Collision course

Ask most fishermen what the most likely ways are to lose a boat and you’ll probably get flooding and fires as the top two answers. And that would match up with statistics that the Coast Guard has kept for fishing vessel casualties for the period 1992 to 2007 in all U.S. waters.

In those fifteen years, 685 boats were lost to flooding and 383 to fires.  In fifth place (behind grounding with 310 boats and capsizing with182 boats) is collision (70 boats lost), which, I bet, is not something that most fishermen ever think will happen to them. In fact, I recently talked with someone that constantly deals with fishing vessel safety issues and when he looked at the record for collisions involving fishing boats in New England, his  reaction was “Holy Smoke” after seeing that in 2008 there were 12 incidents. That was far more than he had expected. (Most of these  didn’t involve major damage.)

That said, the reality of collisions has recently grabbed some East Coast media attention after the scalloper Dictator was rammed by a container ship off New Jersey on April 14, and the lobster boat The Misses sank on June 3 after it was hit by the 46-foot gillnetter Tenacious six miles off Phippsburg, Maine, on a clear, sunny day. In another  New Jersey incident that is looking more and more like a collision, the scalloper Lady Mary went down with six crewmen on March 24.

Now, losing a boat and crew to a collision — while it might not be on most people’s mind — is nothing new for commercial fishermen.

Back in 1839, the Gloucester schooner Sevo was run down in the night by the steamer Huntress. The Captain got aboard the steamer, while “Winthrop Sargent, a lad of 12 years, crawled out to the end of the bowsprit, and as the vessel was going down, grasped a splitting table, which floated by, and by his cries attracted the attention of those on board the steamer who rescued him with much difficulty.” So reads the account in the “Fishermen’s Memorial & Record Book,” which was published in 1873 and is, in part, a record of the 281 boats and the 1,252 men lost from the port of Gloucester, Mass., between 1830 and July 1, 1873. Like all its entries, the book lists the men who went down with the Sevo: Richard Triton, Nathaniel Remby, Jonathan Osgood and James McDonald. It also gives the value of the schooner ($1,300) and what she was insured for ($1,150).

Numerous other entries for collisions are listed in this book as well as the “Fishermen’s Own Book,” which was printed in 1882 and records the 137 schooners lost and 997 men from Gloucester that were drowned between 1874 and 1882.

In a lot of those 19th century collision cases it was probably just a case of bad luck — being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A schooner that was anchored on the grounds or jogging with just a riding sail up would have a hard if not impossible chance of getting out of the way of a fast moving steamer or a full-rigged sailing ship flying all her canvas. And kerosene anchor or running lights were easily blown out in any wind.

The same can’t be said for today’s fishing boats. They have a very large number of electronic tools to avoid collisions: radar, AIS, alarms and radios. I suspect the primary reason fishing boats are run down (or hit another boat) is because neither the captain nor the crew thinks such a thing will ever happen to them. That, in turn, leads to what people today refer to as a lack of situational awareness, which is probably a behavioral psychologist’s fancy term for “not paying attention.”

It’s not such a smart idea to leave no one in the wheelhouse while you drop down to the fo’c’sle for a cup of coffee, go out on deck to help the gang with whatever it is they are doing, or read a magazine on your wheel turn. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have done all those things.)

To avoid an unexpected encounter with another boat, it would be a good idea to consider a few lines from the “Fishermen’s Own Book” about the schooner Guy Cunningham with 13 crewmen that was thought to have been run down in July 1881.

“The utmost precaution is necessary to avoid the dangers which a thick fog engenders, and the lookout’s position on board all vessels crossing the Banks, as well as on board the fisherman, is one of great responsibility.”

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Calculating the cost of bottom paints

It’s spring, and the smart fisherman’s fancy turns to what else — painting the bottom of his boat, of course. For many fishermen, there’s something energizing about watching the boat hauled, seeing the slime and crud of the past year scraped off the bottom and replaced with a fresh, bright coat of bottom paint. It marks the start of another season.

As one squarehead who had watched his share of yearly launchings once told me as the last bit of paint was rolled on to his troller: “Ya, boy. She be ready for another go.”

