Sea Folk

by Jim Wellman

  She knows the workable life vests won’t save everyone, but it might have saved her husband. At the very least, it would have allowed them to recover his body. She hopes other fishermen hear her story and slip on a life vest.

  “At least they’d have a fighting chance,” she says.

  One of Heather’s watercolour “babies”

  Memory Lapse May Have Saved His Life

  Tom Caines from Rencontre East on Newfoundland’s south coast is a lucky man. You may remember Tom. He was featured in our Final Voyages series several years ago when he rescued his brother Gordon and Gordon’s son Tommy from near-death when their small boat capsized. This time, Tom was the one who needed rescuing.

  The spring of 2010 was one of the coldest on record in Newfoundland. Saturday morning, May 15, was a classic example of the cold weather experienced in Newfoundland that spring, but fishermen can’t choose their weather, especially when it is early in the season and everyone needs to make money after a long winter.

  Tom and his fishing buddy, Arch Sheppard, were up at four o’clock on Saturday morning. It was only about seven or eight degrees Celsius with a northeast wind, but otherwise fair enough to go lobster fishing. Like most fishermen, Tom has a routine that he follows every morning before leaving his house to go to the wharf. But for some reason he overlooked a couple of things that morning. Both turned out to be significant in what was about to happen. When Tom was getting ready, he forgot his personal flotation device (PFD), a floater vest that he always wore. “I didn’t notice—I probably thought I had it on,” he says. But more importantly than forgetting the PFD, Tom also forgot to tie straps around the bottom of his oil/rubber pants. A lot of fishermen strap “leggin’s” around their oil pant legs to wrap the pants tightly around the ankle so they don’t get caught or tangled in fishing gear on board their boats.

  Tom and his fishing partner, Arch Sheppard, left Rencontre in Tom’s twenty-foot fibreglass speedboat about 4:45 a.m. and arrived at the site of their lobster traps in an area near known as Doctor’s Harbour about fifteen minutes later.

  The Doctor’s Harbour area is also a pretty good place for herring. Herring is good lobster bait, so Tom had a net set very close to the first string of eight lobster traps that he was going to haul that morning.

  As Tom carefully manoeuvred the speedboat toward the lobster trap buoy, Arch hooked it with a gaff and Tom immediately put the engine in reverse. Because he was carefully watching Arch gaff the lobster buoy, Tom didn’t notice that a rope from the herring net had slid underneath the speedboat, and before he could do anything, the rope became snagged on the skid of the engine. The skid is a fin-like piece of metal located just above the engine propeller. At the same time the rope became snarled on the skid, Arch was using the hydraulic hauler to start bringing in the lobster pots, and as Tom described the scene, “It was like the net brought tight and then the boat was sort of pinned between the net and the fleet of pots.”

  In retrospect, there might have been a better way to try and fix the problem, but Tom didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it; he simply leaned over the engines on the stern of the boat, reached down, and tried to release the rope from the skid. Instead of coming free, the rope wouldn’t budge, and Tom suddenly found himself going head first over the engines and into the ocean. That’s when Tom realized his life vest was still back in his shed at home.

  Tom Caines is a veteran fisherman. He had often heard stories about his peers who had found themselves in similar circumstances, but as he considered his options, he realized he was in trouble. For starters, his size and weight were an issue. At about 250 pounds and several layers of soaked clothing, Tom was now at least 300 pounds. “On top of that, I had wrenches and all kinds of things in my pockets and so on, and without a life vest [to provide buoyancy] I wasn’t much above water,” he says.

  Tom had two engines on the stern of the boat, so climbing up and in over them wasn’t an option. Each time he tried to haul himself up over the side of the boat, his legs would slide under the round bottom of the vessel, and even with Arch trying his best to pull him up, it was no use. After ten or twelve minutes of trying to get on board the speedboat, Tom was nearing exhaustion, and with near-zero-temperature water, his body was rapidly losing heat and becoming hypothermic.

