A sinking boat caught her eye during a Zoom call

Harght, who lives in Marshfield, Massachusetts, said she saw a cloud of smoke around 2:30 pm. It was about 1 mile from her house, but she said she did not need a telephoto lens or scope to understand what was happening.

A commercial fishing boat named Bing Bing that had been combing the choppy seas near Scituate, Massachusetts, for surf clams had rolled over and partially disappeared, authorities said.

Harght, 38, who started working from home during the pandemic for a company that processes payments, recalled Friday the moment she glanced up from her MacBook.

“I said something to my co-workers, who really didn’t think much of it,” Harght said. “My boss is in LA. Thirty seconds later, the boat just vanished. That’s when my jaw just dropped.”

At that point, Harght said she excused herself from the meeting and called 911, figuring that surely others must have seen the overturned vessel and had already contacted emergency responders.

But there was no one else, according to John P. Murphy, Scituate’s fire chief, who said Friday that Harght had played a pivotal role in facilitating the rescue of all three of the boat’s crew members from the 42-degree waters of Massachusetts Bay.

The crew members, who were in the water for 45 minutes, were experiencing hypothermia, had ingested diesel fuel and were clinging to a hose from the boat. Waves were reaching 6 feet, Murphy said.

“She must have just looked up at the right time,” he said. “The stars were aligned for these gentlemen being alive today.”

Murphy said that all three men had been hospitalized but were expected to recover.

It is likely that part of the boat’s equipment for dredging caught on something, causing the vessel to overturn, the chief said. There was no mayday call and no time to put on life jackets.

“They didn’t have much time left,” Murphy said.

In a phone interview from a hospital Friday, Joe Roderick, one of the crew members who was rescued, said that the boat had started leaning toward its starboard side moments before it capsized.

“I said, ‘This is weird,’” Roderick recalled telling the captain. “As he turned around to walk into the boat, the boat flipped over and threw us all right in the water. It happened so fast.”

Roderick, 50, a father of four from New Bedford, Massachusetts, who has been fishing since he was 18, said that he began to weigh his mortality.

“I was thinking about my children,” he said. “In my imagination, I was never going to make it home. It was ice-cold water out. It was terrifying.”

Roderick said that his chest was sore from treading water. His sinuses felt “like somebody went up there with a wire brush” from ingesting diesel fuel, he said, adding that his cellphone, wallet and driver’s license went down with the boat.

But Roderick, who works as a scallop fisherman at other times during the year, said he expected to be released from the hospital Friday. He said that he eventually hoped to connect with Harght to thank her.

“She saved our lives,” he said. “If it wasn’t for her calling, nobody would have found us and nobody would have known.”

Bing Bing Corp., which is part of Intershell International Corp., a seafood processing and distribution business based in Gloucester, Massachusetts, owns the boat, according to U.S. Coast Guard records.

Monte Rome, the owner of Intershell International, said Friday that it was serendipitous that Harght had been watching and that the hose acted as a float.

Harght said it was also serendipitous that she had not stepped away to go to the bathroom or make lunch. Harght said she might have missed the boat, but there was a gap of empty lots along the shore that gave her a clear sightline.

She said that she was glad that she did not buy a large computer screen to augment her laptop — that might have blocked the view.