That was more than a few years ago. Then it seemed there was only one kind of paint. It was thick, dark red and had a lot of copper in it.

It also wasn’t all that expensive, as were a lot of things then, including fuel. If the antifouling paint didn’t work that well and turned into a breeding ground for underwater organisms that at the end of the trip had dragged a few more gallons of fuel out of your expenses than anticipated, it wasn’t that big of a deal.

The cost of fuel today means it is a big deal. The smoother the bottom of the boat, the less fuel you use and the more money you save. Foul-release paints are said to be very good at keeping the bottom of a boat smooth and reducing fuel costs, but they are very expensive. Are they an option for you? One way to find out is by logging into National Fisherman’s interactive paint-estimating calculator. You will quickly find out if these paints make sense for you.

If you want to go with a paint that’s not so pricey, use the calculator to quickly compare the cost of having the job done at one boatyard as opposed to another. Or if the boat is small enough and you think you can do the job cheaper, use the calculator to figure your costs.

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Maine diesel swap

Are you running a diesel engine in a boat operating in Maine? Do you want to swap out an old engine for a new one? Do you want 50 percent of the new engine paid for? Well, if you act really quickly, you can take advantage of the fed's $782 billion stimulus plan that was passed in February and get that engine.

The stimulus plan gives $300 million to the Diesel Emission Reduction Act or as it is better known, DERA. Thirty percent of that money goes to states that have a clean diesel program. If all fifty states sign up for the program, then Maine gets $1.7 million, which could go to replacing old, worn out, polluting marine diesels. 

I say “could” because where the money goes hasn’t been determined. The person trying to decide how best to spend the money is Lynne Cayting with Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection. She has to come up with a proposal by March 20 that meets DERA’s health initiative criteria of reducing diesel emissions, and “meets the criteria for the stimulus bill, which is to create and retain jobs and stimulate the economy,” she says. 

Cayting’s proposal is the Maine Clean Marine Engine program. The thing about the program, says Cayting, is that it fits both the DERA and the stimulus requirements. “It takes the oldest, dirtiest engines out of the fleet, and helps engine manufacturers, engine distributors, boatyards, mechanics and fishermen.” 

Now this is why you have to act quickly. If there’s not enough interest by boat owners in getting a new engine through the Maine Clean Marine Engine program, the money will go to another state program, and boat owners will lose out on the chance for 50 percent funding.

On March 20, Cayting has to tell the EPA how Maine’s $1.7 million will be spent. If the choice is the Maine Clean Marine Engine program, Cayting will continue to take applications for engine swaps until the end of April.

A large number of applications also give Cayting the flexibility to go after a share of the remaining 70 percent of the stimulus money. Of that money, the EPA’s region 1, which includes Maine, would get up to $2 million.

“In a competitive application for my region, I could compete for and get $600,000 to $2 million, if I have enough applications. It all could go to the clean marine energy project,” she says.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

•Besides funding 50 percent of a new Tier II diesel, the Maine Clean Marine Engine program will fund 100 percent for exhaust control devices.

•The old engine will be put out of business by drilling a hole in the engine block and manifold.

•You have to stick with the same horsepower, and transmissions are not included.

•Maine’s EPA will start obtaining engines, or at least get the bidding process going, in June.

•The money must be spent by September 2010

Contact Lynne Cayting, DEP, #17 State House Station, Augusta, ME 04333. Tel. (207) 287-7599. Fax. (207) 287-7641.  E-mail: lynne.a.cayting@maine.gov; Web site www.mainedep.com

Or download the new engine application here.

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Pool drill is no drill at all

Any kid growing up in a beach town in Southern California is going to spend most of his summer in the ocean. That’s a fact of life and along with parental foresight explains why I and several other kids — all between the ages of five and seven — were floating just outside the breaker line early one summer, accompanied by an adult we had been told was our swimming coach. 

 It wasn’t so much a swimming class, though I suppose there was some of that, as lessons in how to handle yourself in the water: How to avoid getting carried out to sea, what to do when confronted by a set of large waves, what to do when there’s no escape, and when it’s not a good idea to go in the water at all. We came away with some safety tips, confidence and a respect — more than most kids of that age had — of the ocean.

