Alaska Ranger was a 189-foot fish-processing vessel of the Fishing Company of Alaska, converted from an offshore supply vessel and working the Bering Sea head-and-gut fleet. On March 22, 2008 she sailed from Dutch Harbor for Petrel Bank, 500 miles west, with 47 people aboard.
At about 2:30 on the morning of March 23, flooding was found in her rudder room. Her calls were relayed to the Coast Guard by a fleet-mate; she broadcast a mayday at 2:46 and reported minutes later, “We think we’ve lost a rudder.” The flooding spread through internal boundaries that were not watertight and shorted her main electrical panel. Power and steering were lost, and with her propellers reversed by the flow of water the ship began moving astern — a motion that swung her launched liferafts away from the crew. Only 22 of the 47 reached the rafts; the rest went into 32-degree water in 20-to-25-foot seas. Listing 45 degrees, she sank at about 4:30 a.m.
The rescue that followed was among the largest in Coast Guard history. The cutter Munro raced some 130 miles to the scene; a Jayhawk helicopter from St. Paul hoisted survivors from the water, and Munro’s own helicopter recovered more. During one hoist a crewman slipped from the rescue basket and was lost; at another point the helicopter’s rescue swimmer was himself left in the water with three survivors until the Jayhawk picked all four up. The sister ship Alaska Warrior recovered 22 survivors from the two liferafts. In all, 42 of the 47 aboard were rescued. Five died: master Eric Peter Jacobsen, mate David Silveira, chief engineer Daniel Cook, fish processor Byron Carrillo, and fishmaster Satoshi Konno, whose body was never recovered.
The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause of the sinking was uncontrolled, progressive flooding due to a lack of internal watertight integrity and to a breach of the hull’s watertight envelope, likely caused by a physical rudder loss — the wreck, in some 6,000 feet of water, was never examined — with the vessel’s movement astern contributing to the loss of life, by accelerating the flooding and carrying the liferafts out of reach. The Coast Guard’s own Marine Board, reporting in 2011, put additional weight on poor maintenance and corrosion around the rudder assembly, and on ill-fitting survival suits.
The Safety Board’s recommendations included asking Congress for authority to inspect and certificate all commercial fishing vessels — an attempt to close, for the fishing fleet, the long-standing gap between the vessels that work for a living and the vessels the inspection laws reach.
Download the NTSB Report (2.6 MB file)