by Jim Wellman
Chapter 17
Loss of the Pubnico Explorer
The weather in Meteghan, Nova Scotia, on Sunday evening, December 13, 2009, was fairly typical of late fall, early winter. It was cloudy with temperatures a few degrees above freezing.
The crew of the fishing vessel Pubnico Explorer had been busy preparing for what might be their last four- or five-day trip before Christmas that year. Leo Jeddry, the vessel’s regular mate, took a look at the propeller shaft stuffing box because there had been considerable leakage in that area on recent trips.
Pubnico Explorer
Although Leo wouldn’t be going with the boat on this upcoming trip because he was slated for a medical procedure, he worked on the stuffing box and secured all the fittings until there was no indication of water leaking in. He also helped the other crew members load the ice for their trip.
Caution was a good idea in the case of the Pubnico Explorer. Owned by Comeau Sea Products in Meteghan, the fifty-seven-foot Cape Island–style wooden boat was thirty years old and had taken on water a few times prior to 2009 that resulted in the captain making distress calls.
The first incident was on November 24, 2007. After receiving the distress call, a Coast Guard cutter brought pumps to get water from the hold and assisted the vessel back to port. According to a Transportation Safety Board (TSB) report, some hull repairs were carried out, but about two weeks later, on December 9, 2007, the Pubnico Explorer again transmitted a mayday due to what the report described as “a large ingress of water.” Again, the same Coast Guard cutter went to the rescue and supplied pumps and the boat made it safely back to port.
Captain Dave Trask
The report states that in 2007 and 2008 the vessel underwent significant repairs, including re-sheathing a major portion of the hull, re-caulking the entire vessel, and installing a new pump manifold. It was generally accepted by everyone, including the Transportation Safety Board, that those repairs were sufficient to fix the damaged areas between the vessel’s planks, where water was believed to be leaking in and caused the trouble during the 2007 incidents. And as far as anyone knows, it did.
But it seems that old boat problems can be like old habits—they don’t give up easily, although this time the problem would arise in a different location on the boat.
Architectural drawing of Pubnico Explorer
According to the TSB report, a year or so after the refit the propeller stuffing box on the Pubnico Explorer started causing trouble. The report states: “The stuffing box had been leaking profusely during several trips before this one” [December 2009].
Satisfied that the stuffing box was in adequate condition and all other preparations were appropriately carried out, Captain David Trask gave the all-clear to ready for departure from Meteghan on Sunday evening. By Monday morning, the Pubnico Explorer, with Captain Trask, Relief Mate Neil Deveau, and two deckhands, was on the fishing grounds about fifty miles west of Meteghan at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy.
The crew fished for two days, and by Tuesday night they had landed approximately seventeen metric tons of redfish. At 5:00 a.m. on Wednesday, the company contacted the Pubnico Explorer to request a change of plans. A Comeau representative asked if the captain could head south to fish haddock.
By nine o’clock, weather conditions had started deteriorating, so after making two tows for haddock, Captain Trask, a well-known and highly respected fisherman, decided it was time to head for port. They had landed only about one ton of haddock, not as much as he would have liked, but winds had picked up to forty knots from the northwest and seas were running twelve to fourteen feet high and increasing. Although the Pubnico Explorer had handled worse conditions on many occasions in its thirty-year life, the forecast called for worsening weather and it might become risky to continue fishing. After all, it was mid-December, and with the temperature now hovering around the freezing point, icing could become an issue with just a slight drop in temperature.
After the crew had hauled back the fishing gear and stowed the fish into the hold, the captain told the men to “go below” for a two-hour rest before they stowed the nets for the rest of the trip home to Meteghan. Captain Trask, a sixty-year old veteran fishing captain, took watch in the wheelhouse, expecting to be back in port at Meteghan by mid-afternoon that day.
When the three crew members went up on deck after their break, one of them noticed that the vessel was lower in the water, especially back aft, than when they had gone below two hours prior. Neil Deveau, an experienced fisherman, looked into the fish hold and became concerned when he saw about thirty centimetres (almost one foot) of water in the hold. He hurried to the wheelhouse to inform the skipper, who was unaware that the vessel had been taking on water. Apparently the highwater-level bilge alarms had been disconnected for some reason, and so there was no functional electronic system in place to send an alert of impending danger from the ingress of water below deck.
Captain Trask immediately went below to the engine room and turned on a bilge pump. According to the TSB report, Trask seemed overwhelmed when he returned to the wheelhouse: “. . . He appeared agitated and unwell; he was sweating and short of breath, with trembling legs and limited/impaired speech.”
Meanwhile, the crew kept looking at the water level in the hold, and to their dismay it was rising despite the pump running.
Captain Trask remained in the wheelhouse and issued several instructions to address the problem, but Neil was unable to get the pump working at full capacity—the water was coming in at a rate greater than the pump could discharge. Water was also entering the engine room, but the level was controlled in that compartment by an electric bilge pump. The crew saw a small quantity of water in the lazarette, too, but they got a small sump pump in that area; after some initial difficulty, it began pumping water.
