The Escape from Akutan Island
A story of the perils of a government inspection, an unsavory innkeeper and the storm of a lifetime in Alaska
She looked in surprise out the window as a 30-foot wave of green water rapidly approached from the depths of a trough and violently crashed into the glass. The large crabbing vessel lurched forward and threw her from the chair to the floor. She would have been terrified under normal circumstances, but she couldn’t summon the energy to think about the severity of her situation. She was perched in the wheelhouse of the boat, which sat fifteen feet above the working deck, which was another fifteen feet above the water line, while sizable slabs of Akutan Bay tried to punch out the windows. As if the harrowing conditions of the Alaskan storm weren’t enough, she had been terribly seasick for hours.
She was desperately ill and couldn’t wait to be on solid ground. The vessel was traveling from Akutan to Dutch Harbor, following the line of the Aleutian chain in the southwestern seas off the coast of Alaska. It was normally a three-hour endeavor. This particular nightmare of a trip would be at least eight hours. While dry heaving her empty stomach contents and trying to keep from clattering off her chair, the Captain of the vessel turned to her and said, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is you won’t die from this. The bad news is you will wish you had.”
A few years prior:
In The Last Frontier in the early 1980s, conducting official government business often had more of a nod to ideology reminiscent of the Wild West than of urban high-rise bureaucracy. It was a time when your federal agency could very well hand you a little blue card and let you book whatever your heart desired for transportation, lodging, etc. before the safety web of approved entities became more common later on. It wasn’t unheard of to go to strip clubs on Kodiak Island the night before official inspections or carry a pistol that weighed more than your firstborn on your hip (you never knew when a brown bear might cause trouble). However, it was unheard of for a female inspector to be calling the shots in Alaska.
In January of 1980, Dianne Soderlund was the first female scientist to be hired by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the state of Alaska. She had been working for the agency in Seattle, Washington since 1978 before transferring north. She was hired to be a permit writer for section 402 of the Clean Water Act, which regulates the discharge of pollutants into waterways. Furthermore, she became the first female inspector for the EPA in Alaska. She traveled from seafood processing plants to municipal waste sites, from drilling rigs on manmade offshore platforms in the Beaufort Sea to placer mines in interior Alaska.
One purpose of inspections was (and is) to check for compliance at the sites and make sure that chemicals/fish guts/industrial waste/mine tailings were being disposed of properly, in order to protect and conserve the integrity of the land, air and sea. However, short-cutting these regulations in order to make a quick buck (at the expense of the crystalline bays possibly turning into hydrogen sulfide spewing dumps) did occur. EPA inspectors were not popular visitors to operating premises, even if they were the most anticipated. People who had lucrative careers profiteering off pristine Alaskan resources were generally not pleased when they got caught. Also, essentially all of Dianne’s professional interactions were with men, and those who gave her tours at facilities during inspections were often surprised to learn that she was a young female. As you can imagine, the job came with a unique set of risks.
In October of 1982, Dianne and a partner from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation traveled to Akutan, Alaska to conduct wastewater inspections on seafood processing plants. When they left, Dianne had no idea what she was getting into.
A novella could be written on the journey alone to access Akutan. It’s an exceptionally remote island on the Aleutian chain, which stretches from the southern coast of Alaska down to the west towards Russia. Dianne and her partner flew on a 4 engine Lockheed Electra prop plane from Anchorage down to Dutch Harbor, where they then boarded another plane (this one was amphibious, meaning it had landing gear for both water and land, which is common for small planes in Alaska) which chartered them to Akutan. From there, the party met with a man who was the keeper of their lodging- among other things.
Since there were no hotels, motels, inns, Airbnbs or Vacasa rentals in Akutan in 1982, their lodging consisted of a decrepit, rusty, abandoned, floating, former fish processing station that would probably have been put to better use sunken at the bottom of the ocean or used as firewood. It was a foul excuse for lodging and the type of place you wouldn’t want to even look at without a tetanus booster. Dianne slept in her clothes. Unfortunately, the conditions of the floating “inn” would soon be the least of her concerns.
Dianne was a professional and was on inspection trips for business, but occasionally there were men present at the often-rural places where she traveled who felt that they deserved her company under no professional pretenses. The man who was the keeper of the hellacious floating inn (who was also tasked with shuttling them to inspections) fit into this category. Dianne instinctively knew that she did not want to spend time alone in his company.
For the first couple days of inspections, things were alright. Dianne and her partner went from plant to plant, checking to see if fish processors were grinding fish to specified parameters and transporting waste outside the harbor. They returned to the floating inn in the evenings where the innkeeper also stayed.
However, her partner needed to depart Akutan early. On the third day Dianne was left to conduct the final inspections by herself. Conducting the inspections wasn’t a problem, but the creep operating the floating inn was. The night after the state inspector had left, Dianne shut the door to her room (it didn’t lock) while the innkeeper knocked on her door incessantly. He kept coming back again and again and again, telling her to come out and have a drink. Telling her to enjoy some company. Telling her to just hang out with him. She wouldn’t budge.
The conditions were gross and this man was worse.
The forecast was also scary. The weather was starting to turn and all night it felt like the anchor to the floating inn was dragging, pulling the line taut and threatening to snap. There were no cell phones, no radios and no coast guard. Dianne stayed in her clothes again and barely slept. She decided the next morning that under no circumstances would she return to the floating inn.
The next day, as Dianne conducted the final inspections, the inclement weather only got worse. By the afternoon, every flight coming and leaving Akutan had been canceled.
For the entire week.
