It was nearing midnight and too dark for captain Chris Fox to see the land or determine how far offshore he was.

But he knew he was too close. The water was shallow. The Aleutian Storm was on a sandbar.

Fox needed help.

The engine and all other onboard systems were still working, but Fox knew he could hold the 57-ton fishing vessel only so long before the waves drove it ashore.

“I wasn’t, like, in total jeopardy yet,” he recalled two and a half weeks later—after his $1.2 million vessel had been lost to winter storms, wind and waves south of Salmon Creek along Sonoma Coast State Park.

Fox radioed the U.S. Coast Guard for help, which wasn’t immediately forthcoming—not in the way he had hoped, at least.

“I needed a boat, like one of their motorboats, to come get me right then and there,” Fox says. “We weren’t in danger, but we needed some help. We needed to get towed out into slightly deeper water.”

He’ll never know if it might have worked.

In the weeks and months since, Fox has been enmeshed in a grief-infused swirl of phone calls, insurance claims, and, in those first three days, desperate attempts to try to save the vessel before it became dug in on land.

As each attempt to save the vessel failed, Fox said he watched what might have been a several-hundred-thousand-dollar recovery swell into likely millions of dollars in salvage efforts—costs for which he is liable.

The February loss of the Aleutian Storm is the latest controversy surrounding the Coast Guard’s local response to grounded vessels. While the details of each emergency are unique, they are viewed with similar frustration and pain by some who believe more could—and should— have been done to save them from breaking apart on land.

To some degree, the Aleutian Storm’s fate reflects the perils of the Dungeness crab season and commercial fishing in general. It’s a grueling profession that demands crews leave port for days at a time, sometimes in rough, wintry conditions, to haul in as much as they can harvest within the parameters of fishery regulations and the capacity of their vessels to hold and chill their catch.

Fox would not confirm reports that his boat landed near shore in the first place because he dozed off while en route from northern crabbing grounds to Bodega Harbor to refuel. But he conceded that restrictions limiting commercial crabbing boats to half their permitted crab traps this past season—an effort to reduce the risk of marine animal entanglement—made the hours of work seem longer than usual.

He said he and his crew of three had been out fishing for two and a half days before his vessel ran too close to shore.

“You push yourself and you push yourself,” veteran fisherman Dick Ogg, president of the Bodega Bay Fisherman’s Marketing Association, said after days at sea himself. “You do everything to make ends meet, and s—t happens. We drive ourselves to just the bitter end. That’s the nature of the industry.”

In 2022, a fishing vessel named the Seastar ran aground near Point Reyes National Seashore after its captain apparently fell overboard and drowned. A year earlier, the disabled American Challenger ran aground on the Marin coast. In both cases, some in the close-knit commercial fishing community believe it was the Coast Guard’s inaction during the first minutes and hours of a crisis and beyond that led to the loss.

Coast Guard officials counter that each response is tailored to the circumstances, available assets, and potential risks. Personnel need time to assess the situation before deciding who to send and, once on scene, what to do.

Still, critics like veteran Fort Bragg fisherman Chris Iversen, a friend of Fox’s, sense déjà vu in the pattern of lost vessels—each briefly in a position for a possible save only to later run aground.

Iversen believes resources and equipment dispatched to clean up the aftermath would better serve everyone if they were directed to help boats in jeopardy in the first place.

“The Coast Guard mission statement says that they’re there to ‘mitigate the consequences of marine casualties and disastrous events,’” Iversen said. “They show up, first responders, minimizing the loss of life and property.”

“I think they failed.”

A sudden, nighttime crisis

According to the Coast Guard, it was 11:13 p.m. Friday, Feb. 9 when captain Chris Fox made his distress call from the Aleutian Storm over Channel 16, the federally designated radio frequency for maritime emergencies. The fishing vessel was off the coast south of Salmon Creek, about 6 miles by water from the U.S. Coast Guard’s Bodega Bay Station at Doran Beach.

Fox said the Coast Guard watch standers who answered his call went through a long list of questions: What were the names of those on board? What was his cell number? Were the GPS coordinates Fox provided correct? If the Aleutian Storm was where he said it was, it already was on land, they suggested.

