ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — Relatives of four fishermen missing off New Jersey’s coast said Thursday they have hired a private dive team to search the sunken wreck for the bodies of their loved ones.
The Coast Guard wouldn’t say whether it will search the submerged scallop boat owned by a North Carolina man. But relatives of the victims said that determining whether the bodies are inside the vessel is their top priority.
A private diver is on standby if the Coast Guard decides not to search, they said.
“We need to know,” said Jack Smith, whose two nephews died in Tuesday’s accident.
Only one of the seven crew members of the Lady Mary is known to have survived.
The Coast Guard called off the search Wednesday night, 37 hours after it first responded to an emergency radio beacon from the 71-foot scallop boat.
“We conducted our search and rescue operation for any remaining survivors, but unfortunately we did not find any,” Coast Guard Lt. Gene Maestas said Thursday. "I can’t speculate where the Coast Guard will go from here or what our future actions might be."
The extensive search failed to turn up any trace of Bernie “Tarzan” Smith, 59, and William Torres, both of Wildwood, N.J.; Frankie Credle, who had been living on the boat; and Frank Reyes of Cape May Court House, N.J.
On Tuesday, the bodies of Roy “Bobo” Smith Jr., 42, and his brother, Timothy “Timbo” Smith, 37, both of Middle Township, N.J. and Mesic, N.C., were recovered.
The sole survivor of the sinking was Jose Luis Arias, 57, a native of Chiapas state in Mexico who lived in Wildwood, N.J. and Raleigh, N.C.
In a three-hour interview with the Coast Guard on Wednesday, Arias was unable to shed much light on what might have caused the sinking.
Any word on what happened. The weather was rough but it did not look that that bad. Along the coast Tuesday morning the winds were reported 10-15kts but increased as you moved eastward off the coast to 20-30kts.
http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/ncep-charts/hires/20090324/namnesfc2009032412.gif
By RICHARD DEGENER Staff Writer, 609-463-6711 | Posted: Wednesday, June 17, 2009 | 6 comments 
Divers Rustin Cassway, left, and Joe Mazraani inspect the starboard side of the Lady Mary wreck. Photo by: Brad Sheard photo
[ul]
[li]
[/li][li]
[/li][li]
[/li][li]
[/li][/ul]
(9) More Photos
CAPE MAY - The key to figuring out what sank the Lady Mary scallop boat may be its damaged rudder.
That's the view of a seven-member volunteer dive team that has been exploring the wreck 65 miles off the coast. They believe damage to the Lady Mary shows it was hit by a large container ship whose unique construction would cause such damage under the waterline.
"If there is a smoking gun in this case, it's the rudder," said Harold Moyers, a member of the dive team. "We saw the port side of the rudder. We have not seen the starboard side. We feel the rudder has to come up."
The divers have been negotiating with the U.S. Coast Guard for permission to retrieve the blue rudder that appears to have red paint on it. Moyers said the Coast Guard may hire a private contractor to retrieve it.
Coast Guard investigators exploring the March 24 sinking that took the lives of six Cape May County fishermen declined comment for this story, pending the active investigation. Coast Guard investigators did look at the Cap Beatrice, a Liberian-flagged container ship that was close to the Lady Mary at the time of the sinking, but not until two months later. They said they found no evidence of a collision.
The divers point to red marks on the damaged rudder that they say matches the protruding bow, called a "bulbous bow," on the 728-foot Cap Beatrice.
"It looks like red paint to me," said Moyers, examining an underwater photograph.
The dive team even checked with the boatyard that put the blue bottom paint on the Lady Mary and found out the primer coat was beige, not red.
It isn't just the rudder that interests the divers. In two dives on the vessel, which lies 210 feet down, they have taken several pictures and video showing damage they argue must have come from a collision. Moyers said the damage could not have occurred when the vessel hit the ocean floor and nothing on the vessel itself, such as a swinging dredge or the winches used to haul gear and lift outriggers, could have caused it.
"The damage is unreal. We've done a lot of sinkings and never seen damage this bad. The stern rudder and 5-inch stainless steel prop shaft are bent straight down. A bearing and skeg are cracked straight down. There's not one thing on that boat that can bend a 5-inch stainless steel shaft like that," Moyers said.
If hitting the ocean floor damaged the propeller shaft, it would have been bent upward, not downward. The stern ramp suffered major damages, as part of it ripped right through the transom, or back of the boat, and the strongest winch on the boat could not have pulled the dredge through it, Moyers said.
