It’s hard to imagine how this happened, but a 115-foot commercial fishing boat collided with a 1,000-foot container ship 63 miles southwest of Chincoteague, Virginia, last Friday and sank. The Coast Guard and two good Samaritan vessels nearby rescued all 13 people (including a child) who had been on the fishing boat. No one was injured on the containership.
The Coast Guard reported that its base in Virginia got a Mayday call at 2 a.m. from the fishing trawler Tremont, from Massachusetts, reporting that they were in a collision with the Rita, a container ship flagged in Panama. The captain of the Tremont said his boat was sinking. The crew was abandoning ship and launching its life raft.
The Coast Guard sent an urgent marine broadcast reporting the sinking, and launched a Jayhawk helicopter and Hercules fixed-wing plane from their air station in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and a 47-foot lifeboat from Chincoteague. It also diverted the Cutter Rollin Fritch.
Meanwhile, two good Samaritan vessels nearby heard the Coast Guard’s broadcast. The Atlantis, a 274-foot research vessel from Falmouth, Massachusetts, which had been studying underwater methane gas just eight miles away, launched a small boat. It towed the Tremont’s life raft, with 12 on board, to the Drystan, a smaller fishing boat that also had answered the Mayday call. No one was injured.
The captain of the Tremont, who had stayed on board, was rescued by the Coast Guard helicopter just as his boat sank.
The containership had been on its way from New York to Charleston. It docked at Charleston after the accident. Read more:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/29/us/rescue-fishing-vessel-collides-container-ship-virginia