 Now that seems to me a sensible approach to preparing a kid for spending time in the water. That’s more than I can say for the so-called “pool drill”  the Coast Guard uses to teach fishermen how to (first) get into their immersion suit, (second) jump in the water and (third) enter a life raft.

 Admittedly, neither have I taken one of these classes nor have I put on a survival suit, but I have stood at the roller of more than one longliner and instinctively knew that I valued the security of that deck and had no desire whatsoever to leave it and enter that water. The water was dark, it was cold, and I couldn’t see the bottom. And I have stood beside the edge of swimming pools and had no sense of trepidation at all about entering that water. It was clear, it was warm, and I could see the bottom.

 Nope, the difference between standing at the edge of a pool and then dropping into the water seems light years different from being on the deck of a sinking boat and have to haul yourself onto and over the rail and into the water.

 Even getting into an immersion suit on a boat must be very different from entering one while sitting next to a pool on a concrete surface that isn’t rolling or pitching or doing both at the same time.

 The same goes for getting in a life raft in a pool. The water is calm. The sides of the pool keep the raft from moving more than a few feet, and if you get nervous, there’s always a helping hand a few feet away. Basically you don’t have to figure things out for yourself.

 Next time the Coast Guard gives one of these classes, I think they should drop the pool business and load the fisherman onto a boat. Take them out into a large harbor, a bay, or just into the ocean — preferably when there’s a good chop and a strong breeze — and do the drill there. I guarantee you everyone will get more out of it.

 If a group of mothers are smart enough to know that a day at the pool isn’t going to prepare their kids for getting along in the ocean, you would think the Coast Guard would be smart enough to get the fishermen out of the pool and into the water.

 

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Flooding issues

The flooding of a boat’s steering compartment is the probable explanation for the sudden disappearance of numerous fishing boats, says Ted Harrington, fishing vessel safety coordinator for the Coast Guard’s First District (Maine to New Jersey).

 “That’s my opinion, based on guesswork from doing this for twenty years and seeing some of the things that go wrong and the stories of our boarding officers,” he says.

 Stories like that of a boarding party that went aboard a New England dragger. When one of the boarding party checked the steering compartment he found six feet of water inside it. The boat’s captain had no idea any water was present, let alone six feet.

 Consider all the things that can go wrong in that part of the boat: failure of packing gland, failure of rudder port, hull fracture, plugged up or jammed bilge pump, water-tight door or hatch not dogged down, faulty gasket around door or hatch, bilge alarm doesn’t work. 

A boat burdened with one or two of those items will go down in a big hurry.

 The following is a list of ways to minimize the chance of becoming another news story about a lost boat and dead fishermen.

 • Vertical instead of horizontal hatches leading to steering compartment

 • Two bilge pumps, each capable of emptying the compartment

 • Two separate bilge alarms

 • Video camera of area

 • Backup steering

 • Wire the doors or hatches so an alarm goes off if they are left open

 • Have someone periodically check the steering compartment

 • Design the steering compartment as small as possible to control flooding

 • Check the rudder assembly and hull plating when the boat is hauled 

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Lazarette Guy

The Achilles' heel of all fishing boats is in the stern where the steering gear and rudder are located. The area goes by various names — lazarette, stern compartment, and rudder room are three. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Maine lobster boat, a Gulf of Mexico shrimper or a Bering Sea trawler, that part of the boat is where you are most apt to have problems that quickly get out of control: incoming water causes the boat to lose stability, which causes her to go down by the stern or roll over. It happens real fast.

The two most recent examples are the 203-foot Alaska Ranger (five people died) that went down in April and the 93-foot Katmai (seven died) that sank last week. Both boats went down in the Bering Sea after flooding  in the stern.

In the case of the Alaska Ranger, an alarm did go off, alerting the crew of a flooding condition, but by then it was a case of major flooding and too late to do much of anything to stop the incoming water.

A camera that feeds to a wheelhouse monitor is a good early warning system, as long as a view of the lazarette area is always displayed on a screen, which isn’t always so.

