{"id":967,"date":"2012-11-30T09:43:35","date_gmt":"2012-11-30T09:43:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2012\/11\/30\/line-by-line-amy-ellis-nutt-and-the-wreck-of-the-lady-mary-part-2\/"},"modified":"2024-03-04T19:06:50","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T19:06:50","slug":"line-by-line-amy-ellis-nutt-and-the-wreck-of-the-lady-mary-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2012\/11\/30\/line-by-line-amy-ellis-nutt-and-the-wreck-of-the-lady-mary-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Amy Ellis Nutt and the wreck of the Lady Mary, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
\n
\n In Part 2 of our annotation of Amy Ellis Nutt<\/strong>‘s Pulitzer-winning “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” Nutt, of the Newark Star-Ledger, explains how the investigative track of her five-chapter narrative unfolded. Yesterday, in Part 1, she walked us through the story conception and first two sections<\/a> of the series, which chronicled the sinking of\u00a0an Atlantic scallop boat and the deaths of all but one of the crew, exposing flaws in maritime safety law. The blue bits<\/span> are Paige Williams, the \u00a0red bits<\/span> are Nutt. For more annotations, see the Tampa Bay Times’\u00a0<\/em><\/em>Michael Kruse<\/strong>\u00a0on \u00a0his\u00a0story about a woman who disappeared inside her own home<\/a>, and\u00a0<\/em>Jon Franklin<\/strong>\u2018s\u00a0classic \u201cMrs. Kelly\u2019s Monster,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0the inaugural winner of the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.<\/em>


CHAPTER 3<\/strong>

Edith Jones, longtime partner of Bernie Smith, lies on the couch in her apartment in Wildwood. It is 11 a.m., and Jones is expecting Bernie back the next day. On ABC, Channel 6 in Philadelphia, Rachael Ray\u00a0has just finished interviewing the latest winner of TV\u2019s \u201cThe Biggest Loser\u201d\u00a0show. Jones is waiting for \u201cThe View\u201d to start when Action News breaks in with a special report.

The Lady Mary, a fishing boat out of Cape May, appears to have sunk, the announcer says. One man is reported to be alive, two others are either dead or in very critical condition, and four are still missing.

Jones leaps off the couch and calls her daughter Rebecca.

\u201cBernie\u2019s boat went down!\u201d she screams into the phone.

\"\"
Nutt<\/figcaption><\/figure>

For 15 years, Jones, now 70, and Bernie, one of Fuzzy\u2019s younger brothers, lived together in a photograph-filled apartment in Wildwood. He was devoted to Jones, and when he wasn\u2019t at sea the two were rarely apart. Bernie, 59, cooked for her, even accompanied her to the laundromat, and when they weren\u2019t watching \u201cDancing with the Stars\u201d or his favorite show, \u201cFriday Night Smackdown,\u201d they were out dancing in Cape May. She often wore her red chiffon dress, he his red tie and tux. Even when they attended the First Baptist Church in Whitesboro every Sunday,\u00a0they liked to wear matching outfits.\u00a0<\/a>Another great visual; same question \u2013 how\u2019d you get? Was there a particular line of questioning that took you there?<\/span>I noticed a photograph on a coffee table \u2013 the one of the couple in their matching red outfits \u2013 and asked Edith about it.<\/span><\/span>

As Bobo did with Stacy, Bernie always called Edith after she dropped him off at the dock for another fishing trip and the boat was pulling out of port. Usually she wasn\u2019t even back home yet when her phone rang.

\u201cI love you, honey\u201d was always the first thing he said.\u00a0<\/a>I\u2019m curious about this, knowing grieving families tend to idealize the dead. Please understand I do not mean to cast doubt, but really, seriously? Did you wonder? <\/span>Sure, you wonder. But when someone insists, then you have to go with it. I also figured people would \u201csee\u201d through the statement for what it is \u2013 that he surely said it a lot, but \u201calways\u201d when it\u2019s said about anything, is doubtful.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0 The two talked for 15 or 20 minutes,\u00a0past the lighthouse and the Coast Guard buoys,\u00a0<\/a>Nice. This because it puts us two places at once<\/span><\/span>\u00a0until reception was lost.

In 2007 Jones retired after 27 years as a housekeeper at the Crest Haven Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Cape May Courthouse. Her first husband, Alford, died in her arms when he was just 58. Several years later she met Bernie. The love of her life, Bernie didn\u2019t mind when Edith said he and Alford were so alike they could have been twin brothers.

\u201cDon\u2019t make no plans,\u201d Bernie joked with Edith on the morning of March 18 as the boat steamed east toward the Elephant Trunk. \u201cWe\u2019re going to Virginia Beach when I come back.\u201d

\u201cAll right,\u201d she said, but the line had already gone dead.

The Lady Mary was out of reach.

 

A DANGEROUS CALLING<\/strong>

Fuzzy wasn\u2019t expecting his sons back until Wednesday morning. That gave him just enough time to drive home to Bayboro, N.C., run some errands and see his wife, Hazel. A few hours later he\u2019d turn around and be back in Cape May in time for the Lady Mary\u2019s arrival. There would be scallops to weigh and checks to cut for the crew.

The commute was a long one, 12 hours each way, but Fuzzy drove it 40, 50, 60 times every fishing season. He\u2019d grown used to it, prizing the quiet time alone.\u00a0He ran his Ford Lariat up onto the Cape May ferry, and when the boat hit the shore in Lewes, Del., 90 minutes later, he turned the truck south down the Delmarva Peninsula and across the Chesapeake Bay.\u00a0<\/a>Lovely<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Before he reached Bayboro, 200 miles to the south, he would thread his way through dozens of small towns stitched into the Virginia and North Carolina coastline.

The sky was high and cloudless \u2014 the kind of day air traffic controllers refer to as \u201csevere clear\u201d \u2014 and the good weather put Fuzzy at ease. Bobo and Tim would soon be hauling back and heading home.

Commercial fishermen always have risked life and limb to pursue a profession where a mere change in wind or a minor mechanical malfunction might mean they never get home. Every year throughout the 1800s, the village of Gloucester, Mass., the oldest seaport in the country, lost about 200 fishermen \u2014 approximately 4 percent of its population \u2014 to weather and accidents.

Advancements in navigational technology and boat design made the occupation safer and the industry profitable, but it also created crowded seas. Overfishing and environmental concerns eventually led to shorter fishing seasons and strict enforcement, all of which meant crews took more chances \u2014 going out in bad weather or overloading their boats with too much catch \u2014 to meet regulations and make deadlines.\u00a0<\/a>I appreciate this truncated but info-packed history. What decisions did you have to make about how much to include? What bits did you have to scale back as you moved forward?<\/span>Oh, Lord, Paige, we cut out probably another 100 inches of explanatory info because it just bogged the story down so much. In the case of the regulations, they are so complicated that I had to really work to synthesize this. Again, though, this is where we made good use of sidebars and graphics.<\/span><\/span>

In August 1985, 20-year-old Yale student\u00a0Peter Barry<\/a>\u00a0died with five other crewmen aboard an Alaskan salmon boat. His parents \u2014 his father was a former congressman and a member of the staffs of two U.S. presidents \u2014 succeeded in pushing Congress to pass the\u00a0Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act<\/a>\u00a0of 1988. <\/a>Here is an amazing coincidence. After the Pulitzers were announced I received an email from the mother of another Pulitzer winner,\u00a0Ellen Barry<\/a>\u00a0of the NYT.\u00a0Peggy Barry<\/a>, who had not yet read my story, only a basic description of it, just wanted to reach out to me with her story. I told her that she and her husband and her late son were part of my series, and so when we met at the luncheon it was very moving for us both.<\/span><\/span>

The new law mandated lifesaving and firefighting equipment on all fishing vessels, as well as survival suits and EPIRBs on vessels operating in certain waters.

Deaths declined by more than 30 percent over the next five years. But fishermen, notorious for their fiercely guarded independence, resisted many of the recommendations. Commercial fishing remained \u2014 and remains \u2014 the most dangerous occupation in America with a fatality rate 30 times that of the average American worker, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Between 1992 and 2007, 1,093 commercial fishing vessels and 934 men and women were lost at sea, the Government Accountability Office reported last year. Fully a third of those deaths were Atlantic Coast fishermen.

In New Jersey alone, more than 100 commercial fishermen have died on the job since reliable records began to be kept in 1931. Last year 11 died, the worst since the winter of 1999 when the same number was lost. In the aftermath of those deaths, a special Coast Guard task force issued a report and made 59 recommendations. More than a decade later, only a handful have been officially adopted.

The 80-page document opens with an 1816 quote from Sir Walter Scott, expressing a reality that is often still true, nearly 200 years later:

\u201cIt\u2019s not fish you are buying \u2014 it\u2019s men\u2019s lives.\u201d\u00a0<\/a>I like the inclusion of all of this info because, obviously, it\u2019s important context. I was surprised by it \u2013 learned something from it \u2013\u00a0and in some ways almost wanted just a tad more about how dangerous a career choice fishing has remained. Curious to know whether there was any of that typical talk about breaking this data out into a graphic,\u00a0and also whether you considered getting back to Fuzzy before the subhed.<\/span>I almost always over-research my stories and so much of it is eventually left on the cutting room floor, so to speak. For instance, I learned a great deal about the arcane, ancient rules of navigation on the sea, but probably only included a single sentence about them. As for getting back to Fuzzy earlier, I think we probably moved him around quite a bit before he ended up here. And again, sidebars and graphics helped alleviate the need for all the explanatory information in the body of the story, but not completely.<\/span><\/span>



\u2018HAVE YOU HEARD?\u2019<\/strong>

Fuzzy was nearly to the North Carolina border when his cell phone rang. It was Keith Laudeman, owner of the Lobster House.

\u201cFuzzy, where are you at? Have you heard anything about the Lady Mary sinking?\u201d

\u201cWhat!? No, no way.\u201d

Fuzzy immediately dialed Bobo\u2019s cell phone, then Tim\u2019s. Both calls went to voice mail. That wasn\u2019t surprising, he realized, they were still too far out. Heck, he talked to Bobo three days earlier and everything was fine. Fuzzy kept driving south toward Bayboro, running names and numbers through his head. Who could he phone to get more information?

A half-hour later, Laudeman called back.

\u201cFuzzy, you better come on back here,\u201d he said. \u201cSomething\u2019s not right.\u201d

Without even thinking, Fuzzy U-turned across two lanes of traffic and gunned his truck north.

Around the same time, Carinna Smith, Tim\u2019s wife, was\u00a0ironing a blouse for work\u00a0when her phone rang, too.

\u201cHave you heard from Tim?\u201d Carinna\u2019s friend, Martha Crawley, asked.

\u201cI\u2019ll hear from him soon. He\u2019s due this week.\u201d

\u201cYou know a boat went down, don\u2019t you?\u201d Martha asked, gently.

