The company insuring the F/V Tanusha is paying B&R Fish Byproducts to salvage the fishing vessel. Perestroika Inc. is listed as the owner of the vessel according to online records.
“Every boat we do is different as far as the process goes," Craig DeHart, the president of B&R, said. “We’ve had some where we’ve got to cut it into little tiny pieces and helicopter it all out to a barge offshore. Some of them we can get equipment to. Some of them we can float out to a barge where we can pick the whole vessel up and put it onboard.”
In this case, B&R broke the vessel into pieces to transport by landing craft to Kodiak for disposal. A local pilot, Mark Patterson, took photos on March 16 of what appears to be two excavators working with pieces of the fishing vessel on a beach along Ugak Bay, south of town.
Coast Guard Petty Officer Cameron Snell, a public affairs specialist with Base Kodiak, said what caused the Tanusha to capsize is still under investigation.
“The responsibility of cleaning up a vessel in similar cases would be to the vessel owner," Snell said. "We [the Coast Guard] would have a very limited role in the process of that. We’ll monitor it and sometimes we may have a limited capability for towing but that’s usually up to the vessel owner.”
The Tanusha capsized about 23 miles southeast of Kodiak in January, outside of the state’s purview, which extends out to 3-miles offshore. But it gradually drifted back into state waters – and the authority of the state’s abandoned and derelict vessel program, according to the program’s coordinator Aaron Timian.
So now, the state has approved and is overseeing B&R Fish Byproducts’ cleanup to remove the Tanusha from state land and waters.
DeHart said most of the vessel washed ashore in the Portage Bay area, but the rest is unaccounted for.
“Sometime in its travels, between rocky shoreline and beaches and stuff, it came across a reef and the top half of the vessel is missing," he said. "The cabin parts, the deck machinery was not present when we were on site.”
He said it’s highly unlikely those parts will resurface, and no one knows where exactly they’re located.
DeHart would not provide a cost estimate for the operation until it’s officially completed.
He expects to finish the salvage and cleanup process sometime next week.
DeHart said local volunteers have offered to help pick debris off the beach at Portage Bay this weekend, March 29 -30, as well.
