Lost at Sea

On the morning of February 3, 1983, the men aboard Americus and Altair, two state-of-the-art crabbing vessels, docked in their home port of Anacortes, Washington, prepared to begin a grueling three-month season in one of the nation's most profitable and deadly occupations - fishing in the notorious Bering Sea. Eleven days later, on Valentine's Day, the overturned hull of the Americus was found drifting in calm seas, with no record of even a single distress call or trace of its seven-man crew. The Altair vanished altogether. Despite the desperate search that followed, no evidence of the vessel or its seven-man crew would ever be found. Fourteen men - the husbands, fathers, and sons of a town changed forever - were lost. And the tragedy would mark the worst disaster in the history of U.S. commercial fishing. With a combination of painstaking research and spellbinding prose, acclaimed journalist Patrick Dillon brings to life the men who were lost, the dangers that commercial fishermen face each day, the haunting memories of the families left behind...and reconstructs the intense investigation that ensued, which for the first time exposed the dangers of an industry that would never again be the same. 264 pages.