Coast Guard safety crackdown reduces fatalities at sea
8:52 PM, Feb. 26, 2011

SANDY HOOK — When Coast Guard boarding officer Richard Vetterl and his four-man team reached the surf clam boat, it was just a few hundred yards off the beach, and lacking survival suits for the captain and two crewmen on board.

"He has two vessels and the suits were on the other boat. He wasn't 100 percent sure he needed them" fishing so close to shore, Vetterl said, after the boarding party and patrol boat Bainbridge Island cut short the clammers' work day and accompanied them back to the docks at Belford in Middletown.

"If that boat sank 500 yards off the beach, they'd never make it," said Lt. Christopher Davis, the Bainbridge Island's commanding officer and a veteran of winter patrols in Alaskan and Northeast waters. "Not in this cold water."

Almost two years after the Cape May scallop boat Lady Mary sank with the loss of six fishermen, the Coast Guard continues to press a rigorous program of checking commercial fishing boats at sea for safety equipment.

Over two decades, that effort has cut in half the annual death toll in the fishing industry, and New Jersey's losses brought heartbreaking lessons that helped save others. After two Point Pleasant Beach clam boats sank in 1999, safety advocates pushed through reforms including better stability tests for boats and more intensive training for crewmen.

Now provisions in the Coast Guard Reauthorization Act of 2010 will tighten safeguards still further. New rules being developed will:

Make now-voluntary dockside safety examinations mandatory every two years.

Mandate training in seamanship, fire fighting and damage control for captains, with refresher training every five years.

Fishing boats less than 50 feet long built after Jan. 1, 2011, would have construction standards equivalent to what the Coast Guard requires of recreational boats.

Vessels over 50 feet that are built after July 1, 2012, must be built to standards of a recognized ship classification society, such as the American Bureau of Shipping, and kept "in classification" with regular surveys — a move long sought by safety advocates, and one that industry observers say will substantially raise the cost for fishermen who want a new boat.



Not much new construction is happening in the East Coast fleet. Apart from the prosperous sea scallop industry, New England fishermen are struggling to stay afloat in a new regime of "catch share" management for cod, haddock and flounders that already has begun to consolidate the Northeast fleet as captains with insufficient shares tie up their boats.

But early this year, former top federal fisheries scientist Steve Murkowski noted 2011 could be the first year in which no American fish stocks are subjected to overfishing. At some point, optimists say, the situation will turn around and the fleet will need to modernize.

For older boats, the Coast Guard wants to develop an "alternative safety program" by 2017 in cooperation with the industry, to create safety classifications tailored to different regions and the industry's working conditions there.

Safety top priority

"Our primary mission is fishing vessel safety," said Vetterl, a Spring Lake Heights native who was executive petty officer at the New Haven, Conn., small boat station before snagging his job on the Bainbridge Island. "I needed to get under way and couldn't think of a better place to do it."

The crew comes from varied backgrounds. One petty officer holds a degree in cellular biology. Hank White, the engineering chief petty officer, is a North Carolina native and former commercial fisherman. Many crew members are on the water surfing or fishing when they're off duty.

"I chose to come here. . . . I have the local knowledge," said Clint Davis of Neptune, a boatswain's mate and seven-year veteran of the service (no relation to the skipper). "I fish on a daily basis when I'm not working, so I've always been interested in the resource."

But "safety of life at sea" tops their orders, Davis said. "A lot of guys are in compliance for the most part." But the Coast Guard commonly finds small oversights that can make a difference between life and death.

Most common are dead batteries in personal beacons like the ARC Firefly, an automatic light used on survival suits, Davis said. They find zippers broken on the suits — potentially fatal if they let cold water leak in. Then there are the emergency position-indicating radio beacons (EPIRBs), which need to have their batteries checked and identification codes authenticated.




The investigation into the Lady Mary sinking found that boat's EPIRB was not properly registered because of a transcription error by a government contractor. The mistake led to a delay of hours before a Coast Guard helicopter could be directed to the accident site, where the crew found one survivor and two dead.

Resource protection

Ranging from Nantucket Island to Cape May, the 110-foot Bainbridge Island and its crew spend about 80 percent of their days on fisheries patrols, checking on safety equipment and a maze of fishing regulations that can confound both fishermen and enforcers.

"It's the most complex fishery I've been around," said Lt. Davis, who has been on the water for seven years and learned skills in the Bering Sea, the location of the Discovery Channel's popular "Deadliest Catch" series about the crab fishery.

"I always remember something I heard early on in Alaska: Our job is to level the playing field, protect the resource and protect the fishermen," Davis said.

Because boardings are a serious drain on fishermen's time, the Coast Guard has a system to prioritize which boats get checked. The Bainbridge Island just got a satellite-linked computer system that's being used on larger ships so crews can run fishing boat names through databases to see who has been boarded recently and if they have any history of violations.

Boardings are even more sensitive now because of the fishing industry's complaints about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and its law enforcement branch that investigates fishing rules violations and assesses civil fines. Reviews by NOAA's inspector general led to the reassignment last year of law enforcement chief Dale Jones and the retirement of Northeast agent in charge Andrew Cohen, after fishermen's complaints they were treated unfairly.

"The vast majority of fishermen are professional. It's hard work, they're tired, they're on a time schedule," Davis said. "By and large, we have a pretty good relationship with them."

In the last two years, the crew of the Bainbridge Island "have not found a whole lot of problems," Davis said. The prosperous scallop fleet has money to be well-equipped and they "don't have a lot of reasons to cut corners," he said. Most captains they meet use the Coast Guard's voluntary safety examinations, a dockside safety review that earns them a decal on the wheelhouse — a signal to boarding crews that they have an easier job.



Off Alaska, "I don't think we found a safety discrepancy we couldn't fix on the spot," Davis said. "The boats are bigger; they're safer." It's getting better in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, too. Out of the last 150 boardings, the Bainbridge Island crew had to turn back only two boats to the dock.

The surf clammers make that number three. The Bainbridge Island's executive officer, Lt. Ed Quinn, comes back from the boarding, red-faced from the whipping north wind and air temperatures in the 30s.

"He was OK," Quinn says about meeting the captain. "When we first board anyone, they can be — how should I say — reluctant. But once you start talking they loosen up."

On the ride back to Belford, the Coast Guard men hear how things used to be there: its claim to being the oldest fishing port in America that rivals Massachusetts towns, plenty of fish for the taking. But the economic downturn is so deep that the crew has stopped fishing for lobsters. Scraping a small dredge in a 24-foot deep gully marked False Hook Channel on the navigation charts, they supply clam meat that thousands of recreational anglers hang on their hooks.

"They can make more money selling clams to the bait shops than they can make lobstering," Quinn reports.