The Deadly Sea

by Jim Wellman

  Loyola swam his cousin back to the others at the dory and then set out to search for more family members, hopeful that, like Marjorie, some of them had held on long enough to be found alive.

  But fate had other plans, and Loyola would soon be facing an emotional reality almost beyond comprehension.

  After getting his cousin Marjorie situated safely at the side of the overturned dory, along with Carmel and Judy, Loyola swam back to where he had found Marjorie, hoping there were others in the same area. For several minutes he scanned the surface of the dark ocean, hoping to see something, all the while calling out and listening for a response. But there was nothing but darkness and silence. At length he saw something in the distance, but it looked too large to be a person. Swimming closer, Loyola realized that it was in fact two people huddled close together. They were unresponsive to his calls. Drawing closer, Loyola realized he was looking at the faces of his mother, Jean Pomroy, and his aunt, Nellie Pomroy.

  “They were close together, and something tells me, although I can’t remember for sure, but I seem to think they were holding on to each other’s hands, I guess so they wouldn’t drift apart,” he says.

  Both women were silent and still. They might have been dead, but Loyola couldn’t be sure, and he knew he had to do what he could to try and save them. For a moment he was seized with anxiety about who he should start with, how he would choose, knowing that even if he could successfully revive one, precious survival time would be lost for the other.

  It was no easy task to hold a person in the water and perform life-saving techniques, but it was the only option he had. With mixed emotions, he swam his mother back to the dory and started performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, hoping his Aunt Nellie could hang on until he got back to her.

  Loyola frantically tried revive his mother. Marjorie has a vivid memory of that moment. She doesn’t remember him rescuing her and bringing her back to the dory, but she can remember what she saw later.

  “When I regained consciousness, I remember Loyola giving his mom mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. And I remember the Delroy captain telling Loyola that it was no use, that she was gone, and that he should look for the children and the others,” Marjorie says.

  Having already dealt with the excruciating decision of choosing between his forty-four-year-old mother and his fifty-two-year-old aunt—something that tormented him for years afterward—Loyola now faced yet another monumental decision. Should he give up and abandon his mother in order to see if he could revive his aunt and search for his brother Billy, his sisters Sheila and Linda, his brother-in-law, Ernie, and the missing Delroy crew members, or should he stay? Driven by the thought that one or more of the others could still be alive, he accepted the harsh reality that he had to leave his mom in hopes of saving another life.

  It’s almost unimaginable that a twenty-four-year-old man could find the emotional strength to continue swimming around in the cold northwest Atlantic Ocean at midnight, searching for survivors or bodies of loved ones, in what must have been the greatest challenge to anyone’s physical endurance.

  Loyola Pomroy was determined to expend his last ounce of strength, if necessary, to try and save someone else that night. However, despite his courage, he was tiring and his own survival would soon become an issue. Still, he managed to push himself through the water, all the while straining to see or hear something, a target to swim toward. But it was not to be. There was nothing to hear and nothing to see except the still-burning Delroy in the distance.

  After weighing the possibilities of finding any more survivors, combined with his worry about those who were clinging to the dory, Loyola made the wise decision to go back to them before he wandered too far away. He could see the flames and smoke coming from Delroy on the horizon, but the survivors and the schooner were drifting in different directions and the gap between them was widening, so he couldn’t use the schooner as a point of reference for the survivors’ location.

  “It’s kind of strange, I must have had those concerns, but I don’t recall feeling tired or having any feelings of panic, from the time I jumped from the schooner or during all of the things that happened in the water. For some reason I seemed to have remained calm through it all,” Loyola reflects.

  At some point, Leo Bullen and one other crew member alongside the dory decided that they would swim to a nearby island. They could see the shoreline in the moonlight and figured their best chance of survival was to make it to land. They must have reckoned that there would be no shipping in the area to rescue them and that swimming was their only hope. Before leaving, Leo gave Carmel his life jacket because it would be of no benefit to him while swimming. Sadly, the two men didn’t make it to the island.

  Back at the overturned dory, Carmel, Judy, and Marjorie were managing to hang on by gripping the corners of the life jacket and the strings. Instead of electing one person to wear the life preserver, they spread it across the bottom of the dory so that the three of them could grasp it and help keep them all afloat. Captain Reuben Evans and his son Clarence were still sitting on the bottom of the flat-bottomed boat in relative comfort.

  After joining the other five, Loyola knew that they could not survive until daylight, the earliest that anyone would start organizing a search and rescue effort. Even in July, the waters of Placentia Bay were just above freezing, and simply trying to hang on for six or seven hours was not an option. They would certainly succumb to hypothermia long before dawn in the frigid salt water.

  Options were few. At one point, Loyola tied the dory’s painter around his chest and tried towing the flat-bottomed boat, along with the five other survivors, to the nearest point of land. Loyola was strong, but he soon realized he wasn’t superhuman, and though it was a noble and courageous effort, he was forced to accept the fact that there was no option but to hope and pray for a miracle.

