Arctic Rose was a 92-foot head-and-gut trawler out of Seattle, a converted shrimp boat so individual that investigators could later find no construction plans for her. In late March 2001 she took on fuel at Dutch Harbor and St. Paul Island and sailed for Zhemchug Canyon and the April 1 opening of the flathead sole season, with 15 men aboard under Captain David Rundall.
Her last contact was a radio conversation with her sister vessel Alaskan Rose at about 10:30 on the night of April 1, in a frontal system with gusts over 45 knots and seas to 24 feet. Sometime in the next five hours she sank, some 200 miles northwest of St. Paul Island, without a mayday. At 3:35 a.m. on April 2 her emergency beacon alerted the Coast Guard; an aircraft found the beacon, a debris field and an oil sheen. Alaskan Rose recovered Captain Rundall’s body from the water, in an immersion suit. The other 14 men were never found; her liferaft floated upright and empty.
The wreck was found upright on the bottom in 428 feet of water, with no hull failure, no excessive corrosion and no sign of collision. One fact stood out in the camera surveys: the aft weathertight door to her processing space stood open, as did the discharge-chute closure beside it. Her stability letter required that processing space to be kept weathertight at all times.
With no survivors and no witnesses, the Coast Guard’s Marine Board could not conclusively prove how the flooding began, and the cause of the sinking has never been settled. The board’s analysis found the most probable route was progressive flooding from the aft deck into the processing space through the open door, spreading forward through non-watertight doors and hatches until the free surface of the floodwater destroyed her stability — a process that could have taken only minutes. It also found that she had not been loaded as her stability instructions required, and that heavy equipment and ballast had been added after her last inclining test without a naval architect’s knowledge.
The board’s recommendations were headed by a simple device: alarms and indicators in the pilothouse for watertight doors — the doors on which a fishing vessel’s stability so often depends, and which no one off watch can see.
Read the Board Recorder’s Forensic Analysis
The Marine Board’s full report (2003) is no longer hosted on a public Coast Guard page. The link above is to the forensic analysis of the casualty written by the board’s recorder, Lieutenant Commander James B. Robertson, and published in the federal IFISH conference proceedings.