noon on June 23, 1964, with four aboard, headed for the salmon grounds outside the bar, the 40-horsepower outboard leaving a clean, white wake. None of us had the slightest inkling of what would happen when we tried to come back.

There had been fog over the bay earlier in the morning, but it had lifted and the day was sunny and bright. A light northwest wind was blowing, no storm warnings were flying over the Umpqua River Coast Guard station, and everything looked perfect for a day of fishing. The wind stirred the water just enough to set it dancing in the sun, charter boats and commercial fishing craft lay moored at their docks, and it would have been hard to imagine a more peaceful scene than the mouth of the Umpqua that morning.

There was no premonition of trouble. If somebody had told us that before the day was over we’d all miss death by a hair’s breadth, we’d have laughed off the prediction. There seemed no more reason to think that than if we had been setting out on a fishing trip on an inland lake. We know now, however, that the Pacific Ocean is never that trustworthy.

The best salmon fishing along the Oregon coast is in the open sea outside a few harbors. For many years, Winchester Bay has been the most popular spot, though Florence, at the mouth of the Siuslaw River 25 miles to the north, has given it tough competition the past two or three seasons. The Umpqua, which runs into the Pacific at Winchester Bay, is a major spawning river for chinooks and silvers and also for striped bass. (The bass go into the 40-pound range and attract a big following of their own.) The salmon season runs from April to October, but June and July are the best months.

I had been pastor of the Camp Creek Village Mission Church at Springfield, Oregon, for four years, and it seemed as if my congregation had more than its share of enthusiastic salmon fishermen. I had caught the fever from some of them, and Winchester Bay was my favorite spot. I had fished there with various partners, usually men from our church, once or twice a week throughout the season for three or four years. I’m 58. married, and have a son, Paul, who’s 19 and a sophomore at Seattle Pacific College. In 1963, he and his mother and I spent our two-week vacation on the bay, parking our trailer near the shore and catching enough salmon for my wife, who had brought along a pressure cooker, to can 70 pints.

This June, 1964, trip had been in the making since the previous March, when two of my fishing partners, Oswald Petersen and Lewis Howes, huddled with me in the rear of the church after service one Sunday morning, and we laid the plans. Howes, 45 at the time, works as a shim patcher in the Weyerhaeuser plywood plant at Springfield. Petersen, 70, is a retired farmer with three married sons who now run the ranch. We later added a fourth member to the party, Lewis’s 14-year-old boy, Danny, who is as fond of salmon fishing as any of us.

We left Springfield about 8:30 that morning after Howes got home from his job on the night shift. He was wearing the heavy, steel-toe safety shoes required for his work and didn’t take time to change. He’d have reason to regret that omission before the end of the trip.

My boat was a lapstrake powered by a nearly new motor. We trailered the outfit the 90 miles to Winchester Bay, launched it, and headed out across the bar. The bay faces due west toward the open Pacific. Jetties on the north and south protect the channel entrance, but in rough weather the giant seas breaking in shallow water offshore set up a savage turmoil. No large ships cross the bar. The channel is near the south jetty, and the water is dangerously shallow in the middle and along the north side. Small boats approach and cross the bar accordingly. We knew all this from our many trips, and we also knew that five persons had drowned in October, 1962, when a charter boat capsized on that bar, but we didn’t give it any thought that morning.

We reached the salmon grounds. let our lines out, and started trolling. We had been unable to buy fresh bait, so we were using frozen herring. Lewis and Danny Howes were equipped with brand-new spinning outfits. Oswald had borrowed his equipment. I had three rods and reels along, plus a new tackle box loaded up with salmon and trout equipment, lines, guides, weights, spreaders, flashers, and all kinds of lures that my son had given to me for Father’s Day. That was the first trip it made with me, and also the last for it and the rest of my tackle and that of the others aboard.

We had been trolling about 20 minutes when Petersen sang out, “Fish on!” I cut the motor. and the rest of us reeled in our lines. The salmon was a chinook that would have weighed about 20 pounds, and it put up a hard and lively fight until it was almost in the net, then it tore free in a last, wild flurry.

We had three more strikes and lost good fish in the next hour or so. One got away from Danny and two from his dad. So far, I was drawing a blank. Then Petersen and the boy got seasick. The weather was still clear and the wind was out of the northwest at 10 to 15 knots, but the long Pacific rollers that beset that coast so much of the time were growing in size. By early afternoon. they were running 15 feet high.

Such seas as that, rolling toward shore in lazy, oily swells a quarter of a mile apart, pose no danger to small craft in deep water. The boat lifts easily to each crest and slides down into the wide trough. While fishing on these grounds, I had often seen a nearby skiff drop out of sight behind one of those big rollers and reappear minutes later as if nothing had happened. But the motion of a small boat at such times can be hard on a landlubber’s stomach. and now it got to be too much for Petersen and Danny.