  Waiting in the water, unable to do anything but cling to the dory, was especially frustrating for Loyola Pomroy. At twenty-four and in good condition, he was accustomed to taking charge of any situation and dealing with it. Accepting that he was no longer able to save any more of his family was not easy, but he was forced to control his emotions and focus on making things as comfortable as possible for those who were still with him, especially his sister Carmel, who was starting to fade.

  Marjorie said her cousin was relentless in his determination to see that those remaining would not die. She later wrote, “He was a calming force who tried to bolster their spirits, urging them to remain awake and alert, motivating them to kick their legs to keep up the circulation and stay afloat, trying to tow the dory to the nearest shore, and taking on the responsibility for ensuring they did not slip into the black waters of Placentia Bay, all the while continuing his search efforts for his family.”

  Whether she had ingested salt water or expended too much energy trying to stay afloat, or if it was because of stress after realizing that her husband, Ernie, and her mom, along with several other family members were missing with little or no hope of survival, Carmel was showing signs of weakening. Whatever the cause, afraid she might let go and slip beneath the waves, Loyola knew he should stay close to his sister.

  Meanwhile, as the survivors held on to the dory for dear life, the Bertha Joyce was just about to round the tip of the last headland before approaching the entrance to Arnold’s Cove. For some reason, at approximately 11:00 p.m., Captain Ray Berkshire opened the top half of the door to the wheelhouse and looked behind the vessel. He doesn’t know why he did that, because his primary concern was always what lay directly ahead and not where he had just come from. As fate would have it, six lives hinged on that one quick, backward glance. Captain Berkshire noticed something on the horizon that led him to take a closer look.

  “It was a light, but not like a bright searchlight or a ship’s light. It was sort of a hazy glow in the distance. It didn’t look like fire at first, but I didn’t spen
d any time trying to figure out what it was. I just knew that it wasn’t normal and turned our boat around and headed toward whatever it was because it just didn’t look right.”

  At first Captain Berkshire couldn’t tell how far away the “glow” was. Judging distance by looking across the ocean at an unknown glow in the dark was impossible. With the engine of the Bertha Joyce at full speed, it took twenty minutes before he realized the glow was in fact flames, and it soon became obvious that he was looking at a burning vessel. Because there was no other shipping in the vicinity, Captain Berkshire knew it had to be the Delroy. Another twenty to twenty-five minutes would pass before he would be able to confirm his suspicions, because the Bertha Joyce’s top speed was about ten knots and he was only halfway to the location of the ill-fated fish collector. He made a mayday distress call on sideband radio to alert the Canadian Coast Guard that a vessel was on fire, but he got no response.

  Arriving alongside the burning schooner, Captain Berkshire observed that the wheelhouse was nearly gone and the entire aft section of the Delroy badly burnt, but, surprisingly, the front half of the schooner was relatively intact.

  “If there was anyone still on board they could have been fairly comfortable up forward at that point,” he says.

  But Captain Berkshire couldn’t see any signs of life on the still-burning vessel, so he asked his crew to stay on deck and scan the waters of Placentia Bay. He noted that the Delroy’s dory was not on the deck, so he was hopeful that the crew and passengers were safe.

  “Those Grand Bank dories were about twenty feet long and sturdy. We’ve carried upwards of two tons of salt in those dories, so it would be possible to get fifteen people in one, especially in this case, because some of them were children,” he explains.

  An experienced captain, Ray Berkshire knew that his search area might be fairly wide because tides and currents could easily push a dead-in-the-water vessel with a cargo of fish on board in one direction and a small dory in another.

  But still, he didn’t have enough information to pinpoint a probable location of the dory or people, should anyone be in the water, so he decided to meander around the bay, widen his radius from the Delroy with each pass, and pray that someone on board his vessel would see or hear something to give them a glimmer of hope.

  A mile or so away, just northwest of White Island, Loyola and the others saw the lights of the Bertha Joyce as it left the burning schooner. The lights gave them hope that they would be rescued after all. Unfortunately, they had nothing to signal their location, and they were forced to wait and watch as the rescue boat zigzagged across the waters of Placentia Bay.

  Captain Ray Berkshire and his son Terry at home in Arnold’s Cove

  At one point Captain Berkshire wondered if the crew and passengers had landed on the opposite side of White Island; it was possible they were in that vicinity when they abandoned ship. As he turned the Bertha Joyce to check out that possibility, the schooner disappeared from the view of the survivors.

  “That was one of the worst low points of the night because we knew we had the chance of being rescued, but now, that one bit of comfort was gone,” Loyola says.

  Joyfully, a few minutes later, the lights of the Bertha Joyce came back into view and, this time, the vessel was heading straight toward them!

  “I picked up a small blip on the radar,” Captain Berkshire remembers. “I didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t very big, but I went to check it out because I had nothing else to go on.”

  A few minutes later, his searchlight spotted Captain Evans and his son on the bottom of the dory, and Loyola, Judy, Carmel, and Marjorie clinging to its sides.

  Captain Ray Berkshire (front middle) and Loyola Pomroy (second row)

  holding awards presented by the Red Cross as “Rescuers Awards” for their heroics in July 1972

  Sometime between midnight and 12:30 a.m., Captain Berkshire manoeuvred the Bertha Joyce to the windward side of the survivors, to block the breeze and the lop on the water, while the crew put rubber tires, used as bumpers for docking, over the side.

