Man on the Ice (2 page)

THE FINAL WINTER WE
lived in Main Brook, Dad built a 35-foot
longliner. His sawmill was located close to the water, where he sawed all of the
planks and timbers. Herb was two years older than me. He helped Dad quite a bit
with sawing the boat planks, but I did my best to help when I was allowed to
come around. He had finished building the boat near the mill, and the first
coastal boat that came into town in the spring was carrying Dad’s new motor,
a 33-HP Kelvin diesel. The boat was tied up at the government wharf beside
Dad’s 20-foot motorboat, containing a 4-HP Acadia make-and-break
engine. It wasn’t fast, but it got the job done.

The coastal boat lowered the Kelvin diesel down into the engine room of the
Miss St. Lunaire
, named after our new hometown. All that was left to
do was couple the motor to the shaft, and connect the fuel lines and battery.
Then she’d be ready to go. We loaded everything aboard the
Miss St.
Lunaire
: dogs, hens, lumber for a new stage, wharf sticks, even the
sawmill house. Everything we owned went aboard the longliner, with the exception
of our home, which we had already sold. Our family headed to St. Lunaire and
arrived there seven or eight hours later. We off-loaded our boat and began to
build a stage and wharf. We settled in and began fishing for the summer.

After a couple of summers, we would go to Labrador. We would travel in the
Miss St. Lunaire
and fish ashore. Dad had a small house in Indian
Tickle, Labrador, about four miles or so south of Cartwright. It was a small
fishing town of ten or twelve families: the Burdetts from Cartwright, and the
Slades, Fitzgeralds, and Penneys, from Conception Bay. From Main Brook were: our
family, Saunders, Powells, Roses, and Ollerheads. It was a good place for fish
and salmon. The Earle brothers from Carbonear had a place at Frenchman’s Island
where they used to collect salmon and bring salt and gas, and whatever else was
needed. In the
fall of the year, the schooner would come and take
the salt fish. Then it was aboard the
Miss St. Lunaire
and back to our
hometown for the winter.

There wasn’t much to do around St. Lunaire. Back then there weren’t any roads,
and very little electricity, only kerosene oil lamps and gas lanterns. The only
electric lights in town provided Mr. Fred Bussey’s small plant and four or five
houses. He was the only merchant in town.

Mr. Bussey owned his own wharf and large fish stores. These stores were storage
places for the fish and would be filled to the rafters, as he would purchase all
of the dried codfish brought in by the schooners. He would hire all of us young
men, and with hand barrows and wheelbarrows we would take the fish from the
stores to the schooners. We would dump large loads of fish down the hold, and
another crowd would be there, packaging the fish. I don’t know how many quintals
of fish went aboard those big old schooners, but it was a lot of fish. I remember
some of the names of those schooners: the
Norma & Gladys
, the
Gull Pond
, the
Mile R
, the
Jenny and Elizabeth,
and the
Dingo
.

When I was twenty-one years old, I met the love of my life, Irene Earle, the
only daughter of Harvey and Levenia Earle. Together we have five children. Denley
was our oldest, then Trudy, our only daughter, followed by Derrick, Darryl, and
Corrie.

In 1964, I bought my own fishing room from Mr. Jack Penney of
Carbonear. I had my very own fishing place with a stage, a small house, and
a 22-foot motorboat containing a 5-HP Acadia make-and-break engine. It was only
a short distance from my dad’s place. Ralph Humby was my first shareman. Between
the two of us we had six gillnets, two salmon nets, and of course an
old-fashioned cod jigger. We didn’t have to travel very far to get to the fishing
grounds, and we did quite well. We fished around the Wolf Islands and the Ferret
Islands. We didn’t know anything about gurdies then, so we hauled all of our
gillnets by hand.

One morning, when we were hauling our gillnets, we had a problem with making
the boat go; the nets seemed quite heavy. We didn’t realize what was happening
at first, but it didn’t take long to discover a big old ground shark coming right
up by the side of our boat. We tried to get his tail out of the water so he
wouldn’t be able to swim, but that didn’t work. He was slamming himself up
against the side of our boat, making it difficult for us to keep it under
control. Finally, we managed to get the nets tied to the rise ends of the boat.
I grabbed a twelve-gauge shotgun and put a couple of loads of shot right in his
head. That fixed him! We weren’t able to clear him out of the net, so we had to
tow him along with us.

