The Deadly Sea

by Jim Wellman

  August 11, 1992, will be long remembered by folks in Murray’s Harbour and St. Lewis–Fox Harbour, Labrador, as the day that fifty-nine-year-old Earl Poole and his thirty-year-old nephew, Wallace Poole, made their final voyage.

  Chapter 21

  The Harbour Manager

  Floyd d’Entremont is probably the most recognizable name in the Pubnico area of southwestern Nova Scotia. In a region where there are hundreds of d’Entremonts and perhaps even another Floyd or two, if you ask for information on Floyd d’Entremont, chances are you will get a response that goes something like, “You mean Floyd the harbour manager, right?”

  Floyd d’Entremont

  Floyd d’Entremont has been Harbour Manager of the Dennis Point Wharf in West Pubnico, southwestern Nova Scotia, for more than twenty years. He is well-known because Dennis Point–West Pubnico is one of the largest fishing ports in Nova Scotia, possibly the largest, which in turn would make it one of the largest fishing ports in all of Canada.

  Close to eighty-five lobster-vessel owners and captains call it home port. About twenty draggers, several seiners, and a few other vessel types in the home fleet mean that Dennis Point is very diversified and, as such, the port operates year-round because in southwest Nova Scotia one or more fish species are landed every week of the year.

  Floyd is an affable fellow who looks younger than his fifty years. His positive demeanour is not just with his clients and friends. Floyd is a person who, when you first meet, you wish you could have more of his time to chat. I remember one fall afternoon a couple of years ago standing and chatting with Floyd on the parking lot next to the Harbour Authority office. Floyd was giving me a basic lesson in his native Acadian French language and how it differs from the Montreal French dialect.

  “Acadian French is easier for non–French speaking people to learn,” he says.

  His zest for life is evident even during casual conversation and makes you want to stay and hear much more than his busy schedule and his constantly ringing cellphone will allow.

  Besides being Harbour Manager for the past twenty-four years, Floyd operates a lobster buying company that he’s had for over thirty years. Going back even before that, he worked on the Bluenose—not the world-famous racing schooner, but the Bar Harbor–Yarmouth ferry of the same name.

  “It was just summer jobs back then. It was fun and they paid good money, too,” he laughs.

  His father was a long-time fisherman who fished until he was seventy-three or seventy-four, but Floyd was not attracted to a life on the sea. He did fish one season with his dad, but after a couple of bouts of seasickness, he decided that he’d better look for something different. Ironically, Floyd says his first job was at the wharf that he now manages.

  “I was thirteen and Digby scallopers would land there and they needed shuckers, so I did that for a while in the summer.”

  Floyd is a proud French Acadian who is very happy at home in Lower West Pubnico.

  “I was born and raised here and I’ve never been away from here for more than eleven days at one time. It’s crazy,” he says, laughing heartily at himself, knowing that for someone of his resources, people look at him curiously when he makes that statement. “I do travel a bit, but we just don’t stay for long. The longest vacation I ever had was when we went to a wedding in Boston once, and afterwards we went to Cape Cod and made a bit of a holiday out of it. These days, my son, who is twenty-two, works out west in the oil business, so we go out there.”

  Even when asked what he likes most about the job as Harbour Manager, Floyd doesn’t hesitate for a second: “Because it’s home,” he says, smiling.

  Other than working at home, Floyd likes the job for the very reason that it would scare away some people. “I don’t work scheduled hours—I’m at the wharf almost every day because we have boats coming and going every week of the year and at all times of the day and night, so I’m not working nine to five and I like that,” he says. “The wharf is also my social life. I know almost every captain and most of their crews and I really enjoy talking to them all.”

  As is prevalent in the French Acadian culture, family is extremely important to Floyd. The father of a son and daughter, he talks proudly of his children and has fond memories of focusing his attention on their upbringing. He says he and his wife were constantly on the road with the children, going to sporting events all over the province and even outside Nova Scotia.

