Scallop Fishermen Lost At Sea

U.S. Coast Guard cutters and aircraft are searching in freezing temperatures and high winds for five fishermen lost at sea after their scallop boat capsized and sank about 45 miles southeast of Nantucket.

Crews on a Jayhawk helicopter and a Falcon Jet from the Coast Guard's Air Station Cape Cod spotted debris in the water late Monday night, including a life ring and an empty life jacket, but no crew members of the 75-foot Northern Edge were found, Coast Guard Lt. Kendall Garran said.

The New Bedford-based fishing boat was carrying six crew members when it sent an emergency position signal at about 4:44 p.m. indicating the vessel was in distress, Coast Guard spokesman Andrew Shinn said. Shortly afterward, a mayday followed reporting the boat had overturned and was sinking.

Crew member Pedro Furtado was found by another fishing vessel, the 91-foot Diane Marie out of New Bedford. Furtado was in the life raft of the Northern Edge, but there was no sign of his crew mates.

"We were dredging, and the boat was on one side. Then came a wave, and it just flipped over," Furtado told WHDH-TV. He said he threw himself on the life raft and called his crewmates to follow, but they never came.

"I don't know what happened. It was so fast," he said.

Furtado was on the raft for about five minutes before the Diane Marie appeared, Shinn said.

With Furtado aboard, the Diane Marie assisted in the search for the Northern Edge, which left port Thursday, Garran said. Coast Guard officials were trying to determine the crew's identities.

Air temperatures were in the teens overnight, with water temperatures of about 47 degrees in the search area, winds of 30 knots and waves up to 15 feet high, Garran said. She declined to estimate how long a person in the water could survive in such conditions, given variables including the type of clothing a person is wearing and their physical condition.

Search aircraft were using infrared equipment to detect sources of heat in the water.

The Coast Guard also sent the Escanaba, a Boston-based 270-foot medium cutter, and the cutter Tybee, a 110-foot patrol boat based in Woods Hole, to search the area where the Northern Edge sank.

Joseph F. Rato, president of K & R Fishing Enterprises, the company that owns the Northern Edge, said of the boat, "She's lost, that's all I know."

"It's an awful tragedy," Rato said by telephone from his home.

On New Bedford's State Pier early Tuesday morning, Francisco Ferreira, 25, of Dartmouth, sat in his idling pickup truck talking through the open window with his cousin, Fernando Ferreira, 32, of New Bedford, and uncle, Joe Ferreira, 49, of New Bedford, about the Northern Edge.

The three fishermen had earlier returned on the Green Acres with a boatload of fish and expected to later offload the catch. But they came down to the nearly deserted pier when they heard what happened in the waters off Nantucket.

Joe Ferreira, a fisherman since 1979, got visibly upset when he was told the latest news of the boat. Fernando Ferreira, a first mate on the Green Acres, said many of the boats had come in early because of the bad weather. He said that an overboard fisherman's chances of survival anytime - let alone in winter, in arctic air and snow - are slim.

"You hit the water, that's it," he said.

He said that while the fishermen are a tight group, and know one another from the piers by sight, if not by name. When a fisherman is lot at sea, it hits those who remain hard.

"They're fishermen, they're doing what I'm doing. I could have been in their position," he said.

The life and death drama for fishermen has played out for centuries in Nantucket and New Bedford, which are both mentioned in the 1851 Herman Melville novel "Moby Dick."

By Matt Pitta