It was not the first time this had happened to them. Oswald had been out with me on many trips, and the boy had fished once before with me and several times with his father. If the sea turned rough, they knew they must expect to be sick, but that had never kept them ashore. They suffered, and they fished between spasms of nausea. Lewis and I were luckier. He had been in the merchant marine and had good sea legs, and I’m immune to seasickness under most conditions.

By 2 o’clock, with the seas mounting and two of the party in misery, we decided we’d had enough, even though nobody had boated a salmon. We were taking in our lines and making ready to leave when we saw a Coast Guard boat bearing down on us. It drew alongside, and the skipper hailed us through a megaphone.

“Don’t try to go in,” he ordered. “The bar is smoking. We’ll come back for you with the big lifeboat.”

There could hardly have been worse news for Danny and Oswald, sick as they were, but we still felt no great concern. We did take the precaution of putting on our life jackets, however, and, since we had to stay put, we went back to fishing.

The wind was rising now and the sea roughening. Spray slapped over the side of the boat and showered us repeatedly as we circled back and forth across the salmon grounds. When my transistor radio blared a news flash of an offshore storm, we began to feel apprehensive, but the sun was still shining, and it seemed likely we’d be safely back in Winchester Bay before the storm reached the coast. Then Danny, who had let his line out to take his mind off his problems, got a hard strike, fought a big, sky-busting salmon, and brought it to the net. It was a 25-pound chinook, and, when the boy’s dad boated one of the same size a little later, we forgot our worries.

Minutes after that, I was fast to one about as good, and it was plain that we had located a school. The daily limit was two fish per man, and we set our sights on eight salmon. But about the time my fish was being netted, we saw the Coast Guard coming again, this time in the 44-foot lifeboat that was the pride and joy of the Umpqua River station.

That boat, CG 44303, was of a new design and had been in service only a little more than a year. Steel-hulled and self-righting, she is powered with two 180-horsepower diesel engines capable of driving the boat at 15 knots, and she has all the latest equipment, including power steering and radar. The Coast Guard regarded her as the last word in small-boat rescue work. It was fortunate for us that such a craft was on hand that day. And, though we didn’t know it until later, it was also lucky that she was commanded by Chief Boatswain’s Mate Elmer Stevens, a skipper of great courage and ability.

“Leave your area and start for Buoy No. 2,” the man on the megaphone directed. “Line up outside and await orders.”

That had the sound of a serious situation, and, as much as we’d have liked another hour over that school of chinooks, we didn’t waste a minute.

Buoy No. 2 is in fairly deep water just outside the channel entrance, off the end of the south jetty. We reached it with spray sloshing in our faces and our boat pitching like a rodeo bronco, and when I saw the bar, I was really scared! The Coast Guard officer hadn’t stretched the truth a bit when he told us it was smoking.

There was a high fog over the area now, not close enough to the water to interfere with visibility, but obscuring the sun, and the sea had turned gray and ominous-looking. Giant waves, 15 to 20 feet high and crested with white, were stumbling and tripping as they hurried toward the beach, breaking in a wild welter of surf like nothing I had ever seen. Over the bar, they seemed to be tumbling in every direction, and the wind whipped great plumes of spray off their tops and sent it flying toward the land in clouds. It didn’t seem possible a boat the size of ours could survive in that fury.

Just off Buoy No. 2, the Coast Guard hailed us again and told us to tie up to the Cleta, a commercial fishing vessel that was lying off the bar, and to save our gas and await our chance to be piloted in. We made fast to the Cleta, and then three more small skiffs about the size of ours came up and joined us in a line behind the bigger craft. We were not the only fishermen caught out that day.

The Cleta nosed slowly to sea with her little convoy in tow, standing away from the danger zone, and we were some four miles offshore when CG 44303 came back and told us to untie and head in once more.

“We’ll take you across,” the skipper shouted.

We clawed our way back through the choppy seas with the lifeboat riding herd on the four fishing skiffs. It took more than an hour to reach the buoy. As we neared the bar, the other three dropped back to wait their turn, the lifeboat came alongside, and Chief Stevens shouted for us to stay beside him and follow him over. That way we’d be partly in the lee of the bigger craft.

It was a dangerous situation. and I nosed my boat into position with my heart in my throat. On the beach and jetties, we could see more than 100 people watching anxiously.

About 100 yards off the end of the south jetty, 44303 turned to port and headed straight for the crashing surf that was thundering over the bar. I turned with her. Just then Lewis Howes yelled “Pour on the coal!” and I looked back to see a wave more than 30 feet high bearing down on us at a speed no boat could hope to outrun. It seemed as if this mountain of water was curling itself up like some huge, fantastic cobra to swallow us.

