Tag Archives: Trawler skipper Paul Murphy
‘If we hadn’t cut the nets we would have gone down’
One spring day in 2015, Paul Murphy was out fishing for langoustines in the Irish Sea on his trawler, the Karen. The weather was good, the sea calm, and when the Karen suddenly shuddered to a violent halt, he thought its nets had simply snagged the seabed. Then, to his horror, the ship was dragged backwards at high speed as if the nets had caught some monster of the deep. Murphy quit fishing in the wake of the incident, hoping to put it behind him. But it all came back last week when he and his wife chanced to watch Vigil, the new BBC murder-mystery drama set on one of Britain’s Trident-armed nuclear submarines,>click to read< ,, April 16, 2015, Irish Trawler Karen dragged backwards, by submarine – Ardglass-based trawler Karen was almost 20 miles off the coast on Wednesday at around 4.20pm when skipper Paul Murphy discovered that his nets had been snagged and it was being dragged. “It happened that quickly, we kept our heads, we kept calm, the crew were straight to the winch to release the wires, so we knew what we had to do. >click to read< 14:44
Skipper blasts Faslane submarines for playing ‘Russian roulette’ with trawlermen’s lives
Trawler skipper Paul Murphy, whose boat was nearly sank by a Faslane-based nuclear submarine has blasted the Royal Navy and claimed they are playing “Russian roulette” with trawlermen’s lives. The fishermen were only saved from catastrophe when the cable attached to their net snapped. The incident brought back memories of the tragedy involving the Scottish trawler Antares which was dragged under by a Navy submarine in the Irish Sea in 1990 with the loss of four lives. Last April’s near miss saw the Karen trailed backwards at seven knots after the sub snagged in its nets 15 miles from Ardglass – one of Northern Ireland’s main fishing ports in the south east. The Karen’s crew managed to release net equipment but the accident caused it to heel heavily to port and its stern was submerged. Read the story here 13:24