At 10:15 on Wednesday morning, Captain Trask called Marine Communications and Traffic Services (MCTS) and asked for assistance. A few minutes later, he called MCTS again to ask for additional pumps. Shortly after that, he called a third time to say that there was no water in the engine room and he thought the vessel would be fine until a Coast Guard vessel or some other help arrived.
He was wrong.
A short while later, Captain Trask observed the rapid influx of water and he could no longer hope that everything was going to be all right. It was time that he and the three-man crew prepared for the worst. They didn’t have to wait long before it happened.
With the water level steadily rising in two of the three below-deck compartments, the captain knew it was time to prepare to abandon ship.
Winds were from the northwest at approximately thirty-five knots (sixty-five kilometres), air temperature was at the freezing point, ocean temperature was also at zero degrees Celsius, seas were running three to four metres (ten to fourteen feet) and sometimes cresting much higher. After more than forty years at sea, Captain Trask knew those conditions meant trouble was at hand for a slowly sinking vessel.
Telling his crew members to “get their suits,” one of the men hurried below to the accommodations quarters and came back to the wheelhouse with four immersion suits; they helped each other get them on. After overcoming some difficulty with fastening the zippers, Captain Dave Trask, Mate Neil Deveau, and crewmen Sydney Melanson and Peter Hogg were eventually suited up and ready to go over the side of their fishing vessel if necessary.
Sadly, their worries would come to fruition and abandoning ship would be more difficult than expected.
Shortly after 11:00 a.m., just as a crew member lowered another sump pump into the hold to try and contain the rise in water level, the men noticed that the stern of the vessel was now so low that ocean water was shipping in over the aft deck and running down the main hatch. It was now a matter of when, not if, the Pubnico Explorer would sink. Captain Trask gave the order to abandon ship.
One of the cre
wmen rushed to deploy the life raft, but it was too late. A couple of large waves struck the port side of the vessel and she began to list and roll heavily to starboard.
Not wanting to be in the wheelhouse or on deck when the vessel rolled over, Neil, Sydney, and Peter clambered up the port bulwark and jumped into the ocean. Captain Dave Trask was on deck, still near the wheelhouse door, but he didn’t appear to make any attempt to follow his shipmates over the side.
Within moments after the three crewmen hit the cold ocean water, another large wave struck the port side of the Pubnico Explorer and finished her off. The fifty-seven-foot vessel capsized and sank about ten miles southwest of Meteghan.
It took a couple of minutes for Neil, Peter, and Sydney to fully assess what had just happened. All three were being tossed around in the heavy seas, making it difficult to communicate, especially in the high winds.
Although they knew that Search and Rescue had been alerted that their vessel had been taking on water, they were also aware that the last communication from Captain Trask indicated that he thought they were not in immediate danger of sinking, because the engine room was still fairly dry at the time. That was approximately forty-five minutes before the Explorer capsized.
The last time they saw the captain he was still standing outside the wheelhouse, so they were fairly certain he didn’t have time to issue a final mayday.
They realized they were in big trouble if a rescue vessel didn’t arrive quickly, but their luck took a turn for the better. The life raft that they didn’t have time to manually deploy had a hydrostatic release system. That system activates a release mechanism when submerged in water and the raft capsule floats free of the vessel. When installed properly, the raft will inflate automatically with release. In this case, the canister released but, because the painter was not secured to the so-called “weak link,” the raft did not inflate. But half a loaf is better than none, and when the canister containing the raft floated up, it drifted toward the men and came close enough to allow one of them to grab it. He pulled the painter and, to the relief of all three men, it worked. The six-man raft inflated, and within a couple of minutes they were safely inside.
The quick turn of events just before the capsizing meant that no one had time to release the emergency position-indicating radio beacon (EPIRB) either. An EPIRB is an electronic piece of equipment that activates when submerged and sends out a radio beacon to Search and Rescue (SAR) with its location.
However, once again luck was with the crew, and the EPIRB activated when the Pubnico Explorer went down. Search and Rescue picked up the location as 43.58.42N—66.24.18W. About twenty minutes later, the Canadian Coast Guard ship Westport pulled alongside and Neil, Sydney, and Peter were taken on board. All three were in good condition. The captain of the Coast Guard vessel decided to search for Captain Trask since it was obvious that the three crewmen didn’t need immediate medical attention after their ordeal.
An extensive air and sea search for the missing skipper continued for the next twenty-four hours, including a US Coast Guard Falcon jet equipped with forward-looking infrared technology.
SAR operations were terminated about 1:00 p.m. on Thursday, December 17, and the case was passed over to the RCMP, who in turn put the case under a “missing persons” file.
In news reports on Thursday, Major James Simiana, with Joint Task Force Atlantic in Halifax, said the search area was hundreds of kilometres wide and had been “extensively gone over several times” by aircraft and the Coast Guard vessel as well as by local fishing vessels from the area.
