Safety – Fishermens News

USCG Helicopter Rescue Procedures

Fishermen have a complicated relationship with the U.S. Coast Guard. When we are at sea and the white Coast Guard boat with a red racing stripe approaches, we are wary. But when we are in trouble at sea and the white helicopter with the red racing stripe is seen approaching, we are so happy to see them. In the Bering Sea a few years ago, the USCG was contacted to evacuate a crew member suffering from a heart attack on a factory longliner. The helicopter crew calculated their fuel consumption and realized that they only had time to make one approach to hoist the patient off the vessel and still have enough fuel to make it back to base. Everything had to go seamlessly. Once they got on the vessel’s location, the USCG pilot found the crew had the patient ready, the deck cleared and the ...

New Vessel Construction

By Jerry Dzugan, AMSEA If you’re interested in building a new commercial fishing vessel measuring 50-180 feet, this would be a good time to look at the U.S. Coast Guard’s new policy letter CG-CVC 24-02 dated Aug. 18 entitled “The Application of Fishing Vessel Construction Requirements.” A policy is an agency’s clarification of a law or regulation. In this case, the agency is the U.S. Coast Guard. Commercial fishing vessel (CFV) classing requirements are specified in Title 46, United States Code U.S.C. § 4503(a). However, in lieu of being classed, certain vessels may opt to choose an alternate-to-class option per U.S.C. § 4503(d). Specifically, this would apply to fishing vessels (FV) and fish tender vessels (FTV) that are between 50 and 180 feet overall in length with a keel laid dat...

Commercial Fishing Sleep and Health – NEC study

By Jerry Dzugan, AMSEA “To sleep perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub!” wrote the Bard. It’s unlikely that Shakespeare ever went commercial fishing. If so, he would have known that trying to get to sleep on a vessel could be the rub. The Northeast Center for Occupational Health & Safety (NEC) has been partnering with the Alaska Marine Safety Education Association (AMSEA), Oregon State University and George Mason University since 2019 to better understand sleep and other health risk issues in fisheries. It’s one of the most comprehensive studies of sleep and health on commercial fishing vessels. The study involved sleep surveys with 262 fish workers and free in-person health exams provided by health care teams in fishing harbor locations for 162 workers. These fish workers came ...

Coast Guard Dewatering Pump Operations

By Jerry Dzugan, AMSEA In a flooding emergency, you can’t expect a rescue resource or good Samaritan to be waiting nearby. Vessel flooding and its often related instability are the most common source of fishing vessel losses. Consider the distance that a Coast Guard helicopter has to travel to deliver dewatering pumps. Plus, they don’t carry a pump on every routine flight due to weight constraints. It makes sense and is a good maritime practice to have your own dewatering pumps and bilge alarms. The quickest way to have a pump available is to have your own dewatering pump installed and maintained. Remember that an ordinary bilge pump is rated by the number of gallons it can pump in an hour. You want a pump that is rated for gallons per minute—a dewatering pump. The pump(s) should be ...

The Decision to Abandon Vessel

The decision to abandon your vessel is one of the most critical decisions you may have to make in your life. It’s also one of the hardest decisions to make, since we have an emotional and financial attachment to our vessels. It’s our livelihood, and we are responsible for crewmembers’ lives. In an emergency, the brain tends to be flooded with often conflicting emotions—‘this can’t be happening to me’, fear, guilt, shame and a flood of stress hormones, which make it hard to make decisions quickly. In 1989, 1,200 miles from shore west of Coast Rica, the f/v Butler was attacked by pilot whales that breached the 38-foot vessel’s hull and caused it to sink. ‘Bill’ made numerous trips into the vessel as it was sinking to gather more tools and supplies for the now inflated life raft. ‘Simon...

Safety Orientations

A safety orientation can help turn crewmembers from liabilities to assets in the event of an emergency. A safety orientation for every person who boards a vessel that leaves the dock is a foundational part of lowering risk in fishing. Take the case of the fishing vessel that capsized in the middle of the night, for instance. As the vessel rolled, the captain ran out on deck to find a crewmember hanging onto some heavy gear in the stern as the vessel was healing over. The captain yelled at him to grab the EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon), but the crewmember had to be told where the EPIRB was located. Soon, the whole crew was tossed into the water. Fortunately, the life raft inflated automatically. The crewmember was able to get to the EPIRB but he unknowingly turned...

Effective Emergency Drills

Conducting monthly drills during the fishing season can help crew members respond more effectively to an emergency. There are hundreds of cases where fishermen attributed their survival to having conducted emergency drills. It makes sense that if you repeatedly practice actions that need to be taken in a crisis at sea, you are more likely to react in a more effective way. Monthly drills are also a requirement for documented fishing vessels operating beyond the federal boundary line or with more than 16 people onboard. 46 CFR 28.270 states: The master or individual in charge of each vessel must ensure that drills are conducted and instruction is given to each individual on board at least once each month. Instruction may be provided in conjunction with drills or at other times and places...

Be Kind to Your Back

Meet Joe. Joe is a real person, Joe is not a bot. Joe is 185 pounds and 6 feet, 2 inches tall. He is standing on deck, knees locked and bends over to pick up a line on the deck. How many pounds of compressive force stress do you think are on his spine as he picks up the line? Ten pounds? Fifty pounds? A hundred pounds? Prof. Don Bloswick, PhD., has decades of experience with his graduate students researching stresses on the human body during work activities. He has a special interest in commercial fishing Muscular--Skeletal Disorders (MSDs). According to Bloswick, Joe is putting a whopping 585 pounds of force on his spine when he picks up that line on the deck. Studies in Scandinavia, where they actually inserted pressure plates in the spine of researchers, have verified Bloswick’s re...

Watertight Integrity: Voluntary Safety Standards and Good Marine Practices

Your vessel is a means of transportation to your work site, but it’s also the place where your work is conducted, your meals are prepared, and it serves as your home away from home. Unlike your permanent home, which is bolted to a foundation, you work home is floating on water. Although your vessel was designed and built to keep the water outside your vessel, not in it, it’s up to everyone on the vessel to preserve and maintain it to keep your watertight envelope. There are a number of ways to preserve your vessel’s integrity. Some of these are found in the U.S. Coast Guard’s Voluntary Safety Standards & Good Marine Practices on their commercial fishing safety website at https://www.dco.uscg.mil/NCFSAC/ This website and the USCG District 13’s website, https://www.fishsafewest.info/...

Vessel Ditch Kits

People call them ‘ditch kits,’ ‘go bags,’ ‘abandon ship’ or ‘evacuation kits.’ No matter the name, having everything you would want for a sudden vessel abandonment will save you precious time. It also will give you a better chance of not getting entangled or entrapped in the vessel while looking for other items to take. It’s the same idea as having an emergency kit for your home or car. At sea your vessel is both your home and transportation when fishing. A prepared ditch kit can greatly increase your survivability if you have to leave the shelter of your vessel and enter into the hostile environment of the ocean. If you have a Coast Guard-approved life raft for your commercial fishing vessel, it should have many helpful items in it. Most of these items are designed to facilitate the ...