\u201cNo, no. I\u2019d hear from his dad if anything was wrong.\u201d

An hour later, at the Woodbine Developmental Center, Carinna\u2019s cell phone rang again. This time it was her pastor, Thomas Dawson, from the First Baptist Church of Woodbine.\u00a0\u201cCarinna, have you heard from Tim?\u201d

\u201cNo, I\u2019m due to hear from him,\u201d she said for the second time that morning.

\u201cA boat went down,\u201d Dawson said. \u201cDo you know the name of Tim\u2019s boat?\u201d

Carinna\u2019s mind raced in a million different directions. Why couldn\u2019t she remember?

\u201cWell, they\u2019re all named after his grandmother, Mary something or something Mary.\u201d

\u201cLady Mary?\u201d the Rev. Dawson asked.

\u201cThat\u2019s one of them.\u201d

Carinna couldn\u2019t believe it, didn\u2019t want to believe it. Tim was too good a fisherman, and he was with Bobo and Bernie and Frankie Credle. Together, they were four experienced captains. How could they sink? She remembered when they first met, the movie \u201cThe Perfect Storm\u201d had just been released. The story of the six New England fishermen killed when their boat went down in one of the worst storms of the century frightened her, but Tim was reassuring.

\u201cBaby, you know things are in place. I\u2019m always watching the weather. If water gets in, alarms go off.\u201d

And when the weather wasn\u2019t good, he would call her and say, \u201cBaby, I\u2019m laying up.\u201d\u00a0<\/a>I love these bits of his voice<\/span><\/span>\u00a0She trusted his judgment and several times actually went out with him on the boat when he went fishing. She loved watching him work the winches and steer the boat, bringing in a full load of scallops. She was proud of Tim, and so she learned not to be afraid when he was out.

In fact, she embraced Tim\u2019s love of the sea. Three hundred guests were invited to their wedding, and Carinna did the decorations herself for the reception at the Rio Grande fire hall. She collected hundreds of snail shells, boiled and bleached them, then dipped them in glitter and deposited one at every place setting.\u00a0<\/a>Haunting detail<\/span><\/span>

 

THE TERRIBLE WAIT AT THE DOCK<\/strong>

If the sea was going to be her husband\u2019s life, it would be hers, too.\u00a0When Carinna hung up with Pastor Dawson, she immediately dialed Fuzzy.

\u201cDad, they said a boat went down!\u201d

\u201cI know,\u201d Fuzzy said. He was still driving north. \u201cI\u2019m trying to find out now.\u201d

Carinna remembered Tim telling her, \u201cBaby, if I fall overboard this time of the year, it ain\u2019t good.\u201d She couldn\u2019t stay at work and she was too distraught to drive, so Crawley picked her up and drove her to Cape May.

Waiting at the dock was awful, and each new bit of information made it more so: A life raft had been spotted, but no one was inside. Three men had been recovered from the water, but only one was definitively alive.

Carinna kept Fuzzy apprised of all the reports. He was a fisherman, and he knew how bad it was. His sons were dead. Now he dreaded they\u2019d never be found.

When word reached him that two bodies had been recovered, he prayed over and over: \u201cPlease God,\u00a0let them two boys be mine.\u201d\u00a0<\/a>Heartbreaking; how did you get the precise quote, and how did Fuzzy come to reveal it was the first time he\u2019d ever prayed? It amazes me that in the face of known catastrophe families often just want to know where their loved one\u00a0is<\/em><\/span>Capt. Fuzzy is an amazing man. He shared his innermost feelings with us, sometimes in just a few words, sometimes reluctantly \u2013 there were a lot of long silences after he answered a question, and that\u2019s usually when he would fill in the silence with his sorrow. We have him\u00a0on the video<\/a>\u00a0saying this same thing, his voice cracking.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0In his entire life, he\u2019d never prayed for a single thing.

\u201cI won\u2019t ever ask for nothing else,\u201d he pleaded. \u201cJust let those boys they got out of the water be mine.\u201d

All afternoon, friends, relatives and fishermen gathered on the Cold Spring dock, as if hoping their presence might be enough to will the Lady Mary home safe and sound. Under an excruciatingly blue sky, they huddled and embraced and whispered encouragements to one another. But they all knew. How could they not?

Few survive the total loss of a vessel, especially that far out, and in water that cold. Most fishermen understand and accept this, but not their families, who for centuries have waited on shores for men who never came home.

For the most part, the other fishing vessels out in the Elephant Trunk still didn\u2019t know anything was wrong with one of the boats in their fleet. The Urgent Marine Information Broadcasts coming out of Sector Delaware Bay were sent out only on one frequency, which couldn\u2019t reach more than 20 or 30 miles out, and the rescue helicopter\u2019s few attempts to broadcast were thwarted by having to hover so low over the rough seas.

Not until late in the afternoon of the 24th did any of the other fishing vessels know one of their own had gone down. At 3:40 p.m., some 10 hours after the Lady Mary sank, and more than four hours after the Coast Guard ship Dependable arrived on scene, the cutter issued an urgent radio broadcast for all vessels to be on the lookout for \u201cpossible PIW\u201d \u2014 \u201cpersons in the water.\u201d\u00a0<\/a>The mariners\u2019 lingo sprinkled throughout this series builds credibility\/authority\/, adds color, captures a world\/subculture<\/span><\/span>

Twenty minutes later, the scalloper Kathryn Marie radioed back to report she\u2019d heard a short, frantic call about 5:15 a.m., but nothing else after that.

At 5:47 p.m. the fishing vessel Margaret Rose volunteered to help. Then Jim Taylor aboard the Elise G. offered to assist. Forty minutes after that, the fishing boats Miss Planters and Nancy Elizabeth joined the others in what would prove to be a fruitless search for the missing men of the Lady Mary.\u00a0<\/a>Great details and such evocative names \u2013 sourcing?<\/span>The Coast Guard hearings included a map of the boats that were nearby and I spoke with many of their skippers.<\/span><\/span>

At the Coast Guard air station, Lake Downham was back in the hangar\u2019s crew room by noon.\u00a0High on the room\u2019s back wall are the testaments to the lives he and his fellow rescue swimmers have saved. The dozen or so life preservers and flotation devices bear inscriptions, scribbled in black ink, with the vessel\u2019s name and the date of rescue or the persons on board (POB): \u201cKilling Time,\u201d \u201cGypsy Blood (Aug. 2004),\u201d \u201cTapped Out (5-12-08),\u201d \u201cThe Chief (7 POB).\u201d\u00a0<\/a>Glad you saved this description for now rather than putting it up high with Downham\u2019s introduction; how did you arrive at this decision?<\/span>First, it means so much more, and it is that much more effective, after you know that nothing was brought back from the Lady Mary except two bodies. Also, this is where the story gets \u201cquiet,\u201d with Downham back at the hangar with basically nothing to do, after all that tremendous drama, so it seemed appropriate to be more descriptive here, as if the reader is just looking around the inside of the crew room along with Downham.<\/span><\/span>

A couple of his colleagues asked Downham if he was okay.

\u201cYeah, sure,\u201d he answered, although truthfully he wasn\u2019t sure.

Downham unpacked his gear and rinsed his equipment, then joined the co-pilot, Matt Tuohy, to hose down the inside of the helicopter. When someone dies during transport, or a body is recovered at sea, the helicopter must be specially cleansed.

After showering, Downham\u2019s shift was nearly up. Another rescue swimmer offered to take the rest of his watch. Inside his cherry-red Pontiac Grand Am, Downham flipped on the satellite radio and turned to Howard Stern.

Settling back, he stretched his well-muscled arms out toward the steering wheel. Both are covered in tattooed seascapes \u2014 violent ones, with skulls, lightning, ominous purple clouds and white-capped waves.\u00a0<\/a>Another terrific bit of delayed detail \u2013 thank you for not telling us this early on; why didn\u2019t you?<\/span>You always want to spread out the details, plus I think it\u2019s more meaningful to describe the tattoos AFTER the reader has gotten to know Downham a bit and after everything he\u2019s been through.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Downham\u2019s mind wandered. He\u2019d\u00a0never seen a dead body,\u00a0<\/a>So much more effective to deliver this information now; some might argue this point, or all these points, but I think if you\u2019d dropped this info into the rescue scene, or just before the rescue\/recovery, you\u2019d have risked ruining it with melodrama. Learning it here allows us to feel the power of his reflection<\/span><\/span>\u00a0He wondered, in an almost clinical kind of way, whether it was going to affect him. Would he be able to sleep that night? What would he feel like when he woke up the next day?

An hour later he pulled up to the house in Sea Bright he shared with his future wife, Alexis. She was still at school, teaching, so Downham donned his wet suit, grabbed one of his surfboards, and headed to the beach. The wind had changed and the waves weren\u2019t particularly good. Still, he stayed out on the water for two hours.


BEHIND THE DOOR<\/strong>

When the local news reported three fishermen had been taken to the hospital, Carinna and Crawley got back in the car and drove to AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in Atlantic City. A nurse told her only one of the men from the Lady Mary was there \u2014 Jos\u00e9 Arias. Two bodies, she said, were taken to Shore Memorial Hospital.

Not until their bodies were being transported from the Coast Guard air station to the hospital were Tim and Bobo Smith declared dead: Tim at 10:01 a.m., Bobo at 10:06.\u00a0Nine miles from Atlantic City, Shore Memorial\u2019s secondary ambulance entrance doubles as the\u00a0drop-off for valet parking. This is also where the body bags are delivered, then wheeled down a serpentine series of hallways that dead-ends at the morgue.\u00a0<\/a>Sounds like you walked it <\/span>Yep.<\/span><\/span> The doorknob-less entry is key-card only.

At 4 p.m., Ralph Henkel, from the Atlantic County Medical Examiner\u2019s Office, escorted Carinna, Crawley, Carinna\u2019s mother, Shirly Harris, and Pastor Dawson toward the door of the morgue. Fuzzy, having driven all the way back, joined them, but refused to go any farther. Harris stayed behind as well.

\u201cAre you ready?\u201d Henkel asked Carinna.

She nodded yes.

Inside the morgue, coroner Hadow Park stood between two gurneys. Lying on the one closest to the door was the body of Royal \u201cBobo\u201d Smith Jr.\u00a0<\/a>Interesting move back to the full name \u2013 reason?<\/span>I think it emphasizes the finality of death and is actually more respectful.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0and next to it, the remains of Timothy Smith. At first, Carinna could only see Bobo. He looked so peaceful, she thought, not a mark on his face.

When the coroner stepped to the side, Carinna\u00a0inhaled sharply.\u00a0<\/a>Nice detail; source?<\/span>Carinna \u201cre-enacted\u201d the moment for us.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0There he was, her beloved Tim, lying side by side with his older brother. A wail of horror and grief could be heard on the other side of the morgue\u2019s thick wooden door and Fuzzy\u2019s legs buckled.\u00a0<\/a>Interesting camera shift, from the inside of the room to the corridor, then back again. Why move from Carinna to Fuzzy and back?<\/span>Well, because I really did \u201csee\u201d this story before I wrote it, and I wanted to \u201ctell\u201d this scene from the perspective of the two most important people to Bobo. Also, it\u2019s to be expected that Carinna would wail. What\u2019s not exactly expected is Fuzzy\u2019s response.<\/span><\/span>

Carinna reached toward the body of her husband.\u00a0His lips were so blue and when she bent to kiss them, so cold.\u00a0<\/a>It sounds awful to compliment such a sentence, but this is a beautiful sentence<\/span><\/span>

\u201cI love you, Tim. I love you, baby,\u201d she said over and over. \u201cI\u2019ll see you again. I promise. I\u2019ll see you again.\u201d

Crawley and the Rev. Dawson helped her out into the hallway.

