Saving Seafood

Coast Guard looks for missing American

September 21, 2015 — U.S. authorities are investigating the disappearance of an American marine biologist who went missing at sea while serving as a monitor on a fishing boat off the coast of Peru.

Keith Davis, 41, was aboard the Panamanian flagged Victoria No. 168 to collect data and ensure the crew was adhering to international fishing guidelines. He was reported missing Sept. 10 when the boat was about 500 miles offshore.

Detectives from the U.S. Coast Guard Investigative Service and FBI agents were waiting for the Victoria when it docked in Vacamonte, Panama on Sunday evening, said Michael Berkow, director of the investigative service.

Berkow said the U.S. investigators are assisting with the probe at the request of Panamanian officials.

He said there is very little preliminary information surrounding the circumstances of Davis’ disappearance.

“He’s just gone,” Berkow said.

Friends, family and co-workers described Davis as a big-hearted, upbeat adventurer who was passionate about the ocean and conservation. They said he was also a seasoned sailor who, over nearly two decades as an observer, spent time on boats under all conditions in oceans around the world.

They have expressed skepticism that he was the victim of an accident and have been pressing for an investigation since learning of his disappearance.

Read the full story at CNN

 

Making the Seas Safer for Fishermen

July 30, 2015 — SITKA, Alaska — Ed Mertz likes to fish, but these days he won’t stray too far from shore. “I’m still kind of chicken,” he says as he casts weighted troll lines in an inlet close to his home in Sitka, in southeastern Alaska. “I look at that forecast, and if it’s not good, it’s like, I don’t want to go.” In 1983, Mertz, now 62, was working on a six-man fishing vessel when it ran aground, flooded, and sank in Alaskan waters. He and two fellow fishermen scrambled onto some rocks, where they spent a bitterly cold night huddled together in survival suits. The bodies of the three others were found the following day by a Coast Guard rescue helicopter.

Commercial fishing has for decades been among the most dangerous professions in America. The most recently available figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, from 2013, show fishermen were about 36 times more likely to die on the job than the average worker. Yet government efforts to address the safety problems have been slow. “The administration and Congress haven’t done their job,” says J.J. Bartlett, president of the Fishing Partnership, an advocacy group representing commercial fishermen. “It’s meant that fishermen are dying unnecessarily.”

After Congress passed the 2010 Coast Guard Authorization Act, which updated fishing industry safety standards for the first time since 1988, activists like Bartlett were grateful their concerns were being taken seriously: Life rafts would be improved, safety training would become mandatory for fishing captains, and new boats would be built to standards set and verified by independent third parties called “class societies.”

Read the full story at Bloomberg Businessweek