Just heard on my Washington radio station that the CG is conducting a search for a lost fishing boat off Cape May with 3 crew members. Anybody know details.
Update, just found this:
COAST GUARD SEARCHING FOR 3 OFF CAPE MAY COAST
Christina Stolfo ( ) - 11/11/09 10:46 pm
Last Updated - 11/11/09 10:49 pm
CAPE MAY--The Coast Guard is searching for three missing boaters off the coast of Cape May.
Officials say they received the call of distress around 7:30p.m. Wednesday when a 44-foot fishing boat named "The Seatracker" sank 20 miles east of Cape May.
A rescue helicopter arrived on scene to find an empty life raft.
Crews are still searching the area, looking for the three people who were onboard that boat.
CAPE MAY - The Coast Guard is sending search planes in an effort to find three people whose fishing boat sank Wednesday about 20 miles off the coast of Cape May.
Flight searches are secheduled to depart at 6:30 a.m. today.
The Coast Guard said it received a distress signal at 7:35 p.m. from the electronic position indicating radio beacon belonging to the 44-foot fishing boat the Seatracker. A representative with the Coast Guard's Delaware Bay sector said he believes the Seatracker is based in Cape May.
A rescue helicopter from Air Station Atlantic City arrived on the scene and found an empty life raft, the Coast Guard said. Rescuers continue to search the area from where the distress signal was sent.
3 missing after fishing boat sinks off coast of NJ
By WAYNE PARRY (AP) – 5 hours ago
POINT PLEASANT BEACH, N.J. — Coast Guard boats, planes and helicopters searched the roiling ocean off Cape May on Thursday for three commercial fishermen whose boat sank, and colleagues of the missing men prayed for a miracle.
Kenneth Rose Jr., 49, the captain of the Sea Tractor, his 75-year-old father, Kenneth Sr., and 55-year-old crew member Larry Forrest were aboard the 44-foot fishing boat when it sank about 20 miles east of Cape May on Wednesday night.
All are believed to be from North Carolina.
The Coast Guard has recovered an empty life raft, but had not found any signs of survivors as of Thursday morning as weather conditions continued to worsen, due in part to the remnants of Tropical Storm Ida, which was churning the sea from North Carolina to Long Island, N.Y..
Seas are 15 to 20 feet in the area of the search and winds are over 40 to 60 mph. Visibility is 2 to 3 miles.
"Let's hope for the best and say a prayer for them," said John Cole, general manager of a fishermen's cooperative in Point Pleasant Beach where the Sea Tractor had sold its catch twice within the past year.
He said the North Carolina-based boat operates from the dock in Cape May when it is in New Jersey. That's the same place where the Lady Mary, a scallop boat that sank in March, killing six of the seven crew members, was based.
Cole said he has known Rose for nearly 30 years, and believes he lived in North Carolina, though the Coast Guard was not immediately able to confirm that.
"He is a great guy — a good, honest, hardworking guy," he said.
Cole said he believed the Sea Tractor may have been fishing for fluke during an 11-day season that ended at 6 p.m. on Wednesday.
"They were probably on their way home when the incident occurred," he said.
At 7:35 p.m. Wednesday, the Coast Guard received a transmission from an emergency radio beacon that is usually activated when water touches it, although they also can be activated manually.
A helicopter crew from the Atlantic City Coast Guard station responded and found an empty life raft with a strobe light attached to it.
A nearby fishing vessel, the Capt. Jeff, arrived at the scene around the same time to help the Coast Guard, and found a debris field floating on the ocean surface with the Sea Tractor's emergency radio beacon, and a cooler.
20'+ seas in that area...probably not going to be good news unless they got their survival suits on...Three more guys showing up for Thanksgiving Dinner at Davey Jones Locker...I fear.....
Last edited by Big Fish Billy; 11-12-2009 at 06:27 PM.
They announced this morning that they are no longer searching for them.
Twenty-foot seas and winds as strong as 60 knots made the ocean perilous during a search that encompassed 387 nautical square miles, Kneen said.
Rescue helicopters and a Coast Guard plane searched 19 hours for the missing men.
Two Coast Guard cutters were involved in the search but had to find safe harbor Thursday due to deteriorating weather conditions, Kneen said.
Kneen said it was too early to determine if weather was a factor in the boat's sinking.
The missing fishermen worked up and down the East Coast, including along the docks in Lower Township, said Mark Mason, who works for Cold Spring docks along the Lobster House.
Mason knew the elder and younger Rose and said they caught primarily scallops and fluke.
"They were a bunch of swell guys," Mason said. "They did whatever they could for you to help you out."
"We lost a lot of people this year - a lot of fishermen," he said.
The Sea Tractor sinking was the second tragedy this year to befall the local fishing industry in a notoriously dangerous occupation.
Last edited by jackdaniels; 11-13-2009 at 08:19 AM.
