The Loss of the Lily Jean = by Sebastian Junger

The Loss of the Lily Jean =  by Sebastian Junger 

Almost 35 years ago, a long liner named the Andrea Gail out of Gloucester, Massachusetts sank in 70-foot seas without even calling a mayday. She was near the shoaling water of Sable Island – the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” – and still almost a thousand miles from home. And now another Gloucester fishing boat has been lost with all hands: Around 6:50 on the morning of January 30 of this year, a dragger named the Lily Jean was headed home from the Fippenies Bank, off the coast of Maine, when the Coast Guard received a distress signal from her emergency locator beacon.

EPIRBS, as they are known, are designed to float free of their mount and relay the identity of a vessel and her position to within a hundred yards. That way, an SOS can be issued even if the crew doesn’t have time to radio the Coast Guard themselves. A signal from an EPIRB almost guarantees that people are in the water, and Air Station Cape Cod had a rescue helicopter in the air within minutes. The EPIRB indicated that the Lily Jean had sunk 22 miles east of Gloucester, and the Coast Guard helicopter arrived on-scene in under half an hour. They found nothing but deck gear, an empty life raft and the body of the 55-year-old captain, Gus Sanfilippo, floating in the water.

As captain, Sanfilippo would probably have been driving the boat while his crew slept in the cabins - they’d spent the last three days working almost non-stop in arctic conditions. Whatever happened at 6:50 that morning, it was so sudden and catastrophic that Sanfilippo didn’t even have time to radio for help. He made it out of the wheelhouse but apparently not to the life raft, which had inflated and shot to the surface a few yards away. The air temperature was twelve degrees and the water was 39; in those conditions, a person can lose control of his limbs and drown within minutes.

Presumably trapped inside the doomed vessel were Paul Beal, age 70, and his 35-year-old son, Paul Jr. The father was taking a few last trips with his son before retiring, and they would have been bunking together when the boat sank. Local fishermen Sean Thierren, John Rousanidis, and Freeman Short were in the other cabins. And a 22-year-old NOAA fisheries observer named Jada Samitt was also on board. Samitt graduated from the University of Vermont last year and became a fisheries observer almost immediately.******