AMSEA – Fishermens News

Joint NIOSH-USCG Grant Program Provides Funds for Improving Commercial Fishing Safety

You’re a Dungeness crab fisherman. It’s 4:30 p.m. on a cold and rapidly darkening January day. It has been a great day, with a catch like you have never seen. You and your crew are pulling the last of your pots when you look over and see one of your crew not looking right. A crew member is standing near the winch with his left arm bending the wrong direction. He’s not saying anything, but he’s wet and starting to shiver. You are 30 miles offshore and even further back to port. The seas are building, winds picking up and the clouds are dropping. This scenario is part of Fishermen First Aid Safety Training (FFAST), developed by Oregon State University (OSU) and Oregon Sea Grant, to address the specific first aid needs of commercial fishermen responding to workplace injuries on their vess...

Commercial Fishing Near Miss/Close Calls Program Development

As the old trope goes, wise men learn from their own mistakes, but wiser men learn from the mistakes of others. It’s also a lot less expensive. So, how can vessel operators learn from their own mistakes without injuring anyone and incurring the costs? Wouldn’t it be more effective to learn from the near misses/close calls of other fishermen in similar regions or fisheries in order to lessen injuries on their own vessels? AMSEA is looking for fishermen who want to help evaluate an anonymous, cost-free, near-miss reporting system on their own vessel. AMSEA is working with NIOSH (the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) and the ABS Group to develop a type of reporting system in which operators can share examples of close calls that have occurred on their own vessels wit...

Alaska Native Salmon Set Gillnetters in Norton Sound Brave Fierce Conditions

Kyle is a young commercial fisherman from an Alaska Native salmon fishing community in Norton Sound. He learned how to fish from his dad, who is also his captain. They manually set nets and haul catch by hand, like many salmon set gillnetters. And like many fishermen, Kyle has close calls from time to time in Alaska’s Bering Sea, with wild weather in the remote wilderness. Like the time a half-hour trip for firewood turned into a two-day, 30-mile trek home after their 24-foot skiff was swamped. Still, Kyle doesn’t always wear a life jacket. “Once I’m getting to a point when I’m my dad’s age, that’s when I’ll have a life jacket on every day,” he said. Research led by Leann Fay, Ph.D., recently gathered knowledge and lessons through interviews with members of this unique fishery to und...

Preventing Onboard Overdose Fatalities

Watching friends, family, or crew members struggle with addiction is devastating. It is tempting to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that addiction won’t impact our family, friends or crew, but denial doesn’t change the odds. Over the last few decades, deaths due to overdoses have continued to rise. There are three distinct waves of opioid use, defined as Rx opioids in the 1990s, heroin in 2010 and synthetic opioids in 2013. We are still experiencing the effects of the synthetic opioid wave. Unfortunately, synthetic opioid use has proven to be the deadliest to date, killing 8.5 times as many people as in 1999. As firmly as we believe that we will never have to deal with an overdose on our vessel, the truth is that each year, as addiction rates continue to rise, you are at an incr...

Fishing as a Contact Sport

Anyone who has spent time on a boat knows that bumps and bruises are inevitable. You can be standing there minding your own business and the boat gets jostled by a wave. Next thing you know, you’re banging up against sharp, pointy things or unyielding wood or metal. That’s just a part of being at sea. However, serious injuries can happen when a crew member comes into contact with the vessel, fishing gear, or equipment. Common injury hazards include getting hit or struck by a moving object, entangling with fishing lines, or caught in a running equipment such as a winch or seafood processing equipment. The working environment on a fishing vessel is never static, not even on the dock. For instance, a crew member can bump into a vessel structure (e.g., door frame, stairway railing) or fis...

Slips, Trips & Falls: Don’t Fall for It

Humans can be amazing. Most of us can stand upright on two feet, walk and move around easily, even gracefully sometimes. It gets harder to walk and do your work when you are out on a rain-soaked dock or moving vessel. There may be gear or equipment to navigate around. There may be steps or ladders to get from one level to another or from the dock to the vessel. There may be something on the working surface that makes it slippery—rain, ice, saltwater, hydraulic fluid, fish or bait. Not to mention that when you are working on deck, there is fishing gear, tools and equipment in motion and coordination of movement with other fishermen, their gear or activities. There’s also the weather and sea conditions. By reviewing the reported injury information for Oregon and Washington commercial fis...

Operational Stability—Stay Upright and Watertight

Continuing our series on fishing vessel stability, this month’s article focuses on operational stability and offers some tools to help the folks on board keep things ‘Upright and Watertight.’ In the previous two articles we covered the importance of stability training: fishing vessel-specific-training, and which vessels and at what thresholds do stability regulations apply. Now, you put your vessel to use. The decisions made by the skipper, engineer and crew, combined with the physical forces of nature, make for a complex and dynamic scene that if allowed to get out of hand, can cause catastrophe. Here are some ways to mitigate the risks while at sea. Maintain Watertightness Keep doors and hatches always secured except while using them. If the manually operated six-dog door is too muc...

Fishing Vessel Stability Requirements—Adding Clarity to the Murky Applicability

This is the second article in a three-part series on the topic of fishing vessel stability. Last month’s column covered awareness and training and next month’s will address operational stability and how the use of a vessel can drastically affect its stability. But this issue’s article focuses on regulations and requirements and how some in the industry and even the Coast Guard, fail to recognize when they apply. What, When, Who? – Does This Apply to Me? When it comes to commercial fishing industry vessels 79 feet or greater (that are not required to have a load line), the stability rules are within 46 Code of Federal Regulations Part 28, Subpart E (Stability). You can look up those on your own if you want to read it word for word. They are most helpful if you are having difficulty fa...

Stability Awareness — Are You Aware?

Fishing vessel stability is often characterized in foreign and misunderstood terms that describe the constantly changing forces that act upon a vessel while it is at sea. The wind and waves provide the motion as the vessel rolls, pitches, yaws, heaves, sways and surges. The burning of fuel and use of water changes the internal weights of the vessel and introduces an additional force of free surface effect. The skipper and crew working hard to move equipment, launch fishing gear, tow nets, haul back the catch, dump it on deck and into the holds adds even more complexity. That’s a lot of dynamic forces going on for a craft at sea. Add in that fishing vessels are what the Coast Guard considers “uninspected,” so there is ambiguity to what standards, if any, need to be followed, which regu...

Why Do I Need to Do Emergency Drills with My Crew?

Because you never know how your day is going to end, emergency drills are required to be conducted monthly on many fishing vessels during the season. Even if they are not required on your vessel, drills are a standard in the industry. In the event of a casualty, not conducting drills is a poor defense. Without regular drills, in an emergency the crew will be looking to the master to answer the big question: what do we do? Meanwhile, the master of the vessel is flooded with sensory information that is incomplete or unknown as well as dealing with conflicting emotions and the weight of responsibility for dealing with the emergency. This is not the best state of mind for someone to make the correct decision. A crew that is not trained in what to do makes it even more difficult for the ma...