The Deadly Sea

by Jim Wellman

  “But all of a sudden I noticed that some boats were leaving Mooring Cove and coming across the Arm, and I looked at the cop and said, ‘Hang on a minute, there’s a couple of boats headed this way, and they wouldn’t be doing that unless there’s something going on.’”

  Sure enough, he was right—there was a new development and it was not good news. Wes’s father-in-law, Azariah King, arrived at the wharf in his thirty-five-foot longliner and announced that they had found Willis’s body. He later explained that searchers were scouring the waters off Mooring Cove Point when someone saw something yellow on the bottom, about seven or eight feet underwater. It was Willis in his yellow rubber clothes in a kneeling position. It looked as if he had been trying to crawl along the rocky ledge to the surface but couldn’t make it. One of the men lowered a cod jigger and retrieved the body.

  During the course of getting the update from Azariah, the police officer asked Wes if he thought they should go and search for Hedley.

  “I looked out and saw all the boats coming toward us, and I knew then that they had found Hedley,” Wes says. “I looked at the officer and told him that no, there would be no need for us to look for Hedley because they have him—the men in those boats would not all be coming home otherwise.”

  A few minutes later, the first of the boats arrived with the sad news that they had indeed found Hedley’s body in Mooring Cove, half in the water and half on the beach. An empty gas tank was also found nearby.

  Meanwhile, eleven-year-old Dennis Drover was struggling with how to deal with everything that Christmas morning.

  “I got up and there were people everywhere. I still had that sick feeling from the night before and could hear some of what they were saying and I couldn’t stand it. I just had to get away from there. So, I took my skates and hockey stick and left and went to one of my friends’, but his house was up on a bank that overlooked the harbour where you could see everything going on down there and I didn’t want to see that, so I went to another friend’s place. My friend’s mom told me to come in and that she’d get me some breakfast. Later, my friend’s father said he’d go and see if there was any news. A little while later, he came back and took my friend and me to a back room in the house where he sat me down and he told me they had found my father’s body.”

  Dennis still gets overwhelmed with emotion when he remembers that day. Sitting alongside his wife, Allison, in the Navigator office in July 2013, it was difficult for him to talk about it. Composing himself as much as he could, he talked about his reaction after being told on Christmas Day that his dad was dead.

  Mooring Cove, Southwest Arm, the location where both bodies were found

  “I don’t know what I was thinking, to be honest, but I had to do something. I remember taking my hockey stuff and skates and I went in on the pond and played hockey until I finally realized that I had to go home.”

  After that, many of the hours and even days are somewhat blurred for Dennis. He knew he couldn’t bring himself to go to the funeral. He withdrew into his own personal space for some time. In fact, that withdrawal has lasted, to some extent, for years.

  Dennis was just one of many Hodges Cove people who had to deal with a broken heart that Christmas. The Drover and Thomas families included dozens of immediate family members—children, siblings, parents, cousins. And of course, as in all small rural Newfoundland and Labrador communities, neighbours and friends were, more or less, extended family.

  Willis Thomas’s brother Doug was working in Labrador City that year, as were several members of both the Thomas and Drover families. Their relatives back home on the island decided to keep the news that Hedley and Willis were missing away from them at first. After all, it was Christmas Eve and everyone thought there would be a good chance to find both missing men alive and well on Christmas Day, so there was no need to get everyone who was away from home upset on this special day. But there was no way to hide the awful truth once Christmas Day came.

  “I was home on Christmas Day,” says Doug, who is a few years older than his brother Willis. “We had children who were doing the usual stuff that children do when they have new presents and so on, and sometime in the afternoon I saw the clergyman’s car coming in the driveway, and of course you know when you see the minister coming to your door like that, it usually means something is wrong.”

  Back in Hodges Cove, Wes Peddle says, the community looked and felt like it died, too. “There was no life, no nothing. The funeral went as well as could be expected, I suppose, but it was like everyone was just going through the motions. Nobody turned on any Christmas lights—it was literally a black Christmas,” Wes says, staring at the floor.

  “But then, about six days into Christmas, Uncle Cyril, Willis’s father, called me and said ‘Wes, can you do something for me?’ ‘Sure, Uncle Cyril,’ I said, ‘anything.’ ‘How about turning on your Christmas lights? Willis would want that, especially for the children.’”

  Wes flicked a light switch and turned on his Christmas lights. A few minutes later, another house was lit, and then another and another, until soon Hodges Cove looked like it had suddenly started breathing again.

  When fishermen and others from small rural communities die young and suddenly, families are often left with severe hardship. Long after the normal grieving period passes, mere survival for many families is extremely difficult. In the Hodges Cove tragedy, Willis Thomas left his mom and dad, along with six siblings, but he also left behind his common-law wife, Lorraine Pitcher, who was expecting their child the following spring. How would she cope? Hedley Drover left his wife and nine children, several of whom were still living at home. Without employment to provide an income, his widow, Beulah, faced a very scary future.

