Man on the Ice

by Rex Saunders

  One morning, when we were hauling our gillnets, we had a problem with making the boat go; the nets seemed quite heavy. We didn’t realize what was happening at first, but it didn’t take long to discover a big old ground shark coming right up by the side of our boat. We tried to get his tail out of the water so he wouldn’t be able to swim, but that didn’t work. He was slamming himself up against the side of our boat, making it difficult for us to keep it under control. Finally, we managed to get the nets tied to the rise ends of the boat. I grabbed a twelve-gauge shotgun and put a couple of loads of shot right in his head. That fixed him! We weren’t able to clear him out of the net, so we had to tow him along with us.

  Once we reached the beach by our wharf where the water was low, we cleared him of the gillnets and learned he had destroyed only two of them. Not bad for a fourteen-foot shark! When the water was high, we towed him back out off the beach and into the harbour with our motorboat, where he sank. The children in town wanted us to leave him on the beach. They thought it was great fun crawling up on the old shark’s back.

  September came and we got aboard the coastal boat and returned to St. Lunaire for the winter. Then it was into the woods to begin cutting firewood for the cold winter ahead. Over the course of the next few years, John Hedderson and Nelson Humby came fishing with me. When we reached Indian Tickle, the first thing we had to do was head to Table Bay, about sixteen miles or so toward Cartwright, and gather some firewood and sticks for our wharf. Fishing was very good. My sharemen were really great young men, and didn’t mind hard work. However, it didn’t last long.

  The summer of 1968 was a complete failure. There weren’t any fish in Indian Tickle that year. That September, I put my wife and children aboard the coastal boat. The coastal boat was full, carrying boats from fishermen farther north who were returning home after a bad summer. Two of my sharemen, John Nelson and Fred Burden, and I steamed our boats, along with Clem Burden. Fred had a tarp over the front of his boat, allowing just enough room for us to lie down. We left Indian Tickle and steamed until dark had almost fallen, when we came to a nice place, tossed a grapple out, and moored up for the night. The next morning was flat calm, not a motion on the water, but it was pitch-black with fog. We decided to travel in it anyway.

  We came upon a small, orange gillnet float labelled “10 Russell.” We figured we must have been around William’s Harbour, because we knew there were Russells in William’s Harbour. We travelled for another couple of hours and came upon another float with the same label. We weren’t sure what to do, as we knew Mr. Russell wouldn’t have labelled the same number on both ends of his gillnet. He would have made a distinction with “10 A” and “10 B.” We decided to go, based on our compass, even though it was off by a couple of degrees.

  Darkness began to fall again and we were getting a little worried. By and by, we came across a small, grassy island and assumed we were in some sort of bay. We tied our boats together, tossed a grapple, and settled for the night. We had a cup of tea and something to eat as we laughed and told stories until we fell asleep. At some point in the night, I think it was Clem Burden who awoke and looked outside the tarp covering the boat. He yelled, “The fog is all gone and there is a big red light in there on a pool.” We got up and discovered we were anchored beside the grassy rock right in the tickle going into Battle Harbour.

  We hauled in the grapple, started up the old six Acadia, and went into Battle Harbour. We rested for the rest of the night, and made a phone call home to our families to let them know where we were and when we would be arriving home. We left and went up the coast, heading toward Red Bay, and came across the Strait. We weren’t steaming long before we saw Cape Bauld coming out of the water. The closer we got, the bigger the cape appeared, and before we knew it we had arrived back in St. Lunaire, safe and sound.

  The following summer, I heard of work in Goose Bay, Labrador. I hauled up my boat, and on the twelfth of September, 1969, I went to Goose Bay with the intent to work for a woods company known as Javelin. When I walked into the office, I was told they were only hiring men from places where woods work was ongoing, like Roddickton and Main Brook, places like those.

