"They called it shore weather," said Suzanne Arenas, daughter to the elder Mr. Rose and sister to the younger. "Inshore, it'd be blowing, but offshore, it'd be beautiful weather. But we'd still say, 'Man, are you crazy? How do you go out in that?'รขâ"
But last week, the bad weather never did turn around for the lifelong commercial fishermen from North Carolina -- who, years ago, made a lasting name for themselves on the docks of Greenport.
The Sea Tractor, the Roses' 44-foot fishing boat, sank into the Atlantic Ocean last Wednesday about 20 miles off of New Jersey's Cape May. Last Thursday night, the Coast Guard called off a 19-hour search for the three men onboard -- Mr. Rose, 73, 49-year-old Kenneth Jr., and crew member Larry Forrest, 55, also of North Carolina. A memorial service was held Wednesday at Broad Creek Church of God in Newport, N.C. (see page 12 for full obituaries and page 9 for the Observer column).
According to a report from Newark, N.J.-based Star-Ledger last week, ocean waves swelled between 15 and 20 feet at the time of the accident and winds from a nor'easter blew between 40 and 60 mph. Visibility for the crew was less than a mile out.
The Coast Guard received a transmission from the Sea Tractor's emergency position-indicating radio beacon at 7:35 p.m., said the newspaper report. An hour later, when a helicopter from Atlantic City arrived at the location, all rescue workers found on the ocean's surface was an empty lifeboat amidst a debris field -- indicating that whatever happened to the seasoned boatmen happened quickly, Coast Guard officials reported.
Ms. Arenas, 46, said that her father and brother were fishermen "down to their souls."
"They really were," she said. "We used to tease them that they had salt in their blood."
Though Ms. Arenas and her siblings grew up in North Carolina, she said that Greenport always felt like home to them. They would spend their summers in the village, where her grandparents owned a home, and go back to North Carolina for the winters.
"My grandmother made dear friends in Greenport," she said. "She would trade fish for vegetables and fruit. Eastern Long Island was always like home to us. It still is to me."
The Rose family, Ms. Arenas said, is a fishing family through and through, and her father and brother always came back to commercial fishing -- because "it's what they knew how to do." Kenneth Sr. never held a job outside of fishing other than a stint in the Navy, Ms. Arenas said, and though her brother Kenneth was an avid musician and photographer and worked as a horse farrier for a time, he was "always drawn to the sea."
Working on boats with names like Miss Maxine and the Margaret Rose, the Roses fished heavily out of Greenport back in the 1970s, when it was more economically profitable.
"But they hadn't been lobster fishing since 1977," Ms. Arenas said.
Kenneth Sr. worked for North Carolina-based R.W. Jones Seafood from 1967 until the early 2000s, when he bought the Sea Tractor and began fishing independently with the younger Kenneth, who'd fished with his father from the time he was old enough to do so, Ms. Arenas said.
Greenport resident Bill Kart, 60, said he got to know the Rose family well when they worked out of the village docks. He was a deckhand with them on several fishing expeditions in the '70s.
"I'll tell you right now, they were a strong, determined fishing family," Mr. Kart said. "Anything about the water, they were into it. Lobsters, scallops, yellow fish. They kept their boats clean, and they made sure everyone was safe."
Joe Rose, 62, told The Star-Ledger that his brother and nephew likely braved the nor'easter last Wednesday to make their quota before a fishing deadline. And since the accident, federal fishing regulations have come under fire from family members of the lost men and those in the local fishing trade.
"The regulations that the federal government are putting on these men are making them stay out when they know they should be on shore," Mr. Arenas said. "They're drowning them."
Mary Bess Phillips, co-owner of Alice's Fish Market in Greenport and wife to fisherman Mark Phillips, said she also believes that current fisheries management "has a lot to do" with last week's tragedy.
"You can't prevent something like this, but they're having to play the weather a lot more than in previous days," she said. "It's a big issue. It shakes the guys a little bit."
Mr. Kart said he, too, was shaken by the loss of the hardworking fishermen he came to know as friends years ago. A strong memory of the Roses for him, he said, was that they never lingered at the bar with the other guys during breaks on shore -- they would always immediately return to sea.
"They got their grub, they got their ice, and they got their asses back out there," he said. "They loved to fish, and they were good people."
eschultz@timesreview.com
Julie Lane contributed to this story