Wind and waves claim most of grounded fishing boat near Bodega Bay

No one thought it would happen this fast, but the fate that everyone feared for the once proud Aleutian Storm has come to pass.

Stranded on Sonoma Coast State Beach amid powerful storms and thrashing waves just 12 days ago, the 58-foot fishing boat has been reduced to little more than a gashed and battered hull.

The vessel has been torn apart piece by piece — the mast, the pilot house, the cabin, the decking — resulting in a debris field that now encompasses much of North Salmon Creek Beach, as well as the south. Bits of foam rubber and Styrofoam are scattered far and wide.

The boat also appears to have leaked all or most of the diesel fuel still left on board after an attempt to drag it out of the surf and onto the beach failed on Friday.

The site “just reeked of diesel fuel,” said Jerry Dodrill, a local photographer and director with the nonprofit B-RAD Foundation who helped with some of the cleanup over the weekend and earlier.

The fumes were so bad that Cea Higgins, a Bodega Bay resident and former executive director of Coastwalk California, went home after four days of collecting wreckage with a headache.

“I got really kind of sick from all the diesel,” she said.

But what bothers her and many people the most are what they consider gaps in the response to the vessel’s late-night grounding near Bodega Dunes State Park. They cite missed opportunities they believe could have saved the vessel, preserved the financial future of its owner, Capt. Chris Fox, and spared protected coastline from the fallout.

“It’s traumatizing is what it is,” said veteran Fort Bragg fisherman Christian Iversen, who described himself as a close friend of Fox. “I wake up every night grinding my teeth over this.”

“We know how to do this. It doesn’t have to be a loss every time”

Fox, 43, fishes out of San Francisco Bay and had been out harvesting Dungeness crab before he lost control of the boat as he turned, spent and weary, toward Bodega Harbor for refueling in the late-night hours of Feb. 9.

The 57-ton vessel ran aground but was still sufficiently buoyed at high tide to be returned to service had it been towed out to open water quickly enough.

But the tugboat Fox arranged to have tow the boat off shore 1½ days later was ill-equipped to handle the operation, arriving with “a rotten line” that was pieced and knotted together in eight sections, said Iversen.

Thirty or more members of the fishing community rallied to help rig the boat and assisted with the operation, along with State Parks lifeguards and local rescue swimmers, until the line snapped — twice. They returned the next day, Feb. 12, to try with a stronger line, which also failed.

In the meantime, a coalition of public agencies led by the U.S. Coast Guard stood watch to ensure the scene was safe and the potential pollution on board, secure, though they did not intervene.

“The Coast Guard does not have the authority to remove the vessel from the beach,” Lt. j.g. Rachel Davis said Tuesday, reiterating what agency officials said last week. “Our authorities lie solely in pollution mitigation and response.”

So the Coast Guard allowed Fox to try to save his boat, but it was listing badly toward the waves and took on increasing volumes of water and sand that weighted it into the sand.

The high waves also kept Coast Guard and state Office of Spill Prevention and Response personnel from accessing different fuel tanks to assess their contents.

Fox had told officials he thought he had about 1,500 gallons on board when the boat grounded, but some unknown, likely small amount leaked in the first few days, the Coast Guard reported. A contractor also managed to vacuum about 137 gallons from a compromised tank at low tide Feb. 13, but high waves prevented future efforts to offload more.

When the Coast Guard took over the incident midweek, its focus was on preventing that fuel from getting into the ocean. Working with Fox and his insurer, it arranged for the deployment of heavy equipment to the scene to try to pull it up farther on the beach, out of forecast weekend waves.

But the line snapped in that case as well, leaving the stranded vessel amid waves that destroyed what remained of it over the weekend.

The Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary has taken over as lead agency on the incident, but what happens next remains unclear. The wreckage and cleanup remain the responsibility of Fox, officials said.

Max Delaney, emergency response coordinator for the sanctuary, said he was stunned by how little time the ocean took to claim the vessel, given its double steel hull and the sandy beach setting, which is preferable to rocks.

He said it was uncertain whether any fuel remained on board and that salvage efforts would be planned to take that possibility into account.

But he also said that while it was “easy to be an armchair quarterback” critiquing the incident response, the reality was that “there’s no single agency that’s responsible for cleaning up and responding to boat groundings.”

Bill Maslach, superintendent of California State Parks’ Sonoma-Mendocino District, said salvage efforts would be weather dependent, requiring closure of parking lots at South Salmon Creek Beach and Bodega Dunes State Park for the immediate future.

South Salmon Creek Beach is now open to visitors who can enter without use of those parking areas, except for an area within 100 yards of the damaged boat.

“There’s still a lot of debris floating and on the beach,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan (she/her) at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @MaryCallahanB.