Unalaska, AK –
A crab fisherman aboard the F/V Seabrooke fell overboard Tuesday morning when his foot became tangled in a line while he was setting crab pots. The 109-foot boat is home-ported in Kodiak and was fishing for tanner crabs about 22 miles northwest of Cold Bay. Coast Guard Petty Officer Walter Shinn said they do not think he was wearing any sort of flotation device and the crew could not see him after he fell into the 34 degree water with four foot seas. Two Coast Guard helicopters and a C-130 began searching for the 40-year-old man at about 11 am and will continue until sunset. He is presumed dead.

This was the first Bering Sea crab fishing fatality since 2005, when crab rationalization went into effect. Injury epidemiologist Jennifer Lincoln said the program might have improved the safety of the fishery, but the biggest improvement actually came in October of 1999 when the Coast Guard began making safety and stability checks on all of the vessels.

"If they had too many pots on boat or if they were loaded improperly of if their survival gear wasn't up to date or was missing, they wouldn't let them sail," Lincoln said.

On average in the 1990s, eight crab fishermen died per year. After the Coast Guard started checking stability and pot numbers, only two people died during the next four seasons. The next big accident was the sinking of the Big Valley in January of 2005, when five men were lost.

Lincoln said fishermen can do two major things to prevent fatalities when crew members fall overboard. "One is to prevent the person from falling in the first place. And so that could be increasing rail height, which decreases chances of getting tangled in the line. Those kinds of things. Then your other point of preventing a fatality is when someone falls in the water and you can recover them quickly because you have a system in place to do that and because they have a flotation device on so they can wait until the boat turns around to get them."

Currently, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health is testing different styles of PFDs with different fishermen to try to find ones that are easy to wear while working.

Despite the Bering Sea crab fishery's reputation, more people are actually lost in the Pacific Northwest Dungeness fishery than in all of the crab fisheries here. From 2000 to 2006, 17 fishermen died there and only eight were lost here.