\u201cIt\u2019s them!\u201d she cried out to Fuzzy.

The two collapsed in each other\u2019s arms.\u00a0<\/a>This is one of those single-sentence grafs that I as an editor would ask you to defend as a standalone but I\u00a0don\u2019t mean to suggest you made the wrong choice<\/em>; I\u2019m just saying I\u2019d have encouraged a small discussion about single-sentence grafs in general and certain choices in particular. Sometimes SSGs are great (\u201cSSGs\u201d aren\u2019t a thing; I just made that up), and sometimes I worry they\u2019re overly Writerly<\/span>I am now officially going to have to think a lot more about the SSG\u2019s (nice acronym). In a lot of instances it really is because our style is not to tack the description onto the end of the quote, and it doesn\u2019t belong with the following graph, so there you have it.<\/span><\/span>

An examination of Tim\u2019s body revealed a distended stomach, the result of swallowing large amounts of water, and white, frothy fluid in the trachea, the larynx and the lungs \u2014 all consistent with asphyxia due to drowning.\u00a0<\/a>Are autopsy reports public record in NJ? If not, how\u2019d you get them? what documents challenges did you encounter overall in the reporting?<\/span>Yes, unless they are part of an open investigation into the cause of the death. \u2026 As for reporting challenges, we FOIA\u2019ed the Coast Guard and the NTSB but all our requests were denied due to the \u201ccontinuing investigation.\u201d<\/span><\/span>

Bobo\u2019s body, the coroner noted, had fully developed rigor mortis, which in cases of recent drowning was evidence of a brief, violent struggle to survive. In all likelihood, when Bobo\u2019s face hit the frigid water he involuntarily gasped, drawing water immediately into his lungs and sending him into a panic from which he couldn\u2019t recover. Cadaveric spasm \u2014 the rigidity of the arms and legs \u2014 is a kind of flash-freezing that occurs almost instantaneously when a victim drowns this way.\u00a0<\/a>I\u2019ve never heard of this; thank you for such a facile explanation<\/span>I didn\u2019t know it either, until I started doing the research.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0The more Bobo battled to breathe, the less likely he was to live.

At 7:51 p.m. on Wednesday, nearly 37 hours after the search and rescue was initiated, the Coast Guard suspended the mission. Two helicopters, two cutters and a C-130 long-range surveillance plane had covered some 3,417 square nautical miles, but turned up nothing more than debris.

After his rescue, Jos\u00e9 Arias spent three hours at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center. The doctors examined him head to toe, checked his temperature and blood pressure, and eventually deemed him well enough to return home. The board he\u2019d clung to all those hours had kept his upper body out of the water, helping him to retain heat longer, thereby slowing the effects of hypothermia.\u00a0<\/a>Crucial info about what allowed him to survive<\/span><\/span>

His problem now was that he was shoeless, and his only clothes \u2014 underwear really \u2014 had been ripped by the EMTs in the ambulance when they tried to check his body for injuries. From the hospital\u2019s special closet of secondhand clothes, a nurse picked out a pair of pants, T-shirt and sneakers. A young woman with the Coast Guard offered him a sweater and blue jacket, then drove him home to Wildwood.\u00a0<\/a>So interesting; did you think this through cinematically and go \u2018wait, how\u2019d he have any clothes?\u2019 or did he volunteer this info and you took it deeper?<\/span>It was during one of our last interviews when we again went through what happened on the boat that night, and when he said he was wearing his boxers I realized he must have needed clothes in the hospital, and so I asked him.<\/span><\/span>

Climbing the rickety staircase <\/a>Rickety = great. Observation?<\/span>We climbed them a number of times.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0on the outside of his second-floor apartment, Arias was hungry and exhausted, his body thoroughly beaten down by the weather, the waves and his desperate struggle to survive. Alone now, the images piled up in his mind \u2014 the Lady Mary lurching to port, the helpless look of his friend Frank Reyes, then swimming free of the Lady Mary before she slipped under the waves.

Arias couldn\u2019t eat and he didn\u2019t want to think. He lay down on his bed, just a mattress on the apartment\u2019s small living-room floor, and closed his eyes.\u00a0<\/a>How did you choose to end this chapter with Arias? I like that you did, and that image of him lying alone on the floor is heartbreaking and points us forward, story-wise.\u00a0Had you ended with one of the families of the dead there the unpacking would\u2019ve been a bit predictable \u2013\u00a0<\/span>mourning, funerals, etc. \u2013\u00a0whereas one wonders where a shipwreck survivor goes from here and\u00a0what happened<\/em><\/span>Exactly. I also wanted to vary my endings, and there has been so much drama to the story this far, that it needed a quiet place, and I wanted to get back to Jose.<\/span><\/span>

 

CHAPTER 4<\/strong>

Just before dawn March 24, 2009, on black, moonless seas, the container ship Cap Beatrice was steaming toward the Delaware breakwater where the bay and the ocean meet.\u00a0<\/a>So clear, so lovely; why do you suppose so many writers (myself included) get so carried away and wind up overdoing it?<\/span>Oh, boy, I am a classic \u201cover-doer,\u201d but I\u2019ve always had fabulous editors to rein me in.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Here, deep-draft vessels like the Cap Beatrice pause and take on a river pilot, who then guides the ship up the Delaware into the Port of Philadelphia. Occasionally a ship will wait at the breakwater if a berth in port is not immediately available, but containers, which often carry food and other perishables, normally do not.

From her position 66 miles off the coast at 5 a.m., the approximate time the Lady Mary sank, the Cap Beatrice needed only about three hours to reach the breakwater. It took her 17, according to the records of the area\u2019s river pilots association, as well as the Maritime Exchange for the Delaware River and Bay, which monitors the area\u2019s river and bay traffic.

\u201cGenerally, ships wait one or one and a half hours at the breakwater,\u201d said Capt. Dick Buckaloo, acting president of the Pilots Association for the Bay and River Delaware. \u201cFor containers, downtime is lost money for them. So it\u2019s odd when a container waits.\u201d

What the Cap Beatrice was doing remains unclear, even to the Coast Guard, which received no signal for six hours from the ship\u2019s Automatic Identification System, a tracking device that records speed, position and direction. Her last transmission was recorded by the Coast Guard at\u00a035 seconds past the hour, 5 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.\u00a0<\/a>The precision here is essential to the chronology. To have written \u201cjust past 5 a.m.\u201d would\u2019ve been lazyish<\/span><\/span>

Because of the missing AIS data, all the Coast Guard could conclude was that the Cap Beatrice \u201chung\u201d around for seven or eight hours at the breakwater, said communications officer Timothy Marriott, who testified at the marine investigation into the sinking.\u00a0<\/a>Did the Coast Guard not press the CB captain for answers?<\/span>This was a very, very frustrating part of the story. The Coast Guard did interview the crew of the Cap B. \u2013 albeit two months after the accident \u2013 but their responses to questions were not part of the hearings and the C.G.\u00a0\u00a0steadfastly refused to tell us anything.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cThat\u2019s unusual,\u201d said Capt. John Hagedorn, who teaches in the marine transportation department at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y. \u201cEither there was some problem on the ship or someone shut it off.\u201d

A river pilot boarded the Cap Beatrice after she reached the mouth of the Delaware at 1:11 a.m. March 25, according to Paul Myhre, the director of operations at the maritime exchange, and steered her the final 86 miles up river to the port. She arrived at the Packer Avenue marine terminal at 7:30 a.m., and longshoremen began to unload the ship at 10 a.m.

Technically, the investigation into the sinking of the Lady Mary was already 24 hours old. According to the Code of Federal Regulations, the Coast Guard\u2019s commandant or one of its district commanders, \u201cupon receipt of information of a marine casualty or accident, will immediately cause such investigation as may be necessary,\u201d including taking possession of all voyage data and navigation records of vessels possibly involved in, or witnesses to, the casualty.

The Cap Beatrice left the Port of Philadelphia at 1:34 a.m. Thursday, March 26, 2009, heading south to Savannah, Ga., then back through the Panama Canal and eventually to Australia.\u00a0Although the Cap Beatrice was docked for nearly 18 hours, no one from the Coast Guard contacted her captain, Vasyl Stenderchuk, the shipping agency that leases her, Hamburg Sud, or the German company that owns her, Reederei Thomas Schulte. In particular, no one from the Coast Guard interviewed Capt. Stenderchuk or requested him to save the information on the ship\u2019s black-box voyage-data recorder, even though it could have filled in the missing AIS record.\u00a0<\/a>I\u2019m guessing all of this is so heavily attributed because you had very little cooperation, if any, from the CB\u2019s owners, and litigation is still possible. How did you deal with the company \u2013 did you hold back until you knew a certain amount and then approach them about the ship\u2019s whereabouts\/possible role in the sinking of the LM? What were the challenges of getting company info and relevant details?<\/span>A lot of these questions will be answered in the next section, but in short, when I felt we had accumulated enough circumstantial evidence that strongly suggested the Cap B. hit the LM, I emailed and called the shipping company. At first the company was willing to talk a bit, albeit defensively, but then they clammed up. And when we went back to Philly to try and interview the new crew of the Cap B. when she was in port again last summer, we were prevented from getting anywhere near the ship. We also talked about the possibility of going over to Germany and trying to confront them, but it was decided that the expense and the time were probably not worth it.<\/span><\/span>

Not until the Cap Beatrice returned from its trip to Australia did officials from the Coast Guard\u2019s marine investigation interview her captain and crew,\u00a0<\/a>Good Lord, why?<\/span>The C.G. had no good explanation, except to say that was the earliest they could interview them<\/span><\/span> and New Jersey State Police divers inspect her bulbous bow. By that time, the Lady Mary had been lying on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for two months.

Two days after visiting the Cap Beatrice, the Coast Guard announced it found no evidence of a collision between the Lady Mary and the container ship.\u00a0<\/a>All this time I sort of assumed the LM capsized after getting caught in the CB\u2019s wake and taking on water. How much did you and eds kick around how strongly\/overtly to draw conclusions? I\u2019m not seeing\u00a0direct\u00a0<\/em>evidence that the CB caused the LM to sink, or am I missing something?<\/span>This was bandied about quite a bit. All of the evidence is circumstantial, but it is considerable, and especially after we spoke to the experts \u2013 next part \u2013 it became increasingly clear that the preponderance of evidence pointed to the Cap. B. That being said, our lawyers wanted us to be careful about making direct accusations.<\/span><\/span>

OUTDATED RULES<\/strong>

There are no road signs on the high seas, no speed bumps, traffic lights, cameras or cops. Most coastal countries designate traffic lanes in and out of their ports, and some, like the United States, impose speed restrictions on ships transiting parts of the ocean traveled by endangered whales. Otherwise, the biggest ships \u2014 or the fastest ones \u2014 usually have the right of way.

