ALASKA – Brock Rainey, a Kellogg man who is among five missing crew members from a crab fishing boat, may have had a chance to get into a lifeboat, but instead chose to be a hero.
A friend of Rainey told The Shoshone News-Press that Rainey reportedly insisted on returning to try and save the captain of the boat, rather than get off.
The 130-foot boat, called the Scandies Rose, had been carrying a load of load of crabbing pots when it capsized and sank on New Year’s Eve off the Alaska Peninsula.
Coast Guard crews were called in and managed to rescue two survivors. Rainey and four others were not among them. The agency used helicopters, planes and a boat to search for the men over 1,400 square miles (3,625 square kilometers) before calling off the effort Wednesday evening.
Ashley Boggs, fiancee of crew member Rainey, told the Anchorage Daily News she last heard from him when he called her on New Year’s Eve at about midnight at her home in Peru, Indiana. It was around 8 p.m. off the coast of Kodiak.
“He was telling me he couldn’t wait to get back. We were going to start our lives together. Everything was perfect,” Boggs said.
A GoFundMe has been set up to help the families of the victims. You can find a link to that here.
