Patrick Dillon
Author of Lost at Sea: An American Tragedy
Patrick Dillon, a senior editor at Forbes ASAP magazine, grew up among commercial fishers on an island in Puget Sound. A former editor and columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, he has won numerous national journalism awards, including a share of the Pulitzer Prize. Lost at Sea: An American Tragedy recounts the Anacortes, Washington, A-boats tragedy profiled in Mayday! Lost at Sea.
Q: In 1995, while writing Lost at Sea: An American Tragedy, you signed on as a deckhand on an Alaskan crab boat. You knew the dangers. Why would you take that risk?
A: When I first stepped onto the boat, I had a real moment of truth. I realized that everything leading up to that moment was just conjecture and speculation. It was New Year’s Eve, and I was thinking—I could see myself like in a movie—“You talked yourself on deck. Now it’s payback time.”
It’s easy to talk about now, but as a journalist, you always wonder whether you can bring an experiential value to the project. One of the cumulative realizations I had, as I was looking at a wave coming my way that’s twice as high as my boat, followed relentlessly by another and another, was a transcendental moment. I realized I had no control over this at all. Giving over the control, much like entering an airplane, made the fear abate, although not all the time.
Q: Two of the four A-boats from Anacortes, Washington, sank during the 1983 crabbing season. Investigators eventually found that their boot striping had been moved up. [Boot striping shows how low a boat can safely sit in the water. If the boot striping is not visible above the water, the boat is likely overloaded. When the A-boats left Anacortes, witnesses said, their boot striping was visible. But when investigators found that the stripes had been repainted higher, they realized that the boats likely had gone out overloaded with equipment.] But all four boats in the fleet had repainted boot lines. Why didn’t they all sink?
A: One of those that didn’t sink, the Alliance, was much smaller, 20 feet [6 meters] shorter; the wheelhouse was in the stern, not the bow, which made it more stable; and it carried fewer crab pots. The Alyeska, which also didn’t sink, was slightly smaller and therefore carried fewer pots, not by many, but just a few.
The question really gets down to, what fatal value do you attribute to the last crab pot? Was it one or two pots? Did the last little piece render the boat unseaworthy?
Q: Why would painters move up a boat’s boot striping?
A: They extended the boot line to prevent the boat from rusting. There’s a lot of wear and tear on the hull of a boat. The combination of air and salt water tends to cause erosion. Lead-based paint acts as a protective shield.
Q: If there were errors made, why was everyone exonerated?
A: It was part of the realm of the investigation. It was an enormous task to simply find the cause of the accidents. The Coast Guard found the probable cause, and everyone roundly pleaded guilty. The shipyard, the owner, and the captains all were at fault. Having solved the mystery, rather than sending it on to the U.S. attorney’s office, the Coast Guard stopped.
But there was clear negligence, on the part of the shipyard and the boat owner—somebody should have paid attention to the increasing weight of the boats.
In the matter of the boot striping, what they did was alter the fundamental illusion that the boat was safe, when clearly it was not. If the investigation were done today, when a body of law exists, this would be a case of negligence. But at the time, in the early 1980s, there were no statutes, not a single law, to go against. In going to court, was it criminal negligence? No. Was there criminal intent? No. And there’s no such thing as criminal ignorance.
If you’re asking why no one was punished, well, the captains [who died] were. And the owner will carry his guilt, which is quite heartfelt, to the grave. He has to live in the town for the rest of his life, and that’s a big decision. One of the great ironies here is that the owner maintained his boats well and had high safety standards.
Q: What do you want people to take from this story?
A: The most important thing is that we understand that the headlines we call catastrophes are seldom measured by the depth of the disaster. We do analysis of the events leading up to them. And we report how people’s lives were affected and how they’re getting on with their lives, but we don’t take into account the suppressed anger and the depth of grief, which is the real aftermath.
