Coast Guard Cutter Polar Star Battles the Beaufort Sea
by Doug O’Harra
CGC Polar Star
USCG photo by PA3 Andy Devilbiss
After a day and night of lurching through the frozen Beaufort Sea, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Polar Star shuddered and stopped. Just as it had several other times during a months-long trip through the polar ice cap, America’s lone icebreaker in the Arctic Ocean had become mired off Point Barrow.
The officers of the pre-dawn watch studied the dark scene through the frosted glass of the con. Snow-shrouded ice stretched in every direction, disappearing into a vague and whitish gloom.
Where did it end? They couldn’t see. How thick was it? They couldn’t tell.
As the dawn broke, Lt. j.g. John Godek took his perch high overhead in the ship’s “loft con.” From there he could see that the Polar Star was, in fact, parked in the middle of a floe large enough to float a small town.
Jagged ridges jutted from the ice, like a range of miniature peaks. Godek recognized something else: Exposed surfaces gleamed royal blue, the unmistakable color of multi-year pack ice with the tensile strength of stainless steel. Some of it was 25 feet thick.
This was early October, 1988, during a time when freeze-up slammed Alaska’s north coast with crushing floes. Within a generation, Arctic ice would undergo a record-breaking meltdown due to warming climate and shifting currents. The ice pack would shrink back hundreds of miles to the northwest, leaving this area of coast open water as far as you could see.
But in 1988, the older unforgiving Arctic still ruled. Within days of the Polar Star’s ordeal, the same conditions would trap three California gray whales — as well as the world’s attention — at nearly the same location.
The rescue of those whales became one of the most extraordinarily publicized media events in Alaska history, with people all over the country following the day-by-day struggle to keep open breathing holes and break a passage to open water. Eventually a massive Soviet icebreaker churned up and broke an aisle through the last ice into the slushy Beaufort Sea for the two surviving whales.
But that uproar and effort lay a few weeks in the future. Now the same ice conditions had trapped a much smaller icebreaker, one of only two icebreakers in America’s coast guard fleet at that time.
As watch officer, it was Godek’s task to break the Polar Star free. Then 23, the graduate of the Coast Guard Academy saw it as a way to prove his mettle as an icebreaking pilot. The previous officer hadn’t gotten out. It was Godek’s shot at a little glory.
On the bridge several floors below him, Capt. Paul Taylor had been wrestling with his own dilemma. Should he continue gambling that the winds would shift, allowing a passage west through the Bering Strait? Or should he turn east, retreating through the Northwest Passage?
Turn to the west and he ran the risk of becoming the skipper of the first U.S. icebreaker ever to get stuck in the Arctic for winter. Turn to the east and he would suffer a 10,000-mile journey out of his way, through the Atlantic Ocean and the Panama Canal, circling the entire continent before returning to his Pacific Northwest home base.
“It was one of those tricky things,” Taylor would say later. “It was almost damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”
A veteran seaman with nearly 30 years of experience, Taylor had planned to retire shortly after the Polar Star returned to Seattle. In many ways, this mission had been the most difficult of his career, which spanned a dozen missions to the polar oceans, including nine trips to Antarctica.
As the Polar Star backed up to get a running start at the ice wall, Taylor was within hours of making a final choice: gamble on the ice to the west or travel the Northwest Passage to the east.
Amid his calculations of fuel, weather and ice, one thought prevailed: “I didn’t want to be remembered in the Coast Guard as the guy who parked an icebreaker in the Arctic for six months.”
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The Polar Star’s journey to the north coast of Alaska had begun 47 days earlier in Seattle. The mission was to conduct seismic surveys of the ocean floor north of Point Barrow. On its way home, the icebreaker was to make a goodwill call at the Russian Far East town of Provideniya — located due west across the Bering Sea from the Seward Peninsula and Nome. This would be the first time a Coast Guard vessel had visited the Russian port in 22 years.
Leaving its home base, the Polar Star steamed north with 1.3 million gallons of fuel and $95,000 worth of food — enough to feed its 157-member crew for five months. Nine days later, it anchored off Nome, where a scientific party and additional crew members came aboard. The crew enjoyed a night ashore. After the brief visit, the icebreaker continued north.
Along with its sister ship, the Polar Sea, the Polar Star was, at the time, the largest vessel operated by the Coast Guard, 399 feet long by 86 feet wide — almost the same dimensions as a football field. When fully loaded, the vessel draws some 32 feet of water. Traveling at its cruising speed of 15 mph, it can circumnavigate the globe without once stopping for fuel. But the journey would not be comfortable for the passengers. Like all icebreakers, the Polar Star has a cutaway bow and a rounded hull, a sort of “bathtub” shape that can make it rock like a gigantic canoe at high sea.
