On December 29 and 30, 2019, the 130-foot crab boat Scandies Rose loaded 195 crab pots at Kodiak, Alaska, and sailed for the Bering Sea fishing grounds with seven men aboard under Captain Gary Cobban Jr. The weather she sailed into was worse than forecast: through December 31, freezing spray built ice on the vessel and on the tall stack of pots on her deck.
By about 8:37 that evening she was listing some 20 degrees to starboard, heavily iced. At about 10 p.m. the Coast Guard at Kodiak received her mayday. She capsized about 2.5 miles south of Sutwik Island and sank within minutes. Two deckhands, Dean Gribble Jr. and Jon Lawler, got into immersion suits and reached a liferaft; a Coast Guard helicopter lifted them from it at about 2 a.m. on New Year’s Day. The other five men — Captain Cobban, his son David Cobban, Seth Rousseau-Gano, Arthur Ganacias and Brock Rainey — were never found.
Both the Coast Guard’s Marine Board and the National Transportation Safety Board investigated, and their conclusions pointed at the paperwork as much as at the weather. The crew had loaded the vessel in accordance with her stability instructions — but the instructions were inaccurate. When the Coast Guard’s Marine Safety Center modelled the vessel forensically, the majority of the sample loading conditions in her 2019 booklet failed the required stability criteria. She had, in the Safety Board’s words, a low margin of stability to resist capsizing.
Onto that low margin came the ice: an estimated 6 to 15 inches on exposed surfaces, building unevenly on the vessel and on the stacked pots and raising her centre of gravity, in local wind and sea conditions more extreme than forecast. The Safety Board determined that the probable cause of the capsizing and sinking was the inaccurate stability instructions, combined with that heavy asymmetric ice accumulation. The Coast Guard board added that the deck load of pots had been unintentionally overstacked, called the loss preventable, and issued 23 safety recommendations.
The investigations also produced new science: a Coast Guard research study commissioned by the board found that a single crab pot could accrete more than its own weight in ice, and that tarping a stack of pots prevents the build-up. Both boards recommended that stability instructions be required to state the amounts of icing used in their calculations — so that a crew loading by the book can know what the book assumed.