Man on the Ice (4 page)

We waited a couple of days. Our speedboat that we had in tow was okay. We
always stored the motor on board the
Trudy Irene
in case something like
this were to happen. We saw the same thing happen to a longliner before. They
lost everything—boat, motor, and all—but we were okay. Mrs. Roderick Cull, God
love her, kept us going with the big lemon pies she baked and gave to her
husband to take aboard our boat for us. Thank you, Mrs. Cull.

One of the boats took us in tow to St. Lunaire. We
put our
longliner ashore on a sandy beach by our house in Joe’s Cove at high tide. When
low tide came we put on our long rubbers and walked around the
Trudy
Irene
, and soon we learned what had happened. Somehow, the brass key
that keeps the blades from going around the shaft had worn down smooth with the
shaft. There wasn’t enough left to hold the blades tight. We had to take off the
blades and replace the brass key, then reassemble everything again. The tide
came in and the
Trudy Irene
was afloat. She was all ready to go back to
Belle Isle. We went and got our cod traps on board and came back home to put
them away for the winter. With our gillnets aboard, we left for the
Labrador.

WE FISHED EVERYWHERE FROM Twillingate to Port Saunders, Belle Isle to
Labrador’s Indian Tickle, Black Tickle, and Domino. In the fall of 1985, we had
some nets on deck and several in the hold of our boat. My boys and I reached
Indian Tickle just before dark. The wind started to blow from the northeast and
we couldn’t get the anchor to hold. We had to travel up to a small area called
Fox Bight, where we tossed out our anchor.

We were having a cup of tea while the motor was still
running. I
opened up the hatch to the engine room and all I could see was smoke. I tried to
get down to take a look, but the smoke was too thick. We extinguished the fire
and sprayed all over the engine, but it only took a minute or so and everything
was on fire again. The fuel tanks were down in the engine room, a 50-litre tank
on either side of the engine. We had our speedboat in tow, so my two sons,
Denley and Derrick, along with my shareman, Lloyd Burden, and I left the boat in
fear of the tanks exploding, and we headed to Indian Tickle. We lost everything,
including our nets. We had planned to set them the next morning once the storm
had passed.

Job and Rosetta Sainsbury from Cartwright were fishing in Indian Tickle. They
took us in until the coastal boat came in from farther up north to take us back
to St. Anthony. My wife was waiting on the wharf to take us home to St. Lunaire
again. If it wasn’t for Job and Rosetta, I don’t know what we would have done.
They fed us and made room for us in their small summer home. People like that
don’t get forgotten very easily.

My wife, Irene, was on the wharf waiting for us. When the boat had docked,
there were my two sons, Denley and Derrick, our shareman Lloyd Burden, and
myself. We had nothing but the clothes on our backs, and I don’t remember the
captain’s name. We were all treated quite well during
our journey
back home. At some point during the night one of the mates came to us and
invited us to have breakfast with the captain. He must have known our boat was
burning, because he wasn’t supposed to call in at Indian Tickle that particular
trip. But the captain and his crew came in to pick us up and take us back to St.
Anthony. At first I was hesitant to sit and eat with a man, a captain, rather, of
such a large ship as the one owned by the Canadian National Railway. I felt too
small, too unworthy to eat with someone of his authority. However, we did have a
great meal. I wish I had kept a record of all of that, the name of the coastal
boat and the captain’s name, but it’s too late for that now. Denley and Derrick
must have enjoyed the company, as they talked about dining with the captain for
some time after.

We arrived home safe and sound, but there was no rest for the weary. We had
just a 20-foot speedboat, with a 40-HP Mariner outboard motor, and a few
gillnets. We didn’t have a gurdy to haul in the nets, and hauling in gillnets in
twenty to thirty fathoms of water by hand is not easy. We did get it done,
though, and managed to make enough money to qualify for EI and get us through
the winter.

The following spring, we bought a 45-foot longliner called the
Sherman
Elaine
from Mr. John Short of Cook’s Harbour. He had bought himself a
newer and larger boat, so he sold us the older one at a very good price,
somewhere
around $7,000 if I remember correctly. We finished
fishing at Belle Isle in the straits, and gillnetted at Cook’s Harbour. We had
some issues getting our larger boat registered with the Department of Fisheries
and Oceans (DFO), since we were only permitted up to a 34’11” boat. DFO didn’t
like the idea of us going to a 45-footer.

Shortly after, I was called to an appeals board meeting in St. Anthony, where
officers from across Atlantic Canada came to hear the stories first-hand from the
local fishermen struggling with some of the rules laid out by DFO. I told them
about the recent loss of my 34’11” boat, the
Trudy Irene
.

