POSSESSION SOUND — Squinting out the windowed wheelhouse of the ship he’s helmed for two decades, Captain Skip Green spots something several hundred yards in the distance.
“See that little black line?” he says, binoculars at hand.
A half-mile or so out, it’s little more than a speck on the horizon off Whidbey Island. But it’s also the reason Green, his four-man crew and their 104-foot, 174-gross ton vessel are searching the waters of Puget Sound.
It’s a log.
A dead floating tree.
It doesn’t look like much and it’s not glamorous, but it is a hazard — it could sink a weekend fishing boat, batter a pier or ding the half-million-dollar propeller on a cargo ship carrying 14,000 shipping containers.
Green and his team from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are on the water four days a week, tasked with keeping Puget Sound — and its shipping lanes, ferry routes, naval bases, ports and beaches — navigable and clear of debris.