ASTORIA, Ore. – Tyler Bartel chats casually with one hand on the wheel as he steers a 47-foot boat over swells peaking 2 to 4 feet high. The waters at the mouth of the Columbia River appear calm, but they’re known as some of the most dangerous in the nation.
Over the past three centuries, thousands of vessels have been destroyed and hundreds of lives lost at the river’s entrance, earning it the name the Graveyard of the Pacific.
Starting in October and continuing through spring, the ocean’s swells become 10- to 30-foot waves. Then Bartel, a surfman at U.S. Coast Guard Station Cape Disappointment, may find himself maneuvering a motor lifeboat through surf and heavy breaking seas that only the most experienced boat drivers are allowed to handle.
According to a 2003 Coast Guard instruction to commandants, operating rescue boats in such conditions is “one of the most challenging and dangerous tasks Coast Guard boat crews perform.” Coast Guardsmen train for years to become surfmen, and the Coast Guard has faced a long-standing shortage of the highly skilled boat drivers.
The shortage will likely continue for several more years because of obstacles to training and high requirements for experience, according to officers in the program. With 97 qualified surfmen, the Coast Guard is about 40 percent shy of its 161-person goal, said Lt. Matt Buckingham, who manages the surfman program.
“Since we established an actual requirement, we’ve seen a gradual increase in the number of surfmen in the Coast Guard. But it’s just a matter of getting the numbers to where we want them,” Buckingham said.
He cited a limited number of locations where surfmen can be trained -about 20 nationwide, the difficulty in training surfmen at those locations and the lengthy certification process as factors in the shortage.
Several years ago, the Coast Guard addressed the shortage by establishing the National Motor Lifeboat School at Cape Disappointment, where Coast Guardsmen come from across the country come in hopes of speeding up the qualification process to obtain surfman certification.
Before the school was created, it took an average of four years for a boat driver to become a surfman by training with his or her unit. The school has cut that to about 31/2 years, but it isn’t just trying to increase Coast Guard numbers, Spencer said.
“Our model here is that we want a quality surfman, versus just knocking out quantity,” he said.
The school is next to the Coast Guard station at Cape Disappointment, where the Columbia River mouth’s treacherous conditions provide prime training grounds.
“It’s the best area in the country to train surfmen,” said Lt. Jamie Frederick, Cape Disappointment commanding officer. “We probably get more surf than anywhere else on the West Coast. The Pacific Northwest has always been known as the breeding ground of surfmen.”
Frederick cited several obstacles to training surfmen, whether at the school or an individual unit.
“The biggest factor we can’t control is Mother Nature,” Frederick said. “Without the weather, you can’t train.”
Bad weather is good for training.
“Either the waves break and we train in it, or we sit and wait until we get some weather good enough to do the training,” he said.
In addition, it takes one surfman to train another. Frederick said Cape Disappointment has five surfmen, but ideally should have nine. The surfmen respond to search-and-rescue calls, train new surfmen and have other station duties.
“I only have two 47-foot motor lifeboats,” Frederick said. “You’re trying to train them all with a limited amount of weather and a limited amount of resources, and they all need a lot of time at the helm for experience.”
Ocean swells pound against a sandbar where the Columbia River spills into the ocean, producing hazardous breaking surf, which in the winter is joined by high winds, heavy rain and fog. Guiding a boat through giant waves with water spraying over the boat’s sides and into the faces of four people strapped in with belts, while reading the waves and navigating to a rescue, is a mentally and physically demanding task.
“Getting hit by a 20-foot wave feels like you just got hit by a semitruck,” Bartel said. “A lot of things can go wrong. You have to be able to trust a person mentally and physically to take a boat out in 10- or 20-foot surf.”
His station’s commander said it takes a lot of experience for a boat driver to “be able to read the waves properly, to know what effects they’re going to have on the boat and to maneuver the boat to counteract those effects.”
“When you put a boat in breaking surf intentionally, it’s inherently dangerous,” Frederick said. “It takes a real level of fortitude for a boat driver to be able to stand up there and do the right things as a wave’s crashing down on them.”
And not everybody can learn the skills needed to be a good surfman, he said.
“You can teach somebody what a wave’s going to do to a boat. You can teach somebody what to do with their hands on the throttles. But the way a person actually reacts when a wave is breaking on them and there are three more behind it – that’s a little more instinctive,” Frederick said.
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