It caught the bigger lifeboat, hurled her up on its crest, and slammed her over on her side so far that the watchers on the beach and jetties and in the Coast Guard lookout tower on shore saw her twin screws and red-painted bottom roll up in full view. Next she was wrenched the other way in a sickening, 180° roll, and one of the crew members tumbled down the almost-vertical deck and vanished in the sea. Stevens said later that for a minute he was sure his boat was going to be lost.

I remember Oswald Petersen standing erect in our boat, frozen with fear and horror. I gunned the outboard wide open and skidded around in a desperate attempt to outrun that murderous wave, but before we could even be sure whether the Coast Guard boat was still afloat, the sea crashed down on us like a monstrous trip hammer.

Our skiff was crushed into matchwood. Lewis Howes recalled afterward that he was washed overboard, but for the rest of us, the boat simply disintegrated beneath our feet.

I was slammed under and felt bitter cold of the water knife through my clothing. Then I was moving at terrific speed beneath and with the wave, spinning and churning and expecting to be dashed to pieces. I thought I might bump into the motor, which might still be running, and brought my arms up to protect my head. The force of the wave was too great to fight, so I held my breath and wondered how long it would take to drown.

I have heard, as almost everyone has, that drowning men relive their lives, or at least many of the major things that have befallen them, in a fraction of a second. Nothing of that sort happened to me, but I do remember thinking that I was about to leave this world without another opportunity to see my wife and boy, and I also had a flash of regret that I had accomplished too little in my 57 years and that the 20 years of my ministry were so unfinished. Then the wave let me go, the rolling and twisting stopped, and I started clawing for the surface.

I broke into the air when it seemed my lungs were ready to burst, gulped it in, cleared my eyes of the salt water, and looked around. Danny and Oswald were struggling in their life jackets only a few yards away, calling for help. Then, 100 feet farther back, I saw Lewis swimming strongly. We found out later that he’d had the most difficult time of all. There had been one junior-size and three adult-size life jackets in the skiff, and Lewis had given one of the big ones to Danny and had kept the smaller for himself. On top of that, he was handicapped by those heavy work shoes. It had flashed across his mind that he should take them off when he saw the Coast Guard boat roll over, but he had time only to catch a deep breath, turn his back to the sea, and brace himself.

Before I could even say “Thank God!” a second wave, almost as high as the one that had demolished our boat, broke and smashed down on us, and again we went under for a long, agonizing minute. But when I surfaced, my three companions were all in sight once more. Now I had time to pray, both in thanks and for deliverance.

I asked the others later what their thoughts and sensations had been in those two dreadful, lagging times under water, for we had all come about as close to drowning as men can and still survive, and I wanted to check their reactions against my own.

Both Lewis and Oswald thought it was the end of their lives, but neither had any thoughts concerning the past. Lewis was wholly concerned with fear for Danny. As for the boy, I guess he was too young to be as frightened as the rest of us were. He said he didn’t think about anything except his father.

When I came up from my second ducking, I looked around for the lifeboat. She was upright once more, rolling and pitching in the angry seas, but her diesels were purring, and she was nosing ahead to the spot where her crewman, Engineman Melvin Goff, still struggled in the water. We learned later that, though the hammer blow of that giant wave had buckled a steel bulkhead, the lifeboat had not spilled a drop of oil from her tanks and had righted herself like a cork.

Other crewmen (the four aboard included Charles Spry and James Flynn in addition to Goff and the skipper) threw Goff a line and hauled him aboard. He insisted on going back on duty as if nothing had happened, and Stevens came around and bore down on us for a rescue try.

By a stroke of luck, the great seas that had swept us under had not torn off our life vests. We could all swim, but without life jackets, the best swimmer would have had no chance in that raging, cold water. The sea temperature there in June averages only 40 to 45°, and, though I was not conscious of the cold after the initial shock, we were told later that men have a poor chance of surviving in it for more than about 20 minutes.

The waves had carried me in close to the broken rocks that form the south jetty. A few more yards of drifting and I would be pounded to death on those jagged boulders, so they came for me first.

The lifeboat inched in as close as she dared, checked to a stop and lay wallowing in the surf, and a crew member sent a line snaking toward me. If there had been a life ring at the end of the line, it had been lost when the boat all but overturned. Now there was only a length of rope without even a knot at the end, and it fell short, just out of my reach.

I suppose it took the crewman about 10 seconds to recoil the line and try again, but it seemed more like 10 minutes to me. I swam frantically, trying to get farther away from the jetty, but in that wild commotion, swimming did little good.

The line came curling toward me again, and again it fell short, sinking into the foaming water hardly more than an arm’s length away. It might as well have been 100 feet. I rested and prayed while I watched my rescuer coil, throw, and fail a third time. Then the line came sailing out again and fell almost across my shoulders, and I grabbed it. My strength was about gone, but I did what I could to pull myself along. After a long time, two husky young crewmen leaned down from the heaving deck of 44303, caught me by the arms, and strained to drag me aboard.

