Curtis Green, 43, says he has recovered about 90 percent of the strength in his right hand, though the scars remain. A year earlier, on December 26, 2019, he sat in a hospital with one side of that hand shredded, a knuckle split open, and the tip of his pinkie hanging by tissue. At the time he had been stunned that he — or any of the men involved — had survived. That day’s events later earned him the U.S. Coast Guard Distinguished Public Service Medal, presented in November 2020.
The men Green pulled from the water were part of the community he’s known since childhood around the Charleston Marina Complex in Charleston, Oregon. The marina serves one of the state’s largest commercial fishing fleets. Green’s stepfather worked at the ice plant, his birth father worked in the fishery, and his grandparents owned the fuel dock — a business his mother ran after their deaths. Green is now preparing to buy Russell’s Marine Fuel & Supply from her. He grew up watching boats come and go, talking with skippers, and breathing the sharp, familiar smells of Dungeness crab, salmon, halibut and cod. “It’s the smell of money,” he says.
In late 2019, Green had been noticing a recurring hazard: boats getting stuck in the channel where the dredge had failed and shoaling created a danger to navigation. Around 3 p.m. on December 26 he was on the fuel dock shooting video of the 40-foot crab boat Darean Rose after it had run aground. The vessel sat heavily loaded with crab pots while the skipper attempted to free her — a scene Green hoped would prompt officials to mark the shoal.
Onboard the Darean Rose were the owner and captain, a man in his 50s or 60s; his son and a deckhand in their late 20s or early 30s; and a younger crewmember about six years out of high school. As the captain used the throttles to rock the boat fore and aft, the bow slipped over the shoal and the starboard side began to drop.
The youngest crewman found himself standing on the port side of the hull, then jumped and swam for shore. The son and the deckhand went into the cabin to ask the captain what to do. None of them realized the engine room was already flooding from a torn keel chock, and they hadn’t considered the single line that had been propping the cabin door open. That line had been left in place to allow more crab pots to be stacked on deck — each pot worth thousands when full — but when the pots tumbled as the boat listed, one snapped the line shut. The door slammed, pots wedged it from the outside, and water rushed forward from the engine space into the cabin.
From the dock, Green watched through the windshield as the cabin filled. The three men were standing not on the sole but on the sloped starboard hull side when the water hit them. “I was standing maybe 40 to 50 feet out, but I could see the whites of their eyes,” he says.
Lt. Justin Long of U.S. Coast Guard Sector North Bend, who later helped arrange Green’s award ceremony, says it’s rare for a bystander to recognize a developing emergency in real time, and rarer still for that person to be able to act. What followed, Long says, was “straight-up bravery.”
Green yelled for someone to call 911 and for his assistant to toss him a hammer. The water between the dock and the boat was about 30 feet deep. Wearing jeans and a hoodie, he leapt in and swam as fast as he could.
The Coast Guard station sits next to the marina, and first responders arrived within minutes, though Green didn’t know that at the time. The three men trapped inside the cabin did not have minutes to spare. The Coos Bay waters are cold — in the 40s and 50s Fahrenheit — giving a person perhaps 20 to 30 minutes of useful consciousness before hypothermia and shock take hold.
At the windshield the only tool the men inside had was a Swiss Army–style knife. The son was trying to smash the glass with it, leaving streaks of blood in the water. The other two used their limbs to batter the glass as Green began pounding from the outside with his hammer. The Darean Rose was built for the Pacific, and its windshield was designed to withstand enormous pressure — far more than the average human can deliver.
“Use the claw! Use the claw!” the son cried from inside, urging Green to flip his hammer and use the claw end. When that didn’t work, Green climbed onto the boat’s port side and tried a side window. He watched the crew fight for breath beneath the waterline: the deckhand’s red hair bobbing, the captain going limp and then vertical before going flat. The captain later told Green he had said goodbye to his maker and thought of his wife as he blacked out. Green feared the worst.
Then Green noticed he was stuck. Debris had trapped his foot, and as the Darean Rose continued to settle, water climbed over his ankle, knee and thigh. He felt the boat shift and heard glass shatter inside. The cabin was filling, and the three men were on their last breaths. Bubbles rose from their mouths as the cabin flooded.
Searching for anything to break the glass, Green spotted a heavy lead ball on the starboard downrigger. He set his hammer aside, hauled the weight free despite his trapped leg, and threw it hard at the window. The ball bounced back. His arms felt like they were being torn from their sockets, the water was now soaking him, and the boat was still sinking.
He struck the window again and heard a crack. The boat shifted, his hammer slid off the bow into the water, and he was left with a half-shattered pane, a trapped leg and rising water up his back. With no tools left, Green used his fist. He punched the cracked glass until his fist tore through and made an opening.
Against all odds, Green reached into the flooded cabin and pulled all three men out one by one. How they fit through that opening remains a mystery to him and to the Coast Guard. As his foot somehow freed itself, the four of them broke the surface and gulped air. The water emptied from their mouths; they blinked and came back to life.
The men sat on the side of the boat, shivering and in stunned silence. The sun shone and the water lay calm. “We just put our heads down and cried together,” Green remembers — four grown men overcome by the moment. Then Green realized his yellow Labrador, Duner, had jumped off the dock and swum out to him. The dog joined the men aboard the Coast Guard boat when it arrived shortly thereafter.
That evening Green received a message from the deckhand’s wife: their kindergartener had the father home that night reading the bedtime story as usual. “That’s because of you,” she wrote, and Green says the simple gratitude made the rescue’s impact feel very real.
When the Darean Rose was hauled to Giddings Boatworks the next day, families and neighbors gathered. People wanted to see the boat and to thank Green. The deckhand’s little girl wrapped her arms and legs around Green’s leg, looked up with tears and said, “I love my daddy.” In that instant Green says he truly understood how small and connected the community is.
This article was originally published in the February 2021 issue.