“She was only two years old and we lost everything. We had gillnets and enough
insurance to cover what was owed on her to the Fisheries Loans Board. All we
were left with was the clothes we were wearing.”

They must have felt sorry for us, because they approved the registry for
our 45-foot
Sherman Elaine
.

Fishing was not easy. Most often we would face some sort of trouble while
fishing cod traps at Belle Isle. One time, we were on our way home to St. Lunaire
with a full load of fish iced in the hold, when all of a sudden the motor stopped
running. I thought it strange, because she was working so well up to that. I
went to the back and opened up the hatch to the fuel tanks and the rudder
steering. I
got down, and right away I knew it was a fuel
problem. I could smell the fumes and I could see that there had been quite a bit
of fuel and water down there. The fuel line had somehow broken and the boat had
started to leak, so gas was mixing with water.

It was eleven-thirty at night and the wind was blowing quite hard from the
west. The batteries were getting low and we had trouble keeping the pump going.
There were no other boats in sight and we only had a CB radio rather than a VHF,
so we couldn’t call the Coast Guard Radio Station in St. Anthony. We knew the
boat would sink as soon as the battery was dead and the pump could no longer
function. Our lifeboat, an old dory, would never stand up to the rough waters
and heavy winds, and being three miles from the nearest land, we knew we would
never be able to row ashore. We were supposed to be within viewing range of my
house on shore, but when my wife Irene peered out, she couldn’t see us.

She went out to my pickup truck where I had a CB radio. Just as she flicked the
“On” switch, she heard the sound of Derrick’s voice. It was enough for her to
know that we were in some kind of trouble. Denley and I were trying our best to
prevent more water from getting in the boat. Irene called Mr. Harvey Compton, a
Fisheries officer with DFO. He happened to have a friend and fellow DFO
officer visiting with his family for the night. Harvey had a
small Fisheries boat for patrolling the small fishing towns from St. Anthony to
Cook’s Harbour. Both Harvey and his fellow DFO officer headed out for our
rescue.

Meanwhile, Irene had called a local fisherman, Mr. Ross Peyton, who owned an
under-35-foot longliner called the
White Coat
. It didn’t take long for
them to reach us. I’m not sure if it was Harvey or Ross who gave us the battery
to run the pump, but we were taken in tow by Ross and the
White Coat
, and
soon we were safe and sound in the port of St. Lunaire. The fish was taken off
and trucked to the St. Anthony fish plant, known then as Fishery Products Ltd. We
worked through the night, off-loading the
Sherman Elaine
, which
contained 25,000 pounds of codfish.

We went home to rest and get ready to go back to Belle Isle and tend to our cod
traps again. The phone rang, and my wife answered. It was for me. As I listened
to the voice on the other end, I could feel a lump swell in my throat. “This is
Fishery Products calling. We’re sorry to tell you we had to dump your fish. We
smelled diesel fuel on it.” Boy oh boy, that was bad.

There was no use crying over spilled milk, so with our fuel lines repaired, we
went back to Belle Isle and everything went well. We got our boat moored up at
Belle Isle and went out in our speedboat to our cod traps. By
this time, the fish were starting to move offshore from the rocks and shoal
water. We stayed for two or three days and only got about 10,000 pounds of fish.
We came back to St. Lunaire and sold our catch. And then I received another
phone call. This time they said it was “blackberry” fish, not good for fresh
frozen fish, but they could split and salt it, which was fine, except the price
was much lower. So, back to Belle Isle we went. This time we took our cod trap
aboard the
Sherman Elaine
, returned home, and stored it away. With our
recent luck, we decided to head to the Labrador around Black Tickle with our
gillnets. The fish weren’t plentiful, but we made a very good summer out of it,
especially considering all the trouble we’d had thus far. At the end of the
season, we returned home and made our way to Flower’s Cove, where we put our
boat on the slip, storing it away for the winter. Denley, Derrick, and I spent
the next few wintery months in the woods to get firewood for our three homes.
That’s a lot of wood, about fifteen truckloads each, to be exact. Plus a few logs
to be sawed into lumber for our fish store.

Spring came quickly and we went to Flower’s Cove to do some work on the
Sherman Elaine
. We had to get her ready for the summer fishery and
have her inspected because of her large size. The inspector came and turned her
down. We weren’t allowed to put her in the water if we
didn’t do
more work on her, and we decided it wouldn’t be worth the trouble, so we
scrapped her there on the marine centre in Flower’s Cove. We sold the motor and
anything else of value. Denley left for Toronto to work for the summer.

