by Jim Wellman
Tracy did her coursework and received her FM Class IV certificate in 2003-2004. Sadly, just two years later, in 2006, Lew passed away.
Tracy admits that she felt somewhat more vulnerable without her dad’s guidance, but she also had a lot of experience under her belt and knew that she was up for the challenge. A year after her father’s passing, Tracy decided that she needed a larger and more suitable vessel and upgraded to the fifty-foot Shanarie Cruiser that she owns and operates today—still out of her old hometown, Happy Adventure.
Tracy has a four-man crew, and although the only relative on board is a nephew, she refers to all her crew as “family.” “You have to respect your crew, treat them well, and I’ve always felt that my guys are my family,” she says. That probably explains why she has not had a lot of turnover in her crew. Her nephew, for example, has been part of her crew for ten years.
Tracy says the gender issue has actually been a non-issue for her. She says it’s not as if she was a woman with little or no experience who suddenly became the head of the enterprise and skipper of the vessel. She grew up in the boat and had earned her stripes and the respect of the men in the business years before she became the captain and owner. “It will pop up once in a while in a mild way,” she says. “Like times when someone will ask one of the boys [crew] if he is the skipper and owns the boat. When the boys point to me and reply ‘no, it’s hers,’ I get a bit of a strange look, but that’s about it.”
Tracy remembers one time though when her father didn’t take too kindly to a sexist remark from some fisheries observer or fisheries officer. “He was on board, and when I got him the logbooks, he looked at my father and said: ‘Giving your little girl her stamps, are you?’ Dad was not an aggressive person and it was a little out of character for him, but he stopped dead in his tracks, looked the guy in the eye, and said ‘Excuse me, sir, but you’d better get off this boat right now!’ Buddy turned red as a beet and got up and left,” she says, chuckling at the memory.
Tracy is cautious in her approach to running the enterprise, especially when it’s decision-making time about sailings. Perhaps the product of her father’s mentoring, and perhaps because she has a ten-year old son to come home to, but she says coming home safely is the focus of every trip. She makes sure that every safety requirement is met and she will not take frivolous chances when weather forecasts are not what she considers appropriate for a safe working environment.
Besides running her fishing business, Tracy is also active in the Fish, Food and Allied Workers (FFAW) union, having held several executive and committee positions including an Affirmative Action post with the FFAW Inshore Council, and on the Mobile Gear Committee, representing Area 3L—Bonavista Bay. She’s also with the FFAW Women’s Committee, which she describes as very dear to her heart, and “good for the soul!”
In summing up her thoughts on the choice she made many years ago to pursue a life at sea, Tracy Button is philosophical.
“Fishing is a great feeling of self-rewarding fulfillment, and a fantastic way to exercise your gambling instinct!”
Thought I Was a Goner
Julien d’Entremont was a happy young man in the spring of 2002. At twenty-two, the young French Acadian fisherman from Pubnico, Nova Scotia, had fished with his father, Pius, for several years, and although he was still young, Julien knew that when his father was ready to retire, he wanted to take over the enterprise and continue in his dad’s footsteps. Life was good for Julien in 2002. Working on his certification for his fishing captain’s licence, he had lots of friends his age who were doing the same thing. Pubnico, located about twenty miles east of Yarmouth in southwestern Nova Scotia, boasts one of the largest lobster fishing fleets in Canada. The Dennis Point wharf in West Pubnico is home port to dozens of vessels.
Literally hundreds of families fish for a living in southwest Nova Scotia. Most are lobstermen, but some also fish species such as haddock while others fish herring or swordfish and other species. One of Julien d’Entremont’s best buddies was Gilles LeBlanc, also from Pubnico. Gilles and Julien were the same age and shared a lot of common interests. They went to school together, played sports together, and shared a lot of their young lives side by side. Like Julien, Gilles was a fisherman who also dreamed of being a captain and owning his own vessel one day. It was the life they knew and the way of life they loved. Regular readers of the Navigator magazine and my last book, Trouble at Sea, will remember the story of Gilles LeBlanc who drowned in April, 2003. “Ode to Big G” was a heart-rending story of the loss of a much-loved young man who, like his friend Julien d’Entremont, had a very promising future in the fishing industry. Gilles fell overboard while on a lobster fishing trip in April, 2003. Despite one of the most intensive searches ever, his body was never recovered.
