Troubled fishing boat successfully raised from sea floor off San Juan Island

Salvage crews have successfully raised a 48-foot fishing boat that had sunk near the northwest tip of San Juan Island.

The sinking on May 3 was not the F/V Chief Joseph’s first trouble at sea.

The U.S. Coast Guard had found the vessel’s captain negligent for abandoning the helm for an ill-timed toilet break immediately before a late-night collision off the Oregon coast in 2021.

Around 6 a.m. on May 3, Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound received a report that the 48-foot commercial fishing vessel was taking on water off Henry Island, immediately west of San Juan Island, with its owner, Steve Zidell of Samoa, California, and his dog aboard.

As the 76-year-old boat sank, it spilled an unknown amount of diesel, leaving a half-mile sheen and a field of debris on the surface of Haro Strait, the wide, current-churned passage separating Washington’s San Juan Islands from Canada’s Vancouver Island.

According to the Coast Guard, Zidell and his dog climbed into a life raft and made their way to the rocky shore of sparsely inhabited Henry Island, where they were rescued.

The next day, salvage divers were able to vacuum up 1,110 gallons of diesel from the fuel tanks of the Chief Joseph as it sat in about 60 feet of water, according to the San Juan County Department of Emergency Management.

“The San Juan Islands are clearly a challenging place to get to and operate in, and getting the fuel off the boat in short order was a major success and avoided a much more impactful pollution event,” department director Brendan Cowan said in an email.

Spilled diesel, while toxic to wildlife that encounters it, is less harmful than crude oil: Diesel quickly evaporates, rather than lingering for years in the environment.

Whale watchers spotted at least seven orcas near Henry Island on the day of the sinking, according to the nonprofit Orca Network.

Orcas would not know to avoid a diesel sheen, according to biologist Deborah Giles with the San Juan-based nonprofit Wild Orca.

“They don't have a sense of smell like other mammals do,” she told KUOW in 2022.

One week after the sinking, a team from Global Diving and Salvage managed to lift the Chief Joseph to the surface with a barge crane, then haul it to Anacortes. The Washington Department of Natural Resources took possession of the boat and is negotiating its disposition with Zidell. To keep his boat, he would have to pay the agency's cost of recovering it from the sea floor by May 27.

“The fishing boat sank in shallow water and didn’t slide any deeper, which was fortunate because it is a high energy, high current location,” Cowan told the Victoria Times-Colonist.

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Another fishing boat, the Aleutian Isle, sank about a mile south of Henry Island in 2022, sending a two-mile sheen of diesel into Haro Strait. Currents pushed that boat along the sea floor to a depth of 240 feet. It took five weeks for deep-water dive teams to bring the Aleutian Isle to the surface.

That sinking is still under investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard.

In April, an empty tandem kayak was found bobbing in Henry Island’s Open Bay, according to the San Juan Islander. Two Canadian brothers had been paddling it on a day trip from Victoria to D'Arcy Island, the southernmost of Canada’s Gulf Islands. Their bodies were found 10 to 15 miles to the south of Henry Island, highlighting the hazards of Haro Strait to boats of all sizes.

RELATED: Washington’s border waters are on the cusp of a major rise in oil tanker traffic

Environmentalists and tribes on both sides of the watery border are concerned about the imminent increase in oil tanker traffic in Haro Strait and other transboundary waters expected to begin in May. The Trans Mountain Pipeline, after a multibillion-dollar expansion project, is now able to carry three times the crude oil it used to from Alberta to tankers docking near Vancouver, British Columbia.

Trouble off the Oregon Coast

In July 2021, the Chief Joseph was motoring south to California when it rammed into another fishing boat, the F/V Linda, about 15 miles out from Yaquina Bay, Oregon.

According to Coast Guard investigators, the Linda was adrift, with both crew members asleep but its sodium deck lights on, when the Chief Joseph hit it about 4 a.m.

“The Master of the CHIEF JOSEPH indicated that he stepped away from the operating station for a period to defecate, only to find upon his return, the starboard beam of the LINDA directly off the bow of his vessel with the risk of collision imminent,” Coast Guard investigators found.

The Linda’s hull was breached and the boat was taking on water. With the help of a pump provided by a Coast Guard response boat, the Linda made it back to port.

Coast Guard investigators said both captains violated regulations aimed at preventing collisions. They found the unnamed captain of the Chief Joseph negligent for “purposefully leaving the operating station of an underway vessel.”

The Linda’s insurance underwriter determined the boat was a total loss and sued Zidell for damages.

The parties reached an undisclosed settlement in June 2023.

Zidell did not respond to KUOW's requests for comment.