We had no trouble getting aboard another longliner. Derrick and I went with
Alonzo Hedderson and his crew— Tony Blake, Whyman Blake, and Carl Pynn—aboard
the
Sharon and Kirby
, a 45-foot longliner. We fished our cod traps at
Belle Isle and did very well. We iced the fish in the hold and steamed back to
St. Lunaire, where we sold our catch to Mr. Graham Burden, who would truck it to
Fishery Products Ltd. in St. Anthony.

We then went to Middle Bay on Quebec’s north shore to fish for crab. I had a
crab licence for 50,000 pounds. One day we were hauling our crab pots when I
fell across the hatch of the fish hold and injured my back. I was in so much pain
that I soon found myself being taken to hospital in Long Point, Blanc-Sablon, by
helicopter. I spent a few days in Quebec and was taken to St. Anthony, then on
to St. John’s Health Sciences Centre, where I had back surgery. That was the
third back surgery I underwent.

The boys finished the fishing season without me. I was feeling okay by Christmas
and was anxious to get back at it. We got our wood for the winter, but we still
needed
a boat of our own, so we went to Springdale where we met
Mr. Otto Yates. He had just started to build fibreglass boats and was already
working on several 18- to 20-foot speedboats. He was also beginning to
build 34’11” boats. We contacted the Fisheries Loans Board in St. John’s and
easily had our loan approved, since our insurance had paid our previous loan, in
full, for the
Trudy Irene
. Mr. Yates built us a beautiful 34’11”
all-fibreglass boat with a 135-HP Ford motor. We were very proud to go to
Springdale and steam our new boat, the
Corrie Charmaine
, back to St.
Lunaire.

We had a good spring sealing. I recall our first sealing trip. We had her
loaded, and we were only out for two or three nights and returned to a little
cove in St. Lunaire, just off our wharf. The ice was still in the cove and I
tried to break in so far, to off-load our seals on either side of the boat, and
take them by snowmobile to our truck. I backed off about three or four times the
length of our boat and came in full speed. She ran up on the ice and her stern
went under the water. I thought she was going to sink right there in the cove.
Well, I didn’t try that again! We only got about eight dollars each for the
pelts; however, we got five dollars each for the seal meat. We made enough money
to get started fishing again when the ice cleared away.

We had two great summers on the Labrador and Belle
Isle. We went
to Middle Bay with our crab pots on board and ran into a big storm of westerly
wind and tide. We had a hundred pots, very heavy and piled high on top of one
another. We had to throw the crab pots off in a hurry to keep her from rolling
bottom-up and losing all hands on board. We finished our crab fishing and decided
we would sell our boat and get something a little bigger. We sold the
Corrie
Charmaine
to my Uncle Basil Allingham, my mother’s brother.

We then bought the
Cape Dawn
from my Uncle Horace Allingham, a brother
of my mother. This vessel was a 53-footer, a fine, big boat with a 150-HP
Caterpillar motor. We had lots of room on deck for our crab pots and plenty of
room for our fish to be iced in the hold. I recall one morning steaming to our
crab pots; it was still dark, not yet daylight, and it was rough, with a bit of
westerly wind. I noticed that the
Cape Dawn
was harder to handle. She
seemed to be going down by the head and running off on her side. One of the boys
checked the engine room and reported there was a lot of water down there. I
remember telling someone to check and see if the pump was working. It was
pumping okay, so we then put the bilge pump on, the one that was operated by the
motor, as we didn’t have a pump engine. That seemed to work well and we turned
around to head for home.

We arrived at the fish plant wharf and I contacted the insurance
company, who advised me to put her in on a sandy beach. There was a beach close
by, a beach at high water, known to some as high tide. The insurance company was
sending an adjuster out at low tide, but I discovered the problem before he
arrived. A piece of the garbit plank, about 18 inches long, had come off. The
adjuster told me to nail it back on, put lots of pitch over it, nail a piece of
plywood over it, tie her to the wharf, keep an eye on her for about five or six
hours, then have her towed to Englee.

My brothers had a 45-foot boat called the
Saunders Endeavor
. They built
her themselves next to our house. Sherwin was the skipper and master
boatbuilder. He went to the College of Fisheries and studied a trade on
boatbuilding. Sherwin, Herb, Wade, and Ezra completed the
Saunders
Endeavor
. We moved the
Cape Dawn
to Englee and put her up on the
marine counter, where the insurance adjuster reported that it would cost more to
repair her than she was worth. They paid the Fisheries Loans Board the remainder
owing, and gave the boat back to me to repair myself. I decided to sell her to a
local man from Englee, Mr. Oliver Fillier. He rebuilt and fibreglassed her over.
To this day she is still known as the
Cape Dawn
; however, she is now a
fine 65-foot boat, skippered by Oliver’s son, Stephen, and used to fish crab and
shrimp.