In this installment, we begin a series of pieces that give insight into the teenaged young men on the Investor crew. There were four in all, including Coulthurst cousin Michael Stewart; veteran Coulthurst crewmember, Dean Moon; Dean’s high school friend, Jerome Keown; and Coulthurst family friend, Chris Heyman. We start with Michael Stewart. We owe many of our insights to Don Tapperson of the Bellingham Herald.
Michael Stewart caught a ride, with his mother Carol, to Bellingham International Airport in early June 1982. He was catching a plane for Alaska. That’s the last time she saw him.
“He’d driven all night from Pullman after completing exams at Washington State University, picked up his clothes, had dinner with his family on Lummi Island and took off for Alaska to work on his cousin Mark Coulthurst’s fishing boat.”
Donald Tapperson, The Bellingham Herald, September 26, 1982
“Michael was doing what he wanted to do,” his mother added in an interview with Seattle Times reporter Susan Gilmore. “Jobs are very scarce and it was a wonderful adventure for a young man.”
And while other fishermen struggled that season, Michael and the crew had experienced considerable success. The Investor crew had “broomed” in Petersburg just weeks before the fire; her mast carried the broom, the traditional signal that it had caught the 100,000th fish of the season.
Student journalists at WSU had a different take. “Fishing for a living seemed a good way to earn money to attend school,” the Daily Evergreen reported from Pullman. “But for 19-year-old Michael Stewart it meant death.”
Stewart went to Alaska at the end of his Spring term at WSU, the student paper noted, where he earned top grades, pursued music, fraternity life and sports. Former crewmates reported that Michael was also into weightlifting and taking vitamins.
“So residents of Blaine mourn the dead,” the Daily Evergreen wrote, “and Alaska police study the crime that has touched Pullman and the members of Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity where Stewart was a member.”
Michael’s mother was hit particularly hard by the news. On hearing from sister Sally Coulthurst that the Investor crew was likely dead, Carol Stewart barely managed to make the short trip from Lummi Island to Sally’s house in Bellingham. It was the longest journey of her life.
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