On February 9, 2017, the Seattle-based crab boat Destination sailed from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, with six men aboard under Captain Jeff Hathaway, bound first for St. Paul Island and then for the snow crab grounds to the west. Heavy freezing spray warnings were in effect for the region — the conditions in which spray freezes onto a vessel and her gear, adding dangerous weight high above the waterline.
In the early hours of February 11 she passed along the sheltered western side of St. George Island. At about 6:10 that morning, some 4.4 nautical miles northwest of Dainoi Point, she slowed and turned hard to starboard, into the seas and the north-east wind. She abruptly lost speed and heading, took boarding seas, flooded, capsized and sank within minutes. No mayday was ever heard; the signal from her emergency beacon, received at 6:15 a.m., was the first word of the casualty. Searchers recovered her beacon, a life ring and crab-pot buoys, but no survivors and no liferaft. All six crew were lost, and none was ever found. A NOAA survey located the wreck in July 2017, in 256 feet of water north of the island.
The Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation found a vessel whose stability had been quietly undermined. Her stability instructions had been calculated for crab pots weighing 700 pounds each — a figure taken from the master and never verified. Her actual pots weighed about 880 pounds wet. She carried 200 of them, a count within the book’s limits but far heavier than the book assumed, with more than 7,000 pounds of bait loaded on top of the stack. Ice from freezing spray added still more weight beyond what the instructions and the icing regulations allowed for, and an open access hatch into the No. 3 hold let the boarding seas flood her.
The Board placed responsibility on the loading decisions made aboard and ashore: the captain’s failure to load her by the stability book, to control the icing and to secure the hatch, and the owner’s failure to have the stability instructions updated by a qualified person for the heavier pots and the vessel’s alterations. Its recommendations reached across the Bering Sea crab fleet — examiners to weigh sample crab pots directly during dockside examinations, stability instructions required to state the pot weight and ice weight assumed in their calculations, and icing rules directing captains to delay departure or seek protected waters when freezing spray is forecast.
The National Transportation Safety Board investigated the sinking in parallel with the Coast Guard and published its own brief. No one survived to describe Destination’s final minutes; the case rested on her beacon, her last tracked positions, the sonar image of her wreck on the seabed, and a stability analysis showing how far beyond her safe limits the loaded vessel had gone.