Helping assure East Shore Partners the dawn after the dark

There's a certain amount of denial in swordfishing. The boats claw through a lot of bad weather, and the crews generally just batten down the hatches, turn on the VCR, and put their faith in the tensile strength of steel. Still, every man on a sword boat knows there are waves out there that can crack them open like a coconut. Once you're in the denial business, though, it's hard to know when to stop. Captains routinely overload their boats, ignore storm warnings, stow their life rafts in the wheelhouse, and disarm their emergency radio beacons. Coast Guard inspectors say that going down at sea is so unthinkable to many owner-captains that they don't even take basic precautions. "We don't need an EPIRB because we don't plan on sinking," is a sentence that Coast Guard inspectors hear a lot.