Unlike his friend Gilles, Julien’s dream of owning his own fishing enterprise and vessel eventually came true. When his dad retired, Julien was ready to upgrade and pick up from where Pius was leaving off, but before that happened, Julien experienced a life-altering experience that nearly changed his future plans forever.
The 2001-2002 winter lobster fishery was winding down with only two weeks left before closing day at the end of May, 2002. On Sunday evening, May 12, Captain Pius d’Entremont, his son and crew member, Julien, along with crew member Vaughan d’Entremont, also from Pubnico, arranged to meet very early on Monday morning at the Dennis Point wharf. The idea was to get an early start on the day in order to get to the lobster grounds by daybreak. The three men arrived at Dennis Point a little after 3:00 a.m., and about twenty minutes later they were steaming out the harbour from the wharf on board the forty-five-foot Richard Francois. The trip to the lobster grounds usually took about three hours steam time and there was no reason to believe that anything would be different on this occasion. As expected, the trip that morning was uneventful. The weather was fine considering the time of year. It was overcast and cool with an occasional patch of clear sky—winds were light and seas were fairly calm. Pius was at the wheel while Julien and Vaughan prepared everything on deck to be ready to haul the first trawl of lobster pots as soon as they arrived.
The day started surprisingly well for the three fishermen. The first trawl/string of twenty lobster pots landed good catches. The men recognized their sudden good luck as a phenomenon that sometimes occurs in the late season when the weather and water starts warming. It seems lobster become more mobile and look for food and, as such, are attracted to the bait in lobster pots. It’s a sort of last surge in the fishery before the season closes. Knowing that these concentrations of lobster were usually localized, Pius decided that he’d like to set more lobster pots in the area to capitalize on a higher level of fishing for the end of the season. To do that he had to leave their location and go to an area where they had three trawls of twenty pots each and retrieve them to bring back to where they had discovered good fishing that morning.
That process went according to plan, and by 9:30 a.m. or thereabouts they had successfully hauled the three trawls of twenty lobster pots and were on the way back to the good fishing grounds to set the sixty pots.
Pius, Julien, and Vaughan d’Entremont were in high spirits as Pius pulled back on the engine throttle to slow down the Richard Francois to prepare to dump sixty lobster traps over the side of the vessel. The possibility of an additional few hundred pounds of lobster to round out the end of the season would be a nice bonus.
What happened was anything but a bonus.
“We had twenty pots on a trawl along with two anchors on each end, and I guess I was excited about everything and wanted to get all the pots in the water as quickly as possible to get them fishing,” Julien says as he explains what followed.
“What happened was, without thinking I grabbed the buoy line just as the last anchor had gone over the stern—so the trawls were still pulling the buoy lines over and my mistake was to grab the buoy line as it was still being p
ulled overboard. I put my hand through the coil and somehow it grabbed me around my wrist and it squeezed on there pretty tight—so tight it cracked some bones. I yelled and grabbed on to an aluminium rack to keep from getting pulled over—I remember yelling to my father to stop the boat,” Julien says.
Meanwhile, Vaughan, who was standing just a few feet from Julien, saw what was happening and he instinctively grabbed Julien around the waist in a desperate attempt to keep his friend from being pulled overboard. But the weight of twenty pots and two anchors combined with the momentum of a forty-five-foot vessel steaming ahead was far too great a force to contend with, and as Julien put it, “Something had to give and I flew overboard just like a slingshot through the air.” Meanwhile, Julien wasn’t aware of it, but Vaughan refused to let go of him and he too was yanked overboard, worsening an already critical situation tenfold.