The divers also found a broken port stay wire, which ran from the gallows, or support structure, to the bottom corner of the ramp, tied off. This suggests the ramp was damaged while the boat was still on the surface and it was tied by the crew to prevent it from swinging while they tried to save the sinking boat.
"We know nobody tied up that stay wire on the bottom. The stay wire broke on the surface. The damage was done pre-sinking. This really paints a scene of men trying to save a boat," said Steve Gatto, the leader of the dive team.
The team found the scallop dredge on deck and full of scallops.
Scallops are normally emptied right when the dredge comes out of the water. The hook used to open the scallop bag was still stowed where it was normally kept. This suggests the dredge was brought up in an emergency with no thought of removing the shellfish.
The team removed sand around the rudder to find the rudder shoe, but its missing. If damage was caused hitting the ocean floor the shoe would still be there.
[B]The clincher[/B]
The clincher for the divers was when they studied pictures of damage to the Maine fishing vessel Dictator after it was hit by the 965-foot British-flagged container ship Florida about 47 miles off Cape May, 22 days after the Lady Mary sinking. The damage looked eerily similar.
The bulbous bow of the Florida hit the Dictator under the waterline. Like the Cap Beatrice, the Florida never responded to a mayday call and continued on its way. It was identified by another fishing vessel and after multiple requests it finally stopped.
Dictator owner Tim Harper has traded pictures with the divers and said damages to the rudder areas mirror each other.
"That bulbous bow sticks out so far and it's down in the water. We couldn't see any damage above the water line," Harper said.
He said the Florida was going 18 knots, compared with almost 20 knots for the Cap Beatrice, in an area limited to 10 knots due to endangered whale activity. Harper is lobbying Congress to move the large ships away from fishing areas where boats, under government regulations, are concentrated at certain times of the year. About 50 boats were fishing the scallop grounds off Cape May that day.
In maritime accidents percentages of fault are found, and Harper said the Florida is trying to blame the Dictator, which is still undergoing repairs, for 15 percent of the fault.
"I don't accept 15 percent. He was going too fast and mowed me over," Harper said.Harper also argues fishing boats that mysteriously sink often are hit by foreign-flagged ships, and he intends to bring this to the public’s attention. He cites cases where they have been caught repairing damage and even changing ship logs.
Horatio Beck, one of two captains who heard the garbled Lady Mary mayday, agrees. Beck concurs with the divers that the Cap Beatrice hit the Lady Mary. Beck said a fishing vessel could not have caused such damage under the water line and such a vessel would have stopped.
“A ship does not care. They’ll run over you and keep on going. Ships don’t stop,” Beck said.
The Cap Beatrice was 0.71 miles from the Lady Mary at 5:10 a.m. when the ill-fated scallop boat last gave its position. The divers argue electronic tracking systems can be inaccurate enough where they could have collided.
“The deck log of the Cap Beatrice brings it a lot closer to the Lady Mary than the AIS (automated information system) tracking,” Moyers said.
[B]The scenario
[/B]The divers have produced what they believe is the scenario of what happened. Gatto pointed out they are not working for anybody. The Lady Mary owners are paying their fuel bill to go offshore, but nothing else.
“We’re bringing this information to everybody. The purpose is to find out why the boat sank so it doesn’t happen again,” Gatto said.
The scenario begins at about 5 a.m., when the Cap Beatrice strikes the aft port corner of the Lady Mary. The bulbous bow drives the rudder against the propeller shaft, leaving blue rudder paint on the shaft hub and bending the 5-inch shaft downward. This knocks off the shoe protruding from the skeg.
The blow is somewhat softened by the wake pushed ahead of the bulbous bow, but as Lady Mary is driven down by the stern a second contact smashes the stern ramp.
There is instant panic.
It is about 5 a.m. when Horatio Beck sits down in the wheelhouse of his vessel Good News with his morning coffee and hears what he describes as a “distorted and hysterical” Mayday.
“The words were ‘Mayday, Mayday, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Coast Guard,’” Beck said.
The Mayday is right after impact. The Lady Mary will sink in as little as 15 minutes, half an hour at most.
Another captain responds to the Mayday asking for more information. There is no response, leading Beck to believe it was a prank.
A hole punched in the lazerette at the stern of the vessel allows water into the fish hold, though most of the water flooding the boat is coming in with waves. There is no steering or propulsion system due to rudder and propeller damage.
The crew feels relief as the freighter clears the area since the Lady Mary is still above the water, though listing to port. The crew works on bringing up the scallop dredge. Tim Smith wakes up lone survivor, Jose Luis Arias, who is sleeping.
