The majority owner of the crab fishing boat Scandies Rose said over the weekend he couldn’t believe his boat went down, explaining to a Seattle radio station on Monday that it was considered a “battleship” among the Alaskan crabbing fleet.
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When the Scandies Rose sank off the coast of the Alaskan Peninsula on New Year’s Eve, two crew members made it into a life raft and were rescued by the Coast Guard after five hours adrift, but five were presumed drowned.
Dan Mattsen, a 50 percent owner of the boat, told KIRO Radio that he didn’t hear about the incident until the next morning. He had arrived into Dutch Harbor on a different fishing boat around 11 o’clock the night before, called his wife to wish her a happy New Year’s, put his phone on “don’t disturb” and went to bed.
“When I woke up my phone was blowing up with condolences and expressions of concern, and I found out what happened,” Mattsen told KIRO Radio. “I’ve been in the industry a long, long time and I have suffered losses before with friends going down in their boats and things, but this has hit home in a way I can’t even describe.”
KIRO Radio host Dori Monson asked Mattsen why he said over the weekend he couldn’t believe his boat went down. Mattsen explained, “The boat had tremendous amounts of stability…In the fleet it’s described as, well, that’s a battleship, that’s a tank. People can’t wrap their heads around the Scandies Rose going down because it was so stable. It could carry so many pots, it could carry so much crab. It was just a tremendously good platform to fish crab on.”
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Asked what he thought happened, Mattsen replied, “We know it was very cold and we know the seas were very rough so we know there’s icing involved. It’s hard for me to speculate. I don’t know what profit there is when we got the Coast Guard and the NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board] all over it. I’m just hopeful that they can come to something definitive.”
Mattsen told The Seattle Times, “We want to know what happened because if the Scandies Rose can sink in these conditions, any crabber can.”
Dean Gribble, one of the surviving crew members, posted a YouTube video saying there were 20-foot seas and 40-knot winds, icy, and “the worst possible conditions.”
“We just started listing really hard to the starboard side,” he said in the video. “From sleeping to swimming was about 10 minutes. It happened really fast. Everybody was trying to get out.”
Gribble also said the safety equipment was [crap], which prompted Mattsen to do the radio interview with KIRO to clarify the comment.
“If you look at the context of it, a lot of what he was referring to was the contents of the life raft and having trouble activating flares and what was going on inside the life raft,” Mattsen said. “Of course, we have nothing to do with that. We send the life rafts out to a qualified repacking station and they repack it. We never, ever — God willing — see the inside of a life raft.”
Mattsen told KIRO he is still processing what happened, adding “I cannot begin to convey just how sad I am with losing my friends and my crew.”
Photo of Scandies Rose courtesy of Bret Newbaker. Generic photo of a crab boat in rough conditions on the Bering sea courtesy of Wikipedia.
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