Everything was happening so quickly that Pius hardly had time to think rationally. One minute everything was fine as his son and Vaughan were on deck dumping a load of lobster pots with happy expectations of a good day fishing coming up, and then, literally a minute later, he heard Julien yelling for him to stop the boat. By the time he turned around to look, both were gone over the stern, with no sign of Julien anywhere.
Pius intuitively understood the seriousness of the situation and knew he had to react quickly and with precision because every second counted. His son was caught with a rope tightly twisted around his arm and was being dragged to the bottom. To save him, Pius would need help with operating the vessel. Before even attempting to rescue Julien, Pius knew that he had to rescue Vaughan first. Although he could see Vaughan in the water not far from the boat, it would take precious time to manoeuvre the vessel back in a position to get Vaughan on board. Even if he could get Vaughan on the deck fairly quickly, Pius wasn’t sure whether his crew member had suffered injuries or had become weakened through the ordeal. In fact, Pius was still not entirely certain about what had really happened. All Pius knew was that to retrieve Julien he needed Vaughan on deck to help with handling the ropes and things while he operated the vessel’s controls. He was keenly aware that there was 150-170 feet of water under the boat and that Julien could be dragged down nearly that entire distance: not much rope had gone overboard when Julien became tangled, and that meant he was probably snagged fairly close to the last pot as it settled on the bottom.
Vaughan d’Entremont, a first-class hero by any standards
(Jim Wellman photo)
But miracles do happen, and as Pius d’Entremont started his manoeuvres to rescue Vaughan, he was just beginning what would become known to everyone later as a true miracle.
The first part of the miracle was the rate of speed in which Pius managed to get the Richard Francois alongside Vaughan and positioned properly to get the crewman on board. Pius was nearly sixty years old at the time, and to pull Vaughan from the ocean was not going to be an easy feat. Vaughan was nearly 200 pounds, and with heavy, soaked clothing and boots filled with water, getting him over the railing of a forty-five-foot lobster vessel took a lot of strength. But somehow Pius managed and soon Vaughan was on board, and despite his personal discomfort from just being hauled out of a very cold ocean, he was so concerned about Julien that he barely gave a thought to his own condition. Vaughan knew that from the way they had been yanked from the boat’s deck, despite both of them holding on with every ounce of strength they had, it was likely that Julien was tightly tangled and unable to free himself. Both Vaughan and Pius knew that the odds of ever seeing Julien alive again were slim. Many minutes had already passed and Julien was obviously still underwater. It would take many more minutes to haul back the trawl line with the pots and, hopefully, Julien attached to the rope. Both men understood what they had to do, and despite the fact that time was running out and that their chances of rescuing Julien alive were growing dim, they also knew they had to whatever was humanly possible to save him.
Julien says he clearly remembers the feeling of being catapulted from the deck of their fishing vessel like he had been propelled from a slingshot. He also remembers being pulled underwater by the entangled rope at a very fast rate. Within seconds he realized that he was trapped close to the ocean bottom in more than 100 feet of water. With a buoy rope twisted and tangled tightly around his left wrist and the other end attached to a string of twenty lobster pots sitting on the ocean floor, Julien knew he was in very serious trouble. If he was going to survive, it could only be through the efforts of his dad, Pius d’Entremont, and his crewmate, Vaughan d’Entremont, on board the Richard Francois.
Julien recalls many of his thoughts as he was sinking deeper and deeper under the surface. “I remember thinking that I’m a goner—this is my last day alive on planet earth.” He also remembers thinking about conversations with his fishing friends about what to do if they ever found themselves in a situation like this. “I remembered we had discussed that if you had a knife you had to be sure to cut the line that was in front or below you and not behind or on top of you because you’d be lost forever.” Sadly, though, Julien’s thoughts about cutting the line were useless because he didn’t have a knife. “And that’s when I let go—I thought there was no way I could survive and so I let go and—I don’t know how to say it—it was kind of like you were just falling asleep—just letting go—I wouldn’t call it suffering or anything like that at all—you just relax and let go of life—and that’s the last thing I remember.”