  When Tom realized that he was losing his strength, both he and Arch grew a bit panicky. Although Arch was a rookie fisherman, he was also a fireman and he knew what would happen if hypothermia became an issue.

  Rencontre East, Newfoundland (Jim Wellman photo)

  Finally, Tom had an idea.

  If Arch could tilt the large (sixty-horsepower) engine in just the right angle, Tom thought he just might be able to pull himself up high enough to get his foot on top of the blade and use the motor as leverage to push himself up. After fumbling with the tilt button a little bit, Arch finally figured it out and started adjusting the angle of the engine. In the water, Tom could feel the engine’s movements with his foot and told Arch when to stop. Sure enough, with all his remaining strength, Tom hauled himself up high enough to place his foot on the engine leg for support and then hauled, pulled, shoved, and wrangled himself in over the top of the two motors, finally collapsing onto the bottom of the speedboat.

  Although in a much weakened condition, Tom was still alert enough to talk about what to do next. Although he was no longer in the water, Tom was soaked to the skin in cold weather, and he knew that he was not out of danger of further weakening and a further deepening of hypothermia. Rencontre was several miles away, so Arch insisted that the safest option was to get Tom ashore and into his cabin, which coincidentally just happened to be located a short distance away in Doctor’s Harbour. Once in the cabin, Tom took off his wet clothes and wrapped himself in a comforter from a bed while Arch boiled the kettle on a propane stove and made a pot of hot porridge. A short while later, Arch had the cabin’s wood stove piping hot, and eventually Tom stopped shivering and felt energy slowly returning to his nearly numb body.

  It was a close call, but Tom was fine now. He says he learned something from the experience. He no longer wears the so-called “leggin’s.” Tom said he’s found out since that had he been wearing those that morning, air would not have escaped from his oil clothes and, because he went into the water head first, the trapped air would have floated the bottom half of his body above surface and he would have drowned, unable to get his head above the surface. Tom says that is exactly what happened in a recent fatality at sea.

  However, as close as it was to tragedy, Tom Caines was not destined for his final voyage that cold spring morning on May 15, 2010.

  His Final Voyage Brought Him Home

  Fogo Islanders won’t forget October 24, 2009, for a long time.

  For residents on the rocky island on Newfoundland’s northeast coast, it was another tragic day that marred their seafaring history with yet more loss of fishermen. While they were trying to cope with the shocking news that Derek Godwin and Ralph Coles had gone missing in a twenty-three-foot open boat while on a turr hunting trip, Fogo Islanders were saddened and almost confused with another news report that a shrimp-fishing vessel had sunk and a crew member was missing about sixty-five miles north of Fogo Island. One man died in that accident.

  Derek Godwin, age forty-seven, and Ralph Coles, age fifty, both from the town of Fogo, were well-known and highly respected fishermen. Derek had fished as a crewman with the Best family for more than thirty years, starting with Captain Don Best and then later with Don’s son, Glen.

  “Derek was what you could call a core member of our crew, a good worker and a very reliable and dependable man—we miss him an awful lot this year,” Glen says of his long-time colleague and friend. Meanwhile, Glen remembers Ralph, owner of his own forty-five-foot fishing vessel, as an easygoing and very likeable man. “He always had a smile and never seemed to get upset about anything. Som
etimes, when he’d have engine trouble or something would go wrong with the boat—the kind of trouble that, if I had, I’d hardly be fit to talk to—Ralph always shrugged it off with a smile and would say, ‘That’s the way it goes,’ or, ‘It’s all part of it’ [the business of fishing],” Glen recalls. Both Ralph and Derek had families.

  Derek Godwin (left, back to camera) working with fishermen friends at the Best family’s Twine Loft in Fogo (Jim Wellman photo)

  Saturday morning, October 24, 2009, was not a fair-weather day. It was windy and damp and seas were high and choppy. But Derek and Ralph were very experienced fishermen, and although the only boats that had gone out from Fogo harbour that morning returned shortly afterwards due to the less than ideal weather, the long-time friends decided that conditions were no worse than they’d dealt with dozens of times before.

