Lost At Sea - Softcover

Tom Walker The Denver Post Patrick Dillon's deftly written Lost at Sea is more than just another man-vs.-the-sea story. It's an engrossing, evenhanded look at how greed, negligence, naivete and downright stupidity can lead to tragedy when man and nature collide. Sudip Bose The Washington Post Book World A meticulously detailed narrative, pieced together with the deft touch of a suspense writer -- a fine accomplishment. Rinker Buck USA Today Dillon meticulously recreates the events leading up to the 1983 capsizing of the Americus and Altair...[and] artfully chronicles the lives of the lost fishermen and their families. Susan Salter Reynolds Los Angeles Times Book Review A gripping account...Lost At Sea is a better book than Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, even more thrilling, more mysterious.

On February 3, 1983, the men aboard Americus and Altair, two state-of-the-art crabbing vessels, docked in their home port of Anacortes, Washington, prepared to begin a grueling three-month season fishing in the notorious Bering Sea. Eleven days later, on Valentine's Day, the overturned hull of the Americus was found drifting in calm seas, with no record of even a single distress call or trace of its seven-man crew. The Altair vanished altogether. Despite the desperate search that followed, no evidence of the vessel or its crew would ever be found. Fourteen men were lost. And the tragedy would mark the worst disaster in the history of U.S. commercial fishing. With painstaking research and spellbinding prose, acclaimed journalist Patrick Dillon brings to life the men who were lost, the dangers that commercial fishermen face, the haunting memories of the families left behind...and reconstructs the intense investigation that ensued, which for the first time exposed the dangers of an industry that would never again be the same.