Man on the Ice

by Rex Saunders

  We didn’t want to cut up too much of the twine, so we spent a little more time trying to untangle it. The whale hardly moved. It almost seemed as though it was aware of what we were trying to do. At one point, Sher got out of the boat and took a step or two on the whale’s back. It didn’t move a bit, so the next time it surfaced, it was my turn to get on its back and I managed to take two or three steps on it. I think each of us managed to get our foot on its back at some point during the five or six hours that it took to untangle the whale completely. When it was finally free, the whale descended about five or six feet below the surface. We watched as it moved that big old tail and created an awful big tide inside the trap. When it got just outside of the boat, it came right on top of the water and threw that big old tail right up in the air, giving one big splash on the water.

  Sher said, “The whale just said thanks, boys! But if I ever catches Rex in the water, I am going to eat him!”

  On one of our many trips to Belle Isle we had our 19-foot speedboat in tow of the Trudy Irene. We always towed a boat back and forth with us in case of an emergency. Sometimes we would have that little longliner loaded deep in the water with codfish iced in the fish hold, and if something went wrong, our speedboat was easy to get aboard. We ran into some strong tide coming out of the straits, and a storm of wind from the west. We watched as the boat towed behind us almost swamped with water. One big wave broke over her side. We watched as two paddles and the gaff fell out and drifted away as we pulled her closer to the Trudy Irene. It was blowing so hard to do anything, so we continued to watch as our boat filled with water, turned bottom-up, and disappeared below the surface. We thought we were going to have to cut the tow rope and let her go.

  We used to go to Lark Tickle on the western side of Belle Isle because it was a bit closer that way, but this time we had to go on the eastern side to try and get in the lund of Belle Isle. After a while we were clear of most of the wind, so we decided to stop and try to pull our speedboat closer. The wind was blowing so hard that we weren’t able to come close to it, so it stayed bottom-up as we headed for Lark Tickle. It was almost dark by this time and we couldn’t go very fast with an overturned boat in tow, but we were glad we still had her with us.

  I put the Trudy Irene in forward gear and pushed the throttle open a bit, but nothing happened. I thought that maybe the cable had slipped off the transmission or something. One of the boys got down in the engine room to check the cables, and everything looked fine. The shaft was going around, so I put her in reverse. Nothing happened, even though the shaft could go around, both in forward and reverse. By this time it was dark. I tried to make radio contact with some of the boats that were still out there, but Belle Isle is not a good place for radio frequency unless you are up on the high hills. The lighthouse keepers only had CB, and now here we were with no response from anyone on Belle Isle, drifting farther offshore.

  We were just about ready to throw over our anchor when we heard over our radio, “Trudy Irene, this is 2970 Belle Isle Northeast. Dave Taylor calling. Over.”

  I got back on our radio and said, “Dave, we’re in a bit of trouble. I think we lost our blades.” Or propeller, as some call it.

  He said that he could see the lights of our boat and he was sending Francis Snow and his crew on the Mona Leslie. As soon as we saw the lights coming toward us, we knew we were safe and sound. They fastened us to their boat and headed back to the little cove called Black Joe. We were thankful for Francis Snow and the crew on the Mona Leslie, and David Taylor, the lighthouse keeper on the northeast end of Belle Isle.

  The following morning we checked everything out. The transmission was okay. It was going in forward and reverse, so we thought that the blades must have come off the shaft. Derrick put a rope around his waist and jumped over the side. He wasn’t gone long before he came back up with news the blades were still there. He double-checked just to make sure, and I put my hand on the blades and turned them over on the shaft. I didn’t think the nut had come off the shaft. If it had, the blades would have come off and would have been lost for sure. Before I could tell him not to go down again, Derrick was below again for the third time, to ensure the nut was secured. Sure enough, it was so tight that he couldn’t move it. We couldn’t figure out what the trouble was.

  We waited a couple of days. Our speedboat that we had in tow was okay. We always stored the motor on board the Trudy Irene in case something like this were to happen. We saw the same thing happen to a longliner before. They lost everything—boat, motor, and all—but we were okay. Mrs. Roderick Cull, God love her, kept us going with the big lemon pies she baked and gave to her husband to take aboard our boat for us. Thank you, Mrs. Cull.