  October is turr hunting season, the time of year when Ralph and Derek always got together to hunt the black and white birds that show up every fall on Newfoundland’s northeast coast. They hunted other saltwater birds as well. Turrs, also known as murres, have been a favourite food staple for Newfoundland and Labrador coastal people, including aboriginal peoples, for centuries. Newfoundland fishermen and others have always taken an ample supply of saltwater birds every fall to put away for dinners throughout the long winter months. A meal of turr was a wonderful treat, especially on remote islands, when food supplies would be in short supply after a long winter that often saw sea ice blocking passage to the so-called Newfoundland mainland for weeks on end in spring. Turr hunting became an integral part of the culture of survival.

  Ralph and Derek steamed out the harbour at approximately 8:00 a.m. Glen Best and a couple of his friends were building a shed on Glen’s property in Fogo, and even though they knew that weather and seas were not ideal, they also knew how competent both men were, and didn’t worry. Glen describes Derek as one who could handle an engine and manoeuvre a boat with tremendous skill. He knew just the proper speed and technique required to ride the waves with ease.

  The bird hunters said they would hunt for a couple of hours and come back about ten or eleven o’clock that morning. Even though Glen and his friends were confident that everything would be fine, they did take note that there was no sign of Derek and Ralph coming in the harbour at the appointed hour.

  “When eleven o’clock came, we started glancing out more often—then at noon we broke for lunch, and when we came back and there was still no sign of the boys, I said ‘something is not right.’”

  Something was not right, indeed.

  As the afternoon wore on, word circulated around Fogo that Ralph and Derek were overdue. Family members filed a missing persons report with the RCMP, and shortly afterwards a combined sea and air search was organized. A helicopter from 103 SAR Squadron in Gander was dispatched. The Coast Guard ship Grenfell was also in the area and joined the search. A local Marine Rescue Auxiliary vessel and other local fishing boats were soon on the scene, and a substantial search effort was under way. Rough seas hampered search efforts, and within a few hours darkness was setting in and the helicopter and boats had to return to port for the night.

  On Sunday morning, October 25, a dozen or more boats were back on the water, shortly after daybreak, searching for the two missing men. Glen Best and Barry Nichol, the latter being one of Glen’s crewmates in the regular fishing season, were among them. As experienced fishermen, Glen and Barry sized up the tides, seas, and wind direction to estimate which path that a boat or bodies might have drifted over the previous twenty hours. They made a decision to go southwest from Fogo harbour, a direction that eventually led them to an area called Deep Bay. As they steamed out in their speedboat, they both carefully scanned the shoreline looking for any sign of the missing boat and men. Both were acutely aware that they were likely looking for bodies and not survivors.

  Sometime around mid-morning, Glen saw something that didn’t look like it was a natural part of the shoreline.

  “When you go in Deep Bay, there are a couple of islands there called Livert Islands, and we went in a little cove there and it got really calm. It was low tide and I looked to the left and I said, ‘Barry, what’s that in there?’ And when we took a closer look, we realized it was Derek. We were a bit surprised because we wondered if we’d find Derek at all, because he never had flotation on. Ralph was wearing a floater suit, so we were more or less thinking we would find him instead of Derek,” Glen recalls.

  A little later that day, searchers recovered Ralph’s body farther in the bay toward the bottom of Deep Bay. It was a bit ironic, Glen says. “Ralph grew up in Deep Bay and moved to Fogo in later years, and now you’re writing about his ‘final voyage.’ Well, his final voyage brought him home, because when his body drifted from the location where they were lost, he passed right alongside the place where he grew up in Deep Bay.”

