May 11, 2016 — From floods to fires — burst pipes to a man overboard, when something goes wrong on a commercial fishing vessel — crew members at sea need to act fast. But how do they prepare?
I recently visited an emergency training session to learn more.
As I stood on a dock in Groton with Alex Taylor, the captain of a fishing boat out of New London, he took a drag off a cigarette, looked out at the ocean, and recalled how his boat’s engine caught fire a few months back.
“I couldn’t get to the fire to put it out,” he said. “So I got everybody on the back deck. Got the life raft down. Tried to go back in to get our immersion suits, but the fire was too much. [I] couldn’t get to the radio to call a Mayday — so we used a cell phone, luckily we were close enough to shore.”
As the fire burned, Taylor said he tossed a life raft in the water, and had his two crew mates jump in. He did a few more things to secure the boat, then hopped into the life raft. All he could do then, he said, was wait.