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Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 33 Number 8
April 2006
Point Club helps fishing vessel members buy safety gear
by Lorelei Stevens
POINT JUDITH, RI - The Point Club, the largest organized fishing vessel mutual insurance club on the East Coast, is taking its commitment to promote safe practices among its members one step further, this time by agreeing to subsidize the cost of putting safety equipment on the boat.
During a recent meeting, the club’s board of directors unanimously voted to spend as much as $50,000 to help pay for wearable personal flotation devices (PFDs), portable automated external defibrillators (AEDs), and ARPA collision-avoidance units.
“This is a great example of a group of guys getting together to invest in their future,” said board member Dennis Nixon, a maritime attorney who is now associate dean for academics at the University of Rhode Island’s College of the Environment and Life Sciences.
A number of things happened to move the Point Club board in the direction of what became known as the safety program.
First off, club President Fred Mattera, a fisherman and professional safety trainer, became convinced that the FSL 1000 PFD, which slides on to the straps of your oilers and only inflates if you end up in the water, was a truly wearable life jacket with the potential to save lives.
Second, a local Rhode Island service organization offered to make defibrillators available to fishing boats. Finally, a member boat suffered substantial damage in a collision.
When the board sent out letters asking members if they would be interested in buying PFDs, AEDs, and/or ARPAs at greatly reduced prices, the response was overwhelming.
“We had about twice as many people say they wanted to take advantage of the program as we anticipated,” said Nixon.
PFDs
Added Mattera, “We got information back saying they’d take 130 PFDs, 21 AEDs plus rebates for two guys who had already bought them, and seven ARPAs plus rebates for 14 vessels that had already bought them.”
With that information in hand, the board got to work organizing the safety program. Wilcox Marine Supply in Point Judith agreed to give the program 130 of the FSL 1000 Inflatable Yoke-Suspenders by Stormy Seas/Grundens at cost.
“We’ve been here for many years,” said Helen Cote, proprietor of the company. “These guys are our bread and butter and they certainly need to be protected. This was a minor thing that we could do, so we wanted to do it.”
Splitting the remaining expense 50-50 with participating members, the Point Club was able to bring the price paid by fishermen down to $50 per PFD.
Mattera jokingly refers to Point Judith fisherman Aaron Williams, captain of the Independence, as the “poster child” for the FSL 1000 since he’s been wearing one for quite awhile now.
Williams admits that a couple of the guys laughed at him at first, but now a lot of people “think it’s a pretty good idea.”
While the PFD is designed to slide onto the straps of a fisherman’s oil pants, Williams thought it made more sense to wear it on top of his pullover and oilers, so he made some modifications to the device’s straps and now wears it whenever he’s working on deck.
“The way fishing is now – the way the regs are – you have to go fishing sometimes even in weather you don’t want to,” he said. “I like (the PFD) for hauling back and even when I’m tying up the boat. If I had a new guy on the boat, I’d make him wear it all the time. I think it’s a great thing.”
AEDs
The dramatically reduced cost for the AEDs was made possible through the Narragansett Lion’s Club. Kirk Pickell of the club became aware of a regional campaign to place defibrillators in public places after the tragic death of 14-year-old Michael J. Monteleone, a local boy who suffered sudden cardiac arrest while playing baseball in 2005.
The Narragansett Lion’s Club, which is one of the largest in the country with 275 members, decided to hold a fund-raiser to purchase a bulk quantity of AEDs and offer them at reduced prices to schools, public meeting places, and the fishing community.
Pickell cited the cases of two local fishermen – Robert Sweeney in 1997 and Scott Westcott in 2005 – who died at sea at the ages of 39 and 42 respectively after experiencing cardiac-related distress.
“There was a feeling that if they had had defibrillators on board it could have saved lives,” he said.
Pickell is also on the board of directors of the Southeast Heart Safe Community Foundation, an organization dedicated to educating the public about sudden cardiac arrest and the benefits of AEDs.
Another source of funding was the family of Robert Sweeney. Each year, the family holds a road race fund-raiser in memory of Sweeney and his sister, Maureen, and looks to the Lion’s Club for help in distributing the money to a worthy cause. In the past, the Sweeneys have donated to the Point Judith Fishermen’s Memorial Foundation. This year, they gave $7,500 toward the AED effort.
“The Sweeney family thought this was a great avenue to help fishermen,” Pickell said.
With added funding from the Point Club, member fishermen will be able to buy the AEDs, which normally sell for more than $2,000, for just $400.
The crew at the Narragansett Fire Department is providing training to fishermen on how to properly use the devices.
