The John and Olaf

The John and Olaf was a big 85’ shrimp dragger, a modern steel vessel, fishing out of Kodiak in the 1970s, and operated by two popular fishermen, John Blaalid and Olaf Welzien. In early 1973, they were fishing, with four men aboard in the Puale Bay area of the Alaska Peninsula when they encountered severe icing conditions with winds over a hundred miles an hour. Concerned that their boat was about to capsize, they radioed a mayday distress call and got into their life raft.
The Coast Guard contacted a nearby crabber, the big 170’ Shelikof Strait, a small tanker that had been converted into a crabber, and asked the skipper, George Johnson, to go into Puale Bay to try to rescue the crew. But when they came around the point, winds Skipper Johnson estimated at 150 miles an hour, pushed his boat sideways and made it impossible for him to enter the bay.
Above him a four engine Coast Guard C-130 also trying to find the lost crabbers, but at 700’ the pilot reported getting into heavy icing spray and had to abandon the search.

48 hours were to pass before the wind eased for searchers to get into Puale Bay. They found the John and Olaf gently bumping the bottom near the shore, heavily covered with ice but still floating. The men’s coffee cups were still on the table, but the crew was never found.
Ever since then that section of the Alaska coast has been nicknamed John and Olaf Country.
Since then, skippers have become more cognizant of the dangers posed by high wind and bitter cold. But sometimes conditions especially in this area are too ferocious for even the best equipped vessels, as shown by the loss of the 135’ crabber Scandies Rose here on New Year’s Eve, 2019. Four men were lost, but amazingly two were rescued by a Coast Guard chopper operating in 60 knot winds, 20’ seas and 10˚ temperatures, dropping a rescue swimmer to help the two fishermen into the rescue basket.