The Petersburg seiner Odin’s crew were setting the net on July 26 when Tausani Ieremia was caught in the purse line and dragged overboard. After the 22-year-old fisherman lost consciousness and stopped breathing, his crewmates successfully revived him with CPR. The U.S. Coast Guard flew Ieremia to a hospital in Sitka before he was medevaced to Anchorage. Ieremia is quickly recovering from the near-death experience that left him with no major damage.
Trevor McCay said it started as a normal morning, seining near Noyes Island, west of Prince of Wales.
“Just another day, we’re not catching much fish, just setting the net,” McCay said, “and like a snap of a finger, it just changes.”
McCay was driving the seiner’s power skiff when he felt a snag about halfway through setting the net. He looked back and saw Ieremia flying overboard in a tangle of net.
“Immediately I’m like, ‘Oh crap, this is not good,’” McCay recalled.
He released the pin holding the net, turned the skiff around and beelined toward Ieremia in the water.
But Ieremia was sinking fast.
McCay can typically see two fathoms, or 14 feet down in the water; he said Ieremia was deeper.
“He’s got bright rain gear on,” McCay said. “Couldn’t see him at all.”
There wasn’t much time. The water too cold to jump in, the net too heavy to pull up, McCay swirled around a plunger pole as deep as he could, trying to reach anything.
“And it was nothing… nothing,” he said. “At that point it was kind of starting to sink in that he might not come up.”
McCay has been fishing with Ieremia, or “Tau,” for years. He said he’ll never forget how helpless and terrified he was that he’d never see him again, as he stared into the water with no sign of him.
“I was yelling, ‘No, no, no!’ Because I didn’t want it to be him, you know, Tau,” he said. “How could it end this way?”
Ieremia remembers everything, up until his vitals were lost.
“Never thought that I would be one of those guys that you’d hear about having an accident like that on the boat,” Ieremia said. “But then, lo and behold, there it was.”
On the stern of the F/V Odin, Ieremia had just fixed a lead line — a move he says he’s done hundreds of times — when he stepped right in the bite of the purse line that fell off the net pile.
“As soon as I noticed it was on my foot, it was just a split second,” Ieremia said. “Pulled me straight over. It all happened really quick.”
Ieremia hit the water and managed a big breath of air before getting taken down with the line, tight around his leg.
He held onto the corks and kicked at his tangled boot, trying to get free.
But eventually, Ieremia started to drown.
“I’m about to die right here,” he recalled thinking. “When I was sucking in water, just thinking, oh, this is not good. And just thinking about like, what a sh—y way to go, you know?”
Then the purse line rolled to his heel.
He said one last kick sent his boot flying “like a rocket,” and the buoyant corks in his hand sent him toward McCay at the surface.
“I remember feeling like I was gonna be okay, when I was floating up,” he said. “And I was.”
Above the water, McCay saw bubbles, the boot, and then Ieremia’s hand.
“I’ll never forget that image. Ever. Nothing there … and then all of a sudden, boom, there he is! You better act! It was like somebody was handing him to me, like, save his life,” McCay said. “The sun was shining on him — it was like an angel guiding him up to the surface.”
That’s where Ieremia’s memory of drowning stops.
“He grabbed my hand, and I heard him say that he got me,” Ieremia said. “That was the last thing I remember, until I woke up on the boat.”
McCay was leaning dangerously far over the edge of the tall skiff, trying not to fall in the water himself. One hand gripped Ieremia’s as he tried picking him up with the other.
“The first thing I grabbed snaps. And the next thing I grabbed snaps … and I finally was able to get around him and I gave one last heave, and just couldn’t get him up,” said McCay.
“And then his head fell back, like he just lost his life at that point.”
The F/V Odin to the rescue.
“At that point I was screaming, ‘Help! Help! I need help! I can’t get him up!’” McCay said. “And then… boom! There’s the Odin.”
Mark Severson owns the Odin and was the skipper that morning. He was able to maneuver the boat, bringing it within arms reach of the skiff.
“We could have missed, and Trevor didn’t have much left in him,” Severson said. “A lot of things had to work really well, and it did. I’m still shocked.”
Ieremia was in the water for about four minutes. They say he looked pale with blue lips and wasn’t breathing. The crew hauled him aboard and immediately began CPR.
“Minutes later he was alive again,” Severson said. “And he was not alive when he came over the rail.”
On the Odin’s deck, crewmates Mike Doyle and Brent Birchell rotated chest compressions and rescue breaths. McCay joined them. Severson called the Coast Guard.
Minutes passed.
McCay and Severson said each compression pushed out more and more water.
“I couldn’t imagine the thought of losing him,” McCay said. “Just keep doing CPR, keep doing everything you can — everything you possibly can to keep him alive — and it worked!”