Once we reached the beach by our wharf where the
water was low,
we cleared him of the gillnets and learned he had destroyed only two of them.
Not bad for a fourteen-foot shark! When the water was high, we towed him back
out off the beach and into the harbour with our motorboat, where he sank. The
children in town wanted us to leave him on the beach. They thought it was great
fun crawling up on the old shark’s back.

September came and we got aboard the coastal boat and returned to St. Lunaire
for the winter. Then it was into the woods to begin cutting firewood for the cold
winter ahead. Over the course of the next few years, John Hedderson and Nelson
Humby came fishing with me. When we reached Indian Tickle, the first thing we had
to do was head to Table Bay, about sixteen miles or so toward Cartwright, and
gather some firewood and sticks for our wharf. Fishing was very good. My sharemen
were really great young men, and didn’t mind hard work. However, it didn’t last
long.

The summer of 1968 was a complete failure. There weren’t any fish in Indian
Tickle that year. That September, I put my wife and children aboard the coastal
boat. The coastal boat was full, carrying boats from fishermen farther north who
were returning home after a bad summer. Two of my sharemen, John Nelson and Fred
Burden, and I steamed our boats, along with Clem Burden. Fred had a tarp over
the front of his boat, allowing just enough room for us to lie
down. We left Indian Tickle and steamed until dark had almost fallen, when we
came to a nice place, tossed a grapple out, and moored up for the night. The
next morning was flat calm, not a motion on the water, but it was pitch-black
with fog. We decided to travel in it anyway.

We came upon a small, orange gillnet float labelled “10 Russell.” We figured we
must have been around William’s Harbour, because we knew there were Russells in
William’s Harbour. We travelled for another couple of hours and came upon
another float with the same label. We weren’t sure what to do, as we knew Mr.
Russell wouldn’t have labelled the same number on both ends of his gillnet. He
would have made a distinction with “10 A” and “10 B.” We decided to go, based on
our compass, even though it was off by a couple of degrees.

Darkness began to fall again and we were getting a little worried. By and by,
we came across a small, grassy island and assumed we were in some sort of bay.
We tied our boats together, tossed a grapple, and settled for the night. We had
a cup of tea and something to eat as we laughed and told stories until we fell
asleep. At some point in the night, I think it was Clem Burden who awoke and
looked outside the tarp covering the boat. He yelled, “The fog is all gone and
there is a big red light in there on a pool.” We got up
and
discovered we were anchored beside the grassy rock right in the tickle going
into Battle Harbour.

We hauled in the grapple, started up the old six Acadia, and went into Battle
Harbour. We rested for the rest of the night, and made a phone call home to our
families to let them know where we were and when we would be arriving home. We
left and went up the coast, heading toward Red Bay, and came across the Strait.
We weren’t steaming long before we saw Cape Bauld coming out of the water. The
closer we got, the bigger the cape appeared, and before we knew it we had
arrived back in St. Lunaire, safe and sound.

The following summer, I heard of work in Goose Bay, Labrador. I hauled up my
boat, and on the twelfth of September, 1969, I went to Goose Bay with the intent
to work for a woods company known as Javelin. When I walked into the office, I
was told they were only hiring men from places where woods work was ongoing,
like Roddickton and Main Brook, places like those.

Mr. Herb Brett was doing a renovation job on a large building up in Spruce
Park. It was a place belonging to the Canadian Armed Forces, and it was being
turned into a mini-mall. So, I worked there for the winter. In November, I got
an apartment on K Street. Mr. Bill Brown was the landlord. It had two bedrooms
and we had four children, with another one on the way. That following year,
Irene
gave birth in Happy Valley to our fifth child, Corrie. Now
we had four boys and one girl. At six months of age, Darryl became very ill and
was diagnosed with meningitis. This illness caused severe brain damage. We
definitely experienced some hard times, and we still do, now that he is forty
years old, but as all parents who love their children, he is ours and he belongs
at home with us.

