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| Salvagers of Cougar Ace: Part 1 |
 About 230 miles south of Alaska's Aleutian Islands, the cargo ship Cougar Ace sliced through the waters, its 15,683-horsepower engine powering its 55,328 tons of steel through the water with a cargo estimated at $103 million in its hold.
As the captain and his crew began releasing the water held in their ballast tanks for re-entry into US territorial waters, ballast water poured out of one side of the ship. Cougar Ace rolls to one side, the starboard ballast tanks failing to refill and unbalancing the ship. A large swell hits Cougar Ace and further rolls the ship to port. Objects on deck slide, crashing against the port walls and pushing the ship even more to port.
The Coast Guard scrambles three helicopters from Anchorage and removes all 23 crew members from the ship.
Rich Habib, senior salvage master for Titan Salvage, gets the phone call. Habib is one of the rare few who holds an unlimited master's license, meaning he is qualified to pilot all ships, no matter the size. Salvaging is sometimes called legitimate piracy. Salvage companies are offered by the insurers of a disabled ship anything from 10 to 70 percent of the value of the ship and its cargo to save it. If the ship goes down, the salvagers get nothing.
Habib contacts Marty Johnson, a naval architect who will build a 3D model of Cougar Ace as it floats in the water, taking into account the 33 tanks containing fuel, freshwater and ballast as well as the cargo and how moving any of them will shift the vessel entirely. If his model isn't accurate and the plan goes forward, the ship could sink.
Cougar Ace begins taking on water after being emptied of its crew and while waiting for Titan Salvage and drifting toward the rocky shoals of the Aleutian Islands. If the ship breaks up, 176,366 gallons of fuel would spill out.
The Titan Salvage team heads out to Cougar Ace and, with the help of the Coast Guard, is helicoptered onto the 60 degree listing deck. The first thing they do is find out how much water the ship has taken on. The task involves mountaineering to get through the yawning pitch black chasms of the ship.
A leaking seal is found and eight feet of water has already gotten in. The compromised seal could give way at any moment, filling the deck with seawater in an instant.
A quick trigonometry calculation shows that the water weighs 1,026 tons and filling the starboard ballast tanks with 160.9 tons of water will right the ship. Overfill it, though, and the ship will simply roll to the other side in a matter of seconds and probably sink the ship.
As the crew goes to leave the Cougar Ace for the night, Marty Johnson loses his footing on the deck and slides eighty feet down the deck, striking a bollard on the way down. During the rescue, the Emma Foss, arriving at the scene after hearing the Titan Salvage crew's radio exchange about Johnson's fall, strikes the ship, knocking Habib into the water. He quickly climbs out to help Johnson. Johnson is transfered to the Emma Foss but dies later that night.
By the next morning, Cougar Ace has drifted within 140 miles from shore. Twenty-six mile winds are predicted and 16-foot waves in the next few days. A towline must be connected to Cougar Ace to keep her from getting to shore but Titan Salvage is battered, undermanned and without their naval architect.
The story of the salvage of the Cougar Ace is continued here.
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