  One of the boats took us in tow to St. Lunaire. We put our longliner ashore on a sandy beach by our house in Joe’s Cove at high tide. When low tide came we put on our long rubbers and walked around the Trudy Irene, and soon we learned what had happened. Somehow, the brass key that keeps the blades from going around the shaft had worn down smooth with the shaft. There wasn’t enough left to hold the blades tight. We had to take off the blades and replace the brass key, then reassemble everything again. The tide came in and the Trudy Irene was afloat. She was all ready to go back to Belle Isle. We went and got our cod traps on board and came back home to put them away for the winter. With our gillnets aboard, we left for the Labrador.

  Chapter Three

  Boats, Boats, and More Boats

  WE FISHED EVERYWHERE FROM Twillingate to Port Saunders, Belle Isle to Labrador’s Indian Tickle, Black Tickle, and Domino. In the fall of 1985, we had some nets on deck and several in the hold of our boat. My boys and I reached Indian Tickle just before dark. The wind started to blow from the northeast and we couldn’t get the anchor to hold. We had to travel up to a small area called Fox Bight, where we tossed out our anchor.

  We were having a cup of tea while the motor was still running. I opened up the hatch to the engine room and all I could see was smoke. I tried to get down to take a look, but the smoke was too thick. We extinguished the fire and sprayed all over the engine, but it only took a minute or so and everything was on fire again. The fuel tanks were down in the engine room, a 50-litre tank on either side of the engine. We had our speedboat in tow, so my two sons, Denley and Derrick, along with my shareman, Lloyd Burden, and I left the boat in fear of the tanks exploding, and we headed to Indian Tickle. We lost everything, including our nets. We had planned to set them the next morning once the storm had passed.

  Job and Rosetta Sainsbury from Cartwright were fishing in Indian Tickle. They took us in until the coastal boat came in from farther up north to take us back to St. Anthony. My wife was waiting on the wharf to take us home to St. Lunaire again. If it wasn’t for Job and Rosetta, I don’t know what we would have done. They fed us and made room for us in their small summer home. People like that don’t get forgotten very easily.

  My wife, Irene, was on the wharf waiting for us. When the boat had docked, there were my two sons, Denley and Derrick, our shareman Lloyd Burden, and myself. We had nothing but the clothes on our backs, and I don’t remember the captain’s name. We were all treated quite well during our journey back home. At some point during the night one of the mates came to us and invited us to have breakfast with the captain. He must have known our boat was burning, because he wasn’t supposed to call in at Indian Tickle that particular trip. But the captain and his crew came in to pick us up and take us back to St. Anthony. At first I was hesitant to sit and eat with a man, a captain, rather, of such a large ship as the one owned by the Canadian National Railway. I felt too small, too unworthy to eat with someone of his authority. However, we did have a great meal. I wish I had kept a record of all of that, the name of the coastal boat and the captain’s name, but it’s too late for that now. Denley and Derrick must have enjoyed the company, as they talked about dining with the captain for some time after.

  We arrived home safe and sound, but there was no rest for the weary. We had
just a 20-foot speedboat, with a 40-HP Mariner outboard motor, and a few gillnets. We didn’t have a gurdy to haul in the nets, and hauling in gillnets in twenty to thirty fathoms of water by hand is not easy. We did get it done, though, and managed to make enough money to qualify for EI and get us through the winter.

  The following spring, we bought a 45-foot longliner called the Sherman Elaine from Mr. John Short of Cook’s Harbour. He had bought himself a newer and larger boat, so he sold us the older one at a very good price, somewhere around $7,000 if I remember correctly. We finished fishing at Belle Isle in the straits, and gillnetted at Cook’s Harbour. We had some issues getting our larger boat registered with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), since we were only permitted up to a 34’11” boat. DFO didn’t like the idea of us going to a 45-footer.

  Shortly after, I was called to an appeals board meeting in St. Anthony, where officers from across Atlantic Canada came to hear the stories first-hand from the local fishermen struggling with some of the rules laid out by DFO. I told them about the recent loss of my 34’11” boat, the Trudy Irene.

