PORTLAND, ORE.—With the Oregon coast in sight and the worst Pacific storm in years whipping the sea, New Carissa freighter captain Benjamin M. Morgado lowered the anchor and prepared to wait out the night of Feb. 3.

Yet nature continued to push the 639-foot freighter toward shore. Morgado ordered the anchor hoisted to try to power the vessel into deeper water, but to no avail. The next day, the boat ran aground three miles from the channel entrance to Coos Bay. Over the next few days, it leaked up to 70,000 gallons of gooey fuel oil.

“Since the wind was so strong and the swells were too big, it took time to fully heave up the anchor, and the vessel was slowly dragged into the shallow water,” Morgado explained in a memo to the ship’s owner, TMM Co. Ltd of Tokyo. He and 22 others on the ship—all Filipino—had far more explaining to do in the weeks ahead, as U.S. officials questioned them for weeks about how the ship ended up stuck on the Oregon coast, fouling its beaches with heavy diesel fuel.

THE RESCUE’S
AFTERMATH

In the days and weeks after Coast Guard helicopters plucked the 23 crew members off the ship, their plight has seemed almost inconsequential to a public still largely focused on the environmental damage caused by the spilled fuel and on the series of efforts to remove a ship that just wouldn’t go away, despite attempts over the past month to firebomb it, pump it out and tow it out to sea.

The sailors spent their first week on shore at the Pony Soldier Motor Inn at Coos Bay. “Everything was a shock to all of us,” said Angelito Tumulak, chief officer of the vessel. “Not one of us had any friends or relatives in the whole state—we were total strangers.”

But they didn’t stay strangers for long. While attending a Catholic church service, they met a dozen Filipino Americans and were asked to sing their country’s anthem: Bayang Magiliw (which means “My Beloved Country”).

“Singing seemed to bring out all of our emotions,” said Rafael Magbanua, the ship’s fourth engineer. “We’d been through a terrible storm for more than a week, ran aground and were airlifted out in awful conditions. We felt blessed just to be alive and to be in one piece.”

Just over a week later, the crew members—minus the cook and four others who were allowed to return to the Philippines—were bused to Portland, a city most had heard of only through the Portland Trailblazers basketball team. They were put up at a downtown hotel while a Coast Guard investigation proceeded.

For many of the sailors, the questions—which came not only from the Coast Guard but also from a battery of lawyers and insurance investigators—was their first exposure to the American legal system.

“I was worried for myself, for my family and for my position,” Magbanua said. “All of us were concerned for the future.” As the hearings dragged on, the officers and the deck crew had good reason for concern. Beyond the Coast Guard inquiry loomed the shadow of a federal criminal investigation into the cause of the grounding.

To its credit, the crew was found to be free of alcohol or drugs, a top concern among U.S. officials since the Exxon Valdez disaster of a decade ago. Yet serious questions remained unanswered: Why was the New Carissa anchored so close to shore on such a stormy night? Why did it start drifting with so little warning? Why did Morgado order the ship to lift the anchor when the ship was drifting inland?

The atmosphere was tense. In the first day of testimony from the ship’s crew, translators spent 25 minutes trying to convey the meaning of just one question to the anchor operator in Tagalog.

Throwing up their hands in frustration, lawyers declined to cross-examine the sailor. “That was tough,’’ sighed an exasperated Cmdr. Chris Lockwood, the hearing’s presiding officer.

No reporters were allowed access to Morgado, who sat stiffly in the hearing room surrounded by a tight phalanx of officials including his lawyer and his interpreter, Corrie Lalangan. He ended up taking the Fifth Amendment on many questions.

According to newly released records, Morgado ordered the anchor raised when the ship was one and a half miles from shore to allow the ship’s engines to move the vessel out into deeper waters. But within 10 minutes, the ship was blown half the distance to shore. A maritime expert testified that Morgado could have let out more anchor chain, which would have weighted down the ship in place, or dropped a second anchor.

Tumulak, the ship’s chief officer and second in command, said Morgado never asked his opinion and that he did not offer it. “That would amount to unsolicited advice,” he said. Under repeated questioning, Tumulak refused to second-guess Morgado’s decision.

Maritime pilot Steve Sweet, who tried unsuccessfully to board the New Carissa, testified that Morgado had ordered his crew to prop open the cargo holds before bringing the ship into port—a common maneuver that allows foreign ships to avoid paying longshoremen’s fees for the work. Though Sweet said the opened holds and doors can sometimes catch high winds and push a ship sideways, a Coast Guard analyst determined that they were not a major factor in the grounding.