  “We focused everything on giving them every opportunity we could.” Some parents make that statement sound like it was a chore, but not Floyd d’Entremont. It’s obvious that he and his wife enjoyed every minute of it and, in fact, are very thankful that they were so fortunate to have the opportunity and wouldn’t hesitate to do it all again.

  Despite having a twenty-four-hour workday, seven days a week, Floyd also finds time to relax and indulge in one of his personal pleasures. “I play guitar and sing just about every day,” he says. He also does a little bit of songwriting and will sing and play publicly if anyone asks.

  One of his four older sisters, Rowena, says Floyd is a good singer and also a really good songwriter and that music is an important part of her brother’s life. She says Floyd is playing and singing more and more in public these days, in venues like farmer’s markets and small restaurants.

  In his other day job, Floyd is a lobster buyer for the De La Tour Co-op. The company has operated for more than seventy years, making it one of the oldest businesses in the region. The company is named after Charles de la Tour, the founder. Floyd speaks with a tone of pride and almost reverence in his voice when he talks about the co-op, where he is also a member. At one point he referenced the co-op as a “movement” when describing its origins and how he worked there for a while many years ago as a clerk. He is happy to explain how it grew from a small business starting in a tiny building to become a large and diversified company.

  “The lobster sector of the company is owned by fishermen only, but the store, hardware, lumber, and petroleum sectors are owned by all community members,” he explains, adding that they are now even licensed to sell liquor. “My grandfather was a founding member of one sector.”

  Co-operatives are popular in southwest Nova Scotia and seem a natural fit in the Acadian French culture and their strong sense of community and family.

  Floyd d’Entremont, the harbourmaster, is a very positive example of that culture.

  Chapter 22

  The Last of His Era

  Captain Les McCarthy boasts a stellar marine and fishing career that is ongoing. At sixty-eight, he’s fished for more than fifty years and has commanded vessels for about forty-eight of those years. That impressive bio makes him the senior captain of the west coast Newfoundland herring seine fleet and perhaps in all of Atlantic Canada. But mere statistics do not make anyone exceptional. Les McCarthy has also earned utmost respect and admiration for his fisheries knowledge, fishing abilities, and leadership qualities. He is a master at his craft.

  Captain Les McCarthy in the wheelhouse of the seiner Ocean Leader

  Bill Barry has known Les since he was a boy. The head of the Barry Group of Companies based in Corner Brook is seldom at a loss for words, but when asked for some thoughts about his lifelong friend, he stumbles trying to find the proper language to adequately express his admiration and respect for Les.

  “I think the world of him. I couldn’t speak more highly of anyone from a professional standpoint, but also as a person in the general sense as well. He is a magnificent character.”

  Barry says Captain Les has an intuitive and unique ability to land herring when others sometimes struggle.

  “Even his colleagues and peers will tell you that Les is probably the best shoal-water seiner in the business. He can catch herring in those conditions like none other and not damage the seine. He is in a class by himself that way,” Barry says. “He is the essence of
a professional—the fellow that you want in the wheelhouse for any and every occasion—the one you’d want to send your kids to sea with to learn the business because he’s the best of the best.”

  Les is from a long line of herring fishermen. His ancestors from the Terrenceville and English Harbour East areas of Fortune Bay suffered a multi-year catch failure around the turn of the twentieth century. Several seiners started travelling to Labrador in the first few years of the 1900s to participate in the cod fishery, but they still needed herring for bait. The best herring fishery at that time was on Newfoundland’s west coast. After several seasons of going to Bay of Islands to fish herring and then continuing on to Labrador, several of the traditional herring fishermen decided to pull up stakes in Fortune Bay altogether and settled their families on the west coast to do what they knew best: herring seining. Woods Island, located at the mouth of the Bay of Islands, was their chosen new home, and soon well-known Fortune Bay names like McCarthy, Hackett, and Hickey were west coast seining masters. Today, Les McCarthy is the last of his era, but his son will likely succeed him when Les retires.

