Lives that passed in the night
During his first time at sea, Coast Guardsman Roger Shine's life was forever altered when the cutter Blackthorn collided with a tanker near the Sunshine Skyway bridge.
By LANE DeGREGORY
Published January 27, 2005
ST. PETERSBURG - It was dark when they finally pulled out of port. Roger Shine stood on the deck of the Blackthorn, watching the lights of land slip away.
The night was clear. The sea was calm. But Shine had to plant his black boots shoulder-width apart to keep from stumbling.
He was 21. He had never been on a boat.
The Coast Guard cutter he had been assigned to was heading west, across the mouth of Tampa Bay. The 180-foot ship was going to Mobile, Ala., to pick up buoys, then on to Galveston, Texas, its home port.
Shine and the other 49 crew members had spent three months in a Tampa shipyard, painting and repairing the Blackthorn. Checking equipment. Doing drills.
As the ship slid toward the channel, some men climbed below, to their berths. Others manned the bridge. Shine stayed outside, drinking in the salty air.
The breeze was warm for January, even in Florida. Below the short sleeves of his blue canvas uniform, the spray was sticky on his arms. A cruise ship paraded past, its towers dripping white lights. Shine caught his breath. He had never imagined it would be like this.
* * *He grew up in Kokomo, Ind., where the only place to swim was the YMCA pool. He became a lifeguard there as a teenager. He had never seen waves.
After three years studying law enforcement, he dropped out of Indiana University. He craved adventure and needed a job so he could afford to get married.
He drove to Indianapolis to enlist in the Coast Guard. He found a lonely recruiter who was thrilled to send the tall, lanky Midwestern boy to sea.
Shine told his fiancee, Pam, to plan the wedding for February.
The Blackthorn shipped out Jan. 28, 1980.
* * *He can still see the sparks, hear the cries, feel the cold water. He can still taste the diesel fuel.
Roger Shine is 46. His mustache has gone gray. He's drinking orange juice in a St. Petersburg diner, rubbing his wet blue eyes, talking about the night he hates to remember.
He has come back to honor the friends he lost. Twenty-three men died that night.
Friday is the 25th anniversary of the Coast Guard's worst peacetime disaster.
The Blackthorn sank on a clear night, in calm seas.
* * *"It was a beautiful night. I stood out there for a while, just watching. But eventually, I had to go below and report to my post," Shine remembers. An apprentice quartermaster, he was trained to read charts and take depth fixes.
His boss, Gary Crumley, was his best friend. Crumley was funny and kind. He smiled a lot through his bushy beard. He had a way of putting Shine at ease, making him feel safe.
The two men were assigned seats in the space farthest back on the ship: above the rudder, next to the wheelhouse. An area as big as a handicapped bathroom stall. They slid on headphones so they could communicate with men on the bridge.
The Blackthorn was an old ship, built in 1943. In former lives, her steel hull had chopped through ice floes in the Great Lakes, helped salvage a Navy helicopter and searched for survivors of airplane crashes. In its current role, the cutter was a buoy tender. The crew maintained navigational aids, channel markers and lights.
While the Blackthorn wound westward through the channel, Shine listened to chatter on the headphones and talked to Crumley. The young men made plans for when they got to Galveston. Crumley's wife and Pam were sure to be friends. The two couples could have dinner together.
Shine had even bought dishes, a surprise for his bride. He stowed them in the ship, along with his Bible and his bicycle.
For about 20 minutes, Shine and Crumley hung out, talking.
"Then, all of a sudden, an alarm started going off," Shine says. He looked at Crumley, who was trying to get up.
"Then we heard the announcement: "Stand by for collision. Collision port side. Stand by for collision. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.' "
Horns. A wail like a train. Over the intercom, the incessant screeching: "Collision portside. This is not a drill."
The two friends stood. The ship lurched. They fell back to their seats.
"I was facing the porthole. And all of a sudden I saw sparks, like someone was welding outside," Shine says.
Then he didn't see anything.
* * *"Come with me," Crumley called as he swung open the door to their compartment. Shine can still hear his friend's voice. Scared but sure.
They ran down a narrow passage, scaled a ladder, then two flights of stairs. They came out by the bridge. Just in time to hear:
"Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Group St. Pete, this is Cutter Blackthorn. Mayday!"
