Man missing after tug goes down.

Byline: LARRY BACON The Register-Guard

FLORENCE - A 100-foot oceangoing tug towing a log barge sank in stormy seas about 18 miles west of Florence early Monday. The U.S. Coast Guard rescued four members of the crew, but one man was still missing Monday night.

Another tugboat later recovered the barge after it broke free.

The search for the missing crewman continued into the night. Coast Guard officials weren't releasing his name.

The tug Primo Brusco, owned by Brusco Tug and Barge Co. of Longview, Wash., sank quickly in more than 500 feet of water after radioing a distress call about 2:30 a.m. that it was taking on water, the Coast Guard said.

"We lost communications and at 3:05 a.m. we received a satellite alert from its emergency locator beacon," Chief Petty Officer Blake Kilbourne said. The beacon is automatically activated when a vessel sinks.

Kilbourne said 30-foot seas and 50 mph winds were reported in the area when the distress call was received. Coast Guard helicopters based at Newport and Coos Bay began an immediate search, and a 47-foot motor lifeboat responded from the Coast Guard station at Winchester Bay.

A helicopter crew found one of the tugboat deckhands, Michael Jensen of Aberdeen, Wash., floating at 5:10 a.m. Three more crewmen, identified as Dennis Coolie, Mitch Russes and Chris Peterson, were found in a life raft about 6:45 a.m. and taken aboard the motor lifeboat. Not all the crew members' hometowns were available.

Coast Guard aircraft and vessels continued the search throughout the day for the fifth crew member but were unable to locate him.

All the men were believed to be wearing survival suits.

The 260-foot barge, loaded with a million board feet of logs, went adrift after the tug sank. The load was taken under tow, intact, Monday afternoon by another tug and was expected to cross the Coos Bay bar this morning, weather permitting.

Kilbourne said there was no indication of what caused the tugboat to go down, and the sinking will be the subject of an investigation by the Coast Guard's Marine Safety Office in Portland.

At Florence's Peace Harbor Hospital, where he was taken after being rescued by the helicopter, Jensen, 45, a deckhand and cook, said an alarm went off about 10:30 p.m. Sunday while he was on watch, indicating flooding in a rear compartment.

He said the tugboat's engineer pumped the water out of the compartment and he thought the problem was solved. He said he went to bed after finishing his watch but was awakened to find the tug listing badly and the starboard stern area under water.

Jensen said he reported to the captain and was told to put on his survival suit. He said he tried unsuccessfully to release the barge's tow cable, then headed back to the wheelhouse and saw other crew members putting on survival suits.

He said he remembers yelling at them that they had to get off the boat, then grabbing a life ring and line with a floating strobe light and heading down a ladder toward the deck, hoping the rest of the crew would follow.

He slipped and landed on the deck, and "a wave picked me up and threw me out," he said.

Then came a nightmare of towering seas, trying to keep his head above water, and sinking as he struggled to pull the zipper on his survival suit higher and blow into a tube to inflate a buoyancy collar around his neck.

He remembered swallowing mouthfuls of salt water and retching it back up, curling into a fetal position to try to retain body heat, and thinking he was going to die.

He also tangled his arms in the line attached to the life ring. "I figured if I tangled myself up, they'd be sure to find my body," he said.

Jensen said he prayed for himself and for his fellow crewmen. He worried about his wife, Cheryl, being able to make the house payment without him. He told God he wasn't ready to die yet.

Sometime later he thought he heard the missing crewman shouting in the darkness but couldn't see him or get close to him. He said he was unsure whether he actually heard the shouts or was hallucinating.

Cold and fatigued, Jensen said he also thought he might be imagining seeing the rescue helicopter's lights. He watched the pilot struggle to put the copter into the right position to drop the rescue swimmer, and recalled telling the swimmer how glad he was to see him.

A veteran deckhand who has held seagoing jobs since 1976, Jensen said the helicopter crew, in his book, ranks "right up there with the firemen and policemen in New York on 9-11." An ambulance met the helicopter at the Florence airport and took Jensen to the hospital. He was able to walk into the emergency room on his own.

The Coast Guard boat carrying the other three survivors arrived at Winchester Bay about 1:30 p.m. The drifting barge was taken under tow about 2:30 p.m. by the 120-foot tug Ocean Service, from Sause Brothers Ocean Towing Co. of Coos Bay.

Jeff Hill, senior port captain for Sause Brothers, said the weather calmed for a time, and the tug's crew was able to get tow gear on the barge in about 15 minutes, about 19 miles west of Heceta Head, north of Florence. The steel cable originally attached to the Primo Brusco was loose beneath the barge and no longer attached to the ill-fated tug, he said.

The Coast Guard and the Sause tug reported a large sheen of diesel fuel on the water where the Primo Brusco went down.

Kilbourne said nothing could be done during the storm to clean it up and it would probably dissipate in the rough seas. "The only question is whether it is something that will seep for a long period of time," he said.

The port engineer for Brusco Tug and Barge, Bill Kelley, said the vessel probably carried less than 50,000 gallons of light diesel fuel "and certainly not all of that would be released."

Kelley said he had no idea what could have caused the sinking. "It was a regular run," he said. "They've made that run before."

He acknowledged that the weather was bad, but he said the crew was experienced and the conditions were within the operating parameters for the tug and barge, which left Aberdeen on Saturday headed for Eureka, Calif.

The tug was built in 1976 but was in good condition, he said, and was surveyed completely in June to meet vessel certification requirements.

Meanwhile, Jensen said he's not sure if he will return to sea. "I'll try, but I don't know if I can do it," he said.

Two nights before the sinking, he said, he awoke twice from dreams that he was going down on a sinking tug and destined to die. But he didn't tell anyone about the dreams because, "It would be bad luck," he said.