Mourning the loss of 34 fellow divers

Update: Captain gets 4 years in prison

Update:

Captain Jerry Boylan was sentenced to four years in prison and three years of supervised release for criminal negligence.

Original post:

It’s been nearly five years (Sept. 2, 2019) since the liveaboard dive boat Conception caught fire, killing 33 passengers and one crew member. They were all asleep below decks. 

These were all divers enjoying life, taking photos and loving the gorgeous scenery. 

The captain and the remainder of the crew abandoned ship that night — the captain was the first to jump overboard. 

It was an awful tragedy.

The boat was on a three-day liveaboard trip in the Channel Islands off California. Santa Catalina is the most famous of those islands, but there are eight in the archipelago — five of those make up the Channel Islands National Park.

The Conception was anchored off Santa Cruz Island, just south of the town of Santa Barbara where the Truth Aquatics charter boat company was located and the Conception docked alongside its two sister ships; the Vision and the Truth. 

I was never on board the Conception, but I spent five days on board the Truth — her sister ship with a very similar layout. There was a group of us on board for a video shoot. That boat was tight and narrow and difficult to get around below decks. Most of the berths were low ceiling bunk beds. 

Any emergency in the dark of night with sleeping people would make escape nearly impossible. 

When I first saw the news of the fire, I was in Houston, Texas working on a story. The next morning I was flying home and was in the airport when I got an email from CNN asking me to write an essay about the accident. I wrote it in flight and then emailed it to them when I was back on the ground waiting for a connecting flight. You can read it here. 

They reached out to me because of my monthly column in Scuba Diving Magazine where I analyze dive accidents. And having co-authored the book Scuba Diving Safety with Dan Orr. 

The next day both CBS and Fox and Friends asked me to appear on their shows virtually. You can see those stories here and here. 

Plenty has been written and discussed about what caused the fire and the loss of life. I’ve seen plenty of speculation, but according to a story by the Associated Press earlier today, there’s no official cause yet about the fire. We will likely never know exactly what happened because the boat burned to the water line before it sank in 100 feet of water. It has been resurfaced. 

The trial of Captain Jerry Boylan revolved around lax attitudes on training and safety and the failure to set a night watch on the boat. If someone had been awake and smelled smoke before the cramped passenger cabin was fully engulfed in flame, there is a good chance many, if not all, of the passengers would have survived. 

After much legal back and forth, Boylan is set to be sentenced with up to 10 years in prison. He was convicted of a form of negligence known as “seaman’s manslaughter.” They attempted to try him on 34 counts, but it was determined it was a single act of negligence even though it cost 34 lives. 

This is something I write about in my accident analysis column on a regular basis. When divers, sailors or any of us develop lax attitudes and don’t follow well-established rules, people get hurt. It may just be ourselves, but sometimes those mistakes hurt others around us. 

My CNN essay closed with this thought. 

“The loss of the M/V Conception and her passengers and crew is devastating. Everyone in the diving community feels the pain of the loss. Those were our friends, colleagues and, at the very least, kindred spirits. There will be memorials and remembrances of the loss as everyone attempts to come to grips with the tragedy.

“My heart goes out to the families and friends of the divers lost and the entire California diving community. I pray they will be able to find peace. But diving will continue. The beauty of the underwater world calls to everyone who has been there.”

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