"On the fishing-boat piers of New England, nearly everyone knows a fisherman who was lost at sea."

"Boat captain Joe Neves remembers when a crew member got knocked overboard. 'We heard him screaming 'Help me!' ' Neves says, grimacing. 'But you know, on the water at night, your head is like a little coconut.' They didn't find him.

Mike Gallagher discovered a friend who was entangled in still-running hydraulics. 'I knew right away he was dead,' he says.

And Fred Mattera was fishing 125 miles off the coast of Cape Cod when the 21-year-old son of a close friend succumbed to poisonous fumes in a nearby boat. 'That was a brutal week in this port,' he says."

Curt Nickisch reports for NPR's Morning Edition August 22, 2012. [2]

SEE ALSO:

"Fishing Without a Safety Net" (Mother Jones/Center for Public Integrity) [3]