  “She was only two years old and we lost everything. We had gillnets and enough insurance to cover what was owed on her to the Fisheries Loans Board. All we were left with was the clothes we were wearing.”

  They must have felt sorry for us, because they approved the registry for our 45-foot Sherman Elaine.

  Fishing was not easy. Most often we would face some sort of trouble while fishing cod traps at Belle Isle. One time, we were on our way home to St. Lunaire with a full load of fish iced in the hold, when all of a sudden the motor stopped running. I thought it strange, because she was working so well up to that. I went to the back and opened up the hatch to the fuel tanks and the rudder steering. I got down, and right away I knew it was a fuel problem. I could smell the fumes and I could see that there had been quite a bit of fuel and water down there. The fuel line had somehow broken and the boat had started to leak, so gas was mixing with water.

  It was eleven-thirty at night and the wind was blowing quite hard from the west. The batteries were getting low and we had trouble keeping the pump going. There were no other boats in sight and we only had a CB radio rather than a VHF, so we couldn’t call the Coast Guard Radio Station in St. Anthony. We knew the boat would sink as soon as the battery was dead and the pump could no longer function. Our lifeboat, an old dory, would never stand up to the rough waters and heavy winds, and being three miles from the nearest land, we knew we would never be able to row ashore. We were supposed to be within viewing range of my house on shore, but when my wife Irene peered out, she couldn’t see us.

  She went out to my pickup truck where I had a CB radio. Just as she flicked the “On” switch, she heard the sound of Derrick’s voice. It was enough for her to know that we were in some kind of trouble. Denley and I were trying our best to prevent more water from getting in the boat. Irene called Mr. Harvey Compton, a Fisheries officer with DFO. He happened to have a friend and fellow DFO officer visiting with his family for the night. Harvey had a small Fisheries boat for patrolling the small fishing towns from St. Anthony to Cook’s Harbour. Both Harvey and his fellow DFO officer headed out for our rescue.

  Meanwhile, Irene had called a local fisherman, Mr. Ross Peyton, who owned an under-35-foot longliner called the White Coat. It didn’t take long for them to reach us. I’m not sure if it was Harvey or Ross who gave us the battery to run the pump, but we were taken in tow by Ross and the White Coat, and soon we were safe and sound in the port of St. Lunaire. The fish was taken off and trucked to the St. Anthony fish plant, known then as Fishery Products Ltd. We worked through the night, off-loading the Sherman Elaine, which contained 25,000 pounds of codfish.

  We went home to rest and get ready to go back to Belle Isle and tend to our cod traps again. The phone rang, and my wife answered. It was for me. As I listened to the voice on the other end, I could feel a lump swell in my throat. “This is Fishery Products calling. We’re sorry to tell you we had to dump your fish. We smelled diesel fuel on it.” Boy oh boy, that was bad.

  There was no use crying over spilled milk, so with our fuel lines repaired, we went back to Belle Isle and everything went well. We got our boat moored up at Belle Isle and went out in our speedboat to our cod traps. By this time, the fish were starting to move offshore from the rocks and shoal water. We stayed for two or three days and only got about 10,000 pounds of fish. We came back to St. Lunaire and sold our catch. And then I received another phone call. This time they said it was “blackberry” fish, not good for fresh frozen fish, but they could split and salt it, which was fine, except the price was much lower. So, back to Belle Isle we went. This time we took our cod trap aboard the Sherman Elaine, returned home, and stored it away. With our recent luck, we decided to head to the Labrador around Black Tickle with our gillnets. The fish weren’t plentiful, but we made a very good summer out of it, especially considering all the trouble we’d had thus far. At the end of the season, we returned home and made our way to Flower’s Cove, where we put our boat on the slip, storing it away for the winter. Denley, Derrick, and I spent the next few wintery months in the woods to get firewood for our three homes. That’s a lot of wood, about fifteen truckloads each, to be exact. Plus a few logs to be sawed into lumber for our fish store.