  Mr. Herb Brett was doing a renovation job on a large building up in Spruce Park. It was a place belonging to the Canadian Armed Forces, and it was being turned into a mini-mall. So, I worked there for the winter. In November, I got an apartment on K Street. Mr. Bill Brown was the landlord. It had two bedrooms and we had four children, with another one on the way. That following year, Irene gave birth in Happy Valley to our fifth child, Corrie. Now we had four boys and one girl. At six months of age, Darryl became very ill and was diagnosed with meningitis. This illness caused severe brain damage. We definitely experienced some hard times, and we still do, now that he is forty years old, but as all parents who love their children, he is ours and he belongs at home with us.

  The woods operation had closed down when the snow got to be too much and had made for difficult working conditions. It reopened in May. The next time I went to the woods office, I was from Main Brook and I had no problem getting hired as a woodcutter. I became a skidder operator a few weeks later. Stan Hodder was my woods foreman and he was a very nice fellow to work for. The company had changed its name from Javelin to Melville Pulp and Paper.

  I had good men working for me as woodcutters. Jim Saunders and Roy Patey could get around in the woods quite well. They were only young, but they were very strong men, and nice young fellows. Harold Adams was another good woodcutter. Our foreman, Stan Hodder, wanted a clean cutover, without a tree left standing. One morning he came into the woods where we were working. We had a small point of woods left. I recall Stan looking around, and he said, “Now b’ys, you got to go back and cut that.”

  I told him there were three or four bird nests there. We weren’t allowed to cut them down because the wildlife people would be very upset if we rid the woods of those poor robins’ nests.

  He replied, “You got away with another one, didn’t ya!”

  There really weren’t any bird nests. The wood left was small and we only wanted to cut the really good wood. We could make almost as much money on a bonus as we did with our regular wages, so we wanted to stay in good wood as much as we could.

  I had a fellow from Hawke’s Bay, or somewhere near there, cutting for me for a few days. His name was Ron Payne and he liked to drink on the weekends. One Monday morning Ron came to work. He’d had a few drinks the night before, and of course he was feeling a bit sick. Stan said to him, “Ron, if you comes to work one more morning after drinkin’ all night, I’m gonna fire you.”

  He was okay for a short while, but Ron got on the beer again. He used to drink India Pale Ale, and on this one particular morning, Ron got off the bus in camp and saw Stan standing there. He looked at Stan and said, “Hello Stan, IPA last night, and I s’pose it’s gonna be EPA (Eastern Provincial Airways) tonight.” Ron thought he was fired for sure, but Stan only smiled and went on his way. Ron was a good woodcutter, so Stan let him off the hook again.

  The woods operation had three different names in the nine years they were in Goose Bay. They started as Javelin, then changed the name to Melville Pulp and Paper, and prior to their closing it was known as Labrador Linerboard. When the Linerboard operations closed, a fellow by the name of Van Beek started buying wood, but the union forced him out. He didn’t want to have anything to do with the union, so he shut down the company. Most of the people who had worked in the woods had nothing left to do, so they moved out and found work elsewhere.

  In 1977, the first coastal boat that came to Goose Bay arrived in June. My family and I loaded everything we owned aboard, headed to the airport, and flew into St. Anthony, Newfoundland. When the boat arrived, we got all of our belongings, and I opened a small sawmill in St. Lunaire. However, that didn’t work out well, so we decided to move to Dryden, Ontario, in September, 1979. I got a job as a skidder operator and my family and I moved into an apartment. After three years, the
company I was working for went to piecework and closed down its camps.

  So, again, we moved. We loaded everything we owned into our truck and trailer and headed home to St. Lunaire. My brothers Sher, Herb, and Wade, had a 42-foot longliner called The Mystic Five. She was a Cape Islander boat. We fished cod traps at Belle Isle and gillnets around Englee, Cook’s Harbour, and at places in Labrador, including Indian Tickle, Black Tickle, and Domino. It was good fishing with my brothers, but my boys were old enough now to go fishing with me, so I decided to have a 35-foot longliner built by my uncle, Ernest Rogers, from Trinity Bay. It was a nice little boat. I named her the Trudy Irene, after my daughter and wife.