If the Lady Mary and Cap Beatrice collided, or came close to colliding, in the early morning hours of March 24, 2009, they were no match for one another. The 728-foot container ship is more than 10 times the size of the 71-foot fishing vessel and was traveling 10 times as fast. Yet both vessels were relying on antiquated rules of navigation pertaining to square-rigged sailing ships first outlined by Great Britain 170 years ago and signed into U.S. law under Abraham Lincoln.\u00a0<\/a>Fascinating; did you hope the series might improve the rules of the sea?<\/span>Well, yes, that would have been wonderful, but I\u2019m not sure I thought it was possible. I was happy to learn that a maritime lawyer who read the series is looking to file suit against the shipping company on behalf of the families of the men who died.<\/span><\/span>

If one ship is overtaking another it is generally the responsibility of the ship coming up from behind to change course, even if the overtaking vessel is much larger and therefore less maneuverable.

\"\"<\/a>The mammoth ships that today transport 90 percent of the world\u2019s traded goods are far less nimble than even the clipper ships of the 19th century. The largest container ship in the world, Denmark\u2019s Emma Maersk, is 1,302 feet long \u2014 52 feet longer than the Empire State Building is tall. The Cap Beatrice is a medium-size container ship, but her rudder alone contains enough steel \u2014 25 tons \u2014 to manufacture 250 automobiles. Just to turn around takes 15 to 20 minutes and more than a mile of sea.\u00a0<\/a>What measures did you play around with in order to convey the contrast between boats? The difference is just unthinkable<\/span>\u00a0I like drawing analogies and comparisons and they\u2019re so important in order for the reader to visualize scale. It\u2019s amazing to stand next to one of these container ships and see how even the anchor chain is gigantic<\/span><\/span>

Because she was traveling at nearly 20 knots the morning of March 24, the Cap Beatrice \u2014 had she come close to or hit the Lady Mary \u2014 would have been a mile past the boat in just three minutes,\u00a0<\/a>This draws those three minutes into such sharp focus and creates an image, whether it happened or not, of a massive boat plowing quickly away<\/span><\/span>\u00a0according to Ron Betancourt, a licensed mariner and maritime lawyer in Red Bank.

A little more than a week after the Lady Mary sank in the Atlantic with four of her crew still missing, a vessel from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration located her. Then, on April 29, the Coast Guard arranged for a small, unmanned submarine to take video of the wreck. The Lady Mary was sitting in 211 feet of water, on the sandy bottom of the ocean, right-side up, leaning slightly to port.\u00a0<\/a>Did you feel the need to give the boat\u2019s condition\/further description here?<\/span>I probably should have mentioned that the visible damage is very localized.<\/span>No,\u00a0I think you handled it exactly right. The temptation would have been to layer on the detail but by delaying the specifics you slow down the mystery.<\/span><\/span>

On April 14, 2009, the Coast Guard opened an official Marine Board of Investigation. The head of the three-member panel was Cmdr. Kyle McAvoy. The board\u2019s role, as McAvoy made pains to clarify on the first day, was not to assess blame, but rather to determine the causes of the casualties. In his opening statement, McAvoy said it was the job of the board to assess \u201cwhether any incompetence, misconduct, lack of skill or willful violation of the law \u2026 caused or contributed to the casualty \u2026 and to make appropriate recommendations in this regard.\u201d

During a recess in the hearings, a group of seven experienced wreck divers, all of them from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, volunteered to visit the Lady Mary. Their mission was to recover any bodies, but also to take detailed video and photos.

On May 12, 2009, in the chilly, early morning darkness, the divers left Cape May and headed east to the Elephant Trunk with navigation maps, air tanks, scuba gear \u2014 and several body bags.

It had been 49 days since the Lady Mary sank, and it took the divers five hours to get out to the site. They descended in teams of two, every 10 minutes. Steve Gatto of Sicklerville videotaped the outside of the wreck. In the ghostly green glow of the diver\u2019s light, the Lady Mary appeared whole, even untouched. With her stern slightly raised, she seemed to hover just above the bottom, as if at any moment she might start her engines and be on her way.\u00a0<\/a>Yow \u2013 did you see the footage? If so, how? It would\u2019ve been part of the investigative record but did you have any trouble getting access to it?<\/span>We worked closely with the professional divers who dived on the LM, gratis, and filmed her. They were staunch supporters of the collision theory and were helpful in explaining a lot about boats, sea conditions, other sinkings, etc.<\/span><\/span>

Gatto was astonished as he slowly swam down and around the bow. Most of the boat was unscarred. Across the hull he could clearly make out the name \u201cLady Mary,\u201d painted in neat, white script outlined in black; the windows of the wheelhouse were all intact; the winches wound and ready to dredge.

What could have happened? Gatto wondered.

Peering into the captain\u2019s bridge, he found the first signs of catastrophe: chairs overturned, cups and dishes scattered, a Bible wedged against the wall. Two satellite phones dangled from their cradles, and in the galley, colorful scallop-buckets floated like party balloons along the ceiling.\u00a0<\/a>Killer detail\/imagery \u2013 how\u2019d you get it? footage?<\/span>Yep, you can see these things in the ghostly video footage<\/span><\/span>

The only sounds were the hiss and bubbling of Gatto\u2019s scuba tank, and every now and then the \u201cwhoop-whoop, weeeee<\/a><\/strong>\u201d of a distant whale.\u00a0<\/a>Again, how\u2019d you get this eerie stuff?<\/span>He had audio attached to the video camera and it actually picked up the sound of the whales.<\/span><\/span>

Sliding down from the wheelhouse to the deck, Gatto panned the camera toward the dredge, full of scallops, lying in a heap in the back left corner of the boat. Fuzzy had painted two big white eyes on the metal net, the better to \u201csee\u201d all those scallops on the seafloor.\u00a0<\/a>Detail about the eyes?<\/span>It was one of the things Fuzzy told us in the course of our many interviews. And in a couple of the photos you can actually just make them out.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong>When he swam out and around the corner of the rusty hull, Gatto was taken aback. The Lady Mary\u2019s stern was severely damaged, but locally, on the port side, and just below the waterline.

A ramp off the stern, once used to help haul up the dredge, was ripped and pushed down on the left, and nearly to the transom, the back wall of the boat. One of the thick struts connecting the ramp to the transom was buckled into an \u201cS\u201d shape and had punched through the transom into the stern storage compartment, called the lazarette.

The 6-foot-long rudder was sheared off at the weld and lay flat on the sand, connected only by a safety chain, and the 5-inch-thick, solid steel propeller shaft was bent straight down.

Gatto and the other divers had seen hundreds of wrecks up close, helped raise a couple of them and even recovered the bodies of fishermen from sunken vessels, but none of them had ever seen this kind of destruction.

\u201cIt was unreal,\u201d said Harold Moyers, owner of the dive boat Big Mac, \u201cincredibly extensive.\u201d\u00a0Tom Packer, another volunteer, swam into one of the bunk rooms, lifted the mattresses, then\u00a0picked through the scattered clothes and other debris. No bodies.

Joe Mazranni, a defense attorney from North Brunswick, was given the job of checking the cut room, where the scallops are removed from their shells. The cut room is accessed from the deck, and when Mazranni swam inside through the double doors he found a survival suit, out of its bag and partly unrolled. It was obvious someone had run out of time and been unable to get into the suit.

Mazranni then squeezed through a small opening and swam down 10 to 12 feet into the fish-hold below the deck. In the darkness all he could see was the small circle of space his flashlight illuminated \u2014 just bits and pieces of the room, really \u2014 so it was hard to get a sense of the space. He wondered if he was in the engine room by mistake. Then his light picked up a pile of boards. It was the fish-hold, all right. The boards were the removable slats of the storage bins.

Moving a couple of feet at a time, Mazranni next shone his light on what he thought was another survival suit \u2014 until he saw a pair of feet and legs. It was one of the missing fishermen and he was buried under the boards. All Mazranni could see of him was from the waist down.\u00a0<\/a>This whole Mazranni passage is just like the rescue passage: almost without air (in a good way), it\u2019s so tight and contained; you wasted nothing; there\u2019s no flab, nothing to distract. How many drafts of this series did you do, by the way,\u00a0and do you like revising?<\/span>Hard to tell how many drafts. Some parts were more seamless than others. The last two sections, including this, were the most difficult, but mostly in terms of how to stitch everything together. As for revising, I love it. I like to tell people that I\u2019m a pretty good writer, but I\u2019m a fabulous re-writer. I take instruction very well. My editor is also a published poet and so he helps to really fine-tune\u00a0things \u2013 he\u2019ll say \u201cyou need another beat here,\u201d and I know exactly what he means.<\/span>I love your editor.<\/span><\/span>

The diver was almost out of oxygen and had to surface. When he came down the second time, however, Mazranni had trouble seeing through the silt he\u2019d stirred up earlier. Like a blind person, he used his one free hand to feel for whatever was directly in front of him.

Suddenly his glove touched something soft. He instinctively recoiled.\u00a0It was a man\u2019s head.\u00a0<\/a>Curious why you added this sentence. Did you toy with the idea of cutting it and letting us \u201csee\u201d the revelation as Mazranni did? As I understand it he didn\u2019t know he\u2019d touched a head until he shined his light on it, or am I misreading this?<\/span>In retrospect, I think you\u2019re right. I shouldn\u2019t have \u201ctold\u201d it, especially since I \u201cshow\u201d it in the next sentence. Nice catch.<\/span>Yeah, well, easy to do when there\u2019s no ticking clock<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Mazranni pushed back a bit and shone his light where his hand had just been \u2014 into the lifeless, wide-open eyes of a middle-aged man. Mazranni was relieved to find the flesh of the man\u2019s face relatively intact. Usually fish eat the softest tissue first, the eyes and lips, but the man\u2019s head, with its neatly trimmed white goatee, appeared remarkably unscathed.

 

\u2018IT HAPPENS TOO OFTEN\u2019<\/strong>

The Coast Guard keeps many records detailing accidents and deaths at sea, but none specifically related to collisions between fishing boats and deep-draft vessels. Two years ago, when the Coast Guard issued a report on fishing vessel casualties between 1992 and 2007, it cited only four fatalities from all types of collisions, including passenger vessels, cruise ships and sailboats, during that 16-year period.

