Safety

August 1, 2013 — “Oh God, I’m going to die,” John Aldridge said was his first thought after he fell off the Anna Mary over 30 miles south of Montauk in the dark early morning of July 24. “I remember almost grabbing the transom,” he said extending his fingers toward the memory during an interview Monday afternoon.

He had been on watch as Capt. Anthony Sosinski, known as Little Anthony, slept. No yell for help would be heard over the engine as the Anna Mary moved away beyond his reach. “I felt so helpless.”

“It was the end of my watch. I was about to wake him up. I was getting the refrigeration going, setting up the holding tanks, getting the system working. There were two coolers on top of the hatch. I grabbed the top one with a box hook like I’d done a thousand times, but it was heavy and I remember thinking, ‘This is a bad move.’ The handle snapped and the force of my pull put me over.”

The thought, “Oh God, I’m going to die” changed to the question, “Is this how I’m going to die?” he said. And then came the answer: “I’m breathing. The water’s warm. I’m living. It was the process of elimination. Survival.”

“I’m laying on my back with my feet in the air,” he said. He realized that his boots were designed to float. “I took them off and held them to my chest. I don’t know what made me do it, but I was this high out of the water,” he said pointing to his chest. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to stay positive. No negative thoughts.’ I didn’t allow them. The floating boots were a major high.”

The lobsterman looked within himself as he described the scene: alone on a dark sea in the moonlight with the boat heading away, and, at one point, fins on the surface. “I pulled out my pocket knife. I was looking at the boat in the moonlight. I saw a fin or two. I looked down and saw my feet, my white socks.”

Asked about the fear of sharks, he said, “I blocked it out. I would think about it every once in a while, but thought, ‘I can’t worry about it until it happens. I can’t waste my energy.’ I live offshore, so I know about the Golden Hour,” he said, meaning dawn, when fish, including the big predators, start to feed. “I’m freaking out on the surface and swimming like a frog,” he said with a laugh full of relief.

Read the full story from The East Hampton Star

(CBS News) OAKDALE, N.Y. — July 25, 2013 — The Coast Guard rescued a commercial fisherman Wednesday in the ocean off Long Island. He'd spent 12 hours in the Atlantic after falling off his boat. In all that time, he managed to keep his wits about him and, fortunately, his boots.

John Aldridge is one tough lobsterman. It was three in the morning and he was in the Atlantic Ocean, more than 40 miles offshore.

"A pair of boots, T-shirt and shorts and my knife," Aldridge says, listing the items he had with him.

"Fins swimming around me, and I'm like, 'I can't even deal with that,'" he says. "It must've been a shark."

Asked if there was ever a point at which he thought he was all done, Aldridge replies, "I wouldn't let that thought come into my head. Positive thinking the whole time. Death was not an option."

"I immediately set goals for myself: OK, I'm floating on these boots. I'm above the water, I'm breathing. The water's warm. All right, that's one goal," Aldridge recalls. "Next goal: I got to stay alive until sunrise. If I make it to sunrise, they're going to call the Coast Guard and come looking for me. They'll be able to find me."

Watch the video and read the full story at CBS News

July 25, 2013 — Anthony “Little Anthony” Sosinski woke up Wednesday morning at 6 a.m. to a panic: His fishing boat Anna Mary was 60 miles south of Montauk Point and his partner and friend since second grade John “Johnny Load” Aldridge was nowhere to be found.

The Anna Mary had set out from Montauk at 8:30 p.m. and Aldridge had taken the first watch as they steamed on autopilot toward their lobster traps.

“I went out onto the deck and started piecing things together,” Sosinski said, “We’d started filling up these lobster tanks with water, and when I came out in the morning I found that the coolers had been moved around and that one of the handles was snapped off.”

Apparently, Sosinski said, Aldridge had been pulling on the cooler by the handle when it broke off and sent him careening off the boat's open stern. When Sosinski first called the Coast Guard, the officers asked if he’d found any sign of a suicide note, but “I knew it wasn’t nothing but an accident,” he said.