  On May 3, 1984, we went to Trinity, Trinity Bay, to steam our boat home. There was a lot of ice and snow around. We got as far as Tilt Cove when we decided to tie up the Trudy Irene to the old wharf there. The wharf wasn’t in great condition, as it hadn’t been used in a long time. Tilt Cove was once a thriving town with a copper mine and some gold, but it had closed down many years prior. I think we were there for four or five days and nights before the ice finally slacked. The wind came western and moved the ice offshore just enough for us to get around Cape John and into La Scie, where we spent another few days.

  After a while the ice cleared and we left La Scie and headed for home. We had a long and hard beat before we finally made it back to St. Lunaire. We spent some time fishing around home and Cook’s Harbour with the gillnets we had aboard before we decided to return to La Scie again, as fishing was quite good there. We sold our fish to Fishery Products Ltd. and continued on to set our gillnets around Cape John and Gull Island.

  I recall one day when we were hauling our nets, and the wind was coming from the west, or the northwest. It was blowing a storm when we had to stop hauling our nets, and leave to steam back to La Scie. One of the boys checked the engine room and shouted, “We’re sinking! The water is up around the motor!”

  We checked the pumps and they were working okay, but they weren’t able to pump out as much water as was coming in. The only thing we could do was take the five-gallon water buckets we had on board and start dumping out the excess water. One man got down in the engine room and would dip up a bucket of water and pass it up to the other fellow, who would then throw it out the wheelhouse door. After a while we started to gain on the water, and then we were throwing out more than was coming in. I had hard-working men: my two sons, Denley and Derrick, along with my buddy Jim Pilgrim.

  I thought it was best to head to Shoe Cove, a small fishing town in Green Bay, as it was much closer and easier to reach than having to steam all the way to La Scie. We got a pump engine from someone there, and the wind dropped out in the evening. We left Shoe Cove and steamed around Cape John, then back into La Scie. There, we put the Trudy Irene up on the marine centre. We soon found out the problem; one of the bolts from the stuffing box had broken off and the other three had come loose. We replaced the broken bolt and tightened the other three. The next day we had her all fixed up, back in the water, and ready for fishing again. We had eighty gillnets aboard. That was a lot of hard work, hauling in all eighty gillnets every day. Some of the boats around there had a hundred, and some even more, but eighty nets was enough for us. The fish grew scarcer every day.

  We heard of fish in Twillingate, just across Green Bay from where we had our nets, so we headed there and set our nets on a small fishing bank before we went in and tied our boat up to the Fishery Products wharf in Twillingate.

  The next morning was a nice morning with no wind, and we hauled our nets and had a good catch of fish. We did great before the fish slacked off, so we took our nets aboard and headed for home. After a few repairs on our nets, we left St. Lunaire once again and headed for Indian Tickle on the Labrador. Dad and Mom still had their small summer home there. They weren’t fishing much, as they were in their late sixties, maybe sixty-eight or sixty-nine years old. They were using two or three gillnets in a small, 18-foot speedboat.

  We set our nets around the Wolf Islands and the Ferret Islands when my back gave out. This wasn’t the first time it had given me trouble.

  Denley had to take over the boat. He was only nineteen years old at the time and he did okay. I went ashore and stayed with Mom and Dad. Mom put me to bed because I couldn’t even walk, my back was so bad, but she took care of me until the coastal boat came into Indian Tickle on her way back to St. John’s. Denley and the boys put me aboard the Trudy Irene and took me to the coastal boat. They made a makeshift stretcher out of an old door belonging to Dad’s old stage, put me onto it, and loaded me aboard the boat. The crew of the coastal boat put straps around it and winched me up on the deck, and some of the other crew members carried me inside. I don’t remember the name of that coastal boat. I was taken to the hospital in Port Hope Simpson for a night and was then taken to hospital in St. Anthony by the Grenfell Mission plane. It was there I had my second back surgery.

  I think I was more worried about Denley and the boys coming home with the boat at the end of the fishing season than I was about my back. Everything turned out okay and the boys made it home all right. It was then time to take the Trudy Irene to the marine centre in Flower’s Cove to put her up for the season, and I took the long winter to recover.

