The day before the March 22 release of the Transportation Safety Board's report into the December 2020 sinking of the Chief William Saulis, Lori Phillips, the mother of Aaron Cogswell, and Michelle Nickerson-Forbes, who was married to Daniel Forbes, along with other family members and friends, spent time at a memorial in Delaps Cove, Annapolis County, that remembers the lost crew.
“We're going to fight,” says Nickerson-Forbes, who had been married to crew member Daniel Forbes. It’s not fair, she says, that their two sons, William, 15, and Jackson, 11, are growing up without their dad. The recommendation coming from the TSB’s report is for"the Department of Transport to ensure that each inspection of a commercial fishing vessel verifies that each required written safety procedure is available to the crew and that the crew are knowledgeable of these procedures.”
“Yet here we are still talking about many of the same issues, and another six fish harvesters didn’t make it home from what could have been a preventable accident,” says Kathy Fox, chair of the TSB.
She’s been fighting for answers on behalf of her son Aaron Cogswell and the rest of the Chief William Saulis crew for the past two-plus years. “This was a tragedy,” she says about the loss of the Chief William Saulis, but she says there have been too many other deaths at sea too.She says the vessel should have been inspected once it was located. It could have held answers that the family and industry need.