Dianne’s ticket was useless now. But she couldn’t stomach the thought of another night on the floating inn. It was dangerous to stay; it seemed impossible to leave.
Via air, anyway.
Dianne stealthily asked the skipper of the last boat she inspected to help her find a way to Dutch Harbor so that she wouldn’t be stranded in Akutan for the week. She expressed no indication of her plans to the disenchanting innkeeper, who thought that she would be staying until the weather resolved.
The skipper made contact with a single crabbing vessel that would be stopping by Akutan later that day to drop off crab before continuing to Dutch Harbor. There were no other vessels after that.
A skiff from the last processing plant took Dianne to the city dock in Akutan that afternoon. She was instructed to wait there until the crabbing vessel came by in the evening. The large vessel would not dock (for reasons she would learn later), so the message was relayed to Dianne that she would literally have to jump from the dock to the boat as it drove by. It would slow down, but jumping onto a moving boat was definitely not a sanctioned federal activity. Also, because of tidal variations, the dock was much higher than the water line.
This may inherently seem like a very bad idea (jumping onto a boat in a storm, with significantly limited knowledge and no cell phone/radio/other communication method). However, the alternative was worse. There was no way she was going to stay on that decrepit floating inn with the guy who kept demanding she drink with him, with no one else around, with weather warnings in every direction and a possible weeks’ wait until the next flight to Dutch Harbor. It was a quietly, quickly calculated risk. During the planning process, she let the innkeeper think she would be returning to the floating inn. She didn’t want to give him any time to think of a way to weasel his way onto the crab boat, or her way off of it.
With the wind gusting and the dock rocking and the waves crashing, the crabbing boat appeared late in the evening. The sun had set, leaving an eerie glow. As it approached the dock, Dianne first threw her duffel onto the deck and then the deckhand looked up at her and yelled “JUMP!”.
It felt like she was in the air forever. She soared down a few feet and landed squarely on the wooden deck. The boat picked up speed and navigated into Akutan Bay as conditions raged around them.
It was a beautiful, shiny, manicured new boat. She would barely have time to admire it before becoming violently seasick.
It was going to be a long trip to Dutch Harbor.
Dianne had been instructed early in her career with the federal government to NEVER sign any waivers releasing someone from liability for damage or bodily harm. It was expressly forbidden; I’m sure you can imagine why. While the boat pulled out of the harbor, Dianne was given a waiver. It stated that the crabbing vessel (and its personnel) were not responsible for any bodily harm, injury, or death incurred. If she didn’t sign it, she couldn’t stay on the boat.
She signed it.
It was an easy decision. This boat was her ticket out. Plus, she figured that if the boat sank, the waiver would too.
It had seemed lucky that this crabbing boat was going to both Akutan and the city of Dutch Harbor, because normally the boats stayed out in open water to maximize fishing time. As it turned out, there was a special reason this boat had an itinerary that could accommodate Dianne.
The vessel was in Akutan to drop off its crab catch. It was dropping off the crab catch because it had a long trip to Dutch Harbor and didn’t want it to spoil. It had a long trip to Dutch Harbor because one of the engines had failed and that’s where the replacement parts were. That was why the vessel couldn’t dock earlier; a failed engine and a storm were not a recipe for success at the docks.
Dianne learned that this was the reason for the trip after she had signed the waiver. As soon as the vessel left Akutan Bay and entered the exposed, turbulent water of the North Pacific, she became ill. She was dry heaving, completely nauseated from the horrific rocking of the boat. The Captain of the vessel was an amiable man who instructed his men to make her as comfortable as possible. They laid her on the couch in the salon as she went into survival mode. She was too physically ill to care about anything other than simply taking one breath after the other, and trying to keep in one place as the waves tossed the boat. She would later be covered in bruises from smashing into various walls and floors over the course of the next eight hours.
The Captain came to check on her, and brought her from the salon on the main deck up to the wheelhouse, thinking maybe it would help her with seasickness. But there was no escape from the unrelenting nausea and vomiting associated with the boat rocking in the treacherous water. The good news was that she didn’t die, the bad news was that she felt like she would.
After what felt like an eternity, the vessel docked safely in Dutch Harbor early the next morning. Dianne thanked the Captain for his assistance and somehow managed to crawl off the dock. She found a taxi and went to the little airport. She had no flight, no itinerary, and nothing scheduled. At the airport, she begged to be put on the next flight to Anchorage, which would be departing in the evening. All day long, she laid on the floor of the airport, too sick to move. She could still feel the boat rocking and see the thirty-foot wall of green water.
Meanwhile, in Anchorage, her husband was going to each incoming flight from Dutch Harbor to see if she disembarked. She hadn’t been on her scheduled flight out because it got canceled due to the storm, and she wasn’t on the next flight either. He called the EPA office to see if they had heard any updates from her. They hadn’t. He had heard reports of a storm, but had no idea where she was and when she was coming home. Finally, after driving to the airport multiple times, his wife got off a plane. She couldn’t explain the sense of relief she felt when her feet touched the ground in Anchorage, Alaska and my Dad was there to pick her up.
That night, my Mom slept on the wooden floor in the living room. My parents had a water bed, which she avoided like the plague because it was reminiscent of the boat trip. She went to the doctor a couple days later because she still felt so ill, and after bloodwork revealed a lofty white blood cell count, they discovered she had a raging infection, likely due to the conditions of the trip.
She eventually recovered from the trip and all the curveballs it threw at her, and continued to travel to remote areas of the state. There was work to be done and stories to be made. There was land to be conserved and water to be cleaned. But she never did get on a crabbing boat again.
