Deadly capsizing still haunts area
GARIBALDI, Ore. — A year ago, the Taki-Tooo left the Port of Garibaldi bound for the deep fishing waters off the Oregon coast and headed into infamy as one of the state’s deadliest marine tragedies.
Within minutes of leaving Tillamook Bay for a Fathers’ Day weekend excursion, 11 people had drowned, including the boat’s skipper and a man from Cheney, and those who remained were fighting for their life in the surf and inside the upside-down hull that was filling with icy water.
A year later, federal transportation officials still have not completed their investigation of the accident. The Tillamook County sheriff’s office ruled the capsizing at the Tillamook bar an “avoidable” event caused by extreme ocean conditions more reminiscent of a winter squall than a late spring morning.
In January, survivors settled a lawsuit against the boat’s owners by agreeing to split a $1 million insurance payout.
Local skippers, whose livelihoods have been in decline for decades by catch limits and other environmental restrictions, say the Taki-Tooo disaster has caused a major loss of charter business this spring. Survivors of the tragedy, as well as those who witnessed it, find themselves struggling with nightmares from the morning of June 14, 2003.
“It’s been difficult,” says Tamara Buell, 23, the deckhand and among the eight who survived. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it.”
Now, Buell is haunted by dreams she is on a boat tipping over and that she is helpless to save herself. Other times, it is someone else going down and she is unable to help.
Mark Hamlett, who was on the boat with his two sons, his son-in-law and his son-in-law’s father, recalls the Taki-Tooo taking one wave without any trouble. A second turned the boat sideways.
“When we were looking at the third wave,” Hamlett recalls, “I said, ‘My wife and my daughter have just lost their entire family.’ It was the most devastating thought I’ve ever had.”
His son-in-law’s father died that day. Since then, he says, the memories won’t go away. “Day and night, there are a lot of reruns,” he says.
The National Transportation Safety Board has spent a year examining the accident that capsized a 32-foot charter fishing boat, but has not completed its investigation.
An investigation by the Tillamook County sheriff’s office concluded last August that the capsizing was an avoidable accident caused by extreme conditions. The report noted that on the morning of the accident, “rough bar” lights were posted by the U.S. Coast Guard on the north jetty, and skippers had reported to each other over radios that the bar was treacherous and littered with floating logs.
Last month, the people of Garibaldi dedicated a new memorial to those lost at sea, including Barry Sundberg, 52, of Cheney. There was music, the annual blessing of the fleet and the fellowship of people bound by hard luck.
For some, the ceremony signaled another step in the struggle to move on. For others, it threatened to revive emotions too painful to endure.