My suggestion for an early warning system that every boat should have — besides an alarm and camera — is what I’ll call the “lazarette guy” or LG for short.

LG’s job — and there might be a couple of people with that title — is to visually check the lazarette area at set times, say every two or three hours. LG would log in the time he was there and the area’s condition — dry, wet, welding seam deteriorating, packing nut loose on rudder port. That kind of thing.

Granted only some of the larger boats have a passageway underneath the deck and out of the weather to the lazarette, while on many smaller house-forward boats, the only way to reach the lazarette is by a hatch or door at the back of the main deck. That’s not a place to be in heavy weather, so LG’s job would be to make sure the hatch or door is watertight and closed. (These boats would definitely need a water alarm and screen display of the lazarette with its own monitor.)

If there’s long periods of snotty weather, then every so often the skipper has to head into it and throttle back so that LG can duck down there and take a quick look around.

Depending on a boat’s size, it will have an engineer or a crewman who periodically checks the engine room to make sure things are running smoothly, and there’s always — or should be — a guy in the wheelhouse making sure the boat is on a proper heading.

So why not have someone — LG — periodically check out a boat’s most vulnerable area. It just makes sense.

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Green boats

Will you ever be able to call a fishing boat “green”? And I don’t mean the color that the boat is painted with.

It depends what you mean by green. You might say that boats with the latest diesel engines have at least a tinge of green since emissions from those engines are not as harmful to the environment as earlier diesels.

If you use a non-metallic, non-toxic bottom paints such as ePaint that falls into the green category.

As does biodiesel — and a few fishermen do use it — because even with a blend of 80 percent diesel and 20 percent biodiesel the carbon-based greenhouse gases produced in the combustion process are reduced. And in the case of a fuel spill, biodiesel degrades about four times faster than regular diesel.

If you have a fuel-air separator in the fuel vent line then only air and not fuel will come out of the vent.

If you recycle, don’t throw trash overboard and use a pump-out facility whenever possible, your boat would have some green credibility.

Considering the above examples, it’s probably not a stretch to say that the owners of some fishing boats do operate their boats in a manner meant to diminish their impact on the environment.

But, all in all, the majority of people don’t think owners of commercial boats are particularly environmentally conscious.

Truth is, owners of workboats are at the forefront of some very innovative propulsion systems that could greatly reduce the impact a boat has on the environment.

These aren’t fishing boats but tugs and ferries that operate in harbors or very close to shore in areas that have tremendous pollution problems — such as the harbors of Long Beach and Los Angeles. To reduce the pollution, government agencies are willing to offer grants and incentives to companies willing to take a gamble and drastically cut back their emissions.

Crowley Maritime is expected to introduce an LNG powered tugboat in Southern California. It would be the first LNG-powered tug in this country. (LNG-powered ferries have been used in Norway for a number of years.)

Foss Maritime is due to put a tug into operation that uses hybrid technology where the tug runs off battery powered electric motors for brief periods of high demand and then generators replenish the batteries.

And Hornblower Cruises & Events in San Francisco just launched a ferry that uses the same hybrid battery and generator combination but throws in a pair of vertical wind turbines on top of the wheelhouse and solar panels to charge the batteries that power the electric motors.

These are all expensive projects with a fair amount of risk. But if successful it would mean that the propulsion options for commercial fishing boats, not just workboats, increase. And since those propulsion systems greatly reduce a boat’s carbon footprint (the amount of greenhouse gases produced), you might suddenly have some very “green" fishing boats.

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Save your butts

Here are some facts:

• In one British Columbia beach cleanup 913,771 cigarette butts were collected.

• Cigarette butts are made of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic.

• Cigarette butts take up to five years to decompose

• Cigarette butts are found in the stomachs of marine creatures that mistake them for food.

Those are pretty disgusting statistics, but cigarette butts are only a much larger plastic problem for the oceans.

• Plastics comprise 60 to 90 percent of all ocean debris

• One estimate has 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating on every square mile of ocean.

• Plastics do not biodegrade. They break down into smaller and smaller pieces until you have plastic dust.