The Coast Guard put Sosinski in charge of setting up a 12-boat search flotilla 12 miles long, each a half-mile apart, sweeping up and down the coast to search for the lost seaman. Boats from Massachussets, Connecticut and Rhode Island participated in the search, and even Jimmy Buffet headed out to help.

Read the full story at East Hampton Patch

July 25, 2013 — John Aldridge used his rubber boots as a life raft as he struggled to stay afloat in the Atlantic Ocean for nearly 12 hours before Coast Guard rescuers plucked him from the water Wednesday, more than 40 miles from where he had fallen overboard.

Read the full story at Newsday

July 24, 2013 — Fishing Partnership Support Services will be offering free safety and survival training sessions during the months of September and October. The locations and times of those events can be found below:

– Hull, MA – Point Allerton Coast Guard Station – Friday Sept. 13, 2013 – 7:30 AM to 3:30 PM
– New Bedford, MA – UMASS Dartmouth (SMASS) – Friday Oct. 11, 2013 – 7:30 AM to 3:30 PM
– Chatham, MA – Stage Harbor – Friday Oct.18, 2013 – 7:30 AM to 3:30 PM
– Gloucester, MA – Coast Guard Station – Thursday Oct. 24, 2013 – 7:30 AM to 3:30 PM

Sign up and learn more with Fishing Partnership Support Services

July 9, 2013 — Police said Monday they are awaiting word from the state’s medical examiner on the cause of death for the man who died aboard the trawler Osprey Sunday, while Coast Guard officials explained why they called for the vessel to travel to Gloucester rather than launch a more immediate rescue mission when the vessel was still out to sea.

Crew members on board the herring trawler Osprey first contacted the Coast Guard regarding what appeared to be a “severe asthma attack” that caused Michael Grindle to collapse Sunday at around 3:45 a.m. The Coast Guard notified the Osprey’s crew that Coast Guard members would not be responding to the medical emergency at sea.

“There is a Coast Guard policy of how and when we send helicopters based on survival numbers after CPR,” Bryan Swintek, Command Center Chief at Sector Southeastern New England said Monday.

He explained that statistics show a person undergoing chest compressions will typically survive for under an hour without access to a heart defibrillator. A Coast Guard helicopter could have reached the 107-foot herring trawler in about two hours, but the trip to the hospital would expend another hour, he said.

Guard members from the Southeastern sector that received the emergency call instead instructed the crew to perform CPR on Grindle, and his colleagues on board pumped at his chest until about 4 a.m., when his pulse dropped away.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times

 

June 27, 2013 — This week is National Lightning Safety Awareness Week, and NOAA's National Weather Service has a stark message for fishermen and boaters: You are not safe outside during a thunderstorm. A new data review of deaths caused by lightning between 2006 and 2012 reveals that water-related activities (fishing, boating, beach, and swimming) make up 36 percent of all leisure-related deaths. Of the 152 lightning deaths that occurred while the victim was participating in a leisure activity, fishing tops the list at 26 deaths. Boating is high on the list at 14 deaths.

John Jensenius, a lightning safety specialist with the National Weather Service, said the large number of fishing and boating lightning deaths may occur because these activities require extra time to get to a safe place. “People often wait far too long to head to safety when a storm is approaching, and that puts them in a dangerous and potentially deadly situation,” he said.

Men make up 82 percent of lightning victims. The study offers possible explanations for this finding: males are unaware of all the dangers associated with lightning, are more likely to be in vulnerable situations, are unwilling to be inconvenienced by the threat of lightning, are in situations that make it difficult to get to a safe place in a timely manner, don't react quickly to the lightning threat, or any combination of these explanations. In short, because of their behavior, males are at a higher risk of being struck and, consequently, are struck and killed by lightning more often than females.

Read the full story at NOAA Fisheries 

 

June 26, 2013 — Researchers are examining a possible meteotsunami that may have hit the coast of New Jersey June 13. The Tsunami Warning Center relayed an account of the events as seen by Brian Cohen, who was out spear fishing in the Barnegat Inlet in Ocean County when he saw waves that were approximately 6 feet peak-to-trough spanning across the inlet.

