The Barefoot Bandit

name, Harris-Moore, the name used by the press, not his usual Colton Harris. Outlaw legend–burnishing and Facebook fan–wise, it was a smooth PR move. Who could hate a poor kid from a rough home who loved animals? Rob from the rich and give to the pups.

The $100 gift itself, though, was confiscated by the police. To them, the money was evidence. The note was also evidence: another sign that Colt was cocky enough to not worry about covering his tracks… “You can’t catch me.”

THAT MONDAY, MAY 31, was Memorial Day. Colt continued down 101 until it hit the Columbia River. Then another puzzler. Turn left and he could have simply driven south and crossed the Astoria-Megler Bridge. Drive a little over twelve miles, and he’d have been in Oregon. A few minutes more and he’d be at his next intended stop. No muss, no fuss… no fun. Instead, he went right and headed for Cape Disappointment.

In 1775, a Spanish explorer sailing up the Pacific Coast figured that the huge volume of brown water flowing into the ocean at 46 degrees 15 minutes north meant there was a river mouth aqui. The waters looked so treacherous, though, he didn’t risk trying to confirm it. Later on, a Brit poked his bowsprit between the two points of land but didn’t believe it was a river, so he renamed the northern headland Cape Disappointment. It was an American merchantman, Captain Robert Gray aboard the Columbia Rediviva, who finally braved the current and waves at the mouth to claim North America’s fourth-largest river for the adolescent United States in 1792, naming it after his ship. As with most New World “discoveries,” Gray was greeted by the Indians who’d been living there forever. These were the Chinook, who lent their name to the king salmon.

Tucked in behind Cape Disappointment lies the Port of Ilwaco, the closest marina to the infamous Columbia River sandbar or, as it’s known to mariners the world over, simply “the Bar”—often said with a shudder. More than two thousand vessels have sunk around the Bar, which is the most crowded crypt in a stretch of Northwest coast called the Graveyard of the Pacific. What makes the area so perilous is the battle between the outflow of the mighty river and the Pacific’s winds and waves that takes place atop the huge sandbar. In the right (wrong) conditions, the mouth of the Columbia can transform from a tremulous smooth swell to twenty-foot-tall breakers in the time it takes to ask, “Where’d we put the life jackets?”

The seas here are so consistently hellish that the U.S. Coast Guard bases its National Motor Lifeboat School at Ilwaco in order to train Guardies to handle anything the ocean can throw at them. The guard also mans a busy search-and-rescue base at Cape Disappointment that includes three lifeboats specially designed to operate in Bar conditions, which means being able to roll over and then right themselves and keep going with only minor soiling of the crew’s survival suits.

That said… there’s excellent salmon fishing just outside the mouth of the Columbia, which makes Ilwaco a great place to keep a boat as long as you know what you’re doing and always respect the Bar. Larry Johnson of Tumwater, Washington, keeps his Fat Cat there during the summer. Fat Cat is a thirty-four-foot Ocean Sport Roamer, a muscular twin-diesel $400,000-plus fishing machine built, coincidentally, at a small factory on Camano Island. Larry had used his boat Memorial Day, then put her safely to bed in her slip that evening. Boaters are second only to plane owners in their obsessive relationships with their craft, and Larry even has a sort of baby monitor for his. “There’s a webcam at the port that you can control by computer, so I sign on and check the boat every day.”

Not that he thought there was much to worry about. Boat theft didn’t happen at Ilwaco. The marina had security cameras and, as a bonus, a woman lived full-time aboard her boat moored next to Fat Cat. Larry kept his boat locked, but like many folks who have to travel long distances to their marinas, he kept a key squirreled away, hidden under gear, just in case he ever forgot his.

The surveillance camera sweeping the port showed Fat Cat right where she should be at midnight on the thirty-first. At 12:45 a.m., though, it showed an empty slip. In the meantime, Colt had crept aboard, rooted around the cockpit (on a boat, the cockpit is the open deck area behind the cabin, not, as on a plane, the place where the driver sits), and found the key. Once inside, Colt unsnapped all the window curtains, carefully rolled them up, and stowed them neatly on a shelf. He started the engines, cast off, and motored out of the marina.