• Plastics kills over a million seabirds each year.

• Plastics kills hundreds of thousands of seals, sea turtles, whales and coral each year.

• Fish accumulate plastic toxins from eating smaller fish.

• Fish with most the toxins are halibut, rockfish and cod

• Toxins will show up in consumer tests.

• Once that happens the commercial fishermen’s product image is somewhere between the garbage pail and a medical alert.

Source for everything but the last point: Alaska Marine Safety Education Association, Sitka, Alaska

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Get rid of the wood

Dividing up a fish hold into pens with transverse bulkheads, stanchions, and penboards, or binboards as they are called on the West Coast, accomplishes several things. A boat’s trim can be controlled depending on which spaces are filled first. Bruising the fish isn’t as much of a problem when they are confined in a relatively small area.

Most importantly penboards act like baffles in a fuel or water tank, only they prevent fish — instead of liquids — from degrading a boat’s stability by sliding from one side of the hold to other. When fish start moving, they have the exact same free-surface effect as water, with potential disastrous effects to a boat’s center of gravity, which shifts outboard with the sliding fish. If there’s not enough buoyancy the boat won’t come back up.

Key to preventing that from happening is ditching wooden penboards for a stronger more substantial material such as aluminum. Most boats have done just that, though a lot of older fishing boats still use wooden penboards.

Wooden penboards come with a couple of problems. First off, they are hard to clean. It doesn’t matter if you are scrubbing the slime off the boards in a water-filled on-deck tub as the penboards are passed out of the hold or using a high-pressure hose. They remain breeding grounds for bacteria.

If the boards are painted to make them easier to clean and the paint flakes off you now have a HACCP or food safety issue.

But the critical problem with wooden penboards is that they break, maybe from rot, maybe from being weakened by gaffs or ice picks used to free them from the stanchions.

So, if a beam sea rolls a boat down and penboards break you have that free-surface effect that sends fish sliding across to what’s now the low side of the hold. If the boat doesn’t right itself before being hit by another wave, that may be enough to roll the hull over to the point the buoyancy forces turn the boat the same direction it is tilted, and she capsizes.

The moral of the story is get rid of those wooden penboards.

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Stability in Seattle

The Coast Guard will be changing its stability regulations for commercial fishing boats. When that will happen hasn’t been determined. Likewise, what the rule changes will be hasn’t been determined, but commercial fishermen have a chance to help formulate the new rules if they take the time to do so. If they don’t they have only themselves to blame when they don’t like the outcome.

The major change being proposed is requiring stability testing for boats down to 50-feet long — instead of the present 79-feet. Stability training and safety examinations could also be part of the deal. The training would include a Stability 101 classroom-like situation with demonstrations such as computer simulation to show basic stability principles. Possibly a risk assessment for specific fisheries would be included and how to understand a boat’s stability book.

Stability training for crews on boats down to 30 feet might be written into new regulations.

The initial public comment on the merits of amending the stability regulations was due to close July 29, 2008. But the public comment period has been extended into December 2008, primarily because the Coast Guard received so few comments.

The Coast Guard will be at Seattle’s Pacific Marine Expo (Nov. 20-22) with public hearing sessions on both Friday and Saturday to get ideas from fishermen on a new stability amendment.

“The public hearings will make [the fishermen] feel better and provide information to us,” says the Coast Guard’s Mike Rosecrans.

He would like to have specific comments. “It’s one thing to tell me a rule is no good. It’s another thing to tell me why it’s no good,” he says.

After December, the Coast Guard will start the second step of the amendment process. It’s called Notice of Proposed Rule Making and will contain detailed changes to the regulations. This step has its own public comment period, but by this time, fishermen will have a lot less influence on the changes.

So, if you feel strongly about stability regulations, be at Seattle in November.

If you can’t be at Seattle’s Pacific Marine Expo, submit comments via e-mail at www.regulations.gov; by mail to Docket Management Facility, U.S. Department of Transportation, West Building Ground Floor, Room W12-140, 1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE., Washington, DC 20590; Fax: 202-493-2251. In all cases, use the identifying number USCG-2003-16158.

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