Coast Guard locates sunken Bay State fishing boat Lady Luck

PORTLAND – The Coast Guard announced Tuesday it located the sunken fishing boat Lady Luck in 530 feet of water and used a remote-control submersible to examine the wreckage, found about 20 miles southeast of Portland.

The Coast Guard took the unusual step of examining the boat on the ocean floor because there’s so little evidence as to why the trawler from Newburyport, Mass., sank either late on Jan. 31 or early on Feb. 1. Rescuers responding to an automated distress signal found only debris and an oil slick. The two crew members are missing and presumed drowned.

“The video that was gathered will help investigators learn what happened,” said Coast Guard Lt. Connie Braesch in South Portland.

The Coast Guard obtained the video footage on March 13 with a tethered submersible. The Coast Guard didn’t disclose the news until Tuesday, after the families of crew members were notified and briefed, Braesch said.

Lady Luck was docked in Portland before it departed on Jan. 31 for Gloucester, Mass. But it didn’t make it far.

The first and only sign of trouble was an automated distress beacon that sounded at 2:15 a.m. Rescuers found the radio beacon floating in the water, but there was no sign of the 52-foot trawler or its crew.

The Coast Guard launched an air-and-sea search, assisted by fishing boats, but the boat’s skipper, Sean Cone, 24, of North Andover, Mass., and crewman Dan Miller, 21, of North Hampton, N.H., were never found.

The Coast Guard in Boston has a remote-control VideoRay device capable of capturing images in 500 feet of water, but three VideoRay workers brought another device capable of going as deep as 1,000 feet to film the Lady Luck.

The video camera captured detailed footage of the boat but it didn’t detect the crew members’ bodies, said Chris Gibson from Pennsylvania-based VideoRay.