Each month, an interesting aspect of the world’s oldest continuous maritime service will be highlighted. The men and women of the United States Coast Guard follow in the fine tradition of the brave mariners who have served before them. As sentinels and saviors of the seas, the United States Coast Guard proudly continues its commitment to honor, respect & devotion to duty to maintain their vigil – Semper Paratus.
The Search for the Gudrun
Captain Johann Axel Johannsson smiled as he watched his crew pulling in his trawler’s nets. The fishing grounds, he thought, continued to be good to him and his men on this trip.1 With over two hundred forty thousand pounds of flounder and other fish, he was pleased with his haul. Captain Johannsson reached for this radio mic and called to the nearby Blue Foam, a trawler from St. John’s, Newfoundland working in the same vicinity. Blue Foam, he began his transmission, “This is the Gudrun. We are heading westward about sixty or seventy miles,” he paused, “We want to shoot for some more rosefish before we head in to market.” The skipper of the Blue Foam acknowledged Captain Johannsson’s plans and wished him a bountiful hunt. Captain Johannsson hung up the microphone and returned to the helm. The bow of the Gudrun turned westward and by the next day, with luck still riding with him and his fellow fishermen, they had stuffed their holds with an additional twenty-thousand pounds of rosefish. The skipper of the Blue Foam, still trawling in his original location, overhead Captain Johannsson’s transmission to another fishing trawler. They were heading home. Captain Johansson marked the log of the trawler. It was fourteen hundred hours on January 13, 1951. The Gudrun, two hundred and sixty thousand pounds of fish in her holds, was heading home to Gloucester.2 Approximately sixteen hours later, at twenty-five minutes past zero-eight hundred in the morning, a distress message, “We are sinking,” was received by the United States Coast Guard. The radio transmission passed the latitude and longitude of the trawler. For the next twenty-six minutes, the Gudrun broadcasted several distress calls on four different frequencies in an attempt to hail someone for assistance. Despite the efforts of Coastguardsmen manning radios in New York, Boston, and aboard the U.S.C.G.C. Acushnet, as well as the Canadian radio station VAU at Yarmouth, Nova Scotia and WOU, a commercial station in Green Harbor, Massachusetts, none of them could establish radio communications with the distressed trawler. Based on the coordinates provided by the stricken fishing trawler, its last known position was roughly two hundred miles south of Cape Race, Newfoundland. The Gudrun had been able to transmit signals but not make any further contact.
As the various radio stations continued to attempt to establish communications with the Gudrun, the Commander of the Eastern Area of the United States Coast Guard began coordination and control of the search and rescue operation for the stricken trawler. Weather reports indicated that the location of the trawler had placed it near a snowstorm that had winds reported at roughly fifty miles an hour the previous evening. Heavy weather, the coordinators discussed, may have been a factor in the vessel’s distress. Facilities were immediately notified of the last known position of the radio broadcast of the Gudrun to the Canadian Rescue Coordination Center at Halifax, Nova Scotia, the United States Coast Guard Air Detachment at Argentia, Newfoundland, the United States Coast Guard Cutters Casco and Coos Bay, the U.S. Navy Commander of the Eastern Sea Frontier, the U.S.S. Powers and U.S.S. Larsen, both U.S. Navy destroyers, and the merchant vessels in the region including the New York-bound S.S. Mauretania, the S.S. African Planter, the S.S. American Scout, and three Nova Scotian fishing vessels, the Isabela Spindler, Blue Spray, and Jean Francis.
As search and rescue aircrews donned their equipment and readied their aircraft and as the various Coast Guard, U.S. Navy, and merchant vessels raced toward the last known position, the radio transmissions from the Gudrun ceased. Knowing the frigid temperatures of the Atlantic Ocean in mid-January offered only suffering to those in the water or tossed about wildly in a lifeboat, all dispatched to the scene knew that time was of the essence. By sixteen hundred hours of January 14th, two U.S. Coast Guard PBY aircraft were already aloft and circling the coordinates of the radio transmission of the Gudrun. There was no sight of the trawler, her lifeboats, or her crew. The planes began and continued their search patterns until their fuel began to encroach the limits of a safe return to base. The armada of rescue vessels and additional aircraft, including a Canadian-based Lancaster, also arrived in the vicinity during the daylight hours. Their officers and crews scanned the waning light of the mid-January day for any signs of the trawler and her crew of fifteen souls. The surface and air armada conducted their search for another five days. With nothing found, it was as if the Gudrun had simply slipped beneath the surface of the sea and had left no trace of her existence.
A month later, on February 13, 1951, the trawler Blue Surf spotted a single lifeboat in the distance. The captain of the trawler and his crew maneuvered alongside and took stock of the boat. The boat, found floating right side up, was undamaged and was only partially filled with water. One row-lock was shipped on the starboard side and the lower block of the forward boat fall was still in the boat. The stock of emergency food containers was also intact. The name stenciled in stark black ink was Gudrun. The lifeboat, the trawler Blue Surf reported, was found approximately sixty-six miles away from the original distress call of the missing trawler. No further evidence or debris from the Gudrun was ever found or recovered.
