Fishing about and about fishing
THE SINKING OF THE “PATRIOT”
Skipper Matteo Russo and his father-in-law, John Orlando. died early the morning of Jan. 3 when their 16.5-m trawler, Patriot, sank somewhere off Gloucester, Massachusetts. The weather was fair and waves moderate. The ground where the trawler sunk was of smooth bottom, so that it was unlikely that her gear could have been snagged and caused the “Patriot” to capsize.
The Patriot was not an old bucket, but an 11-years old modern boat in very good shape. Skipper Russo has recently reconditioned and equipped her with up-to-date communications and survival equipment, among others a radio-fire-alarm system. Last month the Patriot passed her voluntary inspection conducted by the Coast Guard. She was also carrying the VMS, (Vehicle Monitoring System), a satellite-based tracking device, which is continually reporting to a shore tracking station the vessel’s position, and is mandatory on most of the Gloucester-based trawlers working under U.S. federal groundfish permits.
Whatever happened, it seems, happened quickly, given that both men, whose bodies were found hours later, had no time to don their survival suits. The Patriot was located resting on her side at a depth of 34 m. A remote-controlled underwater monitoring of the whole day-long recording and still photography of the wreck couldn’t provide an answer as to the cause of the sinking. There was no apparent sign of fire, a strike, and damage. The propeller and rudder were in place, and both trawl doors were on board.
While I’m writing these words the Coast Guard, prompted by the victim’s family and the Gloucester fishing community and their representatives, is looking for, but is still ignorant of the causes of the sinking, the only available hypothesis at the moment being that the Patriot might’ve hit a heavy cable, hundreds of metres long, by which an oceanic tug passing in the vicinity of Patriot’s location was towing a heavy barge.
Patriot’s sinking is hardly spectacular. Nothing like the one of the “perfect storm”, nothing like the recent one of Alaska Ranger with 42 cre-members in water, or the other recent disaster of Kingfisher, which sunk off South Africa’s Eastern Cape, leaving 5 survivors and 14 crew-members unaccounted for and assumed lost. But here, just one smallish trawler and 2 fishermen dead.
So, why am I writing all this? Because there’s a problem here – the late start of the search-and-rescue operation. What happened is that it took the Coast Guard some 2-and-a-half hour, a delay, which is widely discussed in Gloucester and investigated by the authorities. This problem, however dealt with in the USA, must be of major interest to all countries, whose fishing vessels are obliged, or may be obliged in the future, to carry VMS or similar devices for the purpose of enforcement of fishery management rules. I’m writing this with the hope that after what had happened at Gloucester, Mass., such incidents would never occur also elsewhere.
The bulk of the facts this piece is based on come from the Gloucester Daily Times on-line. What hit my eye was reading of the time that passed since the U.S. Coast Guard had been informed and the time when it took action.
The emergency started when the skipper’s wife was alerted at 1:35 a.m. by the fire alarm at her home, which came by radio from the Patriot. Having tried in vain to contact her husband or her father by radio, she called the Coast Guard, but was unable to persuade them to begin search and rescue operations immediately. The only thing the Coast Guard did was to check to see if the Patriot was at its berth in the harbour. Only about 4 a.m. the Coast Guard sent
out a helicopter and two boats on a search-and-rescue mission.
Now, imagine: there’s a VIMS reception centre at the NMFS, where information on the positioning of all vessels carrying VIMS is received every 30 mins. This information normally should be available directly to the Coast Guard, which needs it both for the sake of enforcement and for the sake of search and rescue. In the past, the Coast Guard used the VMS system quite efficiently in another search and rescue mission. For some reason in the case of the Gloucester's Patriot, just two months later, Coast Guard did not use timely the VIMS system. In Gloucester, fishing people speculate that some bureaucratic feet dragging, and/or lack of standard code of reaction at emergency resulted in the, perhaps, crucial delay, and they want an explanation why the Coast Guard didn’t use this otherwise efficient system as soon as they were informed on the fire alarm.
The VMS was introduced to fishermen as a life-saving tool. This, because instead of searching large areas of ocean they would be able to narrowly focus the vessel-in-distress approximate location, owing to the VMS position reports. No doubt, a local investigation and lessons drawing are a must for the future safety of the Gloucester’s and other American fishing fleets.
This and similar systems all over the world should be so organized and fine-tuned to the possibilities of dangers and disaster at sea so that no one could say as that Gloucester fisherman who said that “there is a great disparity in how VMS is used and that there’s a bias toward protecting fish rather than human life”.
It appears that an agreement, as that signed by Coast Guard and National Marine Fisheries Service, saying that the VMS technology is designed to be used for both enforcement and search-and-rescue efforts is insufficient for ensuring that saving human life must take preference over any other duties and assignments. Wherever VMS system is employed, there must be an explicit procedure prescribing how to react to emergencies, especially when alarm signals have been received. It is, in my opinion, also absolutely imperative that the organization responsible for search-and-rescue operations must have a direct immediate access to VMS data in true time. It is unthinkable that a technology, which is so successfully used to police fishing operations wouldn’t be equally fast and efficiently employed the to locate vessels in distress.