One person is dead, and another four are missing and presumed lost after their charter fishing vessel sank in rough seas near Sitka on Sunday. An extensive air and sea search turned up no sign of the missing individuals. The Coast Guard suspended operations on Monday evening.
On the evening of May 28, Kingfisher Charters notified the Coast Guard that one of its boats was overdue, with five people on board.
The boat had last been seen near Cape Edgecumbe. Coast Guard Public Affairs Officer Ian Gray said an air crew found it on Sunday evening partially submerged near Low Island, about 10 miles southwest of Sitka.
“We launched Air Station Sitka along with Air Station Kodiak to conduct search patterns. We discovered a half submerged vessel at around 6:03 p.m. Sunday night, and conducted search efforts to find the five individuals that were missing,” Gray said. “We located one in the water, an older adult male who was not wearing a personal flotation device, and he was deceased.”
The Coast Guard continued their search throughout the next day for the remaining four people who were missing from the boat, with a helicopter crew, a plane from Kodiak, the fast response cutter Douglas Denman, the Sitka Fire Department emergency response vessel, and several good Samaritan vessels on the scene. Over 20 hours, they scoured a wide area. Gray said the search was called off around 9:30 on Monday evening.
“It’s an unfortunate outcome,” Gray said. “The suspended case is always a hard decision to make…But after searching over 820 square [miles] for over 20 hours, those decisions were made, ultimately…our hearts go out to the families of the victims.”
Names of the victims have not been released to the public. An investigation into the accident is ongoing, but Gray says so far it doesn’t look like the vessel ran aground.
“The initial divers that dove on the boat to examine the vessel [said] it didn’t indicate that the vessel struck anything,” Gray said. “There wasn’t a big hole in the hull of the vessel that indicated that they struck anything to make it sink.”
After the search was called off, local marine salvage company Hanson Maritime took over salvage efforts, and was working to remove the boat from the water on Tuesday afternoon. The loss of five people aboard the charter vessel is the worst maritime tragedy in the area since a chartered float plane went down en route from Sitka to Warm Springs Bay in September, 2004. No sign of the plane, its pilot, or its four passengers has ever been found.
This story has been updated.