Discovery of a body and an empty life raft add to the mysteries of a fishing boat sin
Discovery of a body and an empty life raft add to the mysteries of a fishing boat sinking
By RICHARD DEGENER Staff Writer | Posted: Monday, February 15, 2010 | 1 comment
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A beachcomber spending a Saturday morning collecting seashells on a remote North Carolina beach came across a body, but it only deepened the mystery of the last hours of the fishing vessel Sea Tractor.
The body was identified as Kenneth Rose Sr., one of three crewmen missing since the Sea Tractor went down Nov. 11 during a flounder fishing trip off Cape May. The sinking took the lives of Rose Sr., 75, his son Kenneth Rose Jr., 49, both of Broad Creek, N.C., and Larry Forrest, 55, of Cape May County.
The Sea Tractor was due back to Lund’s Fisheries in Lower Township, Cape May County, on the evening of Nov. 11 as a brutal coastal storm hit the area. The crew never made port.
At first authorities thought the body found Nov. 21 on Pea Island, a remote strand on the Outer Banks, about 10 miles south of Nags Head, would provide answers. Dead bodies can do that.
This one didn’t. It just raised more questions.
Three days before the body was discovered, a life raft from the Sea Tractor washed up just several miles away from where the body was eventually found.
For the body and the raft to end up so close together after traveling about 200 miles seemed odd to fishermen. The U.S. Coast Guard said it found the life raft empty the night of the sinking.
A body in the water drifts with currents and tides while a life raft catches the wind like a sail and can go in a completely different direction, so why were they so close together?
The mystery deepened when a preliminary autopsy done by a medical examiner with the medical school at East Carolina University found Rose died of drowning Nov. 16, five days after the sinking.
Question of survival
Rose was not found in a survival suit. He was wearing clothes. Mark Phillips, a commercial fishermen from Greenport, N.Y. who packed his fish at Lund’s that day and then listened to the rescue attempt on the radio, said there is no way Rose could have been treading water for five days in street clothes.
The Coast Guard insists its rescue swimmer, who arrived on a helicopter from Air Station Atlantic City on the night of Nov. 11, searched the life raft and nobody was in it.
“Atlantic City got on scene and saw strobe lights from the life raft and lowered a swimmer. He checked on board,” said Capt. Meredith Austin, commanding officer at Coast Guard Sector Delaware Bay.
The swimmer left the raft in the water that night, but it was checked out again when it came ashore, Capt. Todd Gatlin, a deputy section commander at Sector Delaware Bay, said items such as food, water and a Mylar blanket in the raft were never used. There were also unused survival suits on the raft.
If Rose were in the raft, he likely would have put on a suit.
“There’s no indication he was on the raft,” Gatlin said.
The Rose family is not speaking publicly, pending the final autopsy, but fishermen are asking questions.
“The autopsy said he was alive for five days. He had to be in that raft, or tied to the raft. Did the rescue swimmer actually look in the raft? That is the biggest question,” Phillips said.
Austin initially agreed to make the rescue swimmer and the helicopter pilot available for an interview with The Press of Atlantic City, but later declined to do so until its investigation is complete.
A new mystery
The preliminary autopsy was recently changed. The time of death is now listed as Nov. 11.
Doug Boyd, a spokesman for East Carolina University, said the medical examiner changed her preliminary findings after talking to the Coast Guard. The medical examiner now believes Rose was dead in the water during those five days.
“She had estimated Nov. 16. She said the main reason for the change is the Coast Guard told her the empty life raft had been spotted on Nov. 11. Hearing that, and looking at water temperature and degeneration of the body, it was consistent with that date. There was nowhere else that body could have been if that life raft was empty,” Boyd said.
Fishermen monitoring the radios the night of Nov. 11 believe they heard a Coast Guard helicopter crew find survivors. Clint Walker, who works at Lund’s Fisheries and sold the Sea Tractor to the Rose family, said he was listening with a member of the Rose family, fisherman Joe Rose, at the time.
“The first copter saw people in the raft and in the water but ran out of fuel. It was on the radio and a lot of people heard it,” Walker said.
Phillips said he heard the Coast Guard radio to a fishing boat nearby, the Captain Jeff, that there were people on the raft.
Coast Guard Cmdr. Ben Cooper said family members called that night believing they heard on the radio, “We found three.” Cooper said what they likely heard was, “We found debris.”
Fishermen complain the search was called off too soon. It was suspended at 5:02 p.m., Nov. 12, less than 24 hours after the sinking.
“I think they gave up the search too quick,” said Phillips, acknowledging that the rescue conditions were horrendous.
Austin said they searched beyond the times that survival charts indicated somebody could still be alive. Cooper said the search would have continued if there was any chance for a save.
“We gave absolutely everything we could to this case as we always do. There were very difficult weather conditions out there,” Cooper said.
The 87-foot Coast Guard Cutter Mako was searching for survivors Nov. 12 and had to return to its port in Cape May due to deteriorating weather including 15 to 20 foot seas, 40 to 60 knot winds with higher gusts and visibility as low as a half-mile.
