Unalaska, AK – The clean-up and salvage of the F/V Icy Mist is almost complete. The 58-foot boat went aground on Akutan Island on February 25, 2009. Dan Magone and his crew immediately set to work removing all of the oils and pollutants from the vessel. To do that, Magone's crew was taken to the island and left on a cliff above the rocky beach where the boat was grounded. On each of four days they climbed down the cliff to remove the pollutants. Then, the project had to be set aside for multiple months while the Magone team cleaned up the F/V Mar-Gun, which went aground on St. George Isalnd. Dan Magone said there was only one major issue with letting the Icy Mist wait.

"The only thing that everybody was worried about was there were still 135,000 pounds of cod fish on the Icy Mist and so nobody was looking forward to the mess that was going to be when we got back."

When Magone went back to the vessel in July, a storm had broken a hole in the fish holds, washed all of the cod away, and left boulders in their place.

"The storms had basically torn the bottom of the boat out so we had great big boulders" instead of fish, he said. "We had one that was about eight feet in diameter that was up in the middle of the main fish hold and a smaller one that was stuck in the number two fish hold. And there was no longer a main engine in the engine room any more. It was replaced by a great big boulder."

The crew blasted away the boulders in order to tow away the wreck and filled in many of the spaces with foam to help it flaot. Though the Icy Mist is relatively small, the boulder-filled beach made it difficult to pull off. On their first attempt, the line attaching the wreck to the tug snapped back with so much force it broke some of the gear. Magone rented another tug and eventually got the boat off of the beach. As they dragged it to Unalaska, it flipped over in the middle of the night and slowed down the trip. Once in Dutch Harbor, Magone's team turned the boat over in order to put explosives inside of it.

"We just blow holes in tanks that are full of air, so that we know it will sink rapidly and go straight down," he explained.

Magone will tow the boat to an area 33 miles northwest of Unalaska sometime next week where the water is 1000 fathoms deep. There they will detonate the explosives so the ship sinks to the bottom in an area where it will not affect any other boats. Nothing on the boat was salvageable, but they did remove many smaller pieces and electronics.

"You can't have loose debris. You don't want a bunch of junk floating on the water when this thing sinks so you have to get all that stuff off whether it's any good or not," he said.

Magone estimates that the Icy Mist's insurance company will have to pay about $400,000 for the salvage work because of the difficulty in accessing the boat next to a cliff. State law requires wrecks to be removed instead of letting them deteriorate and create marine debris.

Correction: The original posting of this article said federal law, not state law