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American Morning

Members of Alaskan Fishing Boat Missing

Aired April 06, 2001 - 11:21   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
STEPHEN FRAZIER, CNN ANCHOR: Looking at pictures there of some of the 15 crewmembers of a missing fishing boat named the Arctic Rose. The Coast Guard has called off its search for that boat now. It went down in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska on Monday and, so far, only the body of the skipper has been recovered. Another body was spotted, but rough waters prevented its recovery.

Joining is now by phone from Juneau, Alaska, is Tom Gemmell, executive director of the United Fishermen of Alaska, to talk about this tragedy in such a remote location.

Mr. Gemmell, thank you for joining us. Are you with us now? Can you hear?

TOM GEMMELL, UNITED FISHERMEN OF ALASKA: Yes, I'm still here.

FRAZIER: OK. Good. Is your group a labor organization or an owner -- boat owners' organization.

GEMMELL: United Fishermen of Alaska is a trade organization of the Alaska fishing harvesters. We -- our membership includes small boats all the way from like 32 foot up to large processor trawlers.

FRAZIER: Well, tell us what you know about the Arctic Rose now. We're showing a map as we're talking to you now that shows it at great distance from the coast. Where was it? What was it doing?

GEMMELL: From what I understand, it was trawling for, I think, rock sole about 200 miles north from the (INAUDIBLE) Islands, and that's pretty much in the middle of the Bering Sea.

FRAZIER: And was there bad weather in that area at the time that it was -- that it went missing?

GEMMELL: From what I understand, at the time the boat went down, the weather was not extremely bad, but it was fairly normal for that time of year. I understand 40, 50 knots of wind, 20-foot seas, and probably one of the big factors there -- or it could be a big factor -- is, at the time, there was freezing -- heavy freezing icing spray going on.

FRAZIER: Forty knots of wind. Is that -- that sounds pretty severe to those of here in the lower 48. Were there other boats around? Did they receive any kind of distress call? GEMMELL: The -- one of the -- the Arctic Rose sister ship, the Alaskan Rose, was somewhere nearby in the area, and they had talked to the Arctic Rose, I think, at about 10:30 the night before. The Coast Guard's first notification of this incident was when the -- the electronic-locating beacon started sending out signals, I believe, about 3:30 in the morning.

FRAZIER: Now that's the kind of electronic beacon that is triggered by exposure to water. In other words, if it goes into the drink, it fires off.

GEMMELL: Pretty much. It's -- it's -- when it goes in, the trigger goes off there, and it starts sending a signal. It's designed to do that to -- it's -- the EPIRB is designed with a hydrostatic release so that it does go off there, and the signal is very good because the satellites pick it up, and it gives you a precise location of where the vessel is. So it cuts down the search time quite a bit.

FRAZIER: So that -- yeah, that EPIRB stands for, I think, electronic positioning indicator radio beacon, which really pinpoints exactly where it is down to yards.

GEMMELL: Yes. Satellite gives it pretty close, and then there's another signal on, too, that basically, if a Coast Guard helicopter aircraft gets in the vicinity, they can almost hone in on it.

FRAZIER: What should we make of the fact that that beacon was the first sign of distress from the Arctic Rose and that there was no radio call, no call for help?

GEMMELL: That's probably an indication that things happened pretty quickly. They didn't have time to get out a radio call Another thing, too. In that part of the Bering Sea, you're -- sometimes even if you do get out a radio call, people might not hear it. It's pretty remote, but -- but the indication is that it probably -- things happened pretty quickly.

FRAZIER: And what would make things happen fast there? Is that far enough north for them to have hit perhaps an iceberg?

GEMMELL: In that part of the world, no icebergs. The -- there is an ice pack, but it's not -- it's not berg-type stuff.

FRAZIER: How about -- you know, the thing that people who saw that movie "Perfect Storm" would be wondering about a rogue wave, one of those huge waves that sort of combines with another one and arrives out of nowhere twice or triple the size of the rest.

GEMMELL: That's a remote possibility. Something like this could have been -- it could have been a number of factors. If there was icing going on, the stability of the ship could have been impaired so that it could have taken a roll or a wave that was -- I'll say -- more normal, and that might have been enough to tip over.

It could have been some -- some kind of catastrophic hull failure, like a water fitting in the hull might have broke, something like that, where there's real fast flooding. That could have been combined with the stability problem caused by the ice. So there's a number of factors, and it's going to be real hard to figure out what happened here since there are no survivors.

FRAZIER: Fifteen souls on that boat. That seems like a big crew for a fishing trawler.

GEMMELL: That's not too bad -- too big a boat. I mean, it's only a 92-foot boat with 15 people on board. That's relatively small. There are bigger trawlers with crews in the neighborhood of 80, 90 people on them.

FRAZIER: Wow! Oh, that would be like factory ship then.

GEMMELL: Yeah, the bigger one.

FRAZIER: And, at that time of the night that the -- the signal was received, would they be they actively fishing?

Are you still -- oh, I guess we've lost Mr. Gemmell there. So we just want to let you know we have been spending time here now talking with Tom Gemmell, who's executive director of the United Fishermen of Alaska, offering us a lot of insight into that tragedy off the coast of Alaska in which 15 crewmembers went down with a traw -- a fishing trawler called the Arctic Rose.

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