A broken stay wire that ran through a 20-foot pipe is swinging wildly. A crewmember ties this off and they get the dredge up. It doesn’t correct the list to port and waves continue flooding into the boat.
Rolling of the boat to port likely brings the starboard outrigger upright. Outriggers are kept out horizontally while fishing. The starboard outrigger was found to be vertically upright but aft, or toward the stern, of the cradle it sits in when upright. An upright outrigger greatly alters a boat’s center of gravity. The crew would not have put it up.
At 5:17 a.m. Capt. Royal “Bobo” Smith makes a satellite phone call to his girlfriend. The crew grabs survival suits, seeing boat lights nearby and believing help is on the way. Water is up to the bridge deck on the port side as they abandon ship.
Arias is saved by a Coast Guard helicopter crew several hours later, and they recover the bodies of brothers Tim and Bobo Smith. In the weeks that follow the divers recover the body Tarzon Smith, the uncle of Tim and Bobo, and a scallop boat nets the body of Frankie Credle. The bodies of Frank Reyes and Jorge Ramos have never been recovered.
Sorry for the mixup I tried to post the whole thing and I didn’t do a good job. I got part 1 after part 2 SJM
CAPE MAY - The key to figuring out what sank the Lady Mary scallop boat may be its damaged rudder.
That's the view of a seven-member volunteer dive team that has been exploring the wreck 65 miles off the coast. They believe damage to the Lady Mary shows it was hit by a large container ship whose unique construction would cause such damage under the waterline.
"If there is a smoking gun in this case, it's the rudder," said Harold Moyers, a member of the dive team. "We saw the port side of the rudder. We have not seen the starboard side. We feel the rudder has to come up."
The divers have been negotiating with the U.S. Coast Guard for permission to retrieve the blue rudder that appears to have red paint on it. Moyers said the Coast Guard may hire a private contractor to retrieve it.
Coast Guard investigators exploring the March 24 sinking that took the lives of six Cape May County fishermen declined comment for this story, pending the active investigation. Coast Guard investigators did look at the Cap Beatrice, a Liberian-flagged container ship that was close to the Lady Mary at the time of the sinking, but not until two months later. They said they found no evidence of a collision.
The divers point to red marks on the damaged rudder that they say matches the protruding bow, called a "bulbous bow," on the 728-foot Cap Beatrice.
"It looks like red paint to me," said Moyers, examining an underwater photograph.
The dive team even checked with the boatyard that put the blue bottom paint on the Lady Mary and found out the primer coat was beige, not red.
It isn't just the rudder that interests the divers. In two dives on the vessel, which lies 210 feet down, they have taken several pictures and video showing damage they argue must have come from a collision. Moyers said the damage could not have occurred when the vessel hit the ocean floor and nothing on the vessel itself, such as a swinging dredge or the winches used to haul gear and lift outriggers, could have caused it.
"The damage is unreal. We've done a lot of sinkings and never seen damage this bad. The stern rudder and 5-inch stainless steel prop shaft are bent straight down. A bearing and skeg are cracked straight down. There's not one thing on that boat that can bend a 5-inch stainless steel shaft like that," Moyers said.
If hitting the ocean floor damaged the propeller shaft, it would have been bent upward, not downward. The stern ramp suffered major damages, as part of it ripped right through the transom, or back of the boat, and the strongest winch on the boat could not have pulled the dredge through it, Moyers said.
The divers also found a broken port stay wire, which ran from the gallows, or support structure, to the bottom corner of the ramp, tied off. This suggests the ramp was damaged while the boat was still on the surface and it was tied by the crew to prevent it from swinging while they tried to save the sinking boat.
"We know nobody tied up that stay wire on the bottom. The stay wire broke on the surface. The damage was done pre-sinking. This really paints a scene of men trying to save a boat," said Steve Gatto, the leader of the dive team.
The team found the scallop dredge on deck and full of scallops.
Scallops are normally emptied right when the dredge comes out of the water. The hook used to open the scallop bag was still stowed where it was normally kept. This suggests the dredge was brought up in an emergency with no thought of removing the shellfish.
The team removed sand around the rudder to find the rudder shoe, but its missing. If damage was caused hitting the ocean floor the shoe would still be there.
[B]The clincher[/B]
The clincher for the divers was when they studied pictures of damage to the Maine fishing vessel Dictator after it was hit by the 965-foot British-flagged container ship Florida about 47 miles off Cape May, 22 days after the Lady Mary sinking. The damage looked eerily similar.