Austin agreed the first medical examiner report raised some questions. She said it’s important to get the final report before making any rash conclusions.
“We’re waiting for the medical examiner to give us a final report. We’re not going to speculate,” Austin said.
Fishing quotas and a freakish storm
The Sea Tractor was fishing for flounder under a system that gives fishermen a set amount of time to land their quota.
Walker said a three-day fluke quota opened up Sunday, Nov. 8, and ended Wednesday, Nov. 11.
“It’s either you go out when they tell you, or you don’t make any money. He had a three-day window. The biggest question is the laws. They’re out there because of these stupid laws. There’s no sense in these lives being in danger. It’s ridiculous,” Walker said.
A post-storm report by the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, Burlington County, shows the 44-foot Sea Tractor was caught in the middle of two storms that met from Nov. 11 to 13 and created the type of storm that only comes once every 10 years.
The remnants of Hurricane Ida had been inland after coming up through the Gulf of Mexico, but had popped back out to sea off the coast of Georgia and then ran into a high pressure system from the north that created a northeaster. The competing weather systems met right over the Mid-Atlantic. Some have dubbed the storm “Nor’Ida.”
The storm was so massive that it had an unusually large fetch — the distance wind blows across open waters — of about 1,000 miles. This created enormous waves, said Jim Eberwine, of the National Weather Service.
“It was a perfect storm,” said Eberwine. “This was a fetch that can lead to triple the size of waves. You can get rogue waves when you get a fetch like this set up.”
A buoy offshore registered one wave at 26.7 feet, the largest measured since 1986. Wind gusts were approaching 60 knots and one hit 80 knots off Virginia. Lower Township, one of the closest points of land to the Sea Tractor, had 50 consecutive hours of sustained winds greater than 34 knots, with one gust hitting 50 knots. Cape May recorded its highest tides since the 1998 storm at 8.21 feet.
‘Every boat has its limitations’
The Sea Tractor was about 20 miles off Indian River Inlet, Del., when it sank, and the crew might have been trying to make safe harbor to the south. Most fishermen had come in earlier with the storm approaching.
Walker said the Sea Tractor was seaworthy but noted, “Every boat has its limitations.” Walker said electronic tracking of the Sea Tractor shows the crew was trying to get in. The last electronic signal was at 6:42 p.m. Nov. 11, and the boat’s emergency beacon, which activates upon sinking, went off at 7:35 p.m.
There was no mayday. Walker said if the storm knocked out the windows, it could have killed the radio and other electronics.
Fishermen at the dock were ready to go search for the Sea Tractor but were advised against it.
Phillips credits the Coast Guard for what they tried to do in such conditions but said the Rose family wants answers on several questions.
Some say at least the men died doing what they loved.
“There are commercial fishermen and then there’s the Rose family. These people loved the ocean. They were out on the ocean 300 days a year. They just fish, fish, fish,” Walker said.
The boat’s final location remains unknown, two bodies are still missing and the cause remains under investigation.
“It’s either you go out when they tell you, or you don’t make any money. He had a three-day window. The biggest question is the laws. They’re out there because of these stupid laws. There’s no sense in these lives being in danger. It’s ridiculous,” Walker said.
THEN MR. WALKER, I'LL SEE YOU IN D.C.
ON THE OTHER HAND....ON THIS PARTICULAR DAY OF THIS TRAGIC ACCIDENT, I WAS 300 MILES TO THE SOUTH OF CAPE MAY AND I ALSO WANTED TO FISH AND MAKE SOME MONEY THAT WEEK ON NOVEMBER...
BUT I HAD BEEN LISTENING TO THE UPCOMING WEATHER REPORTS FOR SEVERAL DAYS...FOLLOWING IT...STUDYING IT....AND LASTLY PAYING HEED TO IT.
NO MONEY MADE BY ME THIS PARTICULAR SAD SAD DAY IN CAPE MAY.....AND I SEND CONDOLENCES TO THE FAMILES OF THIS CREW.
AND I THANK THE NWS FOR THE UPDATE FORECAST THAT KEPT ME DOCKSIDE.
AND I THANK THE USCG FOR THEIR SEMPER PARATUS ATTITUDE.
IT IS THE PERSONAL GOAL OF EVERY MEMBER IN THE COAST GUARD TO BE A PART OF AN OPEN WATER RESCUE WHEN THIS HAPPENS.....
VERY MAN IN THE USCG DREAMS OF THE MOMENT WHEN ALL THE TRAINING PAYS OFF & COMES FULL CIRCLE....AND MANY HAVE DIED WHILE TRYING SAVING OTHERS FROM PERIL.....
IS YOUR LIFE WORTH IT? IS IT WORTH THE RISK TO HEAD OUT INTO YET ANOTHER PERFECT STORM ....AS PREDICTED?
I'M SORRY HERE.... BUT I DON'T GET IT....I MAY GO DOWN ONE DAY WITH THE SHIP BUT IT WILL NOT HAPPEN WHEN A STORM SUCH AS THIS IS PREDICTED.
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