October 26, 2015 — With crab season under way in the Bering Sea, some 70 crab boats are bobbing around Alaska’s Bristol Bay and the Aleutian Islands. About a dozen of those boats have a fisheries observer on board. The observers keep tabs on what the boats haul up from the deep.
Keith Davis was supposed to be one of those observers, but he went missing in September while working on a boat off the coast of South America. KUCB’s John Ryan reports.
TRANSCRIPT
Davis has been a fisheries observer for more than 15 years. His employer says he was planning to return to Dutch Harbor this winter to do more observing work.
But Davis vanished while working on a transshipment vessel about 500 miles off the coast of Peru. He disappeared one afternoon while a boat was offloading tuna to the Taiwanese ship that he was working on. The ship sailed under the flag of Panama.
The Panamanian government, the U.S. Coast Guard and the FBI are investigating his disappearance. Davis’s friends suspect foul play.
Goodman: “Absolutely do. For a number of reasons.”
Lynn Goodman is a fisheries observer and a friend of Keith Davis.
Goodman: “I met Keith in our Dutch Harbor bunkhouse while we were both observing on crab boats.”
She says Davis was exceptionally safety conscious and there’s no way he would have been on board a ship without a life jacket, let alone just fall off unnoticed.
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