  Denley, Derrick, and Corrie cut all of our firewood, about fifteen loads each. I didn`t go into the woods as I wanted to make sure my back was going to be in good condition for the upcoming fishing season, which would start around the beginning of May. The spring quickly approached and we headed to Flower’s Cove to get the Trudy Irene ready. We got her all painted up and, then soon after, in the water. There was a bit of ice in the straits and we got stuck, spending the night wherever the tide took the ice and our boat. We came near Cape Bauld but couldn’t get around it, so we went back to Cook’s Harbour and spent the rest of the day and night there.

  The following day the ice was scattered apart. We left Cook’s Harbour and went around Cape Bauld to come into St. Lunaire. Once the ice cleared off, we got our gillnets aboard and started fishing again, until it was time for the cod traps at Belle Isle. There were quite a few boats around there during that time: us in the Trudy Irene, Glenn Penney in the Penney’s Dream, Norm Cull in the Cull’s Eclipse, my brother Sher Saunders in the Saunders Endeavor, Ralph Rose in the Connie James, and Melvin Penney in the Even Tide. We were all moored up in a small cove called Lark Tickles, on the western side of Belle Isle. Down on the northeast end, known as Black Joe, was Francis Snow in the Mona Leslie and Roderick Cull in the B. J. Allen. It was a good place for fishing cod traps.

  Most of the boats had Japanese cod traps, which were good because you could take a boatload of fish out and let the rest down, as it couldn’t escape. We would fill the trap skiff with whatever fish we could take on board, steam back to the longliner, clear it away and ice it in the fish hold, then back to the trap we would go to haul it up again. We’d take whatever was left in it or whatever we could take in our trap skiff. It didn’t take very many trap skiff loads to fill the longliners, especially the Trudy Irene. It was only a 34’11” boat, not much bigger than a large-scale trap skiff. Two or three crews from up around the Long Island and Fogo Island areas had summer homes at Black Joe. There they would split and salt their fish, and in the fall the fish would be shipped back to St. Lunaire by longliner and sold to Mr. Graham Burden, who bought all of the fish, both fresh and salted, for Fishery Products Ltd.

  Belle Isle is an island about sixteen miles long and one mile wide, with two lighthouses: one on the northeast end operated by David Taylor, and the other on the southwest end operated by Randy Campbell and Glenn Taylor. It was sixteen miles from Cape Bauld, and it would take us about five hours from St. Lunaire to Lark Tickle on Belle Isle. It would sometimes be very rough going, with wind and tide coming through the Strait of Belle Isle.

  I remember one time we were steaming back to Belle Isle and my son Corrie got very sick. He went on deck to get some fresh air. I went to check on him and I saw him
lying across the gurdy table, with his head resting on the gurdy tires. He looked so pitiful I asked him if he wanted me to turn the boat around and take him home. He looked at me and replied, “No, Dad, but you can throw me overboard if you want to.”

  He was very seasick and it was blowing hard. The water was coming over the boat and splashing right over him. I told him that this was going to be his last trip to Belle Isle, because I couldn’t watch him get sick like that anymore. When we returned home with another load of fish, Corrie got out of the boat and soon after went to St. John’s, where he got a job. He never went back to fishing after that.

  My brothers Sher, Wade, Ezra, Herb, and Herb’s son Boyd were hauling their cod traps when a big old whale tangled up in the twine. We were passing by in our boat, headed for our traps, when we saw what had happened. We stopped and helped them free the whale from their trap. Their trap skiff was about thirty feet long and the whale was much longer than their boat. We thought is must have been fifty feet or more.

  The whale was quiet and it didn’t move much. It kind of just laid there and let us clear the twine from its head and from around the big barnacles on its back. Some of the barnacles were the size of a man’s fist. We would clear some of the twine from it and then it would attempt to go down beneath the water’s surface as we pinned the twine underneath the gunnels. As the whale was descending below, we could hear the trap twine straining and cracking from the weight of the whale. After a few minutes the whale would float back up to the surface and we would continue to untangle more of the twine. It was quite difficult to get the twine away from those big old barnacles.