They heard Group St. Pete answer, through the radio: "Go ahead, Blackthorn."
"We heard, "Collision 1 mile west of the Skyway bridge,' " Shine says. "Then we lost power."
For a second, there was silence. Then, the shriek of tearing steel.
"We didn't know what had happened. But we knew we had to get out," Shine says. "Gary went down to the chart room, a half-deck below the bridge, and started handing up life jackets. Rick Gauld - his name's on the monument too - he stood at the top of the stairs, throwing them to me. I was chucking them onto the bridge. We got out maybe a dozen before the ship rolled."
It lurched to the left. Waves slammed over the deck. Shine ran up a wall, which became the floor.
"The water was cold. Really, really cold. Then the ship fell onto its side, and I remember looking up and seeing a red light through the water. Someone had a flashlight, I guess. And they were calling, "Anybody in there?' And I was trying to answer. Then the light disappeared. I remember it disappearing."
He doesn't remember getting out of the ship. He has no idea how he escaped. Much less why.
"The next thing I remember is being face-down in the water, trying to lift my head. And when I turned onto my back, I saw the rudder and propeller in front of me. The ship was upside down."
The Blackthorn was so close, Shine kicked it.
"I don't know what I did next. Started swimming, I guess. I remember unlacing my boots, because they were weighing me down," he says. He remembers being cold. And disoriented in the black waves.
Somewhere, people were yelling. Splashing. Screaming. He started swimming toward the shouts. At least he wouldn't be alone.
"I don't know how long I swam. Then I got to this whole group of people. They were all clinging to this wooden shack that had broken off the deck. A dozen people, at least. The thing couldn't have been 4-feet square. Everyone just holding on. And I remember counting the people, and praying: There's got to be more. Please, God, let there be more.
"And I remember looking up and seeing the Skyway bridge - and the other ship going away."
* * *At 8:21 p.m., as the Blackthorn had turned beneath the bridge, it had collided with the SS Capricorn, a ship more than three times its size.
The Capricorn was carrying 150,000 barrels of oil to the Florida Power plant on Weedon Island.
Both vessels had been too close to the center of the channel, the official investigation would find.
The Capricorn was hardly damaged. No one on its crew was injured.
Most of the damage to the Blackthorn was above the waterline. But one of the Capricorn's 13,500-pound anchors had speared the cutter's hull.
The bigger ship dragged the Blackthorn backward and yanked it sideways through the water.
Then the chain wound around the Blackthorn's hull and pulled it over.
* * *"We were waiting in that water for what felt like forever. We were freezing. We didn't know what to do," Shine says. "This one guy was really injured, and we kept trying to pull him onto the shack.
"But he couldn't hold on. And we couldn't hold him."
They bobbed in the waves, trying not to swallow. Diesel fuel from the ship blanketed the water in an iridescent rainbow. Shine and the other survivors splashed around the debris, bruised and nauseous, watching the bridge lights to see how far they'd floated.
After who knows how long, a shrimp boat, the Bayou, chugged up.
The fishermen flooded the bay with lights, plodding slowly around the Blackthorn's sinking carcass, picking up the injured Coast Guardsmen. Searching for survivors.
"I remember letting go of that wood and swimming a short way to the shrimp boat. We had to climb over these tires. And the guys on deck were sort of lifting us over the side. As soon as I got on board, someone gave me a Mountain Dew. And I hate Mountain Dew, but I drank it. I'd been drinking diesel for so long. But I started throwing up. For a long time, I threw up. When there was nothing left, they took us all to the engine room, where it was warm."
He remembers showering with a hose, trying to squeegee the sheen of diesel off his numb arms. One of the fishermen gave him a green sweat shirt.
After an hour or more, the shrimp boat gave up its search. While it motored beneath the towering bridge, Shine looked around for his friends.
Gary Crumley was gone. Rick and Frank. Jerry too. Donald and Lawrence and Daniel.
Nearly half the crew - 23 of the 50 men - went down with the ship.
The shrimp boat deposited the survivors on the pier at Fort De Soto Park.
In dripping canvas pants and a stranger's sweat shirt, cradling his left wrist, which he had wrenched, Shine asked the girl at the snack bar to let him use the phone. He had to call Pam.
