When an empty fuel barge went on the rocks of North Head last month, the US Coast Guard and Washington State Department of Ecology were in charge of a salvage effort led by Sause Brothers (owners of the barge) and Foss Maritime (owners of the tug). They in turn called in two oil-spill response organizations in case any of the barge’s own fuel supply leaked out. With the barge perched perilously at the foot of the cliffs and being pounded by the surf, the only safe way to put a crew on board was by helicopter.
After a careful survey, the decision was made to airlift compressors, hoses and couplings onto the barge, to pressurize the ruptured tanks and keep the water levels down. This system appeared to stabilize the stricken Millicoma –the final issue was how to drag the barge off the rocks. With two tug companies involved, it would seem natural for them to have ordered their biggest, strongest tugs to the scene. But they didn’t. Instead, they brought in the Salvage Chief, a 203′ ship stationed in Astoria that uses its massive anchors and winches to pull with as much force as a fleet of tugs.
It was just another day’s work for this unique craft that has performed over 250 rescues since it began work back in 1948. That’s an amazing record, especially considering that the Salvage Chief actually began life as a landing craft in February 1945. LSM 380 (Landing Ship Medium) went straight into active duty in the Pacific carrying bridge pontoons for the invasion of Japan. (It could also accommodate five Sherman tanks.) A few months later, the war was over.
LSM 380 was then ordered to China, where it worked on re-construction until the communist revolution began. It returned to the US and was mothballed in Suisun Bay (San Francisco), along with hundreds of other naval craft. It seemed to be headed for the scrap heap, but this was one wartime ship that was destined to live on, thanks to the ingenuity and daring of Portland salvage expert, Fred Devine.
He was a veteran of almost 30 years as a diver and captain when the war began. When the six Portland area shipyards began taking shape, he contracted with them for underwater construction, and his company expanded until it had 18 divers and 65 helpers on the payroll. When the trickle of surplus ships returning to the US became a steady stream, he realized that an LSM with its flat bottom designed to run onto a beach and would be perfect for salvage in shallow waters. This was his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to assemble a new kind of salvage ship entirely from surplus parts.
In 1953, Devine explained to Larry Barber how his idea of a shallow-draft ship had begun. He had first dreamed of it in 1932 when he had watched the freighter Sea Thrush break up on the Clatsop Spit. Originally, he had envisioned nothing more than a small barge with some big anchors and a donkey engine running a winch.
In 1947, he went down to the Bay Area and surveyed 17 LSMs before he found one he liked. His bid was accepted and he returned with a crew to deliver it to Portland. On Swan Island, where a Kaiser company was scrapping war ships, he had the bow doors of his LSM welded shut and the stern cut away. A foredeck was added, and the shape of the new Salvage Chief began to emerge.
Devine poked around the docks and found a treasure trove of gear that would fit perfectly into his bare hull. He picked up six 60-ton pull anchor winches from LSTs (Landing Ship Tank) and had a crane lower them in between the wing walls on the open-topped well deck�it was tight, but he could squeeze in three facing forward, three aft. The well was then covered with part of the deck cut off of another LST. More equipment like generators and compressors was added as it became available. The new deck was reinforced to support derricks, a pair of smaller winches, and the huge anchors that would give it enormous pulling power. The two 1800 HP Fairbanks Morse engines were overhauled, crew accommodation and workshops were added and by 1949 the Salvage Chief was ready for work.
He had invested everything he owned into the Salvage Chief, he told Barber. This was all a huge financial gamble and there were plenty of doubters on the dockside. But during the first four years, the Chief pulled nearly a dozen vessels off beaches between Panama and Alaska, towed in several more, and even extinguished the fire raging in the Danish liner Erria anchored near Astoria.
Then came the test that made Devine and his little ship famous. The 10,000-ton Liberty ship Yorkmar arrived off Grays Harbor early in December 1952. The weather was so bad that the ship steamed around in circles for two days waiting for a lull that would allow the small pilot boat to reach it. In a blinding rain squall, the captain lost sight of the entrance and almost hit the jetty. He turned north, was hit by a big breaker and swept towards the beach. The anchors were dropped, but in a few minutes the 441-foot ship came to rest 500 yards north of the channel. At low tide, the 36 crew were able to walk ashore without getting wet.
The general consensus was that the Yorkmar was a lost cause just like the Peter Iredale 50 years earlier. The only solution was to cut it up and haul it away a truckload at a time. The Oregonian sent Larry Barber to cover this spectacular stranding, and he joined the throng of reporters on the beach. That night, Devine invited him to come out and watch the Salvage Chief at work. “Fred would not promise when I would be back in port. Breakfast crossing the bar was not the easiest to keep down!” wrote Larry.
