Man on the Ice (3 page)

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.

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.