  Spring came quickly and we went to Flower’s Cove to do some work on the Sherman Elaine. We had to get her ready for the summer fishery and have her inspected because of her large size. The inspector came and turned her down. We weren’t allowed to put her in the water if we didn’t do more work on her, and we decided it wouldn’t be worth the trouble, so we scrapped her there on the marine centre in Flower’s Cove. We sold the motor and anything else of value. Denley left for Toronto to work for the summer.

  We had no trouble getting aboard another longliner. Derrick and I went with Alonzo Hedderson and his crew— Tony Blake, Whyman Blake, and Carl Pynn—aboard the Sharon and Kirby, a 45-foot longliner. We fished our cod traps at Belle Isle and did very well. We iced the fish in the hold and steamed back to St. Lunaire, where we sold our catch to Mr. Graham Burden, who would truck it to Fishery Products Ltd. in St. Anthony.

  We then went to Middle Bay on Quebec’s north shore to fish for crab. I had a crab licence for 50,000 pounds. One day we were hauling our crab pots when I fell across the hatch of the fish hold and injured my back. I was in so much pain that I soon found myself being taken to hospital in Long Point, Blanc-Sablon, by helicopter. I spent a few days in Quebec and was taken to St. Anthony, then on to St. John’s Health Sciences Centre, where I had back surgery. That was the third back surgery I underwent.

  The boys finished the fishing season without me. I was feeling okay by Christmas and was anxious to get back at it. We got our wood for the winter, but we still needed a boat of our own, so we went to Springdale where we met Mr. Otto Yates. He had just started to build fibreglass boats and was already working on several 18- to 20-foot speedboats. He was also beginning to build 34’11” boats. We contacted the Fisheries Loans Board in St. John’s and easily had our loan approved, since our insurance had paid our previous loan, in full, for the Trudy Irene. Mr. Yates built us a beautiful 34’11” all-fibreglass boat with a 135-HP Ford motor. We were very proud to go to Springdale and steam our new boat, the Corrie Charmaine, back to St. Lunaire.

  We had a good spring sealing. I recall our first sealing trip. We had her loaded, and we were only out for two or three nights and returned to a little cove in St. Lunaire, just off our wharf. The ice was still in the cove and I tried to break in so far, to off-load our seals on either side of the boat, and take them by snowmobile to our truck. I backed off about three or four times the length of our boat and came in full speed. She ran up on the ice and her stern went under the water. I thought she was going to sink right there in the cove. Well, I didn’t try that again! We only got about eight dollars each for the pelts; however, we got five dollars each for the seal meat. We made enough money to get s
tarted fishing again when the ice cleared away.

  We had two great summers on the Labrador and Belle Isle. We went to Middle Bay with our crab pots on board and ran into a big storm of westerly wind and tide. We had a hundred pots, very heavy and piled high on top of one another. We had to throw the crab pots off in a hurry to keep her from rolling bottom-up and losing all hands on board. We finished our crab fishing and decided we would sell our boat and get something a little bigger. We sold the Corrie Charmaine to my Uncle Basil Allingham, my mother’s brother.

  We then bought the Cape Dawn from my Uncle Horace Allingham, a brother of my mother. This vessel was a 53-footer, a fine, big boat with a 150-HP Caterpillar motor. We had lots of room on deck for our crab pots and plenty of room for our fish to be iced in the hold. I recall one morning steaming to our crab pots; it was still dark, not yet daylight, and it was rough, with a bit of westerly wind. I noticed that the Cape Dawn was harder to handle. She seemed to be going down by the head and running off on her side. One of the boys checked the engine room and reported there was a lot of water down there. I remember telling someone to check and see if the pump was working. It was pumping okay, so we then put the bilge pump on, the one that was operated by the motor, as we didn’t have a pump engine. That seemed to work well and we turned around to head for home.

  We arrived at the fish plant wharf and I contacted the insurance company, who advised me to put her in on a sandy beach. There was a beach close by, a beach at high water, known to some as high tide. The insurance company was sending an adjuster out at low tide, but I discovered the problem before he arrived. A piece of the garbit plank, about 18 inches long, had come off. The adjuster told me to nail it back on, put lots of pitch over it, nail a piece of plywood over it, tie her to the wharf, keep an eye on her for about five or six hours, then have her towed to Englee.