By GARRET JAROS/Lincoln Chronicle
NEWPORT – When things went wrong, they went wrong quickly.
What had been a successful run south from Newport on Sunday to collect end-of-the-season crab pots turned deadly in an instant for the commercial fishing vessel Das Bug.
The 40-foot boat was just beginning to make a turn to head into port when captain Perry Bordeaux noticed something did not feel right. Then the boat began to roll and did not stop. Within 30 seconds the boat disappeared beneath white-capped seas and four men were in the frigid water struggling to stay alive.
One did not make it. His name was Ishan Pillai.
A week before the tragedy, the 28-year-old Army veteran and native of Santa Cruz, Calif., had been exploring the Oregon coast, hiking to forest fire lookout towers and posting about it on his Facebook page.
“I will contribute to the fire abatement one day soon,” he wrote. “Until then. I’ll enjoy the views and hikes here in beautiful Oregon.”
Pillai’s page says he lived in Salem, had studied civil construction engineering technology at Portland Community College and started in July as a civil engineering technician with a company in Salem.
The self-described “advocate for the people & the land, dogs and old 4WD Toyotas” made his final post Saturday when he celebrated meeting new friends at the dock in Newport that included Bordeaux and Das Bug deckhands.
“Might go out crab fishing in the winter with them as a deckhand,” Pillai wrote. “Great group of hard-working guys that have my utmost respect. I already want to be First Mate.”
The post finishes with “… I got to go on a kick ass hike right next to Newport harbor. Oregon is getting better by the day for me. I love it here.” Pillai followed with emojis that included a crab, anchor, fish on a line and an ocean wave.
An invitation
The crew initially met Pillai on Saturday, waiting dockside near the 97-foot F/V Defiant, another boat that Bordeaux owns. Operating with a different captain, the Defiant became disabled the week before while 95 miles offshore and had to be towed to Newport by the U.S. Coast Guard.
“He (Pillai) had talked with a friend from a four-wheeling group who happened to be doing some mechanical work for me,” Bordeaux told the Lincoln Chronicle on Thursday. “And he just wanted to come and check it out because he had an interest in going fishing. He ended up hanging out all day and he was just a super nice guy.
“He had this amazingly positive energy about him. And everyone was immediately drawn to him.”
Bordeaux said Pillai commented to him “Hey, you’re another brown guy.” They shared how Bordeaux’s father and Pillai’s parents had immigrated from southern India and their shared experiences of being first-generation Americans.
“We bonded quickly on that stuff,” Bordeaux said.
Pillai told him about making $19 an hour at his job, thought he could do better and that he had heard fishermen made good money. Another fishermen joined the conversation and they gave Pillai a rundown of what he might expect.
“And he said, ‘That sounds amazing, it sounds like an adventure that you get paid well for’,” Bordeaux said. “And he asked about whether he could sign on to go winter crabbing. I said, ‘Well, before you do you should at least come for a boat ride sometime just to see if you get seasick or like the ocean or the boat or whatever else before you quit your career track’.”
Bordeaux said he did not invite Pillai out. But Pillai and Das Bug deckhand Landon Robinson, 24, later began texting and Robinson asked Bordeaux if Pillai could come along Sunday to retrieve the crab pots.
Bordeaux said yes.
Fateful trip
Pillai was so excited that he arrived at the dock at 9 p.m. Saturday to wait for captain and crew, three hours before the Das Bug was scheduled to shove off.
As they prepared to depart, Bordeaux said he showed Pillai where to store his belongings and then had Robinson familiarize him with the safety gear – the six or seven lifejackets in an open cubby just inside the back door of the wheelhouse, the five ocean survival suits under a bench seat across from them – and a new, top-of-the-line emergency radio beacon mounted just outside the wheelhouse.
In the event of an emergency, the beacon is designed to float free of the boat to the surface where it transmits a distress signal with the vessel’s identification and location.
But when the boat sank 16 hours later, Bordeaux said neither he nor the crew saw the beacon. The Coast Guard later confirmed that no signal was sent.
There was also no life raft aboard, a requirement for the Das Bug in those conditions — something Bordeaux is angry about and wants to explain but cannot while the Coast Guard’s casualty investigation is underway.
The Das Bug plied south through the darkness for five or six hours before arriving to pull crab pots at a “honey hole” that Bordeaux relies on in late summer. With 145 pots left to retrieve before the close of the commercial crabbing season Friday, Bordeaux said he planned to bring in 45 or 50 on Sunday and then finish later with two trips.
By 6:30 a.m. Sunday the crew was hauling pots. As the sun began to rise, Bordeaux said it was clear to him the weather was getting worse than forecast. He decided to be conservative and pull just enough gear to get most of the boat’s allotted 1,200 pounds of crab before stacking 21 pots on the boat and motoring back to Newport.
It was about 11 a.m. and the Das Bug was about a mile offshore of Yachats.
Pillai did get seasick.
“But when he was done, he was back to having a big old smile,” Bordeaux said. “One of his childhood friends contacted me later and said (Pillai) was posting live streams on his Instagram from the boat and he said, ‘Yeah, he was clearly having the time of his life’.”
Bordeaux said he kept the Das Bug at just under four knots at a depth of 10 to 15 fathoms about a mile offshore to keep the boat and crew from getting slapped around by the waves as it pushed against the current.
As the hours passed the wind increased, whipping the surface of the sea into a gauntlet of white-capped waves.
