Empty survival suits found but no signs of life after fishing boat overturns in Alaska storm

The fishing vessel Wind Walker fishes near Sitka, Alaska, March 29, 2022, during the Sitka Sound sac roe fishery. (James Poulson/The Daily Sitka Sentinel via AP)

Anchorage, Alaska -

Seven empty survival suits have been found, but there's no sign of the crew of five people who made a distress call as their fishing vessel was capsizing in a storm in the icy waters of the Gulf of Alaska, a Coast Guard official said Monday.

Four of the suits were located in a bay not far from where the Wind Walker fishing vessel was last heard from early Sunday morning in southeast Alaska. Three other suits were located on the bay’s shore, Coast Guard Petty Officer John Hightower said. Searchers also located the Wind Walker’s GPS beacon, along with two strobe lights, which narrowed the search area.

No wreckage from the ship has been sighted, however, Hightower said. No life raft has been found and there is no indication the crew deployed one, he said. It’s also not known how many survival suits the Wind Walker had.

Two Coast Guard vessels continued the search on Monday near Point Couverden, where the ship is presumed to have overturned. The point is about 20 miles (32 kilometres) southwest of Juneau, among the islands of the state’s Inside Passage, a popular route for cruise ships in the summer.

One of the Coast Guard cutters, the icebreaker Healy, is using underwater sonar, Hightower said.

“They’ve been searching all through the night and unfortunately, so far, no physical sign of the vessel has been found yet,” Hightower said.

The Wind Walker's crew sent a Mayday call that the 50-foot (15-metre) vessel was overturning around 12:10 a.m. Sunday, in heavy snow, winds up to 60 mph (96 km/h) and 6-foot (1.8-metre) seas.

But the Coast Guard’s attempts to get more information from the crew went unanswered, according to a Coast Guard press release.

The five crew members were seen only hours earlier by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration crew that boarded the Wind Walker on Saturday for a routine check, Hightower said.

The crew of the Hubbard, an Alaska state ferry, overheard the Coast Guard’s urgent marine broadcast and arrived on the scene within an hour. A Coast Guard boat and MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter also responded, and the helicopter crew spotted the cold-water immersion suits from the air near Spasski Bay, located about 10 miles (16 kilometres) southwest of Point Couverden. Four of the survival suits were in the waters of the bay and three were seen on land, Hightower said.

The suits were empty, and it was not immediately clear if they had been worn, he said.

The full-body suits are made of a neoprene-like material “that you can put on very quickly and easily over your clothes, and it’s meant to help you survive in cold water,” Hightower said. They also have a floatation device inside them, along with an inflatable pillow so a person in the water can rest their head and remain afloat.

The area being searched by the Healy and another cutter, the Douglas Denman, is fairly small since they had the Wind Walker’s emergency beacon GPS coordinates, Hightower said.

Since the crew reported the ship was overturning, it’s possible it capsized and sank.

“That seems like the most likely but, you know, we try not to rule anything out since we haven’t been able to confirm it ourselves,” he said.

Up to 17 inches of snow fell in Juneau over the weekend, and the water temperature was about 45 degrees Fahrenheit (7.22 degrees Celsius), the National Weather Service in Juneau said.