For thousands of
years mariners set off on their voyages trusting in their knowledge of the sea,
the seaworthiness of their vessels, the gods and luck, to come home safely. And
for thousands of years, when their luck ran out, mariners usually died. For
sailors and their families this was part of their bargain with the sea for
providing them a living.
Until the 1700s, even
as shipbuilding technology made huge advances through the centuries, not much
effort was put into figuring out how to survive once the ship had sunk. But by
the 1780s, lifeboats were being designed, and in 1882, a Philadelphia inventor
named Maria Beasley patented the first “Lifesaving Raft for Use in Case of Shipwreck.”
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| Beasely life raft, 1882 |
But these inventions only helped when
they were installed on vessels, and ship owners resisted the added expense and the
regulations which would require them. When
the Titanic sank in 1912, with the loss of 1,513 people, the ship was sailing
legally with 20 lifeboats- enough for about 40% of the 2,224 passengers. The
shock of the disaster got the public’s attention however, and spurred the
adoption of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea in 1914, which required lifeboats for
all steamship passengers, signaling devices, and improved hull design protocols
to make ships better able to survive flooding.
Neither the 1914 Convention nor
subsequent safety regulations in the decades following applied to American fishing
vessels however. Despite horrendous losses, fishermen and their congressmen
maintained the abiding principle that fishermen could weigh the risks
themselves and make their own decisions about safety equipment, vessel
construction, and training. In vessels under 200 tons they were free to do as
they liked- no vessel standards or inspections, no life rafts, no licensed ship’s
officers.
No one knows how many Alaskan fishermen died
before records began being kept in 1990, but 387 fishermen have died since
then. Historians estimate that 10,000 fishermen from Gloucester Massachusetts,
have died since 1620, but again, no one knows for sure, since records
before1900 are incomplete. But despite the loss of life unparalleled in any
other industry, fishermen were off the regulatory map until 1985.
In that year, on August 20, a seine boat
crossing Marmot Bay north of Kodiak found the body of Peter Barry, a 20 year
old Yale University student, floating in the water. Barry was a crewman on the Western
Sea, a 58 foot wooden seine boat built in 1915. He was wearing a life jacket,
but no survival suit. The Coast Guard later found two more bodies- twenty five
year old Stewart Darling, and Jerard Bouchard, 58, of Coupeville, Washington, the
skipper. The two other deckhands were never found- Chris Hofer, 27, of Fort Collins Colorado, and Bill
Posey, 24, of Anchorage. The cause of the sinking has never been determined.
Peter Barry had come to Alaska that
summer, worked in a cannery for a few weeks, and boarded the Western Sea in July. At first he wrote
home to his parents about the romance of working as a commercial fisherman, and
about the chance to make far more money on a boat than in a cannery. The work
was hard and he was treated as the greenhorn, but he accepted these things. But
as the season progressed he wrote that things on the Western Sea were not
idyllic. He wanted to get off the boat, but was dissuaded when the captain told
him he wouldn’t be paid if he did.
In the investigation which followed the
sinking it became apparent that the Western Sea had carried no life raft, no survival
suits, no EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon) and no emergency
pump. The crewman Peter Barry replaced told Barry’s father he had been afraid
of Bouchard and of the boat and had quit because he feared for his safety. An
autopsy later revealed the presence of cocaine in Bouchard’s body.
Barry’s father was dumbfounded and incensed
to learn that while doing cocaine at sea was against the law, it was perfectly
legal for a 70 year old fishing boat to sail with no safety equipment. There
were no vessel standards or inspections for most commercial fishing boats and fishermen
were not required to pass any tests or master any skills. A twelve year old boy
could set to sea as master of a fishing boat; with the fate of an inexperienced
crew, ignorant of the risks involved, in his hands.
But unlike most survivors of dead
fishermen who had found themselves dismayed but powerless to change the
regulatory structure governing the lives of their loved ones, Robert Barry and
his wife Peggy knew their way through the thicket of Federal bureaucracy. Barry
had been in the U.S. Foreign Service for twenty five years and had recently been
ambassador to Bulgaria. He was on his way to a European Security conference in
Stockholm when his son was killed.
He and his wife began meeting with
congressmen and working to pass legislation to make safety equipment mandatory
on fishing boats. They also hoped to help prevent sinkings in the first place
by making fishing vessels subject to technical standards and inspections, and
to institute standards and licensing for fishing boat captains and engineers.
The story of their, and others, efforts
to get such legislation passed is long, complicated, and in many ways
incomplete, but on September 9, 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed the “Commercial
Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act of 1988.” It was the first legislation in
the United States to specifically mandate safety equipment on commercial
fishing vessels.
The CFIVS mandates that life
rafts, signaling devices, and immersion suits be carried on fishing vessels; and
requires fishermen to conduct drills using that equipment, and to keep logs documenting
the drills. The result has been that commercial fishing fatalities in Alaska
have dropped from 37 in 1992 to eight in 2014, and 0 in 2015, the first time year there have been no commercial fishing fatalities in Alaska. But still, no law yet requires fishing
vessels under 200 gross tons to be built to any standards or be subject to inspection, or for fishing personnel on such
boats to be trained and licensed.
