Sea Tragedy Survivor Forges a Future, Offers Hope

His boat was gone in seconds, dragged down in a powerful rush of water that he barely escaped. As Joe Marcantonio shivered in a life raft, wearing only underwear and a flimsy poncho, he wondered how this could be happening to his family again.

It was roughly this spot, 130 miles off the New England coast, where his father’s fishing boat disappeared 23 years earlier and left the teenage Marcantonio with unanswered questions.

Now, his boat and crew were lost in the water below him, plowed over by a 541-foot tanker that had continued on. When he’d surfaced, all he saw was the raft and the freighter’s wake.

“Dad,” he asked as he huddled in the raft, “did this happen to you?”

Marcantonio’s unlikely survival of the 2001 accident was the start of a painful period of guilt and despair that has just begun to recede. At 39, he’s in college and talking of a new hope he never expected to find.

But he stays away from the waterfront in his hometown of Gloucester, a small fishing town about 35 miles north of Boston.

“I came home wrecked,” he said. “I felt like my father was the lucky one. He didn’t have to live through it.”

Cosmo Marcantonio was about 35 when he went to sea for the last time in 1978. He was supposed to be back from Georges Bank fishing grounds in time for a wedding. When that didn’t happen, the families of the crew met to track the search progress.

The atmosphere was festive at first, with families figuring the boat was merely delayed. But days passed and hope faded. The Coast Guard called off the search, angering his son.

“I remember being upset when I saw the look in people’s eyes, that they’d given up,” Joe Marcantonio said.

The years passed with no explanations. A northwest gale had been reported in the area, but no major storms. Joe couldn’t accept the loss. When he was in traffic, he’d look for his father in other cars. When the TV showed crowds or city streets, he’d search for a glimpse of his dad.

The anger grew, he barely graduated from high school and he found his only opportunity in the industry that claimed his father’s life.

But this was a herring boat, Marcantonio told himself, a different type of fishing. The herring grounds were in coastal waters, where help was much closer than the offshore work his father did.

Though anxiety filled his gut each trip, he ultimately became a captain. About the same time, though, rules changed to restrict coastal fishing. To earn a living, herring boats had to spend some time offshore. By then, a mortgage and other obligations made it hard for Marcantonio to quit.

The night of Aug. 5, 2001, was calm, and Marcantonio’s boat, Starbound, was headed home. He left his buddy, Jim Sanfilippo, in the wheelhouse and retired to the captain’s quarters.

He awoke to Sanfilippo’s shouts. He reached the wheelhouse and turned as Sanfilippo screamed and pointed. A giant ship’s bow was steaming toward them.

The crash knocked him on his back as the 92-foot Starbound scraped down the side of the massive tanker, Virgo. The Starbound remained upright for several seconds after the Virgo passed, and Marcantonio ordered Sanfilippo to get the crew and his survival suit and meet on deck. He grabbed his own suit and stepped toward the stairs.

Next came a sound like “this horrifying wind tunnel.” Water was rushing into the Starbound and forcing the air out with a screeching whistle. The boat suddenly plunged forward, and Marcantonio took three giant steps, barely escaping through the wheelhouse door as the wall fell toward him.

He was underwater and being sucked down. He fought the pull, clutching his buoyant survival suit as he pushed upward. The suit was ripped from his hands, but he was sufficiently out of the ship’s pull to swim to the surface.

The hiss of the lifeboat self-inflating caught his attention, and he scrambled aboard, screaming for Sanfilippo, whom he thought was right behind him, and the other crewmen. But frantic paddling turned up little more than the emergency beacon that would lead rescuers to him. Marcantonio knew his crew was lost.

It didn’t take long to remember his father’s memorial service. He knew the pain that was ahead for the families of his crew.

“It all just came back,” he said. “You’re not supposed to know that stuff. It’s supposed to be once in a lifetime.”

He was rescued five hours later.

The next few years were marked by legal tangles after three Virgo crew members were arrested in Newfoundland and charged with involuntary manslaughter. But the crewmen were eventually allowed to return to their native Russia and the case is in limbo.

Marcantonio, meanwhile, entered therapy to deal with the despair that was consuming him. As captain, he thought, he was responsible for the men, regardless of the tanker crew’s actions.

He thought of Sanfilippo, his buddy from Thomaston, Maine, whom he’d known since sixth grade; of Mark Doughty, his right hand man from Yarmouth, Maine, whom he’d begged to come back to the boat after a falling out with the boat partners; of Tom Frontiero of Gloucester, who’d taken the job two weeks before the accident.

If he hadn’t become a fisherman, Marcantonio figured, none of them would be dead.

But hope has returned in fits and starts. His marriage to his wife, Shannon, weathered the strain, and he has three children, the oldest 13 -- the same age he was when his father vanished.

Successfully returning to school has given him confidence in a future he thought was ruined. His 3.9 GPA at North Shore Community College has earned him free tuition at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.

Now he is telling his story. He wants the children of his lost crewmen to have answers that evaded him for years. He wants to give people who have faced crushing loss a reason to keep going.

“I’ve got some hope for the future,” he said. “Where there was none, there’s some.”