Colleagues and relatives say 21-year-old Corwin Wheeler was doing what he loved when he was trapped in fishing gear and went overboard Friday.
Fishermen in Bristol Bay are mourning one of their own who died Friday during the sockeye salmon gillnet fishery. Alaska State Troopers said inWheeler was working as a deckhand on the gillnetter Anna Joy in Kvichak Bay when he went overboard. Another deckhand, Jackson Wilder, said Wheeler was throwing a hook to pull their net in when he got wrapped in the line.
Wilder said he jumped into the water wearing his full rain gear and boots and swam 20 feet to Wheeler. He tried to keep Wheeler’s head above water but he had to let go because he was tiring quickly. Neither Wilder nor Wheeler were wearing PFDs at the time, which is not uncommon when commercial fishing.
Wilder calls the death a freak accident and said there was no wrongdoing by anyone. He said that it was a normal day and that the crew was well rested. He grew up in Trevor, Wisconsin, and then went to high school in Round Lake, Illinois. Wheeler had fished in Alaska for a number of years with Alaska Leader Fisheries, a hook and line company. According to his grandmother, Denise Rowe, this was his first year commercial fishing for sockeye salmon.“And Corwin stayed out there. And he got into that. And he loved it,” Rowe said. “He made a lot of friends. They, you know, they had really good times. And he was happy.”“He was just so smart.
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