  What happened that awful day is obviously speculative. Glen points out that one thing is certain. “It wasn’t due to lack of knowledge of where they were and had struck a shoal or something like that.” We know where the accident happened, because Barry found the anchor from the boat. They were only a half-mile off Brimstone Head, an area that Ralph and Derek knew like the backs of their hands. They may have had engine trouble, but that is only one of the many possibilities. There was a report that there had been a spark plug in Derek’s pocket, but that doesn’t shed much light on the matter either, because it is possible that the plug might have been in his pocket for days or even weeks. The most popular thinking is that a breaker (large wave) crashed over them and either swamped or capsized their boat.

  Whatever it was, the sad reality is that two good men, Ralph Coles and Derek Godwin from Fogo, Newfoundland, made their final voyage on Saturday, October 24, 2009.

  Exercising Her Gambling Instinct

  The aroma of floating rose petals in a glass bowl on the kitchen countertop was not the typical scent I’ve grown accustomed to while interviewing a fishing skipper.

  But then, Tracy Button is no ordinary fishing captain.

  Sitting in the kitchen of her St. John’s home, the owner-operator of a multi-species fishing enterprise that includes a fifty-foot longliner, Tracy felt a little awkward talking about herself in a media interview, but she was very gracious and chatty.

  There are other female owner-operators of fishing enterprises in Newfoundland and Labrador, but Tracy is one of very few in the fifty- to sixty-five-foot-vessel class. She said she’s heard of only one other currently active in the province.

  “I was only seven when I knew this [fishing] was what I wanted,” she says.

  “It was November, 1979, and my dad bought a new boat from Nova Scotia. I remember the evening he came home with the boat and he took me on board. People gathered on the wharf and some were asking Dad what he was going to do with such a great big boat. Looking back, that was funny, because she was only a small, forty-two-foot fibreglass, but I do remember that the forecastle looked huge—it had a big galley and everything,” Tracy recalls.

  Her dad’s fancy new boat was impressive, but one thing stood out above all else to Tracy. A lampshade in the galley depicted scenes of pirate treasure maps, and something about that image became instantly etched in Tracy’s mind as symbolic to life on the sea.

  Captain Tracy Button at home in her house in St. John’s, NL

  (Jim Wellman photo)

  “That’s when I knew,” she says with a smile. “It was a life of adventure and challenge.”

  From that day on, Tracy, the youngest of four daughters, was on board her father’s boat every chance she could get. “Sometimes I think he’d take me because I got on his nerves so much that it was the only way to shut me up,” she laughs.

  With a quiet determination to become a full-time, bona fide fisher person, Tracy observed and remembered everything her father, Lew Johnson, and his crew did on fishing t
rips. As she grew older, she eventually became a permanent fixture with the rest of the crew. She describes herself as her dad’s “sidekick” in the business.

  The end of the commercial cod fishery in 1992 was a worrisome time for Tracy. The cod moratorium came just six months after her dad finally agreed to accept her as an “official” crew member. Cod was the foundation of Lew’s enterprise, but fortunately he was able to adapt and diversify, and although Tracy wondered and worried about her future, Lew kept her on all through the upheaval.

  The mid-1990s were both scary and fascinating times for a twenty-something Tracy. With the change from cod to shellfish, large, expensive vessels with state-of-the-art technology suddenly became commonplace and the role of small inshore boats like theirs was uncertain. The new crab and shrimp industry meant that boats would have to work far offshore for several days or even a week at a time. The new fisheries, especially shrimping, required heavy equipment like large hydraulics and big engines, generators, and new electronics. “I remember going on board boats and the wheelhouse looked more like the cockpit of an airplane than a fishing boat,” she says.

  But Lew Johnson and his “sidekick” stayed the course, and although that “great big boat” was no longer very big by the new Newfoundland standards, it was a good boat and they managed to make a decent living.

  By 2000, Tracy was in her late twenties and her dad was in his mid-sixties. Lew was aware that his days on the water were getting shorter, so he called his daughter aside for a chat. “He was my mentor and my best friend. He trained me and he knew there was no way I was going to think about doing anything else, so I guess he figured that if I was going to do it, then do it right.” That’s when Lew advised Tracy to go study for her Fishing Master’s certification and prepare to be his successor.