But push the vessel into the cockeyed jumble of leering floes and craggy sea ice, its odd shape meshes with its environment like animal in an ecological niche, and the going becomes much smoother.
Reinforced with a 1 3/4-inch-thick steel “ice belt” at the bow and stern, the Polar Star and its bathtub shape is precisely designed to mount shelves of sea ice and then shatter them beneath its flattened hull. Under full power, it can drive through ice 6 feet thick without even pausing. By “backing and ramming,” it can bust through an ice wall as tall as a three-story building.
From the moment the ship arrived in arctic waters that September, the Polar Star needed every bit of its icebreaking might. Even before it reached the study area, it had received a distress call from the Society Explorer, a Seattle-based cruise ship stranded 50 miles northeast of Point Barrow. As the Polar Star headed toward the cruise vessel, it received a second distress call from an oil company ship, the Shaleen Nicholas, mired in ice about 50 miles away from the Explorer.
Both vessels had journeyed into the same thick compaction of multi-year ice that was to plague the Polar Star for the next month — thick ice that would largely disappear from the region over the following two decades. During the rescue in 1988, as even the thickest ice often does, the pack shifted and ripped open lanes to open water. The Society Explorer broke loose by itself. But the Shaleen Nicholas became cemented even more firmly in place. When the Polar Star arrived to the rescue on Sept. 4, the oil vessel appeared permanently anchored.
“They were completely beset in the ice,” Lt. j.g. Markus Dausses recalled.
The Polar Star surged in front of the Shaleen Nicholas, shattering the thick ice and carving a path to open water. The oil ship followed close behind, mimicking the icebreaker’s every move on its way to freedom like a calf following its mother.
By then the Polar Star was running late. Its scientific party still hadn’t conducted any research. As quickly as possible, the ship hurried north about 200 miles into the polar ice cap, where U.S. Geological Survey scientists planned seismic tests and sampling of sediment up to 4,000 meters deep.
The scientists wanted data on millions of years of climatic changes and the inexorable movement of the ocean floor. Gauging the drift of tectonic plates was their chief goal. But what they got, at first, was a lesson in something less ponderous — the utterly unpredictable movement of the ocean surface.
Ice shredded and tangled their seismic equipment. It mantled the study sites with impenetrable floes. Godek, the young watch officer, recalls that the ice initially prevented any research at all.
“It started off really slow,” he said. “The experiments they wanted to do had never been done before in such thick ice.”
The crew had to search constantly for the thinnest ice possible. The ship’s two helicopters would scout potential areas, looking for polynyas — the eerie fingers and lakes of open water that can appear in the ice cap without warning or reason. Officers of the watch would study the floes, searching for clues to the easiest route.
For Dausses, who pulled many shifts as the watch officer, the struggle to find a path through the wilderness of polynyas and ice became a strategic game, in which a straight heading rarely served as the shortest route.
“It’s almost like a maze,” he said. “A lot of times, a little bit of finesse will get you farther than hitting it dead on.”
Threading the floes to open water could mean traveling miles in the opposite direction or following leads that twisted like a river crossing flat land. Sometimes, when the search ended in a sheer blue wall, the best solution was to shut down for the night.
“In breaking ice, the key rule is patience,” said Dausses. “If you’re stopped in ice, wait an hour. Maybe you can get out.”
Only when the serpentine leads squeezed shut and thin ice disappeared would the ship actually try to bully its way through.
“Skill and technique are about 90 percent” is how Dausses put it. “When all else fails, you use that power.”
It was the icebreaker’s power that amazed Christopher Haley, a Coast Guard photographer who traveled with the Polar Star for three weeks. During that time, he saw walruses and polar bears, photographed the seismic drilling and testing, and observed the crew’s varying emotions to the prospect of being stuck in the arctic ice all winter long. But Haley was most impressed by the ship’s ability to smash its way free.
As the Polar Star’s bow surged up, the upper decks would rock back gently, crest, then ease down. From the bridge, Haley found the surging motion relentless.
“It was kind of an awesome power to be seen,” he said. “No matter what it threw at us, you never felt like the ship couldn’t handle it.”
But in his hull-side stateroom 10 feet below the surface, Haley found something else. He would lie back in his top bunk, eyes closed, warm, relaxed, sleepy.
And then: Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeech.
