to jewelry. The local paper—as well as the
It all finally came together—at least for law enforcement—when a San Juan County detective sent images from the Island Market surveillance camera of the suspect posing by the baguettes. Island County recognized him right away.
“We felt like a doctor giving a patient bad news,” says Wallace. “We’re afraid you have a Colton Harris-Moore problem.”
ICSO gave the San Juan sheriff Colton’s file, including a recent portrait taken by Harris-Moore himself. The eighteen-year-old’s book-length rap sheet started once upon a time when he was ten. Island County warned Sheriff Bill Cumming that Colton had run their deputies ragged. And said that when they finally caught him and thought they’d rid their island by sentencing him to three years in prison, he’d escaped. The file also included the information that Colton liked to play with guns and often armed himself with pepper spray. Island County had already filed a slew of new felony charges against Colton for crimes he’d committed since going on the lam.
Cumming made the tactical decision not to let Orcas residents know who was tearing up their island. He felt that if Colton didn’t know the sheriff’s office was on to him, the Barefoot Bandit might step out in public. He sent all the manpower he could spare to Orcas and made sure his deputies had Colton’s face burned into their memories. He put more officers in plain clothes and sent them out into Eastsound, especially after dark.
It worked—sort of. The deputies didn’t have much trouble spotting Colton, but they soon learned something about him beyond his affinity for going footloose: he was fast. Even those rare few deputies in shape to run after him were easily outdistanced. Every time he was sighted, Colton took off for the woods around town. One cop caught him in the beam of his flashlight and made a positive ID before Colton melted into the trees.
“He virtually vaporized in front of me,” said the officer.
Increasing the police patrols may have at least made Eastsound seem like a tougher target. The night following the Island Market ATM fail, the Bandit crept along the Ditch beside Smuggler’s Villa Resort. Mike Stolmeier had hosted the usual summer evening campfire for his guests and then gone to bed after making sure there were no tall strangers stretched out in the sauna. Tied up less than forty yards from the occupied villas were whale- watching and fishing boats belonging to a charter operation based at the resort. The Bandit chose a thirty-foot catamaran called
The boat thief knew where he wanted to go, though, and the GPS chartplotter offered a video game–like navigation experience as simple as steering a little avatar around the blue screen and avoiding the big beige blocks that signified hard land. Again, very simple in theory. However, Pacific Northwest reality tosses a few challenges into the mix around the San Juans. An enormous amount of water fills and empties the Salish Sea as the tides change. Currents ripping around the islands swirl into whirlpools and, when conditions are right, even pile into standing waves. Just below the surface—and thus not shown as land on charts—lie myriad jagged reefs. A painstaking count of all the islands, islets, seal haulouts, and godforsaken rocks in San Juan County comes to 743. But that’s at low tide. At high tide, only 428 of them are visible; the rest lurk beneath a thin film of water. Experienced local boaters look for hints like kelp fronds or patches of calm water that mark rocks, but that helps only during the day. Many of the known reefs are marked on charts as tiny plus signs—as in if you hit one you’ll “add” shipwrecker to your resume. What can’t be marked, however, are those Salish Sea specialties aptly named “deadheads.”
With logging long one of the Northwest’s major industries, innumerable ex-trees have escaped booms and tugs and now roam free in the region’s waters. The logs eventually get so soggy that they barely float. Those that bob vertically with an almost invisible sliver of wood above the surface are deadheads. Running into one is like striking an iceberg. The great bulk of the log lies underwater, giving it enough mass to easily splinter a wooden hull or smash a fiberglass one. Open a hole too big for the bilge pumps and you get help fast or go swimming.
Cold water often has the final say in the Salish Sea. Even in summer the water temperature barely gets into the mid-50s. Wind up in the drink and the countdown starts—that is, if it doesn’t cause instant cardiac arrest. Depending on body type, it can take one-half to three hours for you to lose consciousness, less if you’re treading water or swimming for land.
The Bandit, though, knew how to run a boat at night, or else he was lucky once again. The GPS recorded his track as he rounded the sheer cliffs of Point Doughty and headed down President Channel between the west coast of Orcas and Waldron Island. He skirted the treacherously beautiful Wasp Islands—perennially the most popular place for visiting boaters to come to grief on the San Juans’ reefs—and steered southeast between Shaw and San Juan Island until he reached the town of Friday Harbor.
He drove the boat to the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs, a marine science center. At U-Dub’s dock, he jumped off and let the $100,000 boat float away. The GPS showed the Harborcraft drifting lazily until it grounded off Shaw, where it was found the next morning.
The Barefoot Bandit ran around San Juan Island for two days, hitting a coffee hut in downtown Friday Harbor but otherwise not calling too much attention to himself. Police later discovered a hideaway secreted in a hangar at the airport where he apparently camped out.
Then, at midnight on September 11, 2009, a small plane took off from the San Juan Island airport.
IF BOB RIVERS’S CESSNA was a classic station wagon, this second plane, a sleek, 310-horsepower, composite-bodied Cirrus SR22, was a high-tech hot rod. It featured a low-wing configuration versus the Cessna’s high wing. Low wings are trickier for inexperienced pilots to land as they tend to float more near the ground. The SR22 also had a completely different steering system—a side joystick versus the Cessna’s classic two-handed wheel. Considered a safe and popular plane for its class, according to the NTSB the Cirrus SR22 still has twice the rate of fatal accidents as the Cessna 182. And remarkably, for only his second solo flight, Colton decided to fly this one at night.
The $700,000 Cirrus was equipped with two major features not found in Bob Rivers’s Cessna. First was the “glass cockpit,” a term used not for the plane’s windows, but for large dashboard video monitors that gather all the information a pilot needs on-screen rather than split among individual gauges. Fans of the new-style instruments love the amazing amount of data—weather maps, flight info, navigation, and all the plane’s mechanical systems— laid on two screens. There are some old-timers, though, who feel the glowing screens might be crowded with too much information, especially for an inexperienced flier.
“I wouldn’t recommend a new pilot start out with a glass cockpit in a Cirrus, particularly at night—too distracting, a real handful,” says Bill Anders, an Orcas Island resident who owns a Columbia 400 (aka Cessna 400 Corvalis), a slick composite plane that’s extremely similar to the Cirrus. And for Bill Anders to call anything related to flying a handful takes a lot.
Anders’s first plane ride came in 1946, when he was an eighth grader in Texas. One day as his father drove him to school, they saw a biplane sitting in a cow pasture. “This guy had a sign up, ‘Rides $15,’” remembers Anders. “I said to my dad, ‘I sure would like to do that.’”
Anders’s father had just gotten out of the navy and $15 was big money back then, “but my dad could always make deals and he made one that morning.” Anders strapped into the open cockpit of the wood-and-fabric plane and the pilot took off. Whatever his dad paid, young Bill got his money’s worth. “He even did a loop, and I thought, Boy, this is fun!”
Anders went off to school with dreams of flying adventures. “Well, on the way home that day, here was the biplane, tail up, in about a three-foot-deep hole… The pilot and his paying passenger dead. I didn’t fly for quite some time after that.”
The pull of the sky was so strong, though, that Anders became an air force fighter pilot and served in an interceptor squadron at the height of the Cold War. One of his claims to fame from that era is intercepting a Soviet Bear bomber over Europe and giving its belligerent pilot an up-close and personal middle-finger salute—decades
