Fixing a Leak – Or Not

The source of Roy Tussing’s eventual departure from the Investor seemed, in retrospect, almost trivial. In the end, it all boiled down to a leaking hydraulic tank. A stupid leak that Tussing struggled to fix.

“[Mark] asked me if I could fix that leak,” Tussing confessed, “and I told him I’d gone down and tried to fix it and the only way I could do it was to tear the valve completely apart. And the tank, it’s probably about a 70 gallon tank. I knew that I could do it. But it would involve a lot of time.”

”I asked him, you know, I told him I could do it but I needed to get that oil out of there and he said, ‘Well can you put it…’ I said, ‘What am I going to do with the oil?’ And he said, ‘Can you put it in a bucket?’ And I told him I don’t have a seventy gallon bucket, you know. I got like a five gallon bucket, maybe. And what am I going to do with 70 gallons of hydraulic oil, because it’s going to go somewhere and I didn’t want it in the boat.”

FV Investor, at dock in Blaine, WA

“So, he got kind of mad at me and said, ‘Well I’ve kind of had it with you.’ And I said, ‘Well okay, come here and talk to me.’ And he wouldn’t talk to me. So, he went down in the engine room. I went down the ladder after him and I just… I, you know, we just got in a big argument and one thing led to another and I just said… I tried to… tried to calm down and show him what was the matter and why I couldn’t fix it. And then, by then I just said, ‘Okay, I’ve had it,’ you know. ‘I’m going home and you can do what you want’. And then that was it.”

But Tussing wasn’t finished with his story. The leak was part of a bigger story. Feelings on the boat, he revealed, had gotten pretty low.

“And then after we calmed down, I come back to the boat and we were talking and the guys were up scrubbing, you know, on the boat and stuff. And I said, ‘Hey, nobody’s happy on this boat.’ I go, ‘Look it.’ I go, ‘You don’t see a smile or anything like that.’ And I go, you know, the guys had a half a day off where they could have… you know, they had to go fishing again right away and they should have been enjoying themselves or, you know, buying an ice cream cone or do something. And they were up scrubbing the stupid black stuff off the top of the house.”

Excerpts from the unpublished original manuscript, “Sailor Take Warning,” by Leland E. Hale. That manuscript, started in 1992 and based on court records from the Alaska State Archive, served as the basis for “What Happened in Craig.”

Copyright Leland E. Hale (2019). All rights reserved.


Craig

Order “What Happened In Craig,” HERE and HERE. True crime from Epicenter Press about Alaska’s Worst Unsolved Mass Murder.

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