Each January Coastal Transportation’s mariners take a plunge into frigid Puget Sound, preparing themselves for the worst the Bering Sea can dish out. Our mariners push survival training to the limit, spending hours in a life-raft, as well as floating free in survival suits. The flares are set off, the biscuits are eaten, the water drank from mylar bags. No training is more realistic.
This week we start a new eight-episode series highlighting Coastal Transportation’s unique Summer Mariner Program.
The program places merchant marine academy students on a variety of the company’s vessels. Between May and August, the trainees will sail for about seventy-two days on the company’s 2000-ton Alaskan freighters as deckhands.
But before that they get training in lashing down cargo, mooring vessels, and driving lift-trucks. Best of all they make the Curlew/Oyster expedition show in this video, something done by no other company in the world, designed to train mariners in classical navigation skills.
Curlew is the company’s own dedicated training boat.
This is no internship. It’s an intense deep-dive into coastal piloting and industrial seamanship, with participants making real deckhand wages.
IN THIS EPISODE: In May 2024 the trainees board the Curlew for the first day of the expedition and head north in the Salish Sea.
I found it telling when I saw the use of the calculator. I’ve done so in the past, but I think most experienced navigators would pick up the dividers and step it off.
The trainees aboard the Curlew head north in the Salish Sea, from Oak Harbor WA to Ganges Harbor BC. May 2024.
Seymour Narrows is the star of this week’s episode. Seymour is the choke point for commercial traffic along the Inside Passage. Everything from cruise ships to yachts time their passage through the 1/4-mile wide narrows at slack water, making for a traffic jam in a pass infamous for 15-knot currents.
Today’s episode includes historic footage of the obstruction in the middle of the narrows being blown up with 1,270 metric tons of high explosives.
The expedition provides something not found elsewhere: expert training on piloting in strong tidal currents. Training which will get intense when these young sailors undertake the Oyster voyage.
When I told one cadet I had on my watch that he would eventually learn to manipulate dividers with one hand, he threw me a shocked look and said “No way!”
He wasn’t joking. I still laugh remembering that.
I too remember the learning curve that comes with one-handed divider use. A rite-of-passage, I guess. As is getting over the fixation about over-precision in their use. Though you do see the trainees stepping things off with their fingers at 00:13.
More about that ‘chart’ seen at 00:13 and 1:07. No nautical chart covers the entire IP. But the table mats in the Curlew’s galley are actually laminated decorative charts of the Inside Passage from Olympia to Skagway. Good study guides, so a trainee learns how the tidal system works, what the routes are, and were the danger points lay.
I think @Kennebec_Captain and myself had similar experiences on our first IP voyages. With me the captain said as we left Seattle, “Take the boat from here. Wake me up there.” [Roughly circles a point on the chart.] “If you hit anything you’re fired.” Right out of the academy, with no experience, I was left alone to figure out things for the next three terrifying days. The captain only came up on my watch to take us through Seymour Narrows and Wrangell.
But with our program trainees get in-depth training on the IP before their first freighter voyage.
They forgot the “wake me up there” part on the Empress of the North.
Well, the bridge watch team was awake on the Empress of the North when she ran aground. What they failed to do was to follow the simple watch-standing rule, “When your mouth is open your brain is off.”
Before I joined the CG Cutter in Kodiak the CG sent me to an 8 week “A” school to learn the basics: laying out track-lines, maintaining a DR plot, plotting bearing and ranges etc. It’s a whole system. Aboard ship the same, standardized, fully supported system is in use with all the required tool (gyro-stabilized radar with VRM for ranges, pelorus to take bearings etc.
Capt Doug’s system was entirely based upon local knowledge and the Aleutian freighter that was my first job as mate lacked the tools (no track-lines, small heads-up radar, no VRM, (fixed range rings only) not able to take a proper fix. At 12 kts every turn around the next point it was OK, figure this out.
I found the first trip to be very stressful.
“Sink (Cinque) Island” 
The training crew reaches Sullivan Bay in the Broughton islands, where they launch Oyster for the sail-and-oar journey. Sullivan Bay is off the beaten track of the Inside Passage. It’s a village of about 50 people in the summer, living in about a dozen houses on pontoons.