  “We put the tires out to give them something to hold onto when we were hauling them on board,” he explains.

  The crew of the rescue boat got the six survivors down in the forecastle, wrapped them in blankets, and made them as comfortable as possible. Captain Berkshire’s brother Dave, who was home on vacation from Halifax, had joined his dad for a trip that day and, fortunately, he knew several life-saving procedures. Seeing that Carmel was nearly dead, Dave immediately started performing CPR and every other technique he knew to try and keep her alive. Thankfully, they worked.

  In the wheelhouse, Captain Berkshire set his course for Arnold’s Cove. “Loyola was the only one in pretty good condition, and he told me that there was no point looking for the others because they couldn’t possibly be alive. It was crucial to get Carmel to hospital, to get the medical attention she desperately needed to keep her from dying, so I headed for Arnold’s Cove.”

  Memorial Stone for the Pomroy family members lost in July 1972.

  The stone is located on Merasheen Island. (Photo courtesy of Rita Pomroy)

  All six survivors were taken to Come by Chance hospital and five were released a few hours later. Thanks to the valiant rescue efforts of Dave Berkshire on board the Bertha Joyce, Carmel responded positively to treatment and was well enough to go home a few days later.

  A search for the missing members of the Pomroy family and three crew members of the Delroy was initiated at dawn Friday morning. Jean Pomroy’s body was the only one found. It is believed she remained afloat because her lungs had filled with air when Loyola performed artificial respiration on her the previous night.

  Searchers also noted that the ill-fated schooner finally slipped beneath the waters of Placentia Bay sometime around 8:00 a.m. Friday.

  The loss of Jean Pomroy, age forty-four, her daughters Linda, twelve, Sheila, ten, and son Billy, six, along with her son-in-law, Ernie Pitcher, and her sister-in-law, Nellie Pomroy, fifty-two, in addition to crew members William Garrett, John Yard, and Leo Bullen, was one of the worst marine tragedies in the history of the settlement Placentia Bay, Newfoundland.

  However, due to the superb marine capability and intuition of Captain Ray Berkshire—and because of the boundless courage and determination of Loyola Pomroy—Carmel (Pomroy) Pitcher, Marjorie Ennis, Judy Snow, Loyola himself, and Delroy’s Captain Reuben Evans and his son Clarence Evans survived.

  Certificate of appreciation from the Pomroy family to Captain Ray Berkshire. The certificate hangs on the wall of Captain Berkshire’s home.

  Chapter 2

  It’s a Family Thing

  In February 2012, I met with Claude d’Entremont in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. We sat in the café at the Mariner’s Stadium and talked about his life and philosophies and learned why he was one of the best-known fish processors in the province. Later, the Navigator magazine published an article based on that interview. About a year after that, I was deeply saddened when Claude passed away after a short illness. The following is what I wrote in the magazine about one of the most respected men in the Nova Scotia fishing industry.

  Claude d’Entremont was manager of a small fish company in southwest Nova Scotia. Inshore Fisheries Ltd. in Lower West Pubnico has been operated successfully by three generations of the d’Entremont family, and the fourth generation is being groomed to take over in a few years.

  Claude’s grandfather and his grandfather’s brother-in-law founded Inshore Fisheries in the 1940s. His dad picked up from Claude’s grandfather, and then, a few years after Claude’s father passed away in 1977, Claude, his brother, and a couple of cousins took over the business.

  One of the cousins, who had also been part-owner of the company for some time, was Jean Guy d’Entremont, perhaps the best-known of the family outside southwest
Nova Scotia because he once chaired a high-level national fisheries advisory organization: the now defunct Fisheries Resource Conservation Council (FRCC).

  Meanwhile, like his cousin, Claude was extremely active in serving on industry-related organizations. Some of those include the NS Fish Packers Association, the Science Advisory Committee for George’s Bank, Scotia-Fundy Mobile Gear Committee, Groundfish Allocation Committee, and several groups dealing with US-Canada border issues.

  Claude d’Entremont was a highly respected man. Usually referred to as a “true gentleman,” Claude was very amiable and easy to talk to. Relaxed and almost always smiling, he talked about his family and the family business with obvious pride.

  He would laugh when asked if he ever fished for a living.

  Claude d’Entremont

  “I tried it but I used to get seasick, so I decided to work onshore,” he said.

  That was a stroke of luck for the company, because managing a groundfish operation for the past thirty years has only benefited from the wisdom and calm approach in decision-making that Claude possessed. Processors of species such as haddock, cod, flounder, perch, and hake have been through tumultuous times during the past three decades in Atlantic Canada and many companies have folded.

  Managing your own business is all-consuming, Claude explained.

  “You wake up worried about an important decision that you have to make today and you go to bed that night worried about if you made the right decision.”

  But Claude was not entirely alone when it was time to make big decisions. His younger brother Shawn is president of the company, and though Shawn takes care of the sales and production side of the business, he was always there to listen to his big brother about any issue.