However, an analysis of 2,548 Coast Guard incident reports, all of them closed cases, in its Maritime Information Exchange, revealed that in just one six-year period between 2002 and 2007 there were at least 70 collisions between U.S. fishing boats and large commercial ships, and six deaths.\u00a0<\/a>Okay,\u00a0take me through the incident-report analysis \u2013 did you have to FOIA them? how did the information come to you \u2013\u00a0as spreadsheets or data bits or in hard-copy form, and how did you begin to process the information? As someone with a fondness for documents I\u2019d have found this among the most fascinating work and not at all tedious. What about u? would you rather be out talking to people or digging through files,\u00a0or both?<\/span>I truly love both. All the accident reports \u2013 or at least reports from completed investigations \u2013 can be found online at the Coast Guard\u2019s website. The problem is they are not categorized by accident type or fatalities, just chronologically listed according to when they happened. So I had to comb through them, something which I found fascinating to do, but which others might consider tedious.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cShips are so large and have so much mass behind them, it\u2019s like a bull swatting a fly,\u201d said Jim Kendall, a longtime fisherman and now executive director of New Bedford Seafood Consulting in Massachusetts. \u201cIt happens too often, way too often.\u201d

In the 20 months since the sinking of the Lady Mary, at least two commercial fishing vessels off the mid-Atlantic Coast have been hit by large merchant ships: On April 14, 2009, in heavy rain and fog, the 85-foot scalloper Dictator was hit by the 965-foot container Florida, 21 days after the Lady Mary went down and in the same fishing ground. On July 30 of this year the 72-foot Atlantic Queen, fishing 11 miles off Long Island, was hit by the 625-foot cargo ship Baldor, which sheered off 15 feet of the Atlantic Queen\u2019s bow.

No one was seriously injured in either incident.

Precise numbers on collisions are hard to come by because many fishing vessels are lost at sea with no survivors and no witnesses \u2014 just questions. Although at least six fishermen were killed in collisions with cargo ships between 2002 and 2007, another 39 died when 18 fishing boats sank, apparently with little warning, and all hands were lost.

\u201cA lot of times a vessel goes missing and no one knows the cause,\u201d Kendall said. \u201cWhen you have something that large coming down on you, they can ride right up over you and possibly they don\u2019t even know it.\u201d\u00a0<\/a>In\u00a0The Wave<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0Susan Casey<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0makes a case for linking rogue waves to missing ships at sea. Did that scenario come up in any of your reporting? Just curious<\/span>Yes, I asked it of several experts, all of whom said it was extremely unlikely, especially since no other boats in the area experienced or reported one. Even the Coast Guard investigators agreed.<\/span><\/span>

When collisions do occur between large merchant ships and much smaller fishing vessels, the boats can sink quickly, according to Arn Heggers, former fishing vessel safety coordinator for Maine and New Hampshire and now a civil servant with the Coast Guard, specializing in emergency preparedness. When he instructs commercial fishermen about what to do in collisions, he warns them they will likely have no more than a few minutes to get into a survival suit or life raft, and in the case of a collision with a large merchant ship, \u201cprobably a lot less.\u201d

\u201cWhen a larger vessel collides with a smaller one,\u201d Heggers said, \u201cit pushes the smaller boat right under the water. Imagine you are driving on a highway \u2014 a large tanker would go right over the top of you.\u201d

When scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied ship-transit risks more than a decade ago, they found three times as many collisions occurred in darkness as in daytime and the highest percentage \u2014 one-third \u2014 occurred between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m.\u00a0<\/a>I appreciate that you let this fact hang in the air \u2013 it speaks for itself<\/span><\/span>

BACK TO LAND<\/strong>

With the help of his fellow divers, Joe Mazranni removed the debris from around the body in the Lady Mary\u2019s fish-hold. The dead man was dressed in sweatpants, a tight-fitting thermal sweater and socks, but no shoes. Mazranni had seen the photographs of the men still missing and believed he\u2019d found Fuzzy\u2019s brother, Bernie. Using ropes, the divers pulled the body from the wreck and, while still underwater, placed it in a body bag, then lifted it to the surface.\u00a0<\/a>Incredible scene; diver interviews?<\/span>Yep.<\/span><\/span>

The four-hour ride back to Cape May was quiet. An overcast day turned sunny in the late afternoon, but at night it was a chilly trip in to port. Some of the men ate, others slept. In addition to recovering a body, the divers had taken extensive video and hundreds of photographs and along with written assessments of the damage they observed, turned it all over to the Coast Guard.\u00a0<\/a>Did you have access to all of this?<\/span>Yes, although not through the Coast Guard, but rather the divers who made copies of the reports they made<\/span><\/span>

\u201cEveryone\u2019s reaction was the same,\u201d Moyers said of the other divers. \u201cThat boat got hit.\u201d\u00a0Twenty miles from Cape May, the divers radioed the Coast Guard about the body they\u2019d recovered and arranged to meet officials at the dock.

There was just one more call to make. Five miles from shore, Mazranni took out his cell phone and dialed Fuzzy.

\u201cI think we got Bernie.\u201d\u00a0<\/a>This is just really, really skillful narrative \u2013 at so many moments you could have rushed the revelations but you draw out the drama without smacking us in the face with it.<\/span>As soon as Mazranni told me what he said, I knew that\u2019s where I wanted to end this chapter of the story.<\/span><\/span>

CHAPTER 5<\/strong>

A Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation into the sinking of the Lady Mary convened in April 2009. Several weeks of hearings were held over the next eight months, with testimony from Jos\u00e9 Arias, the only survivor of a seven-man crew; Fuzzy Smith, the co-owner of the boat; and at least a dozen other witnesses, including Lake Downham, the Coast Guard rescue swimmer who pulled Arias from the water.

More than a year and a half after the accident, the marine board has yet to release its report, although Cmdr. Kyle McAvoy, the chairman of the three-member investigative panel, says it is largely written.

\u201cWe\u2019ve worked very hard to address all the possibilities,\u201d he said. \u201cIt comes down to a few things: a weather event, some sort of event on the surface with another vessel, or a mechanical problem during the night that led to a slowly evolving problem.\u201d\u2028As late as September, McAvoy said the agency was leaning away from the idea that the Lady Mary was the victim of a high-seas hit and run. Instead, the agency was considering the theory that the boat was swamped and the damage to her stern was the result of its impact with the sea floor. <\/a>This seemed likely all along; what do you\u00a0think?<\/span>It made sense to me early on, but as time went on and we spoke to more and more experts, I felt it was the easy explanation, but probably not the right one.<\/span><\/span> He has declined any comment since.

Two sources close to the investigation said the Coast Guard\u2019s final report may suggest several possible scenarios. These sources detailed the Coast Guard\u2019s thinking to The Star-Ledger on the condition they not be named because they are not authorized to speak about the investigation.

The scenarios being explored, according to the two sources, include some combination of human, mechanical and meteorological causes based on last year\u2019s hearing and the Coast Guard\u2019s own investigation. Among the factors:

\u2022 The Lady Mary was an old boat, converted between 2001 and 2003 from a shrimper to a scalloper, and was never tested for stability because it was not required by federal law.

\u2022 The wind was blowing hard and the waves were 6 to 9 feet the night of March 23 into the early hours of March 24, making conditions difficult for the Lady Mary.

\u2022 A hatch on the back deck to the lazarette, a storage area, was always left open, which made the boat vulnerable to swamping in bad weather.

\u2022 Blood tests on the bodies of Bobo and Tim Smith revealed marijuana in both men\u2019s blood, possibly impairing their ability to respond to an emergency. (A forensic toxicologist testified at the hearings he was unable to determine when the marijuana was smoked or how much was ingested.) <\/a>What kinds of conversations did you have with the families about the weed\u00a0\u2013 were they open to discussing how\/whether smoking might\u2019ve played a role?<\/span>Not really. Both families essentially dismissed it, either by saying they only did it to relax or they didn\u2019t do it very much, that kind of thing. It was clear from the toxicology report that they\u2019d smoked at least two hours before their deaths, and so any effects would have been blunted by that time lag.<\/span><\/span>

Some of the possible scenarios would seem to run counter to evidence presented at the Coast Guard\u2019s hearings. Coast Guard reservist Aldo Guerino testified the Lady Mary\u2019s safety equipment was up to code, had passed a voluntary inspection less than a year before she sank, and was well maintained.

Michael Duvall, a former captain on the Lady Mary, also testified \u201cthe boat handled great,\u201d even in severe weather.

\u201cI could lay her in a trough, 15-16 foot trough \u2026 with my coffee cup sitting right on the dash and never spill the coffee,\u201d Duvall said. <\/a>My favorite quote of the whole series<\/span><\/span>\u00a0\u201cShe was a good sea boat. (An) excellent sea boat.\u201d \u2028About one thing there is general agreement among all the experts: The mystery of what sank the Lady Mary lies with a crushed ramp, a broken rudder and a bent propeller. What force could have mangled all that steel? Everyone acknowledges there are only two possibilities: She was either damaged on the surface in a collision, or she was damaged 211 feet down when she hit the sea floor. <\/a>Now I\u2019m torn \u2013 could hitting the ocean floor really cause that much damage? If this smaller craft got run over by a CONTAINER SHIP wouldn\u2019t it have absolutely destroyed the boat, not just crushed the ramp, etc.?<\/span>This seems reasonable, and did to us at first, except that in all likelihood\u00a0this was a glancing blow, with the bulbous bow of the Cap B. essentially picking up the LM briefly before she slid off. Plus, all you have to do is read one of the reports or stories about a fishing boat that survived a hit with a container ship and realize there are very varying levels of damage that can be sustained depending on how and where and under what conditions a collision occurs. For instance, I mention somewhere about a fishing boat hit just a few months before we published, and all the container ship did was sheer off part of her bow. The fishing boat made it back to port otherwise safe and sound.<\/span><\/span>

For seven months The Star-Ledger investigated the wreck of the Lady Mary, examining internal Coast Guard documents and 800 pages of testimony from the Coast Guard hearings, observing fishermen at work on a scalloper similar to the Lady Mary and in similar wind and wave conditions as on the night she sank, and testing the buoyancy of survival suits in cold sea water, especially when they are not worn properly. More than 100 interviews were conducted with some of the country\u2019s foremost naval architects, marine engineers, wreck divers, maritime forensics specialists, fishermen present in the Elephant Trunk when the Lady Mary was lost, mechanics who worked on her engine on land, as well as Coast Guard officials and those involved in the rescue of Jos\u00e9 Arias.