He said friends on other crabbing boats heard his appeal for help. Some called the Coast Guard to ask them to repeat coordinates for the troubled vessel, thinking they might be near enough to help, but they got no response, Fox said.

It was part of a period of confusing communication across the radio, during which it was clear multiple agencies at multiple levels were being consulted. Fox said he was pleading for the motor lifeboat, which he believes should have taken only 20 minutes or so to arrive from the station at Doran Beach.

That the Aleutian Storm was in trouble “is my fault,” Fox said, “but you would think they would have a plan to respond.”

Commander Danielle Shupe was the search and rescue coordinator for the agency’s San Francisco Sector that night. “If there was a way that the Coast Guard could have safely assisted the Aleutian Storm at that time, with those conditions, we would have,” Shupe said.

Shupe explained that decisions about how to respond to a distress call are based on deliberate, measured discussions under the Coast Guard’s Operational Risk Management guidelines, balancing potential gains like preserving life and property against risks to agency personnel and assets, the environment, and economic interests.

“Our priority is to save life and protect life, but we also have a priority of protecting property and the environment and the economy,” balanced against “the risk that we’re asking of our boat crews and copter crews,” she said.

The Aleutian Storm was stuck in the dark, in the elements, and in the surf zone, “which is an extremely dangerous position for the vessel and crew to be in,” said Shupe. Each option available that night—delivering a rescue swimmer by air, approaching from land through breaking surf, or having Fox and crew abandon ship—raised tremendous risk, according to Shupe.

There also was the remote location to consider, away from a major port like San Francisco, where a tugboat could have been mobilized more quickly.

The Coast Guard did approve dispatch of the motor lifeboat from Doran Beach, notifying Station Bodega Bay to launch the vessel at 11:34 p.m., 21 minutes after Fox’s distress call came in, according to petty officer Hunter Schnabel, a public affairs specialist. A Eurocopter MH65 Dolphin was sent from San Francisco at the same time.

Fox said the aircraft arrived well ahead of the lifeboat, and there was talk of an attempted airlift. At the time, that prospect “seemed even more dangerous than what we were in already,” he said.

Besides, he said, “We weren’t in that situation. We weren’t taking on water. Everything was functioning just fine.”

The Coast Guard helicopter crew also raised concerns about rigging on the vessel that could interfere with a rescue attempt, said Schnabel., and the helicopter returned to base.

The motor lifeboat arrived at 12:08 a.m. Feb. 10, 55 minutes after Fox’s call. Officials said it quickly became clear that a close approach was not safe.

Shupe said the depth of the water surrounding Fox’s boat, the vessel’s proximity to shore amid shifting tides, high winds, and breaking waves, potentially unseen rocks or other obstructions, and the fishing vessel’s draft factored in the decision not to approach.

The lifeboat’s crew that night determined they had to stay at least 700 feet away from the Aleutian Storm or risk bottoming out in the shallow water.

“Towing of disabled vessels is something that we do almost daily from the sub-units of sector San Francisco, and so that is not anything unusual,” said Shupe. “But I would say the circumstances of this particular case were unusual due to the environmental conditions, due to the vessel’s location in the surf zone.”

In addition, there was the question of equipment. Petty officer Schnabel noted that the 3-inch towline that is standard gear on the 47-foot lifeboats, while rated for 150 tons of maximum tow capacity, is designed to pull boats afloat in water, not stuck on sand. “They’re not designed to do the things that a tugboat does,” Schnabel said.

In the meantime, Fox repeatedly tried to back off the sandbar and refloat his boat, without success. When he couldn’t hold the boat any longer, the waves took over and pushed it into shore. Finally, at what he estimated to be about 12:30 a.m., Fox and his crew jumped onto the beach. Additional Coast Guard personnel who drove to the scene, arriving well in advance of the motor lifeboat, were present on land to assist the crew, but no help was needed, Fox said.

The Coast Guard said the fishermen were reported safely ashore at 1:20 a.m., ending the agency’s initial response. The window for saving the Aleutian Storm that night had closed.

