Captain Phil Harris Read Online Free

surroundings or location, and certainly no way to communicate with the outside world.
    “We might as well have been in a canoe out there,” Grant said.
    As if all that wasn’t bad enough, a fire had ignited inside the wall of one of the staterooms, caused when the salt from the seawater shorted some wiring.
    The boat’s engineer tried to race downstairs to the engine room to pull the breakers on the electrical panel. But with paper and charts from the wheelhouse strewn all over the stairs, he slipped, bounced off a wall, and went tumbling down, step after step, injuring his hip.
    The crew managed to extinguish the fire, and Grant and several crew members were able to board up the blasted-out windows by cutting the plywood out of several of the bunks and securing the wood with bolts. With a passable defense against the elements, the boat was in decent shape. It still had power, an adequate supply of food and liquids, and, most important of all, it had Grant, a captain so familiar with that area of the Bering Sea that, to his trained eyes, it was as if there were a highway in front of him with markings as clear as signs leading back to land.
    Still, in such uncertain conditions, there is always the danger that the ship will be tossed around so much that even a captain as knowledgeable as Grant could become disoriented.
    So he picked up the fallen compass and bolted it to a shelf in the wheelhouse.
    “Whether it was right or not, I didn’t know,” Grant said, “but at least I would know we weren’t going around in a circle.”
    Navigating by the stars wasn’t a practical solution because the skies remained overcast much of the time while the storm continued.
    “I knew that, as long as I could stay in the direction I was headed,” Grant said, “I was eventually going to get to an island, because the Aleutians stretch out over a thousand miles.”
    While he had a pretty good idea where he was, he had lost all lines of communication to the shore. Back on dry land word soon spread that the Golden Viking was missing at sea.
    The bad news traveled quickly back to Seattle, where Phil was recovering. Arriving at a Seattle hospital the day after his emergency treatment in Dutch Harbor, he had been assured that amputation was totally unnecessary. The EMT had done such a good job—stitching up Phil’s finger and grafting on a piece of skin from his forearm—that the new skin was successfully melding with the old, keeping his finger intact.
    Phil was overwhelmed with relief, but the good news was quickly overshadowed when he learned that contact had been lost with the Golden Viking . Among the crew of five were not only his dad, but also several others to whom Phil had grown close.
    The Coast Guard began a wide search, both by sea and air, but as one day turned into two, then three, four, and five, hope began to fade.
    Phil was crushed. The thought of losing his remaining parent was more than he could bear. Still, by then twenty-one years old, he was grudgingly ready to deal with reality. He began to make funeral arrangements for Grant.
    Back on the Golden Viking, there was no talk of not making it home.
    “I wasn’t worried about that,” said Grant, “as long as we were floating. You can go a long way if you stay above the water.”
    He had rigged up a method for getting the throttle and steering working, but he still couldn’t go much faster than one or two knots.
    Slowly, the crippled ship made its way back to Akutan. Not once in that time did Grant see another vessel on the water.
    About 6:00 a.m. on Halloween Eve, five days after contact had been lost with Grant’s boat, a crewman on a processing ship resting in Akutan Harbor was shaving by a porthole when his eye caught a boat approaching in the distance.
    Recognizing it as the Golden Viking, the crewman got so excited, he cut himself.
    In his typical style, Grant, looking back at the moment, shrugged and said, “They were quite surprised to see me.”
    “The