Kugiya, Hugo

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Kugiya, Hugo

PERSONAL: Children: a daughter.

ADDRESSES: Home—Brooklyn, NY. Office—Newsday, 235 Pinelawn Rd., Melville, NY 11747-4250.

CAREER: Journalist. Newsday, Melville, NY, national correspondent. Formerly worked for Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Publisher's Award, Newsday, 2001, for article on the sinking of the Arctic Rose.

WRITINGS:

58 Degrees North: The Mysterious Sinking of the Arctic Rose (nonfiction), Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2005.

Articles have appeared in Pacific magazine.

SIDELIGHTS: In his first book, 58 Degrees North: The Mysterious Sinking of the Arctic Rose, journalist Hugo Kugiya writes about an incident he first covered for a series of articles in Newsday. The industrial fishing boat the Arctic Rose and its entire crew of fifteen disappeared in the treacherous Bering Sea one April morning in 2001. The resultant search discovered the sunken boat but recovered only one crewmember's body. After an extensive and expensive two-year investigation, the Coast Guard decided the accident resulted primarily from inexperience and human error and may also have been contributed to by bad boat design and a laxness in maintenance. In his book, Kugiya profiles all the crew members, most of whom were young and came from varied backgrounds, including Mexican immigrants, reformed drug users, and born-again Christians. He also discusses the hazardous life of those who work the high seas in the American fishing industry, pointing out that these fishermen have a fifteen-times higher chance of dying on the job than those who work in such dangerous professions as fighting crime or fires. The author also details the search and investigation. A Kirkus Reviews contributor noted that the author had produced "solid investigative journalism, though of no comfort to anyone contemplating a tour aboard a factory ship." Edwin B. Burgess, writing in Library Journal, called the book "an intriguing look into one of the most dangerous occupations in America." Noting that the book "isn't flawlessly executed," a Publishers Weekly contributor nevertheless commented that "the portraits of the doomed fishermen … grip and fascinate."