Load Cited in Sinking Inquiry

A crab boat that sank in the Bering Sea last month was carrying too much weight and the captain had a history of overloading the vessel, Coast Guard investigators said.

Five men on board the Big Valley died Jan. 15, the opening day of the crab season, when the vessel sank 70 miles west of St. Paul Island, one of the Pribilof Islands.

Investigators said they could not conclude that overloading caused the sinking. However, they said the 92-foot vessel was hauling more heavy crab traps, called pots, than were allowed under the boat’s “stability letter,” a document prepared last year by a professional maritime consultant that spelled out how to load the boat safely.

The boat also was carrying thousands more pounds of bait than the letter specified, Coast Guard investigators found.

Factoring in the weight of diesel fuel and a full forward hold, the deck of the Big Valley should have been loaded with no more than 31 steel crab pots each weighing 600 pounds.

The squat, square pots should have been stood on edge on the deck with none stacked on top, according to the stability letter prepared by Jensen Maritime Consultants Inc., based in Seattle.

Also, the vessel should have carried a maximum of 5,000 pounds of herring, cod or other types of bait.

When the boat left Dutch Harbor, it was carrying 50 to 55 pots weighing 700 pounds each, the Coast Guard investigators believe, and they were reportedly stacked twice as high as they should have been.

The boat carried 13,000 pounds of bait.

Though the boat clearly was improperly loaded, “we can’t say this is absolutely why the boat went down,” said Charlie Medlicott, fishing vessel safety coordinator for the Coast Guard in Anchorage. “But it’s not good.”

Gary Edwards, owner and captain of the Big Valley, was among three crewmen whose bodies were not found.

Survivor Cache Seel of Kodiak, Alaska, who made it into a lifeboat, was the only crewman who succeeded in getting his survival suit on properly, Medlicott said.

Seel also was the only person aboard who Coast Guard investigators have been able to confirm had any survival training.