Ben Thomas: Six Failures, One Loss of Life

What Happened

On 12 December 2023, the fishing vessel Ben Thomas departed Port Oriel, Clogherhead, at around 0500 with two crew — only the second day this crew had operated the vessel. They began dredging for razor clams near Dunany Point, the skipper helming and operating the winch, the other crew member working the stern gantry to open the cage and process the catch.

After completing a third towing operation, the vessel capsized and sank before 0800 while recovering the dredge cage. Both crew were on deck and entered the water together. Neither was wearing a personal flotation device.

Everything That Should Have Worked, Didn't

The skipper found a PFD floating nearby and held onto debris to stay afloat. He was found roughly 30 minutes later by a crew member on a nearby vessel who heard calls for help, and brought ashore hypothermic. The search for the second crew member continued for two days. On 14 December, Naval Service divers recovered his body from the seabed. The vessel itself has never been recovered.

MCIB's investigation found the loss of life resulted from a combination of failures, not one single cause:

• Inadequate safety systems for the vessel's operation.
• Neither crew member wearing a PFD, despite it being the skipper's statutory responsibility to ensure it.
• The liferaft's hydrostatic release unit likely didn't activate until much later than intended — the water was too shallow for it to work as designed.
• Even once released, the liferaft never inflated: its painter had been secured to the wrong point, not the HRU's weak link, so the force needed to pull it from its canister was never applied.
• The EPIRB failed to operate promptly.
• No Personal Locator Beacons were carried.
• Cold water immersion.

The Cause Beneath the Cause

The capsize itself is believed to have been caused by the overturning effect of a heavily laden dredge cage during recovery, compounded by the vessel's low residual stability at that specific stage of the fishing cycle. MCIB found the vessel's last stability assessment — a 2021 rolling-period test — used a formula the vessel actually fell outside the intended parameters for, requiring "special care" that wasn't documented as having been applied. The Code of Practice's stability approach also doesn't account for landing the catch being the condition that produces a vessel's lowest stability margins — exactly the moment this capsize happened.

Recommended Actions

1. PFDs are worn on deck during fishing operations, full stop — not "when conditions look rough," not "once we're clear of the harbour." The skipper is responsible for ensuring it, and MCIB called this failure "inexplicable given the plain terms of the statutory instrument."
2. Confirm your liferaft's painter is actually secured to the HRU's weak link, not a nearby strong point that looks similarly secure — this single rigging error is what stopped Ben Thomas's liferaft inflating at all.
3. Carry Personal Locator Beacons for each crew member, not just a vessel EPIRB — a PLB survives with the person, not the vessel.
4. If your vessel operates outside the dimensional parameters a stability formula was designed for, document what "special care" was actually applied — don't just apply the formula anyway because it's what's always been done.
5. Recognise that the moment of landing the catch is often when a small fishing vessel's stability margin is at its lowest — treat that specific phase of the operation with elevated caution, not the same routine attention as the rest of the trip.

Human Element Analysis

See How You’d Handle It

Ben Thomas's decision simulator puts you in the moments before departure, and again during dredge recovery. Two decision points, four outcome paths, one of them the real one.

Test Your Knowledge

Think you've got this covered? Put it to the test in Crew Connect's free Knowledge Checker — try a quick safety round and see how you score.

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