The bulbous bow of the Florida hit the Dictator under the waterline. Like the Cap Beatrice, the Florida never responded to a mayday call and continued on its way. It was identified by another fishing vessel and after multiple requests it finally stopped.
Dictator owner Tim Harper has traded pictures with the divers and said damages to the rudder areas mirror each other.
"That bulbous bow sticks out so far and it's down in the water. We couldn't see any damage above the water line," Harper said.
He said the Florida was going 18 knots, compared with almost 20 knots for the Cap Beatrice, in an area limited to 10 knots due to endangered whale activity. Harper is lobbying Congress to move the large ships away from fishing areas where boats, under government regulations, are concentrated at certain times of the year. About 50 boats were fishing the scallop grounds off Cape May that day.
In maritime accidents percentages of fault are found, and Harper said the Florida is trying to blame the Dictator, which is still undergoing repairs, for 15 percent of the fault.
"I don't accept 15 percent. He was going too fast and mowed me over," Harper said.
Harper also argues fishing boats that mysteriously sink often are hit by foreign-flagged ships, and he intends to bring this to the public's attention. He cites cases where they have been caught repairing damage and even changing ship logs.Lady Mary sinking: boaters should take heed
Posted on 29 July 2011 Written by Jim Flannery
The 72-foot Lady Mary sits on the bottom 65 miles off Cape May, N.J.The March 2009 sinking of the fishing vessel Lady Mary off Cape May, N.J., with the loss of six crewmembers inspired a 20-page Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper account of the tragedy and, with the loss of five other fishermen off New Jersey in 2009, raised an alarm that helped push far-reaching fishing vessel safety measures through Congress.
Yet the cause of the Lady Mary sinking remains in dispute. A May 2 report from the National Transportation Safety Board blames the loss on water flooding in through an open hatch in rough seas. Others still believe the evidence points to a collision, probably with a container ship running through scalloping grounds that night.
In either case, the sinking raises a red flag for pleasure boaters, who also risk collision with big ships in busy sea lanes, especially at night or in fog or rain, and loss of their vessels from water flooding through an open hatch or a hull breach.
The National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety estimates that an average of 50 commercial fishermen died on the job each year from 2000 to 2009 in the United States. A little more than half of those deaths occurred after abandoning ship during a catastrophic event, such as a sinking, capsize or fire.
The loss of 11 fishermen in waters off New Jersey was the worst record of commercial fishing deaths in that state since 1921. That and Pulitzer-caliber reporting by the Newark-based Star-Ledger helped build momentum for the new safety requirements. They are the first major fishing-safety reforms since the Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act of 1988.
“It’s a big step forward,” says Jack A. Kemerer, chief of the Coast Guard’s fishing vessel activities division. He says a high-profile case such as the Lady Mary can draw attention to legislative initiatives that might otherwise languish.
The 1988 act focused on safety gear to help crewmembers survive catastrophes. The 2010 legislation focuses on uniform safety standards, vessel examinations every two years, captains’ training, and designing and building boats to classification standards — measures that aim to prevent catastrophes, Kemerer says.
The Lady Mary sinking also uncovered shortcomings in the administration and use of EPIRBs. The unique 15-digit identification code for the Lady Mary’s beacon was incorrectly recorded in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s database. When the EPIRB activated and sent its alert signal to a NOAA computer via satellite, the computer couldn’t find the identifier code and classified the beacon as “unregistered.” That prevented rescue coordinators from identifying the vessel.
Also, the Lady Mary’s EPIRB wasn’t equipped with GPS, so rescue coordinators could not get the vessel’s position as soon as the EPIRB activated. It wasn’t until an hour and 35 minutes after the EPIRB activated that coordinators were able to pinpoint its location, using information sent from two low Earth-orbiting satellites. Had the rescue helicopter launched an hour and 35 minutes earlier, two of the crewmembers who were found dead in their immersion suits early in the search might have survived, the NTSB report says.
Six men died in the 2009 sinking of the Lady Mary (left), contributing to the worst record of commercial fishing deaths in New Jersey since 1921.Knowing the code
In the months after the sinking, NOAA embarked on a campaign to contact its 235,000 registered beacon owners and advise them to check the information about their EPIRBs in NOAA’s database, including the identifier code, to be sure it is correct. The NTSB also issued a recommendation to the Federal Communications Commission to require all EPIRBs on commercial vessels to have the capability of transmitting position data, a measure that has yet to be adopted.
New Jersey-based fishing crews suffered more than their share of tragedy in 2009. Alisha Marie, a 38-foot scalloper based in Point Pleasant, took a wave, capsized and sank 26 miles off Barnegat Inlet in 6-foot seas and 30-mph winds. Two fishermen died and a third was rescued from a raft after that Dec. 23 sinking.