“We basically just hopped off the boat onto the sand,” leaving the vessel in “perfect condition,” said Fox. “We just walked away. We just left the lights on, and we walked away.”

By the light of day

Early Saturday morning, after hours of overnight interviews, phone calls and questions from authorities about his plan to get the vessel off the coastline, Fox was back at the beach. He was still trying to save his boat.

Though in the shallow surf, the Aleutian Storm was not yet fully wedged into the sand, and Fox thought there was still a chance a tugboat might be able to tow it back to open water. The engine and machinery still worked. The vessel was intact, and Fox was well insured: He had every chance of rebuilding.

Fox’s confidence that he could refloat the vessel and its good structural condition convinced the Coast Guard to allow him the next day to make the attempt. By then, the Coast Guard was part of a unified command structure that included California State Parks, the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response, the Sonoma County Department of Emergency Management, and Fox himself.

On Super Bowl Sunday, 50 or more members of the fishing community from ports throughout the northern half of the state converged on the beach to help.

Some of them, Fox said, he’d met only once before.

It’s just what the fishing community does, said Ogg, who had towed another fishing vessel into shore from 9 1/2 miles out just four or five days earlier. “We’re a competitive group, but we’re a family,” he said. “And, you know, regardless of who it is or what the situation, if somebody is in trouble, we come out.”

Fox had called a tugboat that already was in the region, but it had to stay so far offshore—maybe a quarter-mile away, Ogg said—that a tow was only feasible if the tugboat had a very strong, very long towline. What was available on the tugboat did not fit that description.

“I took one look at that line, and so did my friends, and we were like, ‘oh, man,’” Fox said.

“We’re just fishermen. We’re not specialized with this type of stuff. This is a big deal, and we needed more professional help. If it wasn’t for my friends and fishermen, there would have been no help with anything.”

“I guess it’s my fault. I’m supposed to figure it out.”

And they tried, working under a Coast Guard-approved plan. Taking advantage of high tide Sunday morning, a rescue swimmer and State Parks lifeguards ran the towline out to the tug, while fishermen on shore gripped a separate set of lines and lent their collective strength to straightening the boat so it could more smoothly slide off the sand.

In what one volunteer described as a “really humbling” display of courage, Fox and his crew remained on the 58-foot vessel, trying to wrestle it into submission, as crashing waves battered and tilted the vessel sharply toward the surf.

And for a moment, “we had it,” said Ogg, who was in the scrum. After hours of effort, the boat was moving.

But then the towline snapped. And hours later, it snapped again.

As volunteers worked, the Coast Guard and other agencies monitored the situation for safety and possible fuel spills. Their priority at this point, they said, was to prevent an unknown quantity of diesel still on board from getting into the water. The Coast Guard did not intervene in the rescue attempt, to the chagrin of some involved.

The effort was considered a salvage operation and therefore the purview of the vessel owner, his insurer, and, in this instance, the tugboat involved, Shupe explained. Coast Guard involvement in the work of tugboats would be prohibited as “interference with commerce.”

The agency did not have immediate access to appropriate recovery equipment either, Schnabel said.

But “it’s always our desire to allow the party to try,” as long as it can be done safely, Shupe said, applauding Fox’s efforts.

“It’s personal property,” said Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary superintendent Maria Brown. “And so that also comes into play.”

Fox was given one more day, during high tide Monday, to try to move the Aleutian Storm off the sand, but a third refloating attempt failed, despite the use of a thicker towline. Given high waves predicted in advance of a winter storm later that week, the unified command federalized the incident the next day, taking the operation out of Fox’s hands and making the Coast Guard lead agency.

Fox and his crew left the vessel for the last time Monday afternoon in the bucket of an excavator parked on the beach.

Fox’s two young children, 7 and 2, had spent the previous two and a half days making sandcastles on the beach, oblivious to the struggle underway, as their dad, his crew, and volunteers tried to save the boat. Fox said watching his kids play on the beach and hearing them cry, sad to leave the beach and their sandcastles as the family walked away, was “the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through.”

