The troller/longliner/crabber Ashtella Raelynn sank at Dock 7 in Newport, Ore., on Monday, June 23, while owner operator Leaonard McLay was performing maintenance on his vessel.
“I talked to Leonard McLay, he was working on it and had it listing over to finish the port side corking and painting,” fellow Newport fisherman Robert Clark wrote on Facebook. “It had a pretty big hole on the other side that was taking water the whole time it was listing. I seen it that morning and seen his truck there, so I figured that’s what he was doing. But by 1 p.m. it went down.”
Another Newport fisherman, Georgia Haight, reported bringing the 42-foot boat she captains, the Mystic Isle, in from crabbing at about 1 a.m. “They had the boat listed over and were working on it,” Haight says. “They had tarps and lights set up and a heater. I was leaving the dock at about 9 a.m. with my boss, the boat owner, and he mentioned to them that the boat looked like it was listing pretty hard.”
As Haight recalls, at about 10 a.m., McLay and his crew realized there was a problem and began to try and rectify the situation. “But it was too late. They had a lot of gear on deck and couldn’t manage to move it.”
On June 27, Haight noted that the Ashtella Raelynn remains sunk at the dock. “What happened is that because of the list they’d put on it, the boat went down, hit bottom, and rolled over on its side. Then all the gear that was on deck rolled off onto the harbor bottom.”
As Haight describes it, the bottom of the Ashtella Relynn is tucked under the dock, and the poles are resting on a nearby boat.
“The divers came down to look at it and decided that with all the gear and debris around the boat, it was too dangerous,” said Haight. “We all love Leon, but he was a hoarder. There was just too much gear on deck.”
The Yaquina Coast Guard Station is aware of the sinking. “We can’t comment on that because it’s an open investigation,” said the Petty Officer on call.
Faced with the impossibility of refloating the boat with pumps, the most likely scenario is that a crane on a barge will be required to lift the boat off bottom, a costly solution for the owner.
“Poor guy,” Robert Clark wrote on Facebook. “He was putting a lot of work into it to have this happen.”