  In June 1977, Lorraine gave birth to a beautiful daughter. Without Willis in her life, Lorraine, who was still a very young woman, was overwhelmed by the thoughts of raising a child on her own. Willis’s brother Ron and his wife offered to adopt Lori, the baby, which everyone agreed was a wonderful idea. That way the child would grow up in a good home and still be in the Thomas family. Now in her thirties, Lori is also a mom, living in Labrador City.

  Beulah Drover was also distraught and overwhelmed facing an uncertain future without her husband. In a state of high anxiety, worried about coping, Beulah accepted her son Carson’s invitation to spend the winter with him and his wife in Labrador City. Within a couple of weeks after Hedley’s death, Beulah, along with her four youngest children—Dennis, Roxanne, Lisa, and Roger—packed their bags and headed north.

  After living with Carson for a while, Beulah found a house of her own in Labrador City and moved in with the children.

  For eleven-year-old Dennis Drover, the loss of his dad on Christmas Day and then suddenly being uprooted and separated from his Hodges Cove friends was extremely traumatic. At such an impressionable age, he wasn’t sure how to deal with it all. For years he compartmentalized his fears, his sadness, and confusion by locking them away and kept everything inside. While it might have seemed to others that Dennis had moved on psychologically, he knew that, in fact, he had not even come close to finding closure. He might have stopped talking about the accident, but he certainly hadn’t stopped thinking about it. That’s why, in 2006, in conversation with Willis Thomas’s brother Doug, Dennis mentioned an idea that he’d been carrying in his mind for years. He suggested establishing a memorial at the site where his dad and Willis died. Doug instantly knew it was a great idea and both men shared their thoughts on what to do next.

  Dennis Drover shows the tattoo of a green BIC lighter,

  a symbol of the memory of his dad.

  “We both drew sketches of an anchor, without the other knowing what we had done,” Dennis says. So, with the basic concept determined, Doug, an excellent welder and handyman, along with his cousin and good friend Ray Stringer, started working on a steel anchor monument whil
e the Drover and Thomas family members discussed the wording that would be engraved on it.

  In the summer of 2007, both families invited everyone in Hodges Cove and area to join them for the unveiling. Dozens of people came, and for Dennis Drover a sense of closure was finally starting to seep in. He unlocked that secret compartment in his mind and began talking to everyone about his private suffering. After all those silent years, Dennis’s emotions still overwhelm him, but now he wants to talk about the tragedy and he’s grown to understand and accept that his overt expressions of emotions and tears are all part of the healing process.

  Also part of Dennis Drover’s healing is a touching story about a small BIC lighter. “The only gift I ever gave my father that I paid for with my own money was a green BIC lighter—it was a Father’s Day gift when I was very young,” Dennis explains.

  Monument erected in memory of Hedley Drover and Willis Thomas at the site of the accident

  As fate would have it, shortly before the monument unveiling, Dennis was walking along the beach of Mooring Cove one day very close to the spot where his dad’s body was found. It was one of those solemn times when he was reflecting on everything that had transpired since Christmas 1976, and especially the events of the last few days preparing for the unveiling of a memorial. Although he was lost in deep contemplation, his quiet thoughts suddenly vanished when he saw something that brought tears to his eyes and goosebumps on his flesh. There, lying on the beach, was a green BIC lighter. Picking it up, Dennis knew that it was not likely to be the same lighter that he had given his dad on Father’s Day more than thirty years ago, but still, it seemed to Dennis that his father, Hedley, was there on the beach with him that day and was sending a sign from beyond the grave that he approved of what his son was doing. Dennis kept the little green lighter and, as an expression of how much that incident meant to him, Dennis now has a tattoo inked on his right leg with the image of the BIC along with the larger image of the anchor and monument.

  The sudden loss of loved ones is never easy for families left behind, and undoubtedly there is an added dimension of sorrow when that loss occurs over Christmas. But the Thomases and Drovers of Hodges Cove have found a way to get by, and since the installation of the monument-memorial in 2007, both families have committed to coming home and gathering at the site every five years. The first reunion was in 2012 and plans are already under way for the next one in 2017.

  Both families were drawn together in their common bond of sorrow, and the monument has become the focal point of sharing their memories and fostering even stronger family ties.

  Chapter 10

  Ronnie from River John

  Is Ronnie Heighton a fisherman who is also a volunteer or is Ronnie Heighton a volunteer who happens to be a fisherman?

  Well, unlike the popular television commercial, this is not a trick question. Ronnie is both, but his volunteerism occupies more time than his fishing these days.

  The veteran fisherman is from River John, Nova Scotia, a picturesque little town on the Sunrise Trail overlooking the Northumberland Strait about twenty miles west of Pictou.

  Ronnie is well-known to just about everyone in the fishing industry in Atlantic Canada. As vice-president of the Canadian Council of Professional Fish Harvesters, he is a regular fixture in the Association’s booth at trade shows everywhere. He attends nearly all fisheries conferences in Atlantic Canada as well as others across the country. You can count on Ronnie to make his views known on just about any debate concerning fisheries matters. He is passionate about the industry and is always willing to share his opinion but is not belligerent. He takes the high road and is always respectful of the opinion of others.