My legs seemed paralyzed. They were so numb they felt like sticks, and there was little I could do to help. One of the men hauling me up cussed me out in very forceful language. He didn’t know I was a minister, but I guess it wouldn’t have made any difference. He told me later, with a grin of apology, that he was trying to make me mad, hoping I’d call up a last reserve of strength and help pull myself aboard.

I’ll never forget the relief I felt when I finally pitched forward and felt the deck under me. I lay shaking and helpless while the boat swung around to pick up the others. They got Danny on the first try. He came aboard shivering like a half-drowned puppy. When Oswald was lifted in, I hea1·d someone say, “This man is about gone.” It turned out that he had lost his dentures in the water, giving his face a sunken, death-mask look. Actually, he was in about as good shape as the rest of us.

He and the boy and I lay on the deck together, breathing heavily and shaking hard enough to make our bones rattle, while the boat went for Lewis. No one realized the difficulty he was having just staying afloat, but they ran close alongside him, and he caught the line on the first throw. Seconds later, he flopped on the deck beside the three of us. I’m sure I’ll never say a prayer more fervent than the “Thank God” I mumbled then.

We were led down to the heated bunkroom, and the lifeboat turned and pounded through the wild seas to the quiet water inside the bar and tied up at a dock. An emergency car was waiting to take us to the Coast Guard station. There we were given hot showers, coffee, and soup, and were wrapped in blankets. It seemed as if I would never get warm, but by some miracle we had all escaped serious injury. The doctor who checked us found no water in our lungs and not much wrong except shock and some bad bruises on my legs and Oswald’s. In fact, he thought at first that the bones were broken, but X-rays proved otherwise. The bruises were deep and greatly swollen and painful for days. We still do not know whether we got them while we were being rolled around in the water or when we were pulled over the side of the lifeboat.

It was 9 o’clock that night before the shock passed and any of us felt up to phoning our families in Springfield. By that time, the seas were subsiding and the Coast Guard boat had succeeded in bringing the remaining three skiffs safely across the bar by piggybacking them in one at a time, first taking off their people and then towing them astern on a short line so the small boats rode in the lifeboat’s wake.

We left Winchester Bay an hour before midnight. Howes and Petersen, sleepy and half dazed, took turns at the wheel on the long drive home. I couldn’t drive because I had lost my glasses somewhere in the Pacific. We finally reached Springfield and were welcomed by our families at 3 a.m.

Our outfit was as good as a total loss. Of the boat, only a few splintered pieces of wood came ashore, along with the foam seats and a plastic can containing a small amount of gas. Nothing else remained, and the motor was not seen after the wave smashed us. A rod and reel belonging to Lewis floated in and was found on the beach, as were Petersen’s thermos bottle and cane. Lewis calculated his lost fishing gear was worth about $200, and I was out a partly insured boat that had cost me #1,350, an $800 motor, plus my tackle, transistor radio, and other equipment. The whole thing put quite a crimp in my fishing for financial reasons, but I feel we were four of the most fortunate people on earth.

Many friends called the next day. Some congratulated us on our luck. Others said, “It’s a miracle you’re alive,” and they were the ones who had the right idea. When four men come through an ordeal like ours with nothing worse than a few bruises, it can hardly be called less than a miracle. But in the same breath, Jet me say that I will be grateful all my life to Chief Stevens and his crew.

We’ll never be sure what those killer waves. There was a storm at sea that could have accounted for them, and Chief Stevens and others believe they may have resulted from an earthquake along or near the coast of Japan, 5,000 miles away. Whatever their origin, we were not the only fishermen who got into trouble, and at least two were not as lucky as we were.

In addition to our boat and the three that were brought in safely at Winchester Bay, another, a 17-foot outboard cabin cruiser, swamped on the Columbia River bar off Astoria. Two of the four men aboard were rescued after clinging to the overturned craft for five hours. The others were lost.

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To top off our close call, Lewis Howes fell from a 15-foot ladder at home the following day and broke a leg. With two months to rest, how do you think he wanted to spend them? Going after Chinooks!

As for me, I still rate salmon fishing the most exciting sport I know, and have no intention of giving it up. But from now on, mine is going to be done in waters inside the bar. There is excellent fishing at the mouth of both the Umpqua and Siuslaw rivers in the fall when the fish are moving in to spawn. and it’s not necessary to venture out in the open sea. I’ll settle for that kind, plus some very good trout fishing available in the inland lakes around Springfield. I don’t want to take a chance on facing the terrible waves of the Pacific in a small boat again as long as I live.

This story, “Death Rode the Surf,” appeared in the July 1965 issue of Outdoor Life.