Lack of mayday puzzles owner of doomed trawler

SEATTLE — The owner of the Arctic Rose told a Coast Guard panel Thursday he has no idea what caused the 92-foot trawler to sink last spring in the Bering Sea off Alaska, killing all 15 men aboard.

"It had to be something — a series of events — to cause the boat to roll over quickly," Dave Olney said in his second day of testimony before a Coast Guard Marine Board of Inquiry.

"There was no mayday. That’s the strange thing."

Rescuers arrived to find an oil slick, some survival suits and only one body, that of skipper Dave Rundall. The others had vanished in the commercial fishery’s worst accident in decades.

SeaTac light rail OK’d: Clearing one last hurdle, the Sound Transit board voted 14-2 Thursday to build a 14-mile light-rail line from downtown Seattle to the city of SeaTac. Construction on the $2.1 billion Central Link project could begin as early as next summer, putting light rail on course for a mid-2009 opening. As proposed, the 33-minute route would start near the Washington State Convention and Trade Center downtown, then continue south through the Rainier Valley and Tukwila before ending at a park-and-ride lot in SeaTac — about a mile shy of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. From there, riders could take a 3 1/2-minute bus ride to the airport.

Alaska

Endangered whales may be rallying: North Pacific right whales, the most endangered of the whale family, have been found feeding in a new area of the Bering Sea, giving scientists hope of finding ways to help the whales survive. "This is a very exciting discovery. … These animals are on the brink of extinction," said Cynthia Tynan, an ocean biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In a study appearing today in the journal Science, Tynan and other researchers report that at least five North Pacific right whales are now regularly feeding in relatively shallow waters of the southeastern Bering Sea, far from their traditional feeding grounds. The whales have not been seen in their traditional feeding grounds for years.

Oregon

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