Over the next couple of days, a few unsuccessful efforts were made to haul the Aleutian Storm higher up on the beach to try to prevent it from breaking apart in the surf. But a shattered cabin window allowed in so much water that the structure soon was destroyed. Within a week, much of the vessel was torn apart, its debris littered across a long stretch of coast.

In the weeks that followed, during low tides, salvage crews used heavy equipment to begin dismantling the remainder of the Aleutian Storm, and collect debris that had been scattered on the beach. Officials said they had made good progress, despite battling active surf and constantly shifting sands.

By mid-March, workers had removed about three-fourths of what was left. But two large pieces of hull were still on the beach, buried in sand, said Max Delaney, emergency response coordinator for the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary.

Heavy swells moved sand into and around the wreckage as fast as salvage crews could scoop it out, he said.

Finally, five weeks after the Aleutian Storm was grounded, salvage operations were put on hold—an “operational pause” until the return of minus tides in June, said Delaney.

In making that call, sanctuary representatives took into account changing tides and a shift away from the extra-low water levels that allowed for longer periods of work. Another issue was the beginning of the nesting season for a tiny, endangered seabird called the western snowy plover, which counts the beach area near the wrecked vessel among its few remaining nesting spots.

Still unknown is how much of the Aleutian Storm’s diesel fuel was spilled. Of the estimated 1,500 gallons on board initially, Delaney said 197 gallons were recovered during salvage efforts. Some fuel had been expended early on as Fox ran the engines during the rescue attempts, but an unknown quantity leaked over time, Delaney said.

In late March, a hastily organized band of volunteers swooped in to collect as much of the remaining litter from the beach as possible. And officials say they’re committed to salvage the remaining wreckage, some of which peeks out above the sandy beach these days, though the remains of the Aleutian Storm are mostly buried.

Delaney said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, state parks and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are working with Fox’s salvage contractors to resume work during low tides in mid-summer. But their work is complicated by the presence of active plover nests nearby. Nesting season for the endangered plovers does not close until mid-September.

A series of difficult losses

The destruction of the Aleutian Storm revived criticism of the Coast Guard’s response to grounded vessels—a kind second-guessing that gains strength with each loss.

Tal Roseberry, who sold his boat and retired from commercial fishing last year due to the troubled nature of the industry, said his thoughts could be considered moot, at this point.

But in recent years, after seeing several vessels run aground and break apart while the U.S. Coast Guard stood by, he shares the concerns of others in the local fishing fleet who believe the agency’s reluctance to act jeopardizes vessels that could be saved.

“It’s at the point now where I wouldn’t call the Coast Guard. I’d call my friends,” Roseberry said. “It comes back that we don’t have trust in them.”

It’s an opinion shared by Iversen, now approaching retirement himself, who dates his doubt in the agency to the 2011 loss of the fishing vessel Tasu near Bolinas, a loss he witnessed aboard his own vessel.

Like the Aleutian Storm, the 48-foot Tasu foundered in shallow water off Marin County’s Stinson Beach, where its captain, Greg Ambiel, called for help, hoping for a Coast Guard tow.

But, according to news accounts from the time, small Coast Guard stations like the one near Fort Baker in Horseshoe Bay only respond when human life is at risk, which was not the case. Like the Aleutian Storm, Ambiel’s boat also was in water deemed too shallow for one of the agency’s 47-foot motor lifeboats to navigate. The captain was left to try to free his boat on his own. It eventually overturned and filled with sand.

Coast Guard officials cite challenges specific to each incident, which could not be overcome safely and prevented their intervention. Factors include the safety of personnel, the risk to Coast Guard assets like boats and equipment, and environmental hazards.

Shupe said her agency is “sensitive to the concerns of the fishing community,” as well as to the reality of the North Coast’s rather remote distance from tugboats and other assets more readily available in, say, San Francisco Bay. But in the case of the Aleutian Storm, environmental factors and dangers dashed hopes of saving the vessel, she said.

The Coast Guard has a different calculus when asking crews to risk their own safety to protect property when no one on board is threatened with injury or death, Shupe said. “Obviously there’s a lot of complexity to a response like this.”