To get where he wanted—across the Columbia to the town of Warrenton—Colt had to thread his way down a snaky channel that winds around several small islands and past constantly shifting sandbars just to reach the river. Charts of the area are cluttered with icons for sunken ships along with notations that even some navigational buoys aren’t marked because their positions have to be changed so often due to the deceptive sands. The channel took him right past the Cape Disappointment Coast Guard station, where he would have had to slow to “No Wake” speed alongside their dock.

Just past the station there’s a beach jutting into the channel that would have been invisible on this dark night with just a sliver of moon hidden behind an overcast sky. Around that and past Sand Island, the Fat Cat would finally be in the river.

Once on the river, Colt could open up the throttles, but the danger wasn’t over. The most perilous part of the Columbia is actually crossing the Bar, and Colt didn’t have to do that, though, as Larry says, “he was close enough to spit on it.” Even behind the Bar the crossing can be hairy, with sloppy seas to contend with, and on the other side Colt had to snug into the Oregon shoreline to avoid grounding on the Desdemona Sands. Then he needed to pick out the flashing beacons marking the Skipanon Waterway against the lights of Warrenton, Oregon, a town of five thousand built on tidal flats across Youngs Bay from Astoria. Colt made it and motored down the Skipanon to a commercial pier north of town. He docked the boat, tied her up, shut her down, locked the door, and put the key back in its hiding place.

Tuesday morning, Larry logged on and pulled up the Port of Ilwaco camera. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “I downloaded the image three or four times and then called the port.” The marina sent someone down to the slip and called him back, confirming his boat was gone. Larry phoned the coast guard while Ilwaco called all the marinas around Washington and Oregon. They soon got a call from Warrenton that they’d found Fat Cat at their dock, tied up among much larger commercial fishing boats. When Larry heard where it was, he assumed that it had been taken by someone very experienced with boats and with navigating the local waters.

More evidence of that came when he arrived at the boat. “There wasn’t even any cosmetic damage.” The boat has a full electronics package, with integrated radar and chartplotter, but it didn’t look like that had been used. “The covers were on the electronics, switches off, and there were no new tracks saved on the plotter.” That really puzzled Larry. “With the channels poorly marked and the Bar out there, to have done that at night without navigation equipment… I don’t know how you’d do it. He got real lucky.”

One explanation is that Colt carried his own portable GPS unit—he’d stolen plenty of them by this time. With lots of time to plan, he could pull up charts on his laptop, plot his routes, then transfer them to a GPS. That doesn’t make what he did easy. He still had to contend with everything Mother Nature could dish up, and he had to drive the boat across a big black expanse of moving water while navigating from a tiny screen.

“Why you would steal a boat to get to Warrenton I have no idea,” says Larry. “It takes a long time and you have all the risks out on the river. Instead, you can drive a car across the bridge and be there in a few minutes.” And conditions weren’t ideal: Larry couldn’t bring his Fat Cat back to Ilwaco for several days because the river was raging with eight-foot swells.

The Warrenton chief of police, Mathew Workman, says that as soon as they recovered the stolen boat, Colt was the prime suspect. “Mr. Moore had been put on our radar… and we fully expected to have something else happen in the area because that seemed to be his MO. When we didn’t have anything reported stolen that day, we were concerned he could be staying in one of the vacation homes that we have around here.”

Workman, forty-two, was a twenty-year police veteran who’d been chief in Warrenton since October 2008. He says that he got the word out to all Clatsop County police to be on the lookout. “Then I contacted the TITAN Fusion Center down here and asked if they could put something out to all law enforcement in the area.”

TITAN Fusion Centers are a post-9/11 Homeland Security big fix that allows local, state, and federal law enforcement to share intelligence and connect the dots on a broad range of subjects, including gangs, organized crime, and serial criminals working a local area, as well as activities that might be terrorism related. Workman says he was told that the information he presented to the Fusion Center didn’t “meet their criteria” for forwarding it among other agencies.