He remembers being so worked up, he couldn’t tell at first if the pounding he felt was his own heart, or Ieremia’s.
“Then finally, I was like, ‘Ah, that’s his heart,’” McCay said. “It was like it was on overdrive, just pumping, pumping, pumping.”
After about ten minutes of continuous CPR, Ieremia’s vitals returned. His breaths were short and labored, water was still in his lungs; he sat up but wasn’t fully conscious.
McCay said they were relieved, but “we knew the battle wasn’t over.”
“At that point I’m like, where the heck is the Coast Guard?” McCay said. “He’s breathing on his own, but he’s not healthy. We need to get him off the boat.”
The Sitka-based Coast Guard aircrew were training over 200 miles away, near Glacier Bay, when they got the call, so it took a couple hours to arrive.
“If we hadn’t had him going by then, if it had been crucial we get him to a hospital right away, it wouldn’t have worked,” said Severson. “They were very slow but they were awesome when they got there.”
Meanwhile, two people from the nearby seiner F/V Reality, including a trained EMT, came aboard to help monitor Ieremia’s progress as he grew more responsive.
Eventually, Ieremia woke up — confused, but improving. He could walk and was warming up in the galley when the Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopter arrived and took him to the hospital.
“He actually pretty much got in the basket by himself, with the help of the rescue swimmer,” Severson noted.
For McCay, that’s when “all the emotions” hit him.
“Once he got off the boat and was in the helicopter, I cried,” said McCay. “I was happy, you know, that we did what we could do, and then he was in better hands.”
He said it was a long boat ride back home to Petersburg after that. But the most important thing, McCay said, is the fact Ieremia recovered and he’ll see him again.
“Traumatizing event, but he survived,” McCay said. “That’s the bottom line…”
“We saved him.”
McCay said making the first few sets after the accident was nervewracking. Although things went back to normal by the first full opener, he still thinks about what happened.
“It’s all just dangerous,” he said. “It all seems easy and safe, you know, because we do it all the time, and then everyone gets comfortable. But it’s really not.”
He called it a cautionary tale — a reminder of how dangerous seining can be.
“Stay vigilant. Don’t get too comfortable, because the moment you do, something can go wrong.”
Severson shared similar advice.
“Pay attention to every little detail,” he said. “Don’t ever get so used to the simple job you’re doing that you forget how dangerous it is.”
Severson sets the net slow by habit, just in case. In over 50 years of running the boat, he said he’s never had a crew member go overboard.
“I wanted to retire without ever having anybody get hurt,” he said. “It damn near killed him.”
Severson said he warned the crew, just two days before the accident, to never get up close to the net when setting. He said the situation went from horrifying to “hallelujah.”
“It was the worst set I’ve ever made or seen, but it turned out to be the best one,” he said.
His main message for the fleet is to make sure crews are getting CPR training regularly. It could mean the difference between life and death.
“Any little thing can happen, and you better know what to do,” said Severson. “We got lucky. Those guys just started doing it, and it worked. If it hadn’t worked, I imagine there’d be all kinds of basket cases around here… He’s a great kid.”
He called it miraculous. McCay agreed.
“There’s not many guys that get taken under and then make it back to tell the story,” McCay said. “That’s a big deal.”
Six days after the accident, Ieremia turned 22.
Ieremia said “it was a really special birthday,” and he had a great time out celebrating with friends.
Home in Sitka, he’s making a full recovery. No broken bones. No brain damage. Ieremia said other than some bruising, a busted eardrum and soreness around his ribs, he’s “completely normal and feeling great.”
He also said he doesn’t feel much trauma from what happened.
“Really, it was way more traumatizing for the guys on the crew,” Ieremia said. “I just remember being alive, making it up to Trevor, then waking up alive. But, you know, they saw me when I was dead.”
Ieremia said it was a freak accident; a simple, preventable mistake “that went terribly wrong,” and he doubts he’ll make again.
The experience didn’t scare Ieremia off the water. He plans to keep fishing — but with a different mindset.
“Complacency kills on the boat,” Ieremia said. “It’s just hammered in my head. I’ll always be thinking about it now, in any fishery I’m doing.”
He said he feels loved, blessed and lucky to be alive. He has a long list of people he’s grateful for, especially his crewmates aboard the Odin who saved his life.
“Those guys are superheroes in my book,” he said. “I’d love to thank them again.”
Ieremia and his family extend gratitude to Trevor McCay, Mike Doyle, Brent Birchell, Karen and Mark Severson, the Coast Guard, the F/V Reality crew, the fleet, the Petersburg and Sitka communities and “everywhere in between.”
“Just so many people looking out for me,” he said. “Feel super loved and blessed after all this went down.”
Listen to the broadcast version of this story, here:
