THE RACE TO SAVE THE MARY LYNN, second of six parts
By CURTIS KRUEGER, Times Staff Writer
Published October 24, 2005
[Times photo: Bill Serne]
Anita Miller, right, and Mark Gutek enjoy some time on the docks near the Madeira Beach Municipal Marina. Gutek was captain and Miller was on the crew of the Mary Lynn. Part 1: Gambling in the gulf
The story so far: The fishing boat Mary Lynn is in the Gulf Mexico off the Dry Tortugas. Captain Mark Gutek believes Hurricane Katrina will pass by to the north. But the hurricane has changed course and is heading straight for the Madeira Beach-based boat.
Waves pounded the Mary Lynn . Mark Gutek helped Anita Miller and Charles White stuff anything loose into the wheelhouse and tie down everything else.
They had laid out 5 miles of fishing line the night before, but by Friday morning, Aug. 26, the Gulf of Mexico had turned too stormy for them to haul it back in. So the y left the line in the sea and hoped they could pull it in later.
Gutek still didn't realize Hurricane Katrina had changed course. He tried finding weather reports on a hand-held VHF radio and had no luck.
But there was no denying the weather had turned dangerous. Gutek turned the Mary Lynn toward Dry Tortugas National Park, about 40 miles east.
Wind tore a lid off the hold where their 3,000 pounds of grouper were stored in ice. They fished the lid out of the water, tied it down and stacked 50-pound bags of salt on top. It flew off again.
Then the steering faltered. Every time Gutek turned the wheel, steering fluid leaked out. When he poured more in, it gushed.
Gutek felt he had no choice but to drop anchor.
"We're going to ride 'er out," he said.
And then the anchor broke loose.
* * *
They understood now their fates were chained together.
A weak link, Gutek often said, will get you hurt or killed.
Anita Miller, 40, Gutek's girlfriend, had gutted out some hard times fishing. Once a large fishhook ripped open her forearm as miles of line unfurled off a boat she was working on. The crew could have quit early and charged home to a hospital, but if they did, there'd be no paycheck. So Miller poured on iodine, wrapped her arm in paper towels and duct tape, and kept msgfishing.
"I'm a fisherman," she would say. "I'm not a fisherwoman."
So much time off shore kept her away from her four daughters, who did not live with her. She had no plans to bring them into the fishing life. "It's too damn dangerous."
Gutek was a student of the gulf. He worked to study its secrets. Every time he got a good catch, he wrote the coordinates in one of four notebooks he kept with him always. "I've got a million dollars of fish in those books," he liked to say.
Gutek had met the other crew member, Charles White, 46, about three years ago while doing a construction stint on land. Gutek showed off some pictures with fish as big as him, and it got White to thinking. He had loved the water ever since his father took him fishing. His marriage was ending, so not much was tying him to land.
When the grouper season opened that spring, White, an electrician and amateur blues guitarist, followed Gutek out to sea.
* * *
Night fell and the Mary Lynn drifted. With no steering and an ineffective anchor, the boat turned side-to, parallel to the waves, rocked by each one.
"Nothing we could do," Gutek said. "We sat and prayed."
Then came the first big wave.
To the crew, it felt like a truck had smashed into the port side of the boat. The wave damaged the wheelhouse door and sent water shooting inside. It lifted one of the 55-gallon barrels of bait, weighing 300 pounds, into the air. White watched the barrel fly off the stern, like an empty beer can.
The wave knocked the Mary Lynn so far over that the starboard rail dipped underwater. The gulf surged in. Bait barrels fell over, and their chunks of mullet clogged the drains, preventing the water from running off the deck.
Gutek thought they were going to lose the boat.
"Let's go, let's go, got to go, time's up, over!"' he screamed.
Gutek pulled the switch on the boat's emergency radio beacon.
* * *
Inside a cavernous hangar at the Coast Guard's Air Station Clearwater, Lt. Craig Massello got the call from Miami after 10 p.m. A fishing boat off the Dry Tortugas had sent out a distress signal. Winds were up to 40 knots, Miami said, and waves were at 10 feet. At first glance, Massello thought flying out there sounded rough but it was doable.
Massello, 31, slipped into the operations center. He looked at the coordinates of the Mary Lynn on a framed nautical map, and then at the image of Hurricane Katrina swirling on a computer screen.
For the first time, he comprehended what this mission would mean. The Mary Lynn was caught right in Hurricane Katrina, roughly 10 miles east of the eye.
His first thought, he said later, was, There's no way .
"I must have spent a good 10 minutes staring at that radar picture, the swirl of the hurricane going through."
How were they going to be able to pull people off a fishing boat in a storm like that?
He and a superior officer concluded: There was no good way. But maybe, conditions would improve while he was in the air.