Once on board the vessel, Vaughan paid no attention to his own discomfort. He was soaked to the bone and shivering in near-freezing temperatures. Instead, he immediately started working with Pius to get the buoy line in the hydraulic block/hauler. By then so much time had elapsed that Pius was muttering, “He’s gone—we’ve lost him.” But still, neither of the two men was giving up hope. They managed to get the line in the hauler, and after what seemed like an hour but in fact was probably only a couple of minutes winching in the buoy line, Julien’s lifeless body surfaced.
Although Pius and Vaughan were elated to see Julien, what they saw when they hauled him from the water was not a pretty sight. Unconscious, the young man’s face had turned ashen white and his lips were purple, and a red, foamy, gooey substance was oozing from his mouth. Although it appeared certain that Julien was already dead, Vaughan was not going to give up on his good friend. Laying Julien on the deck, Vaughan immediately started performing CPR. For several minutes it seemed like Vaughan was fighting a losing battle, but Pius kept urging his crewman to keep going until, finally, after approximately five minutes of franticly administering CPR, Vaughan and Pius heard the most wonderful sound they’d ever hoped to hear—Julien started coughing. Vaughan kept working on his shipmate, and after another fifteen minutes of coughing up blood and water and other fluids, Julien started mumbling a few unintelligible words. Amazingly, Julien was alive again. “When I first clued in, I remember I was in Vaughan’s arms. I looked at him and I said, ‘Am I gonna die?’ ‘Not anymore, buddy,’ Vaughan said, ‘not anymore!’”
The next thing Julien remembers was a Coast Guard boat pulling alongside the Richard Francois. Pius had contacted search and rescue people and they had sent a high-speed vessel to the scene with the intention of transferring Julien to their boat in order to get him to a hospital sooner.
Julien was unaware of how much internal damage he had suffered from being underwater and nearly dead for fifteen minutes or more, and when he heard the conversation about transferring him to the Coast Guard boat, he tried to stand up. He got a rude awakening that he wasn’t going to be mobile anytime soon. It was eventually decided that a Coast Guard fellow would get on board the Richard Francois and administer whatever medical assistance he could. “I remember an oxygen mask over my mouth and then they pulled me in the wheelhouse—they stripped me off and wrapped me in blankets and sleeping bags and put me on the wheelhouse floor next to the heater. I also remember, on the way to Dennis Point wh
arf [in Pubnico] about three hours a way, I was coughing and spitting blood and everything and Vaughan kept wiping everything off my face with his bare hands like a mother would with her baby—he saved my life,” Julien says softly.
An ambulance was waiting at the wharf, and despite his seriously weakened state, Julien has vivid memories of that part of his journey as well. “I felt like I was freezing and wanted to sleep, but they wouldn’t let me close my eyes. My father was in the ambulance with me and I could see that he and the paramedic were dripping with sweat because there was so much heat, but it was no good to me, I felt very, very cold.”
Julien spent seven days in the intensive care unit at the Yarmouth hospital where he started his journey back to living. He says he was a big curiosity for the hospital staff, especially doctors. They would visit and tell him how fortunate he was to be alive, but he says the last doctor to visit put it the way he was thinking. “He didn’t sugar-coat it. He looked at me and said, ‘You should be dead . . . I feel like I’m looking at a ghost.’” The more Julien improved, the more word got out that there was no explanation in the name of medical science to explain how he could have survived, until eventually everyone simply referred to him as a “miracle.”
Julien underwent lung therapy for a while and had his wrist bandaged for a couple of months, but just three months later, he went on a swordfishing trip with his good friends Michel d’Entremont and Gilles LeBlanc. Today he is the captain and owner of a new vessel, also called Richard Francois, and still fishes from Pubnico in southwest Nova Scotia.