* * *Lt. Cmdr. George James Sepel Jr., who was piloting the Blackthorn that night, was issued a "letter of admonition" for straying in the channel.
He stayed eight more years in the Coast Guard, then moved to Alaska.
He never went to sea again.
Because of the Blackthorn, the Coast Guard improved its training. The Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., added a Command and Operations School, where every officer who will oversee a ship must go for two weeks.
Buoy lights are brighter because of the Blackthorn. New range lights help ships stay in channels. Captains now have to report their location to the Tampa Port Authority as they cruise beneath the Sunshine Skyway bridge.
The Blackthorn resurfaced again. Three weeks after the tragedy, salvage crews hoisted the battered cutter from the sand.
A tug towed it to the Tampa shipyard, where Shine and his friends had overhauled it.
Shine and other Coast Guardsmen had to testify before a board of inquiry where they answered hundreds of questions - well, mostly the same questions, repeated hundreds of times. "I wish I knew more," he kept saying.
During a court break one afternoon, he and a couple of crewmen hailed a cab to the shipyard. They sneaked aboard the Blackthorn and crawled along the trashed halls.
Shine found his Bible, sea-swollen - but the words holding fast. He salvaged a soggy paycheck. He saved everything he could.
In his bedroom closet, he keeps a scrapbook. He never opens it.
After the investigation, officials sank the Blackthorn off Indian Rocks Beach to be an artificial reef. Shine has never visited the site.
* * *Why did he survive when so many more experienced sailors drowned that night?
After years of counseling, he stopped asking. He had to surrender to the idea that he didn't get to decide.
Life flowed on.
* * *Two weeks after the accident, Roger and Pam married. They moved to Galveston, then Yorktown, Va. They have four sons: James, David, Noah and Ethan.
Their weekends are filled with Cub Scouts and baseball and Baptist youth group activities. Shine's wife loves to vacation at the beach. He won't go there.
"I'm done with water," he says.
He stayed in the Coast Guard for 20 years, picking up Haitians off Guantanamo Bay, finding fishermen floundering on the far shores of Lake Erie, overseeing search and rescue operations in the waters around Buffalo, N.Y. He even worked as a recruiter for a while. Sometimes, he told recruits about his worst day in the service - his first day at sea.
When Shine retired in 2000, he moved back to Indiana. He's a caseworker for the Indiana Department of Child Services now. He oversees 23 cases.
Since the Blackthorn accident, he has come back to St. Petersburg four times. His mom and brother live here. But they're not always his first stop.
"When I'm back here, I visit my old friends, too," he says. "I feel closer to them here, somehow."
He finishes his orange juice, stands in the diner. Stretches. Pulls on his coat.
On Friday, he will rise before dawn. He'll dress in dark slacks, a nice shirt. No uniform. No more. He'll drive to the Skyway, turn underneath its northern end. And he'll park by the stone monument, wait for the ceremony.
Today - a couple of days early - he walks alone through the tiny garden under the palms by the bay. He gazes at the 23 carved names, sees the faces. The Blackthorn's crew came from all over the country: California, Michigan, North Dakota and Tennessee. The boys were 18, 19, 22 years old. They left wives and children, parents and friends.
"They weren't war heroes. They didn't do anything dramatic. They were just men doing their jobs, sloppy, nasty jobs," Shine says. "And they died doing their jobs. That makes them all heroes to me."
He pulls a digital camera from his coat pocket. Runs his finger down the stone slab, until he finds the fifth name: Gary W. Crumley.
The only man who can draw him this close to the water.
-- Lane DeGregory can be reached at 727 893-8825 or degregory@sptimes.com Staff writer David Ballingrud contributed to this story.
MEMORIAL SERVICEThe Coast Guard will hold a memorial service for the Blackthorn's 23 crew members who died when the cutter sank 25 years ago. The ceremony begins at 10:30 a.m. Friday at the Blackthorn Memorial Park on the north end of the Sunshine Skyway bridge. Military planes will fly overhead and officers will lay wreaths on the stone monument.
For more information, call 727 893-3140, ext. 3142, or go to www.d7publicaffairs.com and click on news.