Burden of Proof

It was around 3 a.m. last Easter morning when Joey Galbreath stood on the lip of the fishing vessel Alaska Ranger, looking down at the Bering Sea. He knew he had to jump. He just wasn't quite ready to leap into what seemed a certain death.

The Ranger had unloaded its catch of yellowfin sole in Dutch Harbor the day before, and started steaming west along the Aleutian Islands to fish for mackerel off the far tip of the island chain, just beyond the international date line. Now, most of the 47-member crew was enjoying some much-needed rest. At sea they'd worked long days gutting and processing the catch in the bowels of the boat, and the time spent heading in and out of port was a chance to catch up on sleep.

Just after 2 a.m. alarms blared, but didn't get much reaction. Alarm tests are regular occurrences on these boats, known as factory trawlers. But when more blasts followed, a bleary-eyed crew made its way to the galley to find the phones ringing off the hook as supervisors tried to find out what was going on.

Galbreath was in sweats, a T-shirt, and bare feet. Someone, he wasn't sure who, announced they were taking on water in the rudder room, fast. Within an hour the order came: Abandon ship.

A mayday call went out to the Coast Guard: "Mayday, mayday...this is the Alaska Ranger...We are flooding, taking on water in our rudder room...Number of persons is 47 people on board."

Galbreath and his shipmates ran for the deck, where a crew member was handing out the red neoprene full-body survival outfits known as Gumby suits—Coast Guard–mandated gear designed to keep a body reasonably warm in frigid Arctic water for up to six hours.

Coast Guard rules also require enough life rafts to accommodate everyone on board—the Ranger had three. But when the order to abandon ship came and the first raft was launched, it shot out too fast. The lines connecting the rafts to the boat are designed to break, so a sinking vessel doesn't drag the raft under. But as 20-foot swells pitched the Ranger, the line broke too early, before crew members had time to get in, and the raft drifted away.

The second and third boats were released with more give, and a few men managed to shimmy to them along the still-connected ropes. A couple more men went down ladders over the side of the Ranger and started swimming for the rafts. But the people still aboard were running out of time as the ship continued flooding.

Then the boat listed sharply to starboard. It was about to go down. The crew still on deck could only throw themselves on the mercy of the ocean and hope the Coast Guard arrived soon.

That is how Galbreath found himself standing on the edge of the ship, staring into the inky blackness. He could barely move. In the rush to get everyone into Gumby suits, he had been tossed a jumbo, despite being just 5 feet 7 inches tall. Now the legs were bunching up, making it difficult to walk. His hands fell well short of the gloves.

He doesn't know why, but "Perfect Strangers" by Deep Purple was running through his mind:

A thousand oceans I have flown,

And cold spirits of ice.

"Along with 'Oh shit, I'm going to be dead,'" he says.

Then he jumped.

Galbreath, 37, hadn't planned to make a life at sea. After struggling for years with drugs and alcohol, he ended up on the boats the same way many before him did, looking for some direction—a little metaphorical solid ground.

In the 1980s, the business of converting fish into transport-ready seafood began to shift away from onshore plants and out to the fishing boats themselves. The industry was taken over by giant ships known as factory trawlers, equipped with onboard processing equipment. The ships, including the Ranger, can be nearly as long as a football field, and most are based in Seattle. They drag nets through ocean waters scooping up a huge catch, which is then gutted, packed, and frozen by the crew.

Unlike the union anglers and career fishers who typically work on smaller vessels, trawler crews generally don't need much in the way of fishing or sailing skills. It can be an ideal job for people like Galbreath, who come to Seattle for work, fly to Alaska on the company's dime if they get hired, and move into the belly of the ships, where the vices that made living on land and holding down a job a struggle are kept at bay by the long hours and strictly regimented days.

Except when things go bad, of course. Five people were killed when the Ranger went down, including the captain, the chief engineer, the fish master, the mate, and one crew member.

Even though Galbreath and 41 others survived, many are still recovering from the trauma of the event and the injuries suffered during their escape. And half of them have filed lawsuits against Fishing Company of Alaska, the Ranger's Seattle-based owner, seeking lost wages and compensation for injuries both physical and mental. The complaints filed so far contain nonspecific allegations of negligence by Fishing Company, a relatively small player in the industry that counted seven boats in its fleet before the Ranger sank.