The Chief stopped 4,000 feet from the ship and dropped the first of two 12,000 lbs Eels anchors. Captain Vince Miller allowed the ship to drift in until it was just 1500 feet from the Yorkmar with only a few feet of water under the keel. After three rocket lines failed, the crew floated a nylon messenger line ashore on an oil drum. By 3PM a 1 5/8″ steel cable was strung between the two craft, and the Yorkmar’s crews began winching in. One of the cables snagged and snapped; Devine reluctantly called off the operation for the day.
The Salvage Chief spent the night anchored off the beach. “We rolled, bounced and pitched all night long and a couple of times we touched the bottom–sleep was impossible,” wrote Larry. The next morning dawned “dark, dismal and dreary with wind and rain cutting across the decks.” (Larry Barber was not given to exaggeration.) The crew went through the whole performance again, but this time one of the anchor lines frayed and broke. There was no time to lose. Devine ordered the towline cut with a burning torch. A disappointed crew took the Chief back to Westport. “After 27 miserable hours I was glad to get back on solid ground and returned to Portland,” Larry reported.
Four days later, The Chief returned to the scene with new anchors from Bremerton naval shipyard and more wire. The wind had died and the sea was calm. Three anchors and two towlines were set and the tension taken up. Using the slight motion of the Yorkmar at high tide, the Salvage Chief began to move it an inch at a time. “An inch is a mile when you’re sweating one of those babies off the beach,” Devine explained later. Ten days after it ran aground, the Yorkmar floated free and was able to steam to Portland for drydocking. This triumph was cheered as one of the greatest salvage feats on the west coast.
Over the next 50 years, the Salvage chief worked the waters between Panama and the Aleutians. When helicopters became more widespread, Devine was the first salvage master on the Pacific coast to use them to survey wreck sites. As soon as models with lifting winches became available, he began employing them to ferry men and gear out to the wreck and to carry messenger lines. The Salvage Chief was fitted with a landing pad on the stern long before this became standard.
In 1967, the Greek freighter Captayannis S ran onto the Clatsop Spit, where so many ships had been lost. But this time, Devine was ready. After days of struggle he pulled the freighter off–the first ship ever rescued from this deadly spot. Although this took place in his home waters, he still lost four anchors and great lengths of steel cable during the struggle. That was because the spit really is a “graveyard” for ships and this one was fully loaded, displacing around 9,000 tons. Like most of his work, this job was conducted on a standard Lloyd’s no-cure, no-pay salvage contract. That meant it was another all-or-nothing deal, a high-stakes gamble against wind and waves that Devine won more often than lost.
Devine was one of the last of the old school of self-taught northwest pioneers. He died in 1971 and his son-in-law Mick Leitz took over the helm of Devine Diving and Salvage and himself became a recognized authority in the field. Captain Reino Mattila, who joined the ship for the Yorkmar job, stayed on to become skipper, and was still going out on operations 50 years later at the age of 80. The ship was given a complete refit in 1980-81 and emerged with a new bridge and electronic engine controls, hydraulic cranes, five GM gensets, and a machine shop on the aft deck topped by a helicopter pad.
The Chief has always been stationed on the Columbia River, and captains and owners of the thousands of vessels operating in the northwest know that if the worst comes to pass, the Salvage Chief will come to their aid. It has proved itself in around 250 rescues, so you would imagine the concept would have been copied. But as far as I can tell, it is still the only salvage ship with ultra-shallow draft anywhere in the world.
Occasionally the Chief is chartered for an underwater construction project or a long-term job like the Exxon Valdez, but the rest of the time life for the ship and skeleton crew is a waiting game. It is now six years since the Chief was belatedly called to the wreck of the New Carissa, and it has only averaged one call per year since then–mainly fishing boats on the beach. Modern electronics have almost eliminated navigational error as a cause of shipwreck, and wrecks caused by bad weather like the Millicoma are fortunately rare.
The latest tugs are far more powerful than those of the post-war years, and several working together can generally succeed in pulling a ship off the sand and back into the channel upriver, work that the Salvage Chief used to pick up. But when it comes to a grounding on the beach, they will never compare with the 350-ton line pull the Salvage Chief can develop with its anchors down and its winches turning.
The Chief needed new plating around the starboard shaft at its last drydocking in 2003 for its five-year ABS inspection. It also has to pass annual scrutiny from the Coast Guard. Even though it has turned 60, bosun Don Floyd reckons the ship still has many years left. But he agrees there is little economic incentive for a new-build dedicated solely to salvage. So when the Chief finally is retired, there will be nothing to replace it.