As with any maritime accident or loss, the United States Coast Guard investigated the loss of the Gudrun and her crew of fifteen men on the morning of January 14, 1951. The investigators took stock of the condition of the trawler and her various repairs since she had first been launched by the Bath Iron Works Corporation of Bath, Maine in 1928. She was a steel-hulled vessel of one hundred and fourteen feet in length, with a twenty-three-foot breadth, and an eleven-foot, four-inch depth. After government service, she was purchased and operated by Trawler Gudrun of West Medford, Massachusetts in 1946. She was rated to safely hold two hundred and seventy thousand pounds of catch and was outfitted with all of the necessary lifesaving equipment, including two lifeboats, a life-raft, and safety equipment, as well as the necessary radiotelephone, loran receiver, radio direction finder, and fathometer. During an American Bureau of Shipping survey completed in 1949 and again in 1950, several recommendations were made and subsequently completed by the owners to ensure a classification of A-1 by the American Bureau of Shipping. The only observations made by the surveyors and subsequent inspectors of the Gudrun that had raised concerns for the investigators were that “two exterior doors which gave access to an athwartship passageway in the deck house were not watertight” and that “two exterior doors, which gave access to the space under the whaleback forward and thence, via an open companionway, to the crew’s space below the main deck, were habitually left open at sea and that this practice permitted ingress of seawater from the main deck forward to the crew’s space in heavy weather.”
Though the Gudrun was never found and subsequently unable to be thoroughly inspected, the United States Coast Guard offered its opinions as to the loss in an official report on June 5, 1951. It was of the opinion of the investigators that the trawler foundered at sea in heavy weather on the morning of January 14, 1951 and that the foundering was initiated by heavy seas flooding the crew’s space forward through an open forecastle door and that leakage through and around the deck house doors aft might have been a contributing factor. Lastly, the investigators indicated that they felt, based on the conditions at the time of the foundering “that it would have been extremely difficult for the crew of the Gudrun to have successfully launched a lifeboat under the conditions.”
On January 14, 1951, Captain Johan Axel Johannsson and his crew of fourteen fellow fishermen were lost at sea.3 Though the final moments of their lives are unknown, the loss of the Gudrun reminds all of the vital vigilance to keep an eye on the weather at all times and how the weather can undermine the stability of one’s boat or vessel. The loss of the Gudrun is also a reminder of the heroic nature and willingness of mariners at sea and of the service personnel of the United States Navy and the United States Coast Guard to spring into action at the sign or report of distress. It is this willingness to put oneself in harm’s way that makes all mariners, who follow in their wake to render aid, as sentinels and saviors of the seas.
1 The Gudrun had been running heavy on their recent return trips to Gloucester. In November 1950, after hitting a spot they had discovered, they had brought home two hundred and forty thousand pounds of fish. On a trip over Christmas of the same year, they had tipped the scales at nearly two hundred and thirty-six thousand pounds of catch.
2 The Gudrun had originally been launched in 1928 as the Boston College and had been part of the fleet owned by the Atlantic and Pacific Fish Company of Boston. In August of 1940, she was acquired by the U.S. Navy and was commissioned as the U.S.S. Gull in September 1940. She served as a minesweeper along the east coast from Norfolk, Virginia to Boston, Massachusetts in 1941 before being shifted to Argentia, Newfoundland to serve in the Iceland patrols. She remained in Newfoundland until the summer of 1944 when she returned to Boston, Massachusetts for repairs. She was decommissioned in July of 1944 and after being transferred to the Maritime Commission, she was marked for disposal. She was sold commercially in 1946 and renamed after the Captain’s daughter.
3 The crew of the Gudrun included Johann Axel Johannsson, Captain, Matthew Whalen, Mate, Daniel Meagher, 1st Engineer, Albert Moulden, 2nd Engineer, Wilfred Mello, Cook, and Alphonse Sutherland, Frank Cavanaugh, Krisjon Johanneson, James Cavanaugh, Augustus Hill, Harrow O’Connell, Jr., Daniel Williams, Frank B. Nickerson, John Johnson, and John Koslowski, fishermen/deckhands. As per local coverage of the loss of the Gudrun, a total of thirty-five children were left fatherless when the trawler disappeared. Three of the regular crew had decided not to sail aboard the January trip to the banks. Brothers Russell C. Arsenault and Arthur L. Arsenault were at the fishing pier when the Gudrun was about to put out to sea but, as they stated “call it a hunch or what you will…but I just didn’t want to go with her.” A third “regular” who decided not to ship out was Clarence Simpson. Simpson had felt that his share during the Christmas trip had been too low. He had decided to ship out aboard the dragger Mary F. Curtis instead.