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QuickTake:
The crew of the Aleta was at sea, 130 miles from their home port in Florence, with a load of albacore — and in came the tsunami alerts. They made for home in a hurry.
Aboard her boat, the Aleta, Kate Price was on a roll. She had nearly 300 albacore tuna on ice in the brine freezer, and it looked like smooth sailing ahead.
“Then we started hearing these reports of this tsunami,” Price said.
A magnitude 8.8 earthquake off the eastern shore of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula on Tuesday, July 29, set off international tsunami alerts, including for the entire West Coast of the United States. A tsunami advisory warned of possible strong currents and unpredictable waves near Lane County coastal towns like Florence.
Price and her business partner and boyfriend, Brandon Hiza, were 130 miles from the Port of Siuslaw in Florence. They started to make a plan and sailed toward the mouth of the Siuslaw River.
Price and Hiza had a scheduled slot for the Siuslaw Bridge to open, so their tall boat could safely pass underneath. But they were running well ahead of schedule.
“We were cruising so fast that we shaved an hour off the time,” said Price, who noted that the waters felt surprisingly routine despite the advisory.
Just as they began to anchor, expecting a wait, a siren signaled the bridge was ready for them. Price and Hiza scrambled to pull anchor and pass through, docking safely before any tsunami waves were expected. The National Weather Service reported 1- to 3-foot tsunami waves in Charleston, Port Orford and Brookings — but not in Florence.
“We got lucky,” Price said. “We literally put every dollar we had into our diesel tank. We left out here with two bucks in our bank account, and we were just running on high hopes of finding [fish].”
While they found the fish, a surge at the port could have jeopardized their haul, even if just a few feet high. In Crescent City, a Northern California fishing community, the U.S. Coast Guard turned away multiple fishing vessels as water rose up to 4 feet. For some boats, it’s safer to be offshore than navigating shallower waters near the shore.
But such situations can create difficult choices for fishing crews, who may risk losing their fresh catch if they can’t dock. Delayed returns also add fuel costs, and powerful waves can damage gear.
Often, the first wave of a tsunami isn’t the largest, and the activity can last more than 20 hours.
“It is a ripple effect,” said meteorologist Noah Alviz with the National Weather Service’s Portland office, which had been coordinating with the National Tsunami Warning Center.
“It is a common misconception that a tsunami is one big wave. It is multiple waves, essentially,” Alviz explained. “There is a lot more energy than a normal wave and, crashing down, it will run up much further along the coast or the shoreline.”
That includes tide-influenced rivers like the Siuslaw, where Price and Hiza waited out the event at the port. The National Tsunami Warning Center canceled the advisory at 10:20 a.m. Wednesday.
Not even an hour after the advisory was canceled, Price and Hiza started taking orders from the docks in front of Novelli’s Crab Shack — first come, first filleted.
“We’ll sell until we sell out,” Price said.
Price and Hiza bought their fishing boat about three years ago with a vision of making local seafood more accessible and sustainable for the community. The Aleta, built in 1988, has weathered many storms, and now, she’s got a tsunami run under her belt, too.
