Pam Harght, of Marshfield, Mass., can see Boston from her third-floor home office, but her gaze was drawn away from a Zoom session with her boss and toward the sea on Tuesday.
She reported seeing a clouds of smoke at 2:30 p.m. It was roughly a mile away, but she claimed she didn’t need a telescopic lens or scope to see what was going on.
According to officials, the Bing commercial fishing boat, scouring the turbulent waters near Scituate, Massachusetts, for surfclams, flipped over and largely disappeared.
According to US Coast Guard records, the boat is owned by Bing Bing Corporation, a subsidiary of Intershell International Corporation, a seafood processing and distribution company located in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Ms. Harght, who began working from home for a payment processing firm during COVID-19, said in an interview how she looked up from her MacBook and witnessed the incident.
“I said something to my co-workers, who didn’t think much of it,” Ms. Harght said. “My boss is in LA. Thirty seconds later, the boat just vanished. That’s when my jaw just dropped.”
Ms. Harght excused herself from the meeting and immediately dialed 911, presuming that others had seen the flipped vessel and had already called emergency services.
However, this wasn’t the case, and according to Scituate’s fire chief, John P. Murphy, Ms. Harght was instrumental in saving all three members of the boat’s crew from the 42-degree seas of Massachusetts Bay.
“She must have just looked up at the right time,” he said. “The stars were aligned for these gentlemen being alive today.”
The crew members were hypothermic, swallowed diesel fuel, and hung to a hose from the boat after being in the water for 45 minutes. Chief Murphy said that the waves were up to six feet high.
According to Chief Murphy, all three males got hospitalized but were expected to recover. According to the chief, it is likely that a piece of the dredging equipment aboard the boat became entangled in something, causing the vessel to flip. There was no time to make a mayday call or put on life jackets.
In a phone conversation, Joe Roderick, one of the rescued crew members, stated that the boat began tilting toward the starboard side shortly before it sank.
“I said, ‘This is weird,’” Mr. Roderick recalled telling the captain. “As he turned around to walk into the boat, the boat flipped over and threw us all right in the water. It happened so fast.”
Mr. Roderick said that his chest hurt from treading water. Because of the diesel fumes, his sinuses felt “like somebody went up there with a wire brush,” he claimed. Moreover, he stated that his smartphone, wallet, and driver’s license all went down with the boat.
Mr. Roderick, who works as a scallop fisherman for the rest of the year, said he intended to leave the hospital on Friday. However, he added that he would contact Ms. Harght in the future to express his gratitude.
“She saved our lives,” he said. “If it wasn’t for her calling, nobody would have found us, and nobody would have known.”
Ms. Harght said that it was also coincidental that she had not taken a break from work. Furthermore, she also expressed relief that she did not purchase a huge computer screen to supplement her laptop since this would have obstructed her sight.