The trainees lift the 1,750-pound Oyster off Curlew’s deck using a hand-powered crane. No hydraulics. Why? The expedition has a lot of purposes. One is to get the trainees in physical shape for working in Alaska.
The hand-powered crane is an exercise to build physical strength and endurance. The first fourteen days of the SMP program has a physical training component–that’s one reason the trainees will be rowing most of the next 130 miles.
Where do they spend their nights?
On the Oyster voyage they camp ashore each night in semi-wilderness. There aren’t many places to securely anchor a small boat on that stretch of the Inside Passage. The current is always running and the wind can be stiff. The crew loses a lot of sleep worrying whether the boat will drag anchor in the middle of the night and be lost.
Which is great. We want them waking up at 0200 in a sweat, worried if the boat is ok. We want that drilled into them.
Only a few coves make good anchorages, which forces the trainees to study the geography of the charts with obsessive interest, which is exactly what we want them to do. If they later become deck officers with CTI they’ll have that geography burned into their minds.
They have to worry about tides stranding the boat. If they didn’t consider depth of water and the time of low tide they can find the boat stranded the next morning. Which can mean losing a day of travel.
They only have six days food. If the journey goes long they go hungry. That’s the penalty for poor chart reading skills and failure in tidal calculations.
Do you have people dropping out during or right after this ordeal (which seems like a fantastic learning opportunity and a sincere investment of the company in their trainees), or is the upfront candidate selection process so well-honed, that anybody entering this stage is physically and mentally tough enough for this rite of passage?
No one has ever dropped out. We have a very good vetting program. But the best motivator is this: it’s part of the internship. They drop out, they drop out of the summer internship. They do that, graduation is delayed. So, they’re locked in.
Is making lines fore and aft fast to trees feasible at any point, rather than anchoring?
No. A cove of size/ shape that would allow you to do that is quite rare.
The major issue with anchoring on the Inside Passage is that the boat has to be anchored in deep water, so she is afloat when you want to depart, and not stranded when the tide goes down.
Trouble is, how do you anchor in deep water and still get ashore—without swimming?
The boat is anchored to a clothesline-anchor-rig: an endless loop of line about 100 feet long. One end is rove through a buoy which itself is anchored in deep water. The other end of the loop goes around a tree ashore, a 100 feet away. The loop is free to rotate between tree and buoy, like an old-style clothesline.
The boat is tied with a short length of line to the clothesline. Now you can land the boat and unload all your gear. Then by pulling on the clothesline you can send the boat by herself out to the buoy in deep water.
All of which sounds simple, but is a complete mind-fuck. The actual mechanics of setting the rig in currents and wind takes newbies a couple of hours to accomplish, right when they are dead tired.
And it takes experience for them to read the chart and beach to decide on the best anchorage, and make their tidal predictions correctly for all the work to be worth it. Screw anything up and the boat will still be stranded the next day.
But that’s what they are there for, to learn. A lot of these guys can make a tidal prediction. But no one told them what the ramifications are of doing it wrong. Now they learn the real life lessons and never forget them
And they learn to deal with frustration and exhaustion at the end of a long day of physical work. Take care of the boat and she will take care of you. Screw up and the boat might drift away in a blow, leaving you surrounded by grizzly bears and cougars.
Training doesn’t get any better than that!
The crew leaves the Curlew behind and set out in the open-boat Oyster, beginning a 130-mile journey without electronics or motor, through a maze of waterways.
To reach each night’s camp they must study paper charts obsessively, and correctly predict the time and direction of the area’s strong tidal currents. Failure to correctly plan will result in hours of needless rowing, or camping on the side of a bluff. With CTI’s training program the learning curve is steep: failure equals pain.
The crew gets lost right at the start, which is typical. Without the intervention of their skipper they eventually get back on the correct track.
Man, I’d be lashing myself into the high crook of a tree at night, though I suppose a determined bear or cougar could snatch me out of there. 