The woods operation had closed down when the snow got to be too much and had
made for difficult working conditions. It reopened in May. The next time I went
to the woods office, I was from Main Brook and I had no problem getting hired as
a woodcutter. I became a skidder operator a few weeks later. Stan Hodder was my
woods foreman and he was a very nice fellow to work for. The company had changed
its name from Javelin to Melville Pulp and Paper.

I had good men working for me as woodcutters. Jim Saunders and Roy Patey could
get around in the woods quite well. They were only young, but they were very
strong men, and nice young fellows. Harold Adams was another good woodcutter.
Our foreman, Stan Hodder, wanted a clean cutover, without a tree left standing.
One morning he came into the woods where we were working. We had a small point
of woods left. I recall Stan looking around, and he said, “Now b’ys, you got to
go back and cut that.”

I told him there were three or four bird nests there.
We weren’t
allowed to cut them down because the wildlife people would be very upset if we
rid the woods of those poor robins’ nests.

He replied, “You got away with another one, didn’t ya!”

There really weren’t any bird nests. The wood left was small and we only wanted
to cut the really good wood. We could make almost as much money on a bonus as we
did with our regular wages, so we wanted to stay in good wood as much as we
could.

I had a fellow from Hawke’s Bay, or somewhere near there, cutting for me for a
few days. His name was Ron Payne and he liked to drink on the weekends. One
Monday morning Ron came to work. He’d had a few drinks the night before, and of
course he was feeling a bit sick. Stan said to him, “Ron, if you comes to work
one more morning after drinkin’ all night, I’m gonna fire you.”

He was okay for a short while, but Ron got on the beer again. He used to drink
India Pale Ale, and on this one particular morning, Ron got off the bus in camp
and saw Stan standing there. He looked at Stan and said, “Hello Stan, IPA last
night, and I s’pose it’s gonna be EPA (Eastern Provincial Airways) tonight.” Ron
thought he was fired for sure, but Stan only smiled and went on his way. Ron was
a good woodcutter, so Stan let him off the hook again.

The woods operation had three different names in the
nine years
they were in Goose Bay. They started as Javelin, then changed the name to
Melville Pulp and Paper, and prior to their closing it was known as Labrador
Linerboard. When the Linerboard operations closed, a fellow by the name of Van
Beek started buying wood, but the union forced him out. He didn’t want to have
anything to do with the union, so he shut down the company. Most of the people
who had worked in the woods had nothing left to do, so they moved out and found
work elsewhere.

In 1977, the first coastal boat that came to Goose Bay arrived in June. My
family and I loaded everything we owned aboard, headed to the airport, and flew
into St. Anthony, Newfoundland. When the boat arrived, we got all of our
belongings, and I opened a small sawmill in St. Lunaire. However, that didn’t
work out well, so we decided to move to Dryden, Ontario, in September, 1979. I
got a job as a skidder operator and my family and I moved into an apartment.
After three years, the company I was working for went to piecework and closed
down its camps.

So, again, we moved. We loaded everything we owned into our truck and trailer
and headed home to St. Lunaire. My brothers Sher, Herb, and Wade, had a 42-foot
longliner called
The Mystic Five
. She was a Cape Islander boat. We fished
cod traps at Belle Isle and gillnets around Englee, Cook’s Harbour, and at
places in Labrador, including
Indian Tickle, Black Tickle, and
Domino. It was good fishing with my brothers, but my boys were old enough now to
go fishing with me, so I decided to have a 35-foot longliner built by my uncle,
Ernest Rogers, from Trinity Bay. It was a nice little boat. I named her the
Trudy Irene
, after my daughter and wife
.

On May 3, 1984, we went to Trinity, Trinity Bay, to steam our boat home. There
was a lot of ice and snow around. We got as far as Tilt Cove when we decided to
tie up the
Trudy Irene
to the old wharf there. The wharf wasn’t in great
condition, as it hadn’t been used in a long time. Tilt Cove was once a thriving
town with a copper mine and some gold, but it had closed down many years prior.
I think we were there for four or five days and nights before the ice finally
slacked. The wind came western and moved the ice offshore just enough for us to
get around Cape John and into La Scie, where we spent another few days.