The Six-Minute Logbook: How a Lighthouse Called Men Back From Death

The Six-Minute Logbook: How a Lighthouse Called Men Back From Death

Cold, isolated, and watching a causeway drown, a twenty-four-year-old lighthouse attendant wrote six words in a logbook at 11:47 PM on September 9, 2021 - “Vessel in distress, Channel 16, responding now.” The county’s automated radio log shows no Channel 16 transmission until 11:53 PM, when a vessel four point two miles offshore called in amid sixty-one-mile-per-hour winds - so what bridged that six-minute gap?

In this episode, we follow the sequence of events recorded in the Heron Point logbook and county radio records, the improvised shared antenna circuit between a lighthouse and a snapper boat, and the storm that left two men pulled from the water alive; could a coaxial splice and a passive splitter explain a radio that seemed to speak before it should?

Person: April Tucker Date: September 9, 2021 Location: Heron Point Lighthouse, Calder Inlet, Merritt County Vessel: Maren G., thirty-two-foot snapper boat Wind: sixty-one miles per hour

- April Tucker wrote “Vessel in distress, Channel 16, responding now” at 23:47 in the Heron Point logbook. - The county automated radio log shows the first Channel 16 transmission at 23:53, six minutes after the logbook entry. - The calling vessel was recorded four point two miles offshore during the transmission at 23:53. - Joe Ferris’s boat, the Maren G., is a thirty-two-foot commercial vessel whose VHF antenna had intermittent SWR spikes. - Two men were pulled from the water alive at approximately 02:00 following the storm.

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