Imagine, said Haley, the sound of fingernails scratching a blackboard. Imagine it amplified until it actually trumpets. Imagine that sound so loud that it vibrates your teeth.
“It was very, very obnoxious. You really never got used to it.”
Just when the screeching would seem to ease off, a slab would hammer the hull. If Haley were standing, the jolt would almost knock him down.
“It was the combination of a ‘ping’ and a ‘bong,’ ” he said. “It’s almost like being inside of a bell.”
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After 20 days of pounding such ice, the Polar Star finished its scientific mission and headed south for Point Barrow. The thick pack ice followed. Just 10 miles north of the point, the icebreaker came upon two Canadian vessels trapped in ice and offered to break them free, heading west.
One of the vessels, the Martha Black, had damaged screws and, as a result, could only move slowly. But neither vessel had the power of the Polar Star. As a result, the icebreaker would repeatedly cut them free, steam ahead only to watch the Canadian ships fall so far behind they became stuck again.
“We’d break them out, and then they’d refreeze, and we’d have to go back through,” Dausses said.
About that time, the crew of the Polar Star discovered a further complication: The thickening ice was driving them east each evening when the ship routinely shut down to conduct maintenance on the propellers’ hubs.
“It was like a recurring nightmare,” Dausses recalled. “When you went to bed, Point Barrow would be behind you. And then when you woke up, it would be ahead of you again.”
With the ship’s own center turbine damaged, Capt. Taylor decided finally to lead the Canadians east, into the open Beaufort Sea. He would then beat it back to the west. If he could.
At Prudhoe Bay, the Polar Star took on a repair crew, spare parts and fresh fruit, long since depleted from the ship’s stores. Meanwhile, Taylor studied reconnaissance flights and weather reports. For the next few days, he thought, “the ice looked very favorable.”
With repairs finished, the Polar Star drove west, making the ice off Point Barrow late on Oct. 6. It was the ship’s last chance for a quick trip home and a visit to what was then still an outpost of the old Soviet Union.
But from the first, the reports of open water and thin ice seemed a fantasy.
Thick and enormous floes of multi-year ice scrapped and hammered the ship as though it were attempting to plow through a floating continent. Choosing a daily route “was like driving a nail into an ice cube,” one officer said.
The “nightmare” returned: The Polar Star would steam west all day, make 20 miles, only to be driven east all night, losing 22 miles. The only clear passage appeared near shore, in the shallows.
The second day out, the weather turned worse: Whipping snow covered the ice. Watch officers could not distinguish between the fragile new ice and the multi-year floes. They couldn’t pick the best route.
The Polar Star’s fuel gauges continued to drop. As the ship’s fuel load lightened, bit by bit, the ship lost some of its ability to break ice. At some point, Taylor and his officers knew, their vessel would become too light to escape.
On the third day out, after taking the unusual step of traveling at night, the Polar Star found itself parked in the massive floe of multi-year ice. It was to be what one officer called the piece de resistance of their journey. Ice 25-feet thick — the height of a two-story building.
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As the officer of the first daylight watch, Lt. j.g. John Godek decided the only way the Polar Star could break out was by “backing and ramming,” a technique used when nothing else works.
At his command, the icebreaker slowly reversed — that’s it, ease her back, steady as she goes — with the hope, the prayer, that bobbing chunks larger than buildings wouldn’t jam the rudders and disable the ship. Finally, the ship made it.
Ahead of the ship lay maybe 800 feet of open water, only twice the ship’s length. Godek gave the order.
Rudders amidships! Full power to all three shafts!
The Polar Star accelerated through the floating rubble, its turbines burning three gallons a second, its 32-foot-wide propellers driving 60,000 horsepower of thrust. Mammoth chunks thudded the hull. Blue pillars of ice bubbled in the wake.
In seconds, the Polar Star’s bright red concave bow surged up the blue wall and smashed it down. Shattered ice rumbled beneath the keel and tumbled through the propellers to surface at the stern.
Polar Star in the Arctic
USCG photo by PA3 Andy Devilbiss
For Godek, the moment hung suspended: turbines whining like jets, ice pounding the hull. Fifty feet below, on the bridge, the captain and his fellow officers kept close watch. The ship would have to reverse at just the right moment. Too long, and the propellers would jam, “tripping” an overload device on the shafts and shutting down the engines. But quitting too soon might cause the ship to hang-up like a car high-centered on a snow berm. Or perhaps worst of all, break nothing from the wall.
Perhaps Godek thought of the “F-Word,” posted as the plan of the day: Be Flexible. So he waited.
The pounding continued, the turbines roared, the ship didn’t stall. After what seemed to him an eon, Godek ordered the ship off the ice.
The clamor ceased as the Polar Star eased back into the broken ice. For a moment, Godek says, he was practically stupefied with disbelief at the sight below him in front of the ship.
The floe was hardly touched. Only a few feet had broken off.
For the next few hours, under Godek’s piloting, the Polar Star made run after run at the ice wall. Sometimes the ship smashed off yards of thick, blue ice. Sometimes the shaft “tripped,” wasting valuable minutes for a restart in the short Arctic day. Too often, the 12,000-ton vessel — even then carrying the ballast of 500,000 gallons of fuel — slid back with the wall intact.
“In a lot of ways, you get an idea of how powerful the Polar Star is, but then comes something that won’t break,” recalls Dausses, then present on the bridge. “When you can’t get through, you get respect for Mother Nature putting her power where her mouth is. It’s like she’s saying: ‘You’re powerful, but not that powerful.’ ”
In the end, aided by the indifferent shifting of floes, the Polar Star traveled 100 yards through the ice barrier and reached relatively ice-free water. It had taken four hours, and more thick lay ahead.
Even in his moment of triumph, Godek remembers feeling “overwhelmed” at the ship’s predicament.
“It was seeing miles and miles of these huge mountains of ice, and knowing you have 3,000 miles to go.”
Even before the young officer busted the ship loose, Taylor was already calculating the odds.
To refuel, the Polar Star had to make Dutch Harbor, hundreds of miles away through the Bering Strait and across the Bering Sea. Reconnaissance flights by the ship’s helicopters and Canadian planes reported that 120 miles of unbroken ice lay ahead. It was the heaviest ice Taylor had ever seen, and fighting it would consume the ship’s 500,000 gallons of fuel in five days.
It wasn’t enough. The Polar Star’s chances of getting stranded in the pack were high. Just too damn high, Taylor finally concluded.
“When you only have two icebreakers in your fleet, you can’t afford to park one icebreaker for the winter. . . . It appeared to me that it was prudent to go east.
“In other words, we had banged our head into a wall twice, and it got us nowhere.”
So, when the Polar Star broke free, Taylor gave the order to retreat. The ship turned south to skirt the massive floe, then, on Oct. 8, steamed east toward the open Beaufort Sea and the Northwest Passage to the Atlantic Ocean.
The Arctic Ocean’s ice cap shifts according to no human plan. Three days after the Polar Star steamed east, on Oct. 11, an Eskimo hunter in Alaska discovered three gray whales stranded in an ice hole near the place where the Polar Star had turned back. Although much closer to shore, perhaps the hole — the size of a basketball court — was a drifting remnant of the Polar Star’s battle with the ice.
By the time the hunter and others called for help, the Polar Star was already in Canadian waters, hundreds of miles away, too far to respond.
As the world became obsessed with the plight of the whales, the winds and currents that had pounded ice against the Polar Star eased. Soviet icebreakers sailed in behind the opening ice to free the whales. By then, the Polar Star was in the Atlantic, heading for the Panama Canal.
Its trip through the fabled Northwest Passage was peaceful compared to the ship’s previous battering. One officer likened it to entering a harbor. “It was so quiet.”
Accompanied by the Canadian icebreaker John A. MacDonald, the Polar Star followed, in reverse, the same route through the passage as did explorer Sir John Franklin, who perished with all hands 140 years ago in Victoria Strait. Franklin’s wooden ships, the Terror and Erebus, had been caught by pack ice too, but, unlike the Polar Star, never escaped.
Other than a brief detour to assist some fishermen off Costa Rica, the Polar Star’s journey through southern waters proceeded uneventfully, as well. The ship and its crew arrived home in Seattle by late November.
Awaiting his retirement now as the Polar Star prepared for an upcoming 11-month cruise to Greenland and Antarctica, Taylor expressed no regrets about his decision to turn east and miss out on the celebrated whale rescue.
“The Arctic pack is always moving,” he says. “People could say: “Well, why didn’t you wait, and, when it opened, just sail on down?’
“Well, that’s fine . . . if you have unlimited fuel. I saw no reason to take the chance.”
And after his last mission — one that climaxed a career of journeying into the Arctic and Antarctic, Taylor was sure of something else, too. When he retired that May, the Coast Guard’s most experienced ice-breaker captain and his wife began looking for a place to live in the U.S. Southwest. In the desert.
“I don’t like ice and snow,” he says. “I don’t like shoveling it.”
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