Said Mattera of the PFDs and the AEDs, “The fact is, you fall into cold water and there’s a 95 percent chance you won’t survive without a PFD. And the average age of the fishermen in Point Judith is now 50 years old. A couple of boats already carry the AEDs.”
Collision avoidance
ARPA stands for automatic radar plotting acquisition. John Ednie of Land and Sea Communication in Harwich Port, MA explained that the Furuno model the Point Club is making available is basically a circuit board that plugs into a compatible radar unit.
The ARPA gives the radar the ability to acquire and track 10 targets and sounds an alarm if the vessel gets too close to any of them.
“It shows you the vessels in yourarea, the heading, direction, and speed of the targets,” Ednie said.
The cost of the ARPA varies depending on whether you just need the circuit board plug-in or a whole new radar system that either includes ARPA or is compatible with it.
The Point Club board agreed to provide a $500 rebate to fishermen who said they would put ARPA capability on board.
“Fourteen vessels now have it, so those 14 will have to show proof of purchase and then we’ll rebate them the full $500,” said Mattera. “Seven boats will purchase them new.”
A safety club
The Point Club, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, was formed in response to both the fishing vessel insurance crisis of the 1980s and to a guide written by Dennis Nixon that described the idea of self-insurance.
Nixon said that the Point Judith Fishermen’s Co-op had an insurance plan at the time but that the idea of self-insurance intrigued co-op President Jim McCauley and founding memberJake Dykstra.
“They came up to me and said, ‘Make it happen,’” Nixon recalled. “I got together with Frank Ostrow and Bill Scola of Ocean Marine Insurance Agency (OMIA). We wanted to start a group insurance in which the fishermen would take on some of the risk and impose their own safety standards on themselves. We founded the Point Club.”
Today, the club does all of that. Member vessels are required to carry specific safety equipment beyond what the federal Commercial Fishing Vessel Safety Act of 1988 mandates, such as a spare battery in the pilothouse to run the radio in case of a power loss.
Recently, members also agreed to conduct and log monthly safety drills with certified drill instructors.
Members pay premiums to the club, which is managed free-of-charge by OMIA. The Point Club retains some of the risk for member vessels and reinsures the rest through Sunderland Marine Mutual Insurance, a large fishing vessel mutual insurance company based in England.
Club membership includes fishing vessels from Maine to New York and, as Nixon put it, “we have had our losses.” Still, the club’s page on the OMIA web site noted that, as of the millennium, the club had more than $1.2 million in assets and no debt.
Dividends
The Point Club’s extremely high safety standards have undoubtedly helped keep losses low, and that has allowed the club to accumulate funds.
Bill Scola is a partner at OMIA along with Kris Boehmer and Bob McVey. He explained that when the funds build up to a certain point, the club’s board of directors decides what, if anything, to do with the club’s “profit.”
“We’ve used excess funds to reduce premiums, to fund fisheries research, to pay cash dividends,” Scola said.
This year, the board decided to spend some of the available money on the safety equipment program.
“If I’ve ever seen an investment that makes sense, this is it,” Nixon said.
Early on in the discussion, the board agreed to put up $25,000 for the program. But once the industry surveys came back and the board saw the high level of interest among member fishermen, it voted to increase the club’s support to $50,000.
According to Scola, now that the club has figured out how many PFDs, AEDs, and ARPAs will be purchased, the total cost to the club will be about $35,000.
“A monumental day”
Recognizing OMIA’s invaluable role in helping the club through the years, Mattera said, “I can’t say enough good about them. OMIA has guided us along and they have been very creative. They insure hundreds and hundreds of vessels but they still dedicate a lot of time and effort to the Point Club. We are so fortunate to have them.”
Everyone involved was thrilled that the Point Club was able to make its new safety program work.
Mattera called Feb. 24 – the day the board unanimously voted to support the program – “monumental.”
“Changing a whole culture is difficult. You have to start with baby steps. But now, hopefully, there’s going to be 130 fishermen out there wearing PFDs,” he said. “Hopefully, it will be like a virus and more and more fishermen will start doing it too.”
Pictured at top of page:
Among those included in the community-wide effort to provide affordable AEDs for Point Club fishermen were, from left: Kirk Pickell, advisor to the Heart Safe Community Foundation and Narragansett Lions Club spokesman; Capt. Byron Cahoone, Narragansett Fire Department Station 1; Tim Hauser, owner of the Shelby Ann; Anne Sweeney, Robert & Maureen Sweeney Memorial Run; Tony Faciano, captain of the Shelby Ann; Jim O’Grady owner/captain of the Ironhorse and Rhonda Denise (Robert Sweeney’s former boat); and Dr. Bill Sabina, co-founder of the Heart Safe Community Foundation, an emergency room physician at South County Hospital, and medical director for the town of Narragansett.
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