Tag Archives: F/V Ambition
Personal Locator Beacons improve the chance of rescue at sea
A PLB is a personal electronic device that transmits a survivor’s location on or in the water to the Search and Rescue Satellite-Aided Tracking system during an emergency. It’s designed to be carried in a person’s life vest (or elsewhere on their body) and manually activated when the wearer is in distress. PLBs continuously update a survivor’s location. New Year’s Eve is a time of celebration and remembrance. Three years ago, on December 31, 2019, as the new year was being rung in across the lower 48 states, a tragedy was playing out in icy Alaskan waters. F/V Scandies Rose, with seven crew members aboard, capsized and sank before reaching safety. >click to read< Then, there is survivor John Aldridge, a crewmember of the 44-foot lobster 
vessel Anna Mary was last seen aboard the boat during his watch relief at 9 p.m., Tuesday, while the vessel was underway off Montauk, N.Y. How many times have you read of or heard of a fisherman going overboard, only to watch an unsuccessful chain of events involving fruitless search and rescue operations to see them become possible recovery operations, and predictably, abandoned after a period of time, dictated by estimates of rate of survival and sea conditions? Way too many.
A UConn Student’s Dramatic Rescue In The Bering Sea
Megan Potter mustered all of her strength to swim through 10 foot swells as the boat she had spent the summer on slowly sank into the frigid water of the Bering Sea off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. A UConn student, she had spent the last two months on the Ambition, her father’s boat, ferrying thousands of pounds of salmon from fishing boats to canneries on the Alaskan shore. Now, with her family scattered in the water around her, Megan started to panic. Her rescuers were on another fishing boat, the Star Watcher, some 100 yards away. Megan had been working alongside her father, mother, brother and a family friend, Erin Tortolano, on the 75-foot fish transport boat. Recently, she recalled the dramatic events of July 23, an afternoon she will never forget. Read the story here 10:06
