Romance and Tragedy at Sea

May 23, 2007 — -- Rose Bard went to sea on a fishing vessel to change the pace of her life.

"Sometimes, I'd go out on the side of the boat, and you just look out at the water," she said. "And at night, you can see every star in the sky. The stars light up the water, and you can see every crater on the moon."

The story of her last voyage, which ended during a storm at sea, still recurs in her nightmares.

The ship on which she was working, the Excellence, was a floating factory. The international crew on the ship lived and worked together for months at a time, processing fish caught by other vessels.

In October 2005, it was positioned off the coast of Russia in the Bering Sea.

"I was a quality-control technician," Bard said. "We check the bacteria in the machines. We check the product to make sure it is at the right quality. We make sure the factory deck doesn't have too much fish guts or, you know, stuff like that on it."

Bard was also a single mother, with a daughter who stayed with relatives when Bard went to sea to earn a living.

During the two-month voyage to the Bering Sea in 2005, Bard was also having an onboard romance with another worker, Alex Laigo.

On the morning of October16, she gave herself a pregnancy test. It was positive. The only other person she told, just before she started a new shift, was her friend, Ruby Oliver.

"And I asked if Alex knew," Oliver said. "And she said, 'Not yet. I will tell him later on.'"

On the sea, a storm was raging as Bard went to work.

"We had the portholes open at the beginning," she said. "The waves were hitting the side of the boat so hard that they were actually coming through the portholes."

With a high-pressure hose, Bard was cleaning a hopper -- a large, cylindrical vat with augers at the bottom to churn the fish paste as it feeds through. Cleaning the hopper required her to stand inside it.

"When you hit a button, the screws turn, and they feed the meat into the extruder," she said. "They put a packaging bag over the end of the extruder, and the meat is fed into that bag, and then it's sent on down the line."

The machinery had been shut down for maintenance.

When a violent wave struck the ship, another worker was knocked off balance. According to his account, he fell onto the button that turned on the augers.

"I felt something on my feet jerk," Bard said. "At first I just kept thinking, 'Jump.' By the time I even started to react, I just felt. … my ankles being crushed, and my legs dropped out from under me. … It took me maybe two seconds for any noise to exit my mouth. And the first thing was, like, 'Hey, hey, hey!' And then it was just a high-pitched scream."

The machine was turned off within seconds, but Bard's legs had been fed into the augers.

What kept her entire body from tumbling in was the fact that she was straddling a metal bar that spanned the hopper. Laigo, her boyfriend, rushed to the location of the accident.