He had the least experience fishing of the four-man crew. It was four years of part-time fishing but no prawn fishing experience. And it was prawns the 40-foot Canadian boat Diane Louise was after on the morning of June 2, 2014. He was attaching traps to the free-running groundline when he was tangled up in the line and went overboard.

Someone tried to deploy a lifebuoy, but it got tangled in the railing. It might have saved him. He was at the surface for a while and then went under. When they hauled the line back, they hauled him up. Try though they did, there wasn’t anything to be done for him. He became one of the 44 percent of Canadian fishermen who have died since 2004 and weren’t wearing a PFD.

Would a PFD have saved him? Perhaps, because he was treading water for a period of time, and as the Canadian accident report states, “a PFD would have assisted him to stay afloat while he attempted to free himself.”

It’s not as if he didn’t have an idea of what might happen if he wasn’t extremely careful — and perhaps a bit lucky. When he was just learning how to snap traps onto the groundline, the groundline snarled up and almost wrapped around his hand, nearly entangling him.

Of course, he wasn’t surrounded by good examples. None of the crew wore a PFD when fishing, and at the time of the accident there were no PFDs aboard the boat. That’s despite the fact that Canada’s Pacific Prawn Fishermen’s Association put out a best practices document that included “remember to wear a PFD on the working deck.”

What I don’t understand is why fishermen don’t wear PFDs. After all, in this country none of the 191 fishermen who have died between 2000 and 2013 was wearing a PFD.

I would like a fisherman to give me a good, rational, logical argument for not wearing a PFD. (Don’t forget, NIOSH has shown that PFDs work in several fisheries.) But go ahead, try to convince me that not wearing a PFD is, in fact, an intelligent way to go about working on deck.

In the meantime, you can read the Diane Louise incident yourself.