On the morning of September 1, 1951 — the Saturday of the Labor Day weekend — the 42-foot party fishing boat Pelican left her dock at Fort Pond Bay, Montauk, New York, carrying 62 passengers and a crew of two: her owner and captain, Edward Carroll, and a mate. Most of her passengers had arrived on the early train from New York City for a day’s fishing on Frisbie Bank, south of Montauk.
Warnings of strong winds had been issued, and through the morning the wind strengthened from the north-east. Other skippers heard the small-craft warnings and headed in; Pelican fished on. Her return was slowed by engine trouble — she covered only about six miles in two and a half hours — and as she rounded Montauk Point into the tide rips, wind and sea came onto her beam and quarter and she rolled heavily, her passengers crowding to port as the seas broke over her other side.
At 2:10 that afternoon, one mile north of Montauk lighthouse, two successive heavy seas struck her starboard quarter and she capsized. Life preservers — 86 of them — were stowed in unmarked lockers, and almost none were worn. The party boats Bingo II and Betty Anne, close by, pulled 18 people from the water, and a Coast Guard picket boat rescued one more from the capsized hull; 19 people survived. Forty-five perished, among them Captain Carroll, whose body was never recovered.
The Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, reporting in October 1951, found the decisive cause was overloading: the 64 people aboard amounted to some four tons of shifting weight carried high above the waterline, with wind, sea and the failure to distribute the load only contributing causes. A boat of her size could not ordinarily be expected to carry more than about 30 people with safety, and had she been subject to inspection she probably would have been permitted no more than 20 passengers. The Board said that Captain Carroll, had he lived, would have faced serious charges of gross and criminal negligence — yet he had broken no effective law.
That was the loophole at the heart of the disaster: at 14 gross tons, Pelican fell below the 15-ton threshold for federal inspection, and so could legally carry passengers for hire with no effective supervision. Congress closed it with the Small Passenger Vessel Act of 1956 (Public Law 84-519, signed May 10, 1956), which required the inspection and certification of vessels carrying more than six passengers for hire, and which led to the Coast Guard’s “T-boat” inspection rules. The National Transportation Safety Board’s later safety history records the Act as following, among others, the capsize of the Pelican in 1951.
Read the Official Record — U.S. Coast Guard Historian, Station Montauk
Download the Small Passenger Vessel Act of 1956 (Public Law 84-519)
The capsizing was investigated in 1951 by the Coast Guard’s Marine Board, before the National Transportation Safety Board existed; its findings are summarised in the Coast Guard Historian’s account linked above.