  Les practically learned to walk on the deck of a seiner. His father, Mike, was also a well-known captain. In my book Sea Folk, I published a story about Captain Mike McCarthy’s death in January 1980. Captain Mike was boarding his seiner one winter’s night in North Sydney when he fell between his vessel and the wharf and perished.

  Les has fond memories of being on board vessels with his dad as a young boy. Knowing that he would be following in his father’s footsteps, Les was carefully watching and learning his future craft at an elementary-school age. His early work experiences were with his father on board collector boats that travelled up and down the Labrador Coast collecting fish from small boat fishermen and then transporting it back to the island for processing. While still a teenager he went to Cape Breton working as a crew member on fishing draggers. By the time he turned twenty, he had impressed company owners enough that they offered Les his first full-time position as captain.

  “That was on the Alder Point, an eighty-seven-foot side dragger in Cape Breton,” Les says.

  A couple of years later, he returned to Newfoundland, alternating between collectors and seiners before eventually becoming exclusively involved in the herring seiner fishery.

  Ocean Leader docked at Barry’s Fisheries, Corner Brook

  By the time Les was in his thirties, he had advanced in his trade to a point that he was leading and conducting research work for the Newfoundland Government on the province’s east coast. Government wanted to determine if purse seining for herring was feasible on the east coast of Newfoundland in large vessels, because east coast fishermen had traditionally fished herring with fixed gear, but seining was more efficient. Les was captain of the National Sea seiner Canada 100, a 100-foot vessel, and he says their survey work demonstrated that all east coast bays could easily support seine technology at that time.

  It is interesting to listen to Les’s take on the state of today’s herring stock on the west coast of Newfoundland and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. There have been significant changes over the past twenty years, according to Les. He says there are just as many herring in his zone today as there ever were, but he thinks their behaviour has changed. He says years ago herring would appear in one area at a time and then migrate from one bay to the other. Now he says they show up in all the bays on the west coast at the same time.

  Herring spawning behaviour has changed, too, he says. Traditionally, herring had two spawning seasons in his area—spring and fall—but he thinks that the stock now spawn mostly in fall. And not only has their spawning time changed, Les says herring are spawning much farther to the west, nearer to Quebec than Newfoundland. However, they still travel over the same grounds, but in broader aggregations and at different times of year.

  Les is a soft-spoken man who answers questions directly and honestly. He smiled when asked if he has any plans for retirement.

  “Not really,” he said. “As long as I feel good and in good health, I see no reason to give it up yet. In fact, I feel like I’m sort of semi-retired anyway these days because government regulations keep us tied up at the wharf half the time.”

  Les explains that, during his early years, seiners worked year-round and were allowed in most of Atlantic Canadian waters. Now, he says, they are only allowed in certain areas at specific times of the year, they are not allowed to fish in certain depths of water, and they are restricted to waters, more or less, next door to home. It’s when he talks about those layers of bureaucratic policies that you see a rare flash of frustration in the otherwise calm and cool captain. He explains how many of the Ottawa-designed rules are made by people who wouldn’t know a herring from a hippopotamus.

  “In many cases they [the people and the rules] make no sense at all,” he says, admitting, though, that a lot of fisheries policies are tied to politics as much as science. One of his pet peeves is a policy that says he must fish in two or more zones to take fish that are part of the same stock. He raises a valid point. If he has a quota of 100 fish from the same aggregation, why does he have to fish fifty of them in Box A and then have to travel to Box B before he can take the second half of his allowance?

  This frustration with the bureaucracy is not uncommon these days. Many retirements are decided for that reason rather than based on economics or age. However, frustrations aside, Les will not take the decision to retire without a lot of soul searching. The sea and the art of fishing have always defined who and what he is for his entire life. It’s in his blood and at the core of his entire existence. For a man like Les, that essence is not easily transferred from the wheelhouse to spending mornings at Tim Hortons.