Tal Roseberry was especially close to another incident in February 2022, when a young fisherman named Ryan Kozlowski fell overboard and perished while working alone harvesting Dungeness crab off Point Reyes National Seashore.

Commercial and recreational crabbers in the area found Kozlowski’s boat, the Seastar, unmanned and adrift, and called the Coast Guard. They sought help to anchor or tow the boat to preserve it for Koslowski’s family and prevent it from running ashore. But the vessel soon broke apart on Kehoe Beach.

The Seastar incident occurred almost exactly a year after a decommissioned, unoccupied fishing vessel being towed south from Port Angeles, Washington to be scuttled in Mexico, came loose when a steel shackle linking it to its tugboat failed.

The 90-foot American Challenger was adrift for more than 12 hours before ending up on the rocks off the north Marin coast, where it remains today. Both the tugboat and the American Challenger were uninsured.

The tugboat captain, Christian Lint, said at the time that the Coast Guard had several options to prevent the American Challenger from running aground, including getting on board and dropping the anchor or securing a 100-foot-long “insurance line” tied to a buoy and trailing behind the vessel.

In each case, Coast Guard representatives cited reasons for decisions that are difficult to evaluate in hindsight, from outside the agency, let alone after the passage of years.

But the decisions were robustly challenged at the time.

In the case of the American Challenger, the Coast Guard said the then-commander of the 87-foot Coast Guard cutter Hawksbill had determined it was unsafe to put personnel aboard “due to weather conditions, the proximity to shore, and the unknown structural integrity of the unmanned vessel.”

Lint countered that “calm seas” and “unlimited visibility” prevailed during the extended period the American Challenger remained offshore. He pointed out that Coast Guard personnel would not have had to get on board to secure the trailing insurance line, which might have kept the vessel off the rocks.

A year later, when the Seastar was in trouble, the Coast Guard said the vessel was on rocks by the time its personnel boarded, so towing the vessel would have risked rupture to the hull and the potential release of fuel or other pollutants into waters of the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary.

They also considered the possibility that Kozlowski, still missing, might have become entangled in gear or rigging underneath the boat and wanted to find him or his remains before moving the vessel.

But fishermen who were present said the Seastar remained in deep water by the time the search for Kozlowski moved elsewhere. The loss of the fishing vessel added to the pain of its captain’s family.

‘This is all we have’

That night in February, the Aleutian Storm was on a sandbar for an hour or more before waves shoved it into the surf at Salmon Creek Beach, where it was later destroyed.

“When I say it traumatized the whole industry,” said Iversen, “I mean it traumatized the whole industry.” He believes that there’s an opportunity to reconsider the response to vessels in distress along the North Coast—perhaps by staging a suitable tow line near the harbor, for example. “There is a fix out there,” said Iversen. “This is fixable.”

“It’s frustrating because we do have the infrastructure within our area to respond to these kinds of incidents,” said west Sonoma County supervisor Lynda Hopkins. “It just felt like all the ingredients weren’t there.”

Hopkins and Sonoma County emergency management director Jeff DuVall also believe a fix is possible. They are now working with Ogg to develop a playbook for vessel groundings that identifies best practices and available resources like tugboats and other equipment, plus phone numbers and government agency roles—“kind of like a wildfire plan,” explained Ogg.

They hope to improve coordination between the Coast Guard, the Office of Spill Prevention and Response, the county and the fishing community for faster, more successful responses.

“Up until the Coast Guard federalizes a case,” said DuVall, “it is 100% on the owner to try to mitigate and get the vessel off the beach, and that’s when we saw the community coming together and trying to help. We’re trying to learn from past lessons.”

Fox is hopeful his insurance will cover the costs for which he’s responsible, but he’s exasperated by the need to make a claim of complete loss. Though final figures aren’t available and the status of his insurance claim is unknown, costs are likely several million dollars. Fox recently declined to say anything further about the claim.

“I spent a lot of time on that boat thinking it would be saved, while my kids built sandcastles right next to it,” Fox said.

“This is my boat,” he said, though it had by then been smashed to pieces. “This is my livelihood, my wife’s boat, my kids’ boat, my family’s boat. This is all we have.”