Whether Morgado tried to bring Sweet on board too late is also at issue. Under federal law, freighters such as the New Carissa must have a state-licensed pilot on board when they enter waters shallower than 180 feet. The day of the shipwreck, the subagent vessel Ingvar Doessing received a cable from the ship indicating that a pilot would be needed to guide the ship into Coos Bay at around 4 p.m. At that time a Coast Guard gale warning was in effect because of 21 foot waves and winds gusting up to 235 knots, and by the time Sweet arrived in Coos Bay that night, waves up to 25 feet high were breaking across the jetty. The New Carissa was impossible to board.

AN OUTPOURING OF COMPASSION

The crew members’ stay in Portland might have been even more stressful had it not been for El Shaddai, a Christian group that has made reaching out to seafarers a key part of its mission.

The group, which visited the men soon after they arrived, offered warm fellowship. Brother Cesar Quinto, a native of Manila, led prayers, and volunteers donated sweaters and jackets.

Homemade ethnic dinners struck a particularly poignant chord—the men had for weeks subsisted on hotel food, some of it so unfamiliar that they sometimes didn’t know what they were ordering.

“It was a near miracle that they found us, and we were amazed that Portland had such an active Filipino community,” Tumulak said.

The group stayed close to the seamen for weeks. Said Sister Bang Piercy: “These sailors are all very young, and yet they’ve handled themselves so well. They are the finest gentlemen you could imagine meeting.”

Others extended a hand as well. The Blazers Boys & Girls Club of Portland let the crew use its gym to work off tension with two hours of basketball. The sport, said seaman Richard Paule, has replaced baseball as the favorite back home. “We even play basketball on the ship when the weather is good, but we’ve already lost three basketballs to the ocean.”

Don Liddle, regional director of the Columbia River Region Inland Boatmen’s Union, helped raise $1,400 in donations, mostly from local longshoremen. “I hate to think of any merchant sailors stranded on foreign soil with nothing but the clothes on their backs—and some of these guys didn’t even have decent coats,” he said.

International Transportation Federation Inspector Lila Smith, who had attended several of the Coast Guard hearings, broke the ice by showing up at the hotel with eight large pizzas and several cases of soft drinks. Laughter rang out as Smith bantered good -naturedly and distributed donated funds.

Later, Smith contacted the general consul of the Philippines, Amado P. Cortez, who called the ship’s officers and assured them that the crew would not be forgotten or mistreated. She helped the workers get back wages and even $1,000 each in reimbursement for their gear, clothing and other personal belongings—all of which had to be left behind on the ship. The seamen said the money would go toward warm clothes and phone cards so they could talk to their wives and families back in the Philippines.

As February turned into March, the sailors said they had largely adjusted to their surroundings, even acquiring a hankering for barbecued ribs, hamburgers, French fries and steaks. Adjusting to the blustery weather was more difficult, Paule admitted. “Oregon is beautiful, but it is so windy and cold, and it rains every day.”

Like most of the crew, Paule, in his late 20s, still loves life at sea despite its perils and the long separations from loved ones. “When we are at sea, we miss the land; when were on land, we miss the sea,” he said. “That’s a sailor’s life.”

Baltazar Soan, 20, the youngest crewman, said both the shipwreck and the outpouring of compassion left indelible memories. “This is my first voyage overseas,” said Soan, a third-year student at Baliwag Maritime Academy in Bucalan. “I will remember the storm, the shipwreck and the friendships as long as I live.”

AN ELUSIVE ENDING

On March 1, nearly four frustrating weeks after the New Carissa ran aground along Oregon’s coastline, the cargo ship’s broke

n bow was towed out to sea by the Sea Voyage, a powerful salvage tugboat.

“Yabba dabba doo!” said Bill Milwee, the Japanese ship owner’s salvage consultant, as he saw the bow go.

Such jubilation turned out to be premature.The bow had been destined for a point 200 miles out to sea, where gunboats had planned to sink it into thousands of feet of water so cold that the fuel aboard would turn as hard as asphalt.

But the next day, the tow line—a 3-inch-thick, 1,100-yard tow rope flown in from the Netherlands—snapped in a storm that kicked up 70 mph winds and 30-foot swells, setting the wreckage adrift. Eventually, it settled in shallow water about 50 miles away from the stern.

As military and civilian salvage experts wrestled anew with how best to tow out the wreck, the Coast Guard hearing back in Portland was abruptly ended on March 3, even although Cmdr. Lockwood estimated that it would be three to four months before a decision would be rendered. By the next day, all the remaining crew members, including the captain, were allowed to go back to the Philippines.

Before flying out of Portland, the sailors laughed, danced and sang karaoke at a farewell party hosted by El Shaddai. “It w

as like they were freed from a jail,” said Teresta Lumapas, an El Shaddai volunteer.

But as the men watched television footage of their once-proud vessel beached near Waldport, the festive atmosphere—at least for a moment—turned melancholy.