The Star-Ledger asked more than a dozen maritime experts \u2014 among them a fishing boat stability expert, a hydrodynamicist who studies how ships sink, a rudder designer, and one of the few marine forensics specialists to inspect pieces of the Titanic \u2014 to examine videos, photos and Coast Guard investigation documents. None of these experts concurred with the theory that the Lady Mary\u2019s stern was bent and crushed by the impact with the sea floor. Only representatives from one company believe this scenario. <\/a>It would\u2019ve been easy to get utterly obsessed with this story, and it sounds like you did. How did the obsession manifest itself at work and in your everyday life? Seriously, I wanna know.<\/span>I was big-time obsessed. It was all I could think, talk, even dream about. I must have read the transcripts from the Coast Guard hearings \u2013 about 1,000 pages \u2013 at least 10 times, looking for clues or things that might have been missed, or inconsistencies. In fact, it was during one of my readings that I stopped at the statement from Jose about where the dredge was on the deck at the time the boat went down and realized he wouldn\u2019t have been able to see it because the boat was already tipped hard to port and so the net of the dredge would have been underwater. It wasn\u2019t significant, but it\u2019s an instance of how I couldn\u2019t stop thinking about the Lady Mary. The Coast Guard transcripts became my bedtime reading.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cIt\u2019s garbage for anyone to think the bottom caused all that destruction,\u201d said George Edwards, a naval engineer at CSC Advanced Marine Center in Washington, D.C. \u201cIt\u2019s just not possible.\u201d

The preponderance of opinion, and much of the evidence found by the newspaper, point to a collision with another, much larger vessel \u2014 something powerful enough to bend and rip thousands of pounds of steel and send the Lady Mary to the bottom of the sea before she could even shoot off a flare. Navigation records from that night show there was only one such merchant ship in the area at the time \u2014 the 728-foot-long container ship Cap Beatrice. <\/a>It\u2019s a testament to the strength of the narrative that I, the reader, have gone back and forth over what might\u2019ve happened; yet here you seem to leave no room for doubt about what happened \u2013\u00a0<\/span>how much did you waver, or did you never waver?<\/span>We wavered early on and made a conscious effort to really, really stay objective, but by the end, Andre and I were both convinced the Lady Mary was hit.<\/span><\/span>

AN EXPERT\u2019S OPINION<\/strong>

<\/a>We now have almost parallel narratives \u2013\u00a0the first was the story of that night and those lives, and now we have the story of an investigation, yet the fishermen are still there in our minds<\/span><\/span> William Garzke is a pioneer in the field of shipwrecks. A long-standing member of the Society for Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, Garzke is also founder and chairman of SNAME\u2019s renowned marine forensics committee, which devotes its time to the scientific investigation of sunken ships. He has consulted on a number of Coast Guard investigations and is probably most well-known for his work analyzing pieces of the Titanic, after which he concluded a flaw in the design of the hull\u2019s joints likely doomed the \u201cunsinkable\u201d ship.

When Garzke and the 14 other members of the forensics committee, at The Star-Ledger\u2019s request, examined the video and photographic evidence of the Lady Mary and analyzed Coast Guard documents and navigational records, they all agreed about the damage to the fishing vessel. <\/a>Was it difficult, getting these guys to participate in this project? How willing were they? Were you there for their examination of the photos and their deliberations?<\/span>They were reluctant at first, but I think because they were involved in maritime accident analysis they couldn\u2019t stop themselves. Yes, I was in Washington, D.C.,and met with them to show them the photos and the video.<\/span><\/span>

\u201cIt\u2019s hard for me to believe it was just the sand that caused it,\u201d Garzke said. \u201c(It) was a collision with another object. That\u2019s the likeliest possibility.\u201d

Alexander Schulte, the head of Reederei Thomas Schulte in Hamburg, Germany, which owns the Cap Beatrice, has repeatedly declined to comment on the Lady Mary tragedy despite numerous calls and e-mails.

Oliver Kautz, the quality manager for OCEAN Shipmanagment, owned by Reederei Thomas Schulte, initially spoke about the incident, but later said he was told by his superiors to say no more. Kautz oversees the parent company\u2019s fleet. In earlier conversations and e-mails he said the company had conducted an \u201cintensive internal investigation\u201d in which it assisted the Coast Guard, but \u201cunfortunately both investigations have not brought the case forward.\u201d

The dockside manager in Philadelphia for Hamburg Sud, the company that leases the Cap Beatrice, allowed The Star-Ledger to board the ship in April when she was in port and sailing under a new captain, but refused a second request in July when the Cap Beatrice returned once again under the command of Capt. Vasyl Stenderchuk, who was in charge the night the Lady Mary sank. Several e-mails sent to Stenderchuk\u2019s Linkedin.com profile also have gone unanswered.\u2028<\/a>How else did you try reaching him? What were you able to learn about him as a person and as a pilot, and did you leave that material out of the story for a reason?<\/span>As I note somewhere else, I found a phone number in the Ukraine for Stenderchuk and tried to reach him there but was told he no longer lived there. Not sure if that person was telling the truth or not. The language barrier was considerable. I had a photo of him, from a maritime database, but no other information, except that he had an interest in photography.<\/span><\/span> As noted, not all the experts consulted by The Star-Ledger agreed with the collision theory. The professionals in the marine division of Robson Forensic in Lancaster, Pa., which provides investigative and consulting services to lawyers, <\/a>Did RF have an official role in this case? Anything at stake for them?<\/span>They had no offical role and there was nothing at stake, except that one of the members of the team was a former NTSB official, and so might have felt some loyalty to the department, although she claimed she was independent. As it turns out we had quite a debate as to how \u2013 and how much \u2013 to include from Robson. I found them after searching online but we realized later that none of them had nearly the background the D.C. group had in terms of expertise in the mechanics and physics of maritime accidents. And when I asked follow-up questions about specific aspects of their theory, they were less than convincing. But we contacted them, so we could hardly leave them out of the story<\/span><\/span> concluded the Lady Mary was swamped \u2014 perhaps by a bow wake from a passing container ship \u2014 and that all her stern damage was the result of hitting the sea floor.<\/span>

\u201cIf she develops even a slight port list, which is what we believe happened,\u201d said Bart Eckhardt, president of Robson Forensic, \u201cthen the Lady Mary could not shed water. When this happens, and there\u2019s wave action, the water becomes trapped between the bulwark and the house. \u2026 The situation becomes catastrophic.\u201d \u2028Eckhardt and his three-member team believe the Lady Mary sank, stern first, at a speed of 4 to 7 meters per second, basing their conclusions on the Coast Guard\u2019s assessment of the Lady Mary\u2019s terminal velocity \u2014 the speed she was traveling when she hit bottom. A copy of the assessment was obtained by The Star-Ledger and provided to various experts. Robson says that if the boat did have a port list and was traveling at the speed estimated by the Coast Guard she would have hit the sea floor at a 49 degree angle \u2014 which they believe accounts for the damage to the stern.

However, SNAME\u2019s marine forensics committee, which viewed those same Coast Guard calculations, believes they are flawed.\u2028\u201d(They) are very off-the-cuff and can\u2019t stand up to rigorous examination because there are too many vaguely qualified assumptions,\u201d said Sean Avery, a hydrodynamicist who models the various ways ships sink. \u201cIf you simulated the free fall through the water column 10 times, you would get 10 different answers. \u2026 This is tricky to do right.\u201d

The experts who point to a collision say the following points support their conclusion:

\u2022 The severity and direction of the damage, which suggests a sudden and powerful impact from a very large moving object.

\u2022 The rudder stock, which appears to have been sheared off in a collision as opposed to breaking due to corrosion and metal fatigue.

\u2022 The severely contorted propeller stock, which is bent down, as if from contact with a much heavier object, as opposed to up, which would be expected with a bottom hit.

\u2022 The marks on the propeller blades, which indicate they were still turning when the propeller was pushed against the rudder. That scoring could only have happened on the surface, when the Lady Mary\u2019s engine was still engaged, say proponents of the collision theory. When she finally sank she lost all power, which means the propeller was no longer turning when the Lady Mary hit the sea floor.

\u2022 The way the port side of the transom is bowed-in, indicating an impact from a rounded object, such as a container ship\u2019s bulbous bow.\u2028One of the Coast Guard assumptions in the terminal velocity calculations, according to members of the forensics committee, is that the rudder buckled when the boat hit the bottom.

\u201cI don\u2019t agree with that,\u201d said George Edwards, a committee member and naval engineer at CSC Advanced Marine. \u201cThat would only apply if the boat went down on a fairly even keel,\u201d that is, if it sank right-side up, such that the end of the rudder hit first and the rudder was vertical.

The problem with this scenario, he said, is that \u201csinking on an even keel also results in the lowest possible terminal velocity.\u201d\u2028In other words, the slower the sinking, the softer the landing; the softer the landing, the less damage.

Instead, said the forensics committee, to even consider the possibility the Lady Mary crumpled when she hit the sea floor, she would have to sink stern first at a nearly vertical angle.\u2028Like the other divers, Steve Gatto, who was in the first group to dive on the wreck of the Lady Mary, believes the vertical-hit scenario is improbable because of the pristine condition of the gallows, a large rectangular frame that supports the dredge. It rises high over the deck and is angled over the stern\u2019s ramp.

\u201cIf the Lady Mary sank nearly vertically, the gallows would have hit the bottom first,\u201d he said. \u201cYet we inspected it carefully and it had no damage whatsoever, not even a scratch.\u201d <\/a>I mean I\u2019ve got nothing here. Maybe not definitive but all clearly laid out. Any insights about this particular bit of summary reporting\/writing? Were there differing opinions within the newsroom about what happened to the LM?<\/span>There were no real differences of opinion, just reminders to stay open to all the possibilities. We went over and over and over again all the scenarios, wrote down the pros and cons, and every time the collision theory came out on top.<\/span><\/span>

Gatto has nearly 30 years experience diving on wrecks. He has helped raise sunken fishing boats and assisted in the recovery of bodies. If the Lady Mary struck the bottom either vertically or at a 49 degree angle as Robson suggests, he says, the propeller stock would have bent upward, not downward, as the dive photos and video show.

\u201cWith that angle and force, I\u2019d expect to see the (propeller) blades bent back, too, maybe even broken, but they\u2019re not,\u201d he said. \u201cThe blow came from behind and pushed the boat down.\u201d

Robson said it used the Coast Guard\u2019s calculations to do a complete reconstruction, and it stands by its analysis, including the 49 degree angle of impact. The SNAME forensics committee counters that a reconstruction entails far too many variables to be accurate and that the only thing that explains the damage done to the Lady Mary is a surface collision.

Another issue, says SNAME\u2019s Avery, is the rudder. If it was damaged when the boat hit the sand, its \u201cshoe,\u201d the bracket underneath the rudder that holds it in place, should still be there, he says.

The divers, however, never found it.\u2028The only plausible explanation for the shoe not being in the vicinity of the boat, says SNAME\u2019s marine forensics committee, is that it was knocked loose by impact on the surface.

\u201cI\u2019ve designed rudders for boats that size,\u201d Edwards said. \u201cI\u2019ve done the calculations for that type of rudder. What\u2019s left, where the rudder shoe came off, is consistent with it being hit from above and forced down.\u201d

The conditions out in the Elephant Trunk on the morning of March 24, 2009, were rough, but not excessive as far as commercial fishermen are concerned. According to the nearest offshore buoy, seas were 6 to 9 feet and the winds 25 to 30 mph, from the north by northwest.

What has puzzled many of those involved in the case was how quickly the Lady Mary appeared to sink. In the debris field there were unused survival suits, emergency flares and hand-held distress signals, and no one in the empty life raft.

For this reason, many experts find it hard to believe the Lady Mary simply foundered and sank. A boat without power, even in rough seas they say, does not go down in a matter of minutes.