The 44-foot Sea Tractor, based in Cape May, sank Nov. 11, 20 miles east of Cape May in winds and seas from Tropical Storm Ida. All three of its crewmembers were lost. But it was the compelling story of the Lady Mary sinking, its effect on the North Carolina fishing family who owned her, and their efforts to come to grips with why it sank that provided grist for both the Pulitzer story, written by Amy Ellis Nutt, and the new fishing vessel safety requirements.
Smith family patriarch Royal “Fuzzy” Smith Sr. of Bayboro, N.C. — shoreside manager for the Smith & Smith fishing business, owner of the 72-foot Lady Mary — lost two sons, a brother and a cousin when the vessel sank March 24 in the Elephant Trunk, a productive shellfish area 65 miles off Cape May. In April 2009, the Coast Guard convened nine days of hearings about the sinking. It still has not released its conclusions but seemed at the time to be leaning toward a finding of inherent vessel instability, a malfunction of the dredge or circumstances that might have caused the vessel to list severely in the seas, take on water and sink.
The family contended that damage to the rudder, props, stern ramp and gallis, and red paint on the trailing edge of the rudder indicate the Lady Mary had sunk in a collision, a theory Nutt’s story supports. It cited a number of experts who thought the vessel had been run down and only one forensics team that didn’t.
The NTSB finding states that the Lady Mary, buffeted by 7-foot waves and 35-knot winds, began taking on water over the sides and across the deck, and that water flooded into the lazarette through a hatch that had been left open to pump water out. Its engine and electrical system disabled by the flooding, the Lady Mary began to drift.
“The water accumulating in the lazarette would have sunk the vessel’s stern deeper into the sea, allowing even more water onto the deck and into the lazarette” until the boat sank, the report says.
David Downham describes his actions during the rescue/recovery to the Marine Board of Investigation.The family’s doubts
That finding remains in dispute. Besides the expert opinion in the Star-Ledger story, Stevenson Weeks, the Smith family’s Beaufort, N.C., admiralty lawyer, remains steadfast in his belief that the Lady Mary sank in a collision. He believes the Coast Guard convened its hearing prematurely, before divers had even examined the Lady Mary wreckage, because they had already made up their minds that this was a classic case of vessel instability.
The Lady Mary had been altered since its construction in 1969 from a shrimp boat to a scallop dredge with the addition of a scallop-shucking house, a bunkroom and galley, and on top of that a wheelhouse and winch deck — all built of plywood. To compensate for the greater weight topside, a fuel tank under the hold was filled with concrete.
Weeks believes the Coast Guard saw the Lady Mary as the poster child for advocating better design and construction standards for fishing vessels. “In my opinion, they developed this theory to substantiate [the need for better regulation of vessel stability] and to bolster their position in Congress,” he says.
He says the damage to the stern was too great to have been the result of the vessel falling 210 feet through the water column and hitting bottom. “We still believe this was a result of vessel collision,” he says.
Whatever the cause of the Lady Mary sinking, the upshot is that Congress has adopted a host of new and uniform safety standards for all fishing vessels — documented and state-registered — operating beyond three nautical miles of a fixed baseline. Among those standards:
• The vessels must carry a survival craft of some kind and be examined at the dock at least once every two years.
• Masters must keep a logbook of equipment maintenance, crew drills and instruction, and receive training in seamanship, navigation, stability, firefighting, damage control, safety and survival, and emergency drills.
• New vessels under 50 feet must meet federal recreational boat standards, which include requirements for electrical and fuel systems, ventilation below deck, load capacity, flotation (for boats less than 20 feet), navigation lights, and horns, bells and whistles.
• New builds 79 feet or larger must have the loadline marked on the hull.
• All fishing vessels over 50 feet operating beyond 3 nautical miles must be designed and built to one of the classification standards.
The legislation, which will be translated into regulations in the next several years, covers 20,000 federally documented and 58,000 state-registered vessels.
Meanwhile, Weeks says his and the Smith family’s concerns about the NTSB findings likely will remain just that — concerns. “My client has limited assets to chase this rabbit,” he says.
It could cost $1 million to raise the Lady Mary, do a thorough investigation of other vessels in the vicinity of the sinking that night, and challenge the NTSB’s findings. That’s $1 million the Smiths don’t have.
“I don’t think we’re ever going to get an answer to this mystery unless down the road someone admits [there was a collision], and that’s very unlikely,” he says.