Lady Mary, scallop bank, sank suddenly in just two minutes 70 miles offshore on March 24. The accident left six men dead. The one man who survived the sinking managed to get his survival suit on properly and in time. The two victims whose bodies were recovered had the immersion suits on – but they weren’t zipped properly, and they filled with water. The others remain missing; it isn’t known if they managed to don survival suits.
In a safety class in Cape May 18 fishermen learned that a key point of the two-day class, taught by marine safety consultant John O’Leary in conjunction with the Coast Guard and several marine insurance companies, was to show fishermen how to get into their immersion suits quickly and properly. Correctly fastening a zipper can be the difference between life and death. Neither survival suits nor such safety classes are new. But the sinking of the Lady Mary has caught the attention of fishermen who may have been ignoring such things, at their own peril, for years.
Bob Sheridan, a 59-year-old from Brick Township, has been a commercial fishermen for 35 years – and he had never taken a safety class or put on a survival suit. But he was at the recent class in Cape May where he claimed that he learned a lot. If there’s a harder, more dangerous way to make a living this side of being a combat Marine or a Navy SEAL, we don’t know what it is.