  Chapter 23

  The Worst Day of My Life

  On Tuesday morning, May 3, 2011, Raymond “Ray” Belliveau arrived at his harbourfront office in Lower East Pubnico at seven thirty, about the same time he arrived most mornings. The owner of Charlesville Fisheries Ltd. in southwest Nova Scotia liked to get an early start on his workday because managing a fish plant as well as coordinating a fleet of five inshore draggers required long, busy hours, especially during, or preparing for, peak fishing seasons.

  Silver Angel

  For the most part, things looked normal as Ray pulled alongside the harbourfront that morning, although he noticed his vessel Silver Angel was not at the dock as he had expected. The fifty-eight-foot vessel left East Jeddore near Halifax on Monday morning and was scheduled to arrive at East Pubnico late that night or early Tuesday morning to undergo a scheduled Transport Canada inspection. Because the vessel was going to be out of service for a few days, one of the Silver Angel’s crew members was to drive his vehicle to East Pubnico and meet his fellow crewmate Ward Wickens and Captain Gerry Henneberry. Once the vessel was secured, the three men planned to drive back to their homes in, or near, East Jeddore while the inspections were under way.

  At first Ray didn’t think much about it. Boats often get delayed for a variety of reasons. Still, the first thing he did once inside the office was check the Silver Angel’s location. He checked the vessel’s so-called black box reading and noticed the coordinates indicated the Silver Angel was about five and a half nautical miles off Cape Sable Island and apparently not moving.

  “I still didn’t think it was anything serious at first,” Ray says, but he was wrong.

  At ten o’clock on Monday morning, Captain Gerry Henneberry and Ward Wickens pulled away from the wharf in East Jeddore and headed the Silver Angel on a southwesterly course toward the Pubnicos.

  It was a fairly routine and uneventful day, and by 11:00 p.m. the Silver Angel was only a few hours from reaching its destination.

  Just before midnight, the northeast wind increased to about thirty knots and the vessel was rolling about twenty-five degrees, so the captain decided to deploy the paravane stabilizers to allow for a smoother tr
ip. The stabilizers are triangular pieces of metal attached to a chain and lowered under water by booms stretching out from the vessel’s sides. Once submerged, the kite-shaped paravanes slice through the ocean and keep the vessel from rolling heavily.

  At about midnight, the two men had the stabilizers secured and went back inside. Gerry said he would take a nap and handed the watch over to Ward, asking to be called when they were about five nautical miles south of Cape Sable Island. Gerry knew the area well and told Ward he wanted to retrieve both stabilizers before entering waters where lobster trap buoys could get snagged in them. Gerry then went to his bunk for a much-needed rest.

  At 4:45 a.m., the vessel was south of Cape Sable Island and Ward called out to inform Gerry that it was time to retrieve the stabilizers. The captain went to the wheelhouse and took the vessel out of gear while Ward went aft to work on the port paravane. Both men had done this procedure on numerous occasions, and this time it was no different. After smoothly going through all the motions of getting everything ready for the final steps in securing the paravanes on board, Gerry moved to the starboard side of the upper deck, let go the starboard paravane rope from the cleat, and looked aft to check on Ward, who would normally be near the starboard aft gantry.

  He couldn’t see Ward, but that didn’t worry him because he knew Ward was very efficient and he assumed his thirty-three-year-old deckhand had moved on and was waiting for the line just aft of the upper deck.

  With that thought, Gerry began crawling back on top of a row of tote boxes to pass the line to Ward. That’s when Gerry’s heart started pumping like crazy. He saw Ward in the water about nine or twelve feet off the vessel’s side, just forward of the starboard aft gantry. Ward was calling out for help. Gerry quickly climbed back off the boxes and secured the starboard paravane line on its cleat to steady the vessel. Running as fast as he could through the wheelhouse, down the stairwell, and out onto the back deck, Gerry grabbed a gaff from the starboard side of the net reel on the stern and attempted to reach Ward with it, but the gaff wasn’t long enough. Gerry then ran forward, took a life ring from its bracket on the starboard side, rushed back aft, and without uncoiling the rope he threw the ring with the line as hard as he could toward Ward. It fell several feet short.