Coast Guard petty officer boatswain mate second class Derek Knight, who would be first at the rescue scene in one of the two 47-foot boats dispatched from Yaquina Bay, described the conditions to the Chronicle.
“We were seeing six-to-eight-foot swells with the occasional 10-foot swell,” Knight said Monday. “And it was the 20- to 25-knot winds that were really kicking everything up. And they went down pretty close to the reef so the water shallows up, which was making everything stand up.”
Disaster strikes
After traveling north from Yachats for about six hours, the Das Bug was one to two miles offshore and just beginning to angle toward the Yaquina Bay bar when disaster struck, Bordeaux told the Chronicle on Monday.
“It happened insanely fast,” Bordeaux had said. “We are talking maybe 30 seconds between knowing there was an issue and the boat being gone.”
Bordeaux said when he began to make the turn toward the bar something didn’t feel right.
“It felt like a slack tank but I looked back and the fish hold was still pumping water out of the top so it wasn’t slack,” Bordeaux said.
A slack tank means the tank is not full of water and can create a dangerous side-to-side sloshing that can capsize a boat. A full tank means good stability and ballast.
“I had just enough time to check my high-water alarms and look at my bilge pumps and both the engine room and the lazarette were still just doing their occasional cycling thing that they do,” Bordeaux said.
With only a couple thousand pounds of gear stacked low there was no issue of load height and center of gravity, he added.
“It had to be water in the back fish hold,” Bordeaux said. “But before we could even investigate, the (expletive) boat just leaned over (to port) and kept going. I tried to steer into the turn and compensate for it until we could figure out what was going on or get safety equipment or something but the boat had a mind of its own at that point.”
Robinson and Andy Tierney, 37, both lifelong friends of Bordeaux’s, were at the back of the boat while Pillai was inside the wheelhouse with Bordeaux when the Das Bug began to roll.
“So I threw him out the back door — picked him up and threw him,” Bordeaux said. “And I went in and grabbed two life jackets with my two hands and chucked them out the back door. And I went in to get two more and the wheelhouse was going underwater by then. So I went out and one of the guys had thrown a life jacket on and swam off on his own and the other two guys were clinging to the hull and not grabbing the life jacket.
“So I threw the life jacket on and bear-hugged the two of them and tried to keep them above water. I basically tried to keep them from panicking and tried to keep them working together. They were both a little panicky.”
When the boat first rolled, it was a quick-thinking Robinson who scrambled to the side of the boat which was above water, and made the distress call on his cell phone that alerted the Coast Guard.
The boat went down bow first and the men began to drift south with the current.
“We were getting hit by buffalo,” Bordeaux said, referring to large wind-raked whitecaps. “For the most part I was able to hang onto the guys but all three of us, our heads were going underwater because we had one life jacket between us. I was trying my best to keep the both of them up and not drown myself in the process. And try to keep them calm.”
Bordeaux said he encouraged the men to lay on their backs and rest their heads on the life jacket so the three men could kick together in search of a buoy or some debris they could hold onto. But he couldn’t keep them calm enough.
“And then basically we got hit by a series of three or four or five buffalo in a row that were pretty big ones,” he said. “I lost hold of the both of them. And by the time we cleared on the backside of that I saw Landon right in front of me. He was eight or 10 feet away from me and I slammed and got ahold of him.
“And by the time I turned around and tried to look for (Pillai) he was just nowhere to be seen,” Bordeaux said. “So initially I had hope that on the backside of one of those buffaloes, because he was kind of on the weather side, and I was kind of down weather from him, I had hoped that maybe he just took the opportunity and made a break for some of the floating (debris) that wasn’t that far away.”
Knight said one of the crew told rescuers that Pillai had begun to seize from the cold before disappearing. Even with a life jacket, Knight said, a person could not survive for long in the cold ocean water.
“We were on scene and the people we did recover were already hypothermic,” Knight said. “And they had only been in the water for about 20 minutes.”
Bordeaux, who has met with Pillai’s family and expressed his condolences, called the accident an “absolute tragedy” and something he has avoided for decades by doing everything he can to make sure that safety and maintenance are up to par.
“And after decades of doing this, you almost start to think that this can’t happen to you,” he said. “But,” he pauses, “it can happen to anybody at any time.”
Days after the sinking of the boat, debris from the Das Bug has been found as far south as the mouth of the Siuslaw River in Florence.
A family mourns
A Facebook post on Newport Fishermen’s Wives page on Wednesday shared a message from the Pillai’s family. Fishermen’s Wives is taking donations for the family, which came up immediately from California.
“Our beloved Ishan was lost at sea in a tragic boating accident,” the family said. “He was on a commercial crab fishing vessel on what was just an adventure and a learning experience for him when it capsized in the Pacific Ocean in Newport, Oregon. An adventurer, a nomad, a nature lover — he went the way he lived — chasing yet another thrill.
“Though his time with us was brief, he filled every moment with light, laughter, and boundless love. He lived with a joy, a gleam in his eye and a wonder and unfettered curiosity that touched everyone around him — an unforgettable spirit who made a lifetime of memories compressed into just a few precious years and made an indelible impression on everyone he met, however briefly! Loved and remembered forever for his joie de vivre. You will never be forgotten, our precious boy, Ishan.”
- Garret Jaros covers the communities of Yachats, Waldport, south Lincoln County and natural resources issues for Lincoln Chronicle and can be reached at GJaros@YachatsNews.com
Peace be with your spirit, Ishan. Even strangers are mourning your passing.
Has that poor guy’s body been found, yet? Condolences to his family…
Wish we could have met!!