  I usually chat with Ronnie at fisheries trade shows in the Maritimes, and I was delighted to learn that he was inducted into Navigator/Master Promotions’ Atlantic Canada Marine Industries Hall of Fame at the Eastern Canadian Fisheries Expo in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, in February 2013. It was there that I managed to sit down with Ronnie for a chat just minutes before his induction.

  Ronnie collected his first old-age security cheque last year, but he says retirement is not on his horizon in the foreseeable future—either from fishing or from his volunteer responsibilities.

  “I don’t have any hobbies as such and I don’t golf because golfers take the game far too seriously for my liking,” he laughs.

  When we talked about years gone by, Ronnie says everything is different now. On the fishing side of his life, he says he and most fellow fishermen in Northumberland Strait were “groundfish dependent,” but with the collapse of the cod fishery in the early 1990s, they were forced to switch to scallop, herring, and lobster as their principal species. Earnings have not kept pace with rising expenses in running an enterprise and, like everyone else, Ronnie had to fish harder, longer, and with more gear to make a living until government restrictions and decreasing quotas made it almost impossible to make a decent living.

  Ronnie Heighton accepts his Atlantic Canada Hall of Fame Mariner Award from Trevor Decker, a TriNav and Navigator Director.

  Things are more difficult in his volunteer activities, too. Besides being VP with the Canadian Professional Fish Harvesters, Ronnie is the longest-serving president of the Northumberland Fishermen’s Association. He is a board member of the Eastern Fishermen’s Federation (EFF), a board member of the Nova Scotia Fisheries Sector Council, and also a board member with his local Harbour Authority. For a little variety, he’s also served on the heritage and museum committees in his region.

  “I like working with people, I like meeting new people, and for some reason, if something is not moving, or moving too slowly, I seem to get drawn to it and try to get it moving again,” he says.

  Ronnie says he has been privileged to have travelled and met interesting people as part of his volunteer work.

  “I will never forget some of them. For example, I was in BC at a conference and this man who was Grand Chief of the First Nations groups in the region—he was eighty-six at the time but he had jet-black hair and looked years younger than his age—he spoke at the conference and for two solid hours had everyone’s full attention. He was the most entertaining and informative speaker I have ever heard. No one in the audience wanted him to stop. His wisdom was amazing.”

  Obviously, a lot of his work with fisheries-related organizations means that Ronnie has to deal with government bureaucracies at all levels.

  “And that’s where the big change has been in recent years,” he says.

  Ronnie explains how, years ago, he could arrange a meeting with a middle-management person with the provincial government, and, at the end of the conversation, they had reached a firm decision on a course of action to follow and that would be it. Today, he says, bureaucrats can’t make decisions. Everything gets passed on to another office, another level, until it reaches the federal level, and even then there is no solution. Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) in Ottawa doesn’t seem to want to make decisions anymore, he says.

  “Almost everything is passed on to the Prime Minister’s Office, and of course that’s where it turns political and goes all out of whack,” Ronnie states, adding that the bureaucracy constantly behaves as if the Prime Minister is going to call an election the next day, and so everything stagnates on the back burner.

  “And of course all the cutbacks don’t help, either,” he says. “It looks to me that top managers don’t want to cut people, opting instead to cut programs—and that makes it very hard to get things done, and it’s very frustrating at times for people like us.”

  Ronnie smiles when he talks about River John. He was born there sixty-six years ago and his roots are deep.

  “It was a wonderful place to grow up—there was never any crime and it’s still more or less the same that way today,” he says.

  Unlike many rural communities, River John still has the same population as it had y
ears ago, but Ronnie isn’t sure how much longer that will last.

  “We have a few new people coming to live there each year. Some are retiring from jobs in Ontario or out west and coming back home to enjoy their retirement, and we also have a few people settling there who just want a simpler lifestyle.”

  However, the fishing industry is no longer the employer that it once was, and it’s getting hard to find people to work in fish plants anymore. Some plants even have to bring in workers from foreign countries.

  “A plant in our area has a workforce of people from Thailand, and I’m afraid that pretty soon it’s going to be the same in boats,” Ronnie explains.

  He doesn’t blame young people for leaving when they can only expect a few weeks’ work a year.

  “Our lobster fishery is only about nine weeks and herring is less, about three or four weeks’ work, and changes in the EI system are not adequate anymore [for survival], so our young people are going west where the jobs are year-round and the money is good, so I can see the day when we might have to hire foreign labour for our boats, too.”

  People who give of themselves through volunteering and spend countless days and weeks away from home struggling to help their industries are also getting harder to find. In fact, I caught up with Ronnie for our interview while he was on the road, and when I called him with a question just before going to print, he was in an airport on the way to a conference in Montreal. We all should be thankful for dedicated people like Ronnie Heighton.

  Chapter 11

  Lady Luck Elusive for Springdale Skipper

  It’s impossible to label Bon Pelley in a word or two. “Boat designer” comes to mind; businessman, too. There’s also mechanic, fishing skipper, entrepreneur, and raconteur.