"Earlier in the day around noon, thunderstorms had moved through the area. By 3:30 p.m. [EDT] the weather was overcast with a light east wind. At approximately 3:30 [p.m. EDT], the outgoing tide was amplified by strong currents which carried divers over the submerged breakwater (normally 3-4 feet deep). This strong outrush continued for 1-2 minutes and eventually the rocks in the submerged breakwater were exposed. Brian backed his boat out before being sucked over as well."

The low-end derecho that pushed from Chicago to Washington, D.C., on June 13 may have sparked the possible meteotsunami on the New Jersey coast, said Paul Whitmore, Director of the Tsunami Warning Center.

"The first impulse was to see this as meteorologically driven, but once a system gets over the [continental] shelf, we lose data," he said. "It makes it hard to confirm."

It could take months before the event is officially confirmed one way or the other, but it seems likely at this time that the derecho may have caused the tsunami-like waves.

Read the full story at the Huffington Post 

 

 HARPSWELL, Maine — June 12, 2013 — Philip Tuttle saw an opportunity and took it. With his wife preoccupied upstairs, he quickly scribbled a note — “Headed out to look for a trap. Be back shortly.” — and headed toward his boat Saturday afternoon.

Tuttle has hauled lobsters from the waters of Casco Bay for about 40 years. And he found the trap, but got a little too close to shore in the process. He hit a ledge, and the Queen Tut, his 26-foot lobster boat, began sinking.

“The boat just went right over on its side,” he said. “Within three minutes, it was sunk.”

Unable to reach a life jacket, Tuttle took a deep breath as the boat went down, pried loose a nearby buoy, and swam 30 yards, though it felt more like 2 miles, through chilly water to an island. Slowly, he clawed his way up the jagged rocks, barnacles slicing into his shins and arms with each movement.

Unable to reach a life jacket, Tuttle took a deep breath as the boat went down, pried loose a nearby buoy, and swam 30 yards, though it felt more like 2 miles, through chilly water to an island. Slowly, he clawed his way up the jagged rocks, barnacles slicing into his shins and arms with each movement.

Philip Tuttle is 90 years old.

He’s not supposed to lobster alone anymore. But Tuttle, a feisty and spry retired casket salesman who spends about three months a year lobstering, is not one easily told what to do. On Saturday, he sneaked out of the house.

“I get the Dickens for that,” he said with an impish grin Wednesday, sitting beneath a picture window overlooking the ocean.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe

 

 

June 10, 2013 — A 90-year-old Great Island man swam from his sinking lobster boat to a small island Saturday night before being rescued by his son-in-law.

Philip Tuttle was home Monday afternoon recovering from cuts and scrapes suffered in the ordeal, according to his daughter-in-law Verian Tuttle.

“He’s a pretty stubborn, feisty Mainer,” she said Monday.

Tuttle left his home late Saturday afternoon after leaving his wife a note that he was heading out to check a trap and would be right back, Verian Tuttle said. But when he didn’t return in time for dinner, they knew something was wrong.

Tuttle’s 26-foot-lobster boat, Queen Tut, had run aground off Gun Point sometime between 6:30 and 6:45 p.m., according to Jeff Nichols of the Maine Department of Marine Resources.

“He’s very sharp — he really is — and he definitely was trying to find something to float on,” his daughter-in-law said. “He climbed out onto the ledge he hit, the tide was coming in now, so he knew he had to get to shore, and he had to swim about 30 yards. He’s a pretty good swimmer, or was in his day, and he made it ashore. He said he would crawl on the rocks a few inches at a time.”

In the meantime, Tuttle’s family headed down to the shore to look for him. After one son, Brooks Tuttle, took a skiff to search of the Queen Tut, another son, Stewart, and Tuttle’s son-in-law Michael Innis saw the boat’s muffler sticking out of the sea.

Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News