\u201dYou can be dead in the water, it still takes time to sink,\u201d said Bruce Belousofsky, a retired Coast Guard commander, former vessel safety inspector and president of Blancke Marine Services, a naval architecture and engineering firm in Woodbury. \u201cFlooding in those conditions is a process, and there are high-water alarms. It\u2019s hard to be taken by surprise.\u201d

When he heard the Lady Mary went down, he thought it was unusual.

\u201cIt had to be something very, very dramatic to sink that vessel without giving those guys much time to get out.\u201d

A CRUCIAL CLUE<\/strong>

If there is a smoking gun in the sinking of the Lady Mary, divers Gatto and Harold Moyers believe they found it.

When they filmed the wreck underwater, each diver said he noticed that the stay wires on the stern ramp, which run from the top of the gallows to the lowest corners of the ramp, were broken at the welds. The port stay wire, encased in a steel sleeve, was tied back with rope, albeit haphazardly, to a cleat on the stern.

Gatto and Moyers believe that in rough seas, after a collision, and with the boat essentially dead in the water, the heavy cable would have been swinging around the deck \u201clike a club.\u201d They theorize a crew member, perhaps Frankie Credle, <\/a>Why him?<\/span>Because we know basically where nearly everyone else was, and because we know Credle was the one yelling something from that area of the boat when Jose was ascending the ladder to the wheelhouse.<\/span><\/span> quickly tied it out of the way.

The broken stay wires, which would have been mended if they had both suddenly broken on their own earlier in the trip, are the key for Gatto.\u2028\u201dYou can\u2019t tie back a stay wire on the bottom of the ocean,\u201d he said. \u201cSomething happened before it sank.\u201d

Gatto, Moyers, Belousofsky and the SNAME marine forensics committee all believe the Lady Mary was moving \u2014 or trying to move \u2014 hard to port when she went down, perhaps trying to get out of the way of an approaching ship. Photos of the interior of the Lady Mary\u2019s wheelhouse and control panel, specifically the open throttle and the rudder gauge, said Belousofsky, appear to confirm the boat was turning when she foundered. The slashes in the rudder also seem to confirm this, he and the others say, because the prop had to be turning to gash the rudder in this way.

In a collision, with the boat trying to take evasive action, the rudder could have been pushed up against the propeller by the larger ship\u2019s rounded bulbous bow, according to these experts, at which point it would bend the propeller shaft downward and in the process stove in the transom.

In seas of 6 to 9 feet, say Gatto, Moyers, Belousofsky and the others, a collision with a ship 10 times the size of the Lady Mary could have pushed her stern down so far that her decks were awash in a matter of seconds.

A TWO-MONTH WAIT<\/strong>

In the course of its own investigation, The Star-Ledger also found possible problems with the Coast Guard inquiry.

It was not until Memorial Day 2009 \u2014 two months after the Lady Mary sank \u2014 that the Coast Guard finally contacted the Cap Beatrice on her way back in to the Port of Philadelphia. The ship anchored at the southern end of Delaware Bay where Coast Guard officials interviewed the crew, and scuba divers from the New Jersey State Police entered the choppy seas to examine the ship\u2019s bulbous bow.

Coast Guard officials offered no explanation <\/a>In general or to the newspaper? What reason, if any, did they give you guys?<\/span>To me, and they gave no reason except that was the earliest they could.<\/span><\/span> as to why they waited to inspect the Cap Beatrice when she returned to Philadelphia, but 48 hours after the crew was interviewed, the Coast Guard released a statement announcing no evidence of a collision had been uncovered.

A number of people, including Belousofsky and Garzke, are critical of the Coast Guard\u2019s investigation.

In June 2009, Gatto invited Cmdr. McAvoy to a meeting of the SNAME forensic committee in Washington, D.C., which McAvoy accepted. The committee made a number of recommendations, including the necessity of raising the rudder, and also provided McAvoy with a copy of its guide to marine investigations, because, Garzke said, McAvoy seemed \u201cmystified about forensic techniques.\u201d <\/a>Did anyone want to raise the boat, or was that too expensive, too much trouble, and would it even have proven anything?<\/span>It\u2019s very, very expensive. Fuzzy had no insurance and it would have been his money used to bring it up. It certainly could help in terms of being able to look inside, especially, in the wheelhouse and inside the lazarette and to be able to inspect the pumps.<\/span><\/span>

McAvoy says he has spent his entire 20-year Coast Guard career in the field of marine safety, specializing in inspections and marine casualty investigations. He also has two master\u2019s degrees in the field of marine engineering from the University of Michigan.

Much of his experience, he says, has been with large commercial ships, freighters, tankers and passenger vessels. Now based in Washington, D.C., at the Coast Guard\u2019s Office of Traveling Inspections and National Centers of Expertise, McAvoy says he has taken part in 20 to 24 casualty investigations over the past two decades \u2014 none involving sunken fishing vessels.

The requirements to become a Coast Guard marine investigator include a three-week course in Yorktown, Va. A number of performance qualification standards must also be met, such as \u201cinitiating an investigation\u201d and \u201cgenerating a timeline.\u201d <\/a>Speaking of timelines, did you use one to help with the reporting?<\/span>Oh, yes. I had an extremely detailed timeline that included not only what was happening on the LM, but what was happening on shore, with the satellites overhead, with other boats in the area, etc.<\/span><\/span>

A 2008 audit of marine casualty investigations by the Office of the Inspector General found 68 percent of the casualty investigators the panel interviewed and tested were \u201csubstandard.\u201d <\/a>Good detail; sourcing?<\/span>This was from an official, and publicly accessible report<\/span><\/span>\u00a0McAvoy was interviewed five times by The Star-Ledger. He discussed the process \u2014 and progress \u2014 of the investigation of the Lady Mary, as well as his background, but would not speak about the specifics of the case. When McAvoy was contacted last week, Lisa Novak from Coast Guard public affairs in Washington, D.C., spoke for him. \u201cWe are not giving any interviews until the investigation is over,\u201d she said, but could not predict when that would be. <\/a>Interested to know the CG\u2019s reaction to the series as\/after it ran<\/span>When I called McAvoy to see if he wanted to comment \u2013 he did not, and was clearly told by superiors to no longer do so \u2013 he said it was \u201cimpressive.\u201d<\/span><\/span>

The Star-Ledger also uncovered evidence of problems during the search and rescue mission.\u2028Testimony at the hearing suggests the Coast Guard might have been hampered by the fact the helicopter crew was unfamiliar with the use of its new 406 EPIRB direction finder when trying to locate possible survivors. Instead, the crew had to rely on an older device with less range, potentially delaying the first sighting of the life raft.

After then locating Jos\u00e9 Arias in the water, the helicopter was too low to radio back to land information about how many fishermen were still missing. That meant another delay before the officers at Sector Delaware Bay could send an urgent marine broadcast.

Finally, when a Coast Guard communications officer in Philadelphia eventually did radio all the mariners in the vicinity of the sinking, the officer failed to use the frequency most likely to reach them \u2014 a mistake he acknowledged in a Coast Guard report. <\/a>How did this series change regulations and CG training procedures, if at all? The story makes it clear that they have some work to do<\/span>Sadly, none at all, as far as I know.<\/span><\/span>

In addition to the Coast Guard, the National Transportation Safety Board, which assisted in the investigation, has declined further comment until their official reports are made public.

A BODY IN THE NET<\/strong>

When the phone rang inside Coast Guard headquarters in Cape May at 10:35 a.m., Wednesday, May 20, 2009, it was Richard Gibbs, captain of the scalloper John & Nicholas, on the line. He had a grim message. Under a tarp on the back of his boat lay a body.

The John & Nicholas had been fishing in the Elephant Trunk, a few miles from where the Lady Mary sank. When they lifted the dredge after a run they found tangled in the net, among the fish and shells, the partially decomposed body of an African-American male.\u2028Gibbs was pretty sure he knew who it was: Frankie Credle.

At age 56, Credle had been fishing for more than 40 years. The 13th of 14 children from Mesic, N.C., he was Fuzzy\u2019s cousin and the two grew up just a couple miles from one another. When he was in his 20s, Frankie helped Elwood Jennett build the Sea Pal, a 50-foot fishing boat, behind the Mesic service station. <\/a>Great detail, that little extra something<\/span><\/span>\u00a0One day when they were out shrimping in Pamlico Sound in rough weather, the Sea Pal capsized. Credle saved Jennett\u2019s life by helping him swim out from under the boat, and if Frankie hadn\u2019t been such a strong swimmer, both would have died.

With the confirmation the body in the net was Frankie Credle, <\/a>How\u2019d they get confirmation? Just curious<\/span>Dental records, I believe<\/span><\/span> two men from the Lady Mary remain missing: Frank Reyes, so panicked he could not get into an immersion suit before the boat went under, and Jorge Ramos, the youngest fisherman, whom Arias never saw in those last, desperate minutes before the Lady Mary disappeared into the black Atlantic.

In July, however, the John & Nicholas, the same boat that scooped up Frankie Credle\u2019s body from the chilly depths, plucked Reyes\u2019 driver\u2019s license from the sea. <\/a>How\u2019d they spot a driver\u2019s license? Or did it get trapped in their nets?<\/span>Found in the net<\/span><\/span>

The men of the Lady Mary were not the only New Jersey fishermen who died last year. On Nov. 11, 2009, just days after the Coast Guard announced it was stepping up inspections of safety equipment aboard commercial fishing vessels, the 44-foot scalloper Sea Tractor sank in a storm off Cape May. Three men, including a father and son, were lost.

Six weeks later, the 38-foot Alisha Marie went down with two of its three crew. When 2009 finally came to a close, 11 commercial fishermen had lost their lives in the waters off New Jersey. Within months, changes in safety practices in the fishing industry were being considered.

This past March, the NTSB issued a recommendation to the Federal Communications Commission regarding EPIRBs. Although the Lady Mary\u2019s device was incorrectly registered, it also lacked a $100 GPS transmitter, which could have been attached to the EPIRB and would have identified the location of the boat, if not its identity. Currently, the GPS transmitter is not required, but the NTSB cited the Lady Mary as a reason why the law should be changed.

\u201cIf a rescue helicopter could have been launched after the first EPIRB signal was received,\u201d the NTSB\u2019s letter reads, \u201c(it) is possible that the two victims found in the water wearing immersion suits would have still been alive when the rescuers arrived.\u201d <\/a>The letter was a matter of public record and\/or part of a public statement? You developed various confidential sources for this series \u2013 how did you manage it, and what challenges did you run into?<\/span>Yes, the letter was public record. As for confidential sources, we had one very, very close to the Coast Guard investigation and it was difficult because he was a believer in the C.G. theory of a swamping.<\/span><\/span>

NOAA also has instructed its contractors when recording EPIRB registration forms to now read the printed code on the manufacturer\u2019s label \u2014 if it is provided \u2014 not just the handwritten code copied onto the form by the owner of the vessel. <\/a>Did you ever talk to the clerk who miscopied the code? How did you decide not to name this person and\/or get into the personal consequences of the clerical mistake? This person must\u2019ve felt partly responsible for the deaths, no?<\/span>NOAA would not release the name. In fact, because it was a contractor, the agency said it wasn\u2019t sure it even had a name.<\/span><\/span>

Recently, a bill mandating safety inspections of all commercial fishing boats, and safety training for all vessel operators, passed both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. Last month, President Obama signed the legislation and it became law. <\/a>I like that you didn\u2019t get into penalties; why didn\u2019t you?<\/span>I just think it would have taken us too far afield, since there was a lot of explanatory information in this part already.<\/span><\/span>

COPING<\/strong>

In the meantime, many of the families of the men who died continue to struggle with their grief. The day before the Smith brothers were buried in North Carolina, Stacy Greene, Bobo\u2019s longtime girlfriend, answered a call from Adele\u2019s Jeweled Treasures in Cape May. The consignment shop wanted her to know it was the last day to reclaim Bobo\u2019s gold chain. Stacy raced down and paid the bill.

