Long before the television cameras made crab fishing fashionable, the men of the fishing fleet took to the sea at their peril to earn a living and feed the nation. The cameras will go away and once again the fishermen, no longer celebrities, will face the sea day after day like they have done for hundreds of years, relatively unknown and under appreciated.

Before the cameras came a crabber named Westerly was fishing north of Strawberry Island, Alaska when the rolling waves caused the crab pots to shift. She was now too heavy in the stern and she began to take on water. The ship soon sank, but the fortunate three crewmen were taken aboard another boat before she went down. They were not famous, they were not on television, they were just men doing their job without the fanfare brought on by a cable show. They were lucky to survive where so many others had been lost.