“The determination has been made that at this point it would now be beyond the survival capability of the missing fisherman given the weather conditions that have prevailed since the ship sinking,” he said.
On top of all that, it is believed that Captain Trask went down with the vessel inside the wheelhouse.
Why the captain didn’t follow his three crew members who jumped overboard is unknown. One theory is that he may have tried to get back inside to issue a radio alert to Search and Rescue that they were abandoning ship. Another possibility is that he knew he was not physically able to climb up the port bulwark as the others did because of his health. The TSB report focused on his medical records and, along with much more, wrote: “. . . Although not indicated on the medical certificate, the master had, within the previous six months, taken prescription medication for the treatment of hypertension, chronic bronchitis, and emphysema.”
Whatever the reason why he couldn’t make it to the life raft, his fellow skippers in the area speak highly of Captain Trask’s actions. Hubert Saulnier, a well-known captain in the region, says Trask did the job he was supposed to do.
“He made sure the crew were safe before he was going to leave—he’s supposed to stay at the wheel, he’s supposed to stay at the radio, contact the Coast Guard, assess the situation while the crew gets the life raft ready, survival suits, etc.—and they are the first ones to disembark from the boat. The captain did his job properly, from what I can see it’s just very sad he didn’t have time to make it out himself,” says Saulnier.
Sad indeed.
From all accounts, the southwest Nova Scotia fishing industry lost a well-liked and respected man when Captain Dave Trask made his final voyage on December 16, 2009.
Chapter 18
Addicted to Fisheries
Glenn Blackwood is probably not an instantly recognizable name in every home in Newfoundland and Labrador—but it should be.
The native of Hare Bay, Bonavista Bay, has held the most prestigious positions with nearly every fisheries and marine agency in the province.
Today he is a vice-president of Memorial University of Newfoundland (Marine Institute), the largest university in Atlantic Canada and home to nearly 19,000 students. More than 1,000 of them are full-time students at the Institute.
Glenn Blackwood
But the reason Blackwood’s personal profile is not as high as some people in lesser positions is because of his modesty. He has always wanted the PR focused on his projects rather than on himself.
A soft-spoken and friendly man, Blackwood beams when he reminisces about his childhood days in Hare Bay. He has fond memories of summer days out in a punt catching tomcods and flatfish and doing all the fun things that Newfoundland bay boys have done for centuries.
Blackwood is from a family of mariners. A couple of his uncles were fishermen, and his father worked on coastal boats along with his uncle, who was captain on one of the well-known passenger and freighting ships that served Newfoundland and Labrador coastal communities. As a child he hung around boats and wharves and cut out cod tongues to earn a bit of pocket money, so perhaps not surprisingly, young Glenn developed a curiosity about fish biology and decided that fisheries science would be his career choice.
During his university student days and then after graduation, Blackwood worked with provincial fisheries in the development branch. The job required a lot of travel, and he was having the time of his life.
“I spent my twenty-first birthday in Labrador on some river with Harry Martin.”
Martin is a Labrador wildlife officer and better known as a great singer and songwriter.
Blackwood says that, as a people person, knowing so many wonderful folks in the fishing industry in his early career was a fascinating experience. He smiles as he remembers his association with names like Max Strickland from Burgeo, Frank Moore from Codroy, the Pateys of St. Anthony, and Lester Petten from Port de Grave, just to name a few.
Among other assignments, Blackwood worked on developing an eel fishery in Notre Dame Bay and lumpfish in Bonavista Bay. In fact, he wrote his honours dissertation on lumpfish.
In 1984, he became the “biologist” with the provincial department of fisheries and aquaculture and focused on growing the aquaculture industry, especially salmon farming on the south coast. Aq
uaculture is now worth tens of millions of dollars to the Newfoundland and Labrador economy.
In the late 1980s, Blackwood was appointed director for resource analysis, a position that required him to be part of federal and provincial committees responsible for fish assessments. That was just preceding the most calamitous event in Newfoundland and Labrador’s fishery—the 1992 moratorium. In fact, it was in that capacity that Glenn Blackwood dared to officially suggest that northern cod might be in danger of collapse. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), which had the final say on science and management matters, did not take his argument seriously. He was a member of the Fisheries Resource Conservation Council (FRCC) and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO) councils, and this gave him inside information not only on what Canada was thinking, but European countries as well. That was educational but sometimes frustrating.
Blackwood served as fisheries assistant deputy minister with the province for a little while, but he’s not the political type, and soon he moved on to head up the Canadian Centre for Fisheries Innovation (CCFI) in 1997. Once again, he was happily working on projects for fishermen and marine people.
In 2000, he became the director of the Centre for Sustainable Aquatic Resources (CSAR) at the Marine Institute, where he was responsible for the Institute’s research and development activities related to harvesting and gear technologies and resource management.
Under his leadership, that Centre became a world leader in its field.
All that experience positioned Blackwood perfectly for the job that his colleagues say he was designed for. In 2005, he became director of the Marine Institute and is now vice-president.