Ten-year-old Jonathan, one of Stacy and Bobo\u2019s sons, believes he\u2019s seen his father.

\u201cI was walking around the yard and I looked up above the house and saw my Dad. His arms were spread out and he flew down and hugged me.\u201d\u2028<\/a>In\u00a0another installment of Annotation Tuesday! \u2013\u00a0<\/span>\u201dThe Falling Man,” by Tom Junod \u2013\u00a0the child of a dead man also claimed to have seen her father; what do you make of it?<\/span>I have to say this was one of those times when it was hardest not to cry. In fact, I had to keep wiping my eyes. This boy had the most angelic face and spoke with such a quiet, intelligent power for a boy his age. He was very, very earnest, and I believe children, either because their imaginations are still so very fertile, or, because they are more open to things than adults who have become cynical and skeptical about such things, they can sense \u2013 or somehow \u201csee\u201d \u2013 the dead.<\/span><\/span> Carinna Smith, Tim\u2019s wife, still keeps her husband\u2019s truck parked in the driveway and every now and then sneaks out of the house just to sit in the driver\u2019s seat. Tim\u2019s Bible is still there, and the little sea horse he once caught still hangs from the rearview mirror.

Before Bernie\u2019s body was found, Edith Jones would lie in bed every night and call his cell phone just to listen to his voice-mail message from somewhere out in the ether. <\/a>Such poignant details; they require a great deal of sensitivity and humaneness. What questions did you ask in order to arrive at this material?<\/span>It was very hard, but I gently probed, asking the same question a few different ways spread out over an interview. She was both shy, and yet incredibly open, wanting to share the relationship and the memories, even the most painful ones.<\/span><\/span>

Jos\u00e9 Arias, the only survivor of the wreck of the Lady Mary, has lost weight since the accident and still needs medication to sleep. The TV at the foot of his bed is always turned to a Spanish-language station, a kind of white noise to distract him from his thoughts.

His eyes pool with sadness when he speaks. <\/a>Lovely; thank you for not using \u201ctears\u201d or some variant of \u201ctears spill down his cheeks\u201d or \u201chis eyes overflow with tears\u201d or etc.<\/span>You\u2019re welcome!<\/span><\/span> Through an interpreter, he says he has worked a bit on the docks since the accident, but not on a fishing boat, and that he won\u2019t, not ever again.

A NEED TO KEEP MOVING

Fuzzy brought his sons home to Bayboro to be buried in his backyard, and that\u2019s where he finally buried Bernie\u2019s ashes, too. Hazel, his wife, says she\u2019s out there \u201cfrom sunup to sundown.\u201d She puts fresh flowers on the graves every week and keeps an eye on Bobo and Tim when she\u2019s on her exercise bicycle in the shed next to the graves.

\u201cThere\u2019s my babies,\u201d she\u2019ll say. \u201cI love you, babies.\u201d <\/a>At any point during the reporting did you lose your composure?<\/span>I came close to losing composure a number of times, this being one of them, and often when talking to Fuzzy, who remains so haunted.<\/span><\/span>

Sometimes she even hums to them.

For Fuzzy, who lost his only children as well as a brother and a cousin, nothing gives him comfort.

\u201cIt\u2019s like somebody punched a hole through me,\u201d he said. \u201cI get up and get ready to go, but instead I look out the window. My energy is like seeping through a crack.\u201d

A descendant of slaves, his ancestry can be traced to Elizabeth Jennett who survived the shipwreck of the English bark Good Intent off Cape Hatteras in 1767. Most of the 300 Africans being brought to America to be sold into slavery perished that day, but Jennett survived.\u2028 <\/a>Interesting fact. How did it aid the narrative, do you think, showing that eerie legacy with regard to shipwrecks?\u00a0Also, where did this info come from and how did you confirm?<\/span>I wanted to include this information mainly because of the terrible ironies. When I realized the Smiths and Credles had lived in North Carolina for a long time, I researched the genealogies online and confirmed the link through two sources. Fuzzy confirmed a few of his ancestors but was not familiar with the story of Elizabeth Jennett. Fuzzy has not read the series, by the way, and I totally understand why.<\/span><\/span> The sea gives and the sea takes.

Fuzzy says he has to keep moving. He drives mile after mile, hour after hour, back and forth between Bayboro, N.C., and Cape May, though none of his remaining fishing boats goes out anymore. On one of those trips home to North Carolina, right after the accident, he pulled off the highway into a Burlington Coat Factory to buy a suit and pair of shoes to bury Bobo in \u2014 the socks came two in a pack, he said. The other pair remain in the back seat of the truck. <\/a>How did these incredibly touching details come to you? Thru the interviewing? Or did you see the socks in the truck and ask?<\/span>Both, actually.<\/span><\/span> He doesn\u2019t have the heart to fish anymore, Fuzzy says, but every couple of weeks he still hits the road in his Ford pickup anyway, just to check in on his other rusting boats.

\u201cIt feels like someone pushing at me,\u201d he said. \u201cDoesn\u2019t matter how many trips I take on the ferry and come back, it\u2019s going to be the same. It took me awhile to figure that out. \u2026 Now I get to where I don\u2019t want to be neither place.\u201d\u2028Fuzzy has always known what to do on the sea. \u201cYou work on the boat with the motion of the boat,\u201d he likes to say. It\u2019s how to be on land that\u2019s hard for him to figure out.\u00a0<\/a>How difficult was it, getting the families to let you in? how did you manage it, and how did you speak with them \u2013 always in person, sometimes by phone, both? Multiple meetings? Were they immediately receptive or did it take them a while to trust you? What other reporting did you do, regarding\u00a0the families that informed the storytelling but that isn\u2019t apparent within the storytelling?<\/span>Because we had many months, we had many, many interviews. All of them were in person, although there were many follow-up conversations on the phone. We probably met with Fuzzy, both in Cape May and in North Carolina, at least a dozen times. He was always remarkably open with us, although sometimes it was a matter of letting him fill in the silence and NOT asking questions, because he was rarely not thinking about his boys. Most of the families were also very open. Only the wife of Jorge Ramos refused to be interviewed.<\/span><\/span>

Last summer he bought a new lawn mower and to fill the time spends warm weather weekends cutting his lawn in Bayboro. When he first bought the machine he not only trimmed his own grass, but also the empty lot across the street, then his neighbor\u2019s lawn, then the town square. A few days later he received a letter from the mayor who wanted to thank him for making the town look so much better.

For the most part, though, Fuzzy avoids friends and acquaintances.

\u201cWhen I go places where I don\u2019t know people, I feel better,\u201d he says. \u201cI quit going to the place where I get my oil changed because he was too nice. \u2026 It\u2019s not so much what they say, it\u2019s what they\u2019re thinking.\u201d

For Fuzzy, life now is entwined by the vocabulary of loss. So on many days, in the quiet before dawn, he gets in his truck and heads north again, past Credle\u2019s Salvage, past the Play Boy Barbershop, past the Original Free Will Baptist Church, until all that he\u2019s left behind is swallowed by darkness. <\/a>An echo of the swallowing sea; how many kickers did you consider and what were a couple of the others? Or was this the original kicker?<\/span>Oh boy, I had a huge argument with my editor over the ending. I was even in tears over it. Initially I ended the story at the Fisherman\u2019s Memorial, only because a certain image there seemed to sum up the story. The main metaphor I wanted to end with had to do with the fact that the names of the Lady Mary\u2019s drowned crew were not well etched into the stone of the memorial. Most of the other names were deeply carved, but the six most recent names were very lightly etched, so much so that at least the edge of one of the names was beginning to fade. It was clear to me that within a few years, unless something was done, their names would be gone, and this idea really spoke to me about how easily and quickly we forget, how unkind Time is, and how the elements of sea and air wear away all of us, and yet remain as ever. As soon as I noticed this, I knew that\u2019s where I wanted to end the series, because I also kept thinking about one of my favorite poets, John Keats. When he was dying of \u201cconsumption\u201d he asked his friend, the painter Joseph Severn, to make sure that when he died they put these words on his tombstone, \u201cHere lies one who name was writ in water.\u201d (Many people say Keats died of a bad review.) Severn, god bless him, honored his friend\u2019s request, but added a nice little caveat \u2013 \u201cThis grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet who, on his deathbed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraved on his tomb stone: Here lies one whose name was writ in water.\u201d My editor\u2019s complaint was that ending the story at the memorial was too cliched, too expected. Ordinarily, I would have agreed with him, but I felt very strongly about ending the story with a kind of philosophical summary. Not heavy, or heavy-handed, but I felt the scope of the story suggested an ending that wasn\u2019t just about one character. Another editor suggested I end with the startling image of Fuzzy mowing all those lawns. I was adamant that was not the right place, but I decided, under pressure from my editor, to end with Fuzzy, who remains, at least for me, the most tragic, most poignant character.<\/span><\/span>

\"\"<\/a>Newark Star-Ledger<\/em>\u00a0reporter Amy Ellis Nutt won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and was a finalist in that category in 2009, for \u201cThe Accidental Artist,\u201d which became the subject of her first book,\u00a0Shadows Bright As Glass<\/em>. She is a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Before going to the\u00a0Star-Ledger<\/em>\u00a0she worked as a fact checker, reporter and golf writer at\u00a0Sports Illustrated<\/em>, and before that she taught philosophy at Tufts. She is at work on a new book of nonfiction.

 \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Part 2 of our annotation of Amy Ellis Nutt‘s Pulitzer-winning “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” Nutt, of the Newark Star-Ledger, explains how the investigative track of her five-chapter narrative unfolded. Yesterday, in Part 1, she walked us through the story conception and first two sections of the series, which chronicled the sinking of\u00a0an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4107,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[61],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-annotation-tuesday","authors-paige-williams"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAmy Ellis Nutt and the wreck of the Lady Mary, Part 2 - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2012\/11\/30\/line-by-line-amy-ellis-nutt-and-the-wreck-of-the-lady-mary-part-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Amy Ellis Nutt and the wreck of the Lady Mary, Part 2 - Nieman Storyboard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In Part 2 of our annotation of Amy Ellis Nutt‘s Pulitzer-winning “The Wreck of the Lady Mary,” Nutt, of the Newark Star-Ledger, explains how the investigative track of her five-chapter narrative unfolded. 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