Weekend Events

I started this post on Sunday evening but for reasons which will become apparent later on in this piece I am finishing it on Monday at noon.

We had a busy and productive weekend here in this household being left on our own as we managed to bottle two batches of wine yesterday afternoon, I cleaned out the car, we found cleaned and organized all the camping gear - no small feat as it’s been 3 yrs since we’ve been camping and the kids have been, we stored lobster gear and cleaned up around the barn.

Our summer neighbours added some excitement to our weekend too as the son of one of our neighbours headed out across the harbour in a kayak, the fog shut in and they couldn’t find their way back so we got a call from the haul over (on the other side of the harbour) where they’d made it to a fish plant. I trotted next door to relay the message as the neighbour’s phone wasn’t working and she was on the phone to her sister (our neighbour on the other side) as there was a canine/porcupine incident. His mother ran over to pick up them and the kayak and myself and the shore captain headed in the other direction to assist with quill removal. Oh my goodness - their two dogs had found a porcupine and were a mess of quills - the worst we‘d ever seen. Jack the Airedale was the worst, but calm and Buddy, the pound dog was not coping well. We tried to help a bit but it was clearly a job for a professional. So multiple calls later to vets resulted in someone answering in Yarmouth who agreed to extract them. So an hour drive each way, likely a $500 bill and dealing with two agitated 95 lb.dogs would not be a good way to spend your evening.

In what turned out to be a short night the drama began at almost midnight. The shore captain had been chasing boats since 6 p.m. and there was one overdue from Ingomar so…the Coast Guard was alerted and neighbours on shore and the water started to search. One of the other guys fishing from this wharf saw him in the morning about 9 or 10 a.m. and they went in different directions after that. A tough one because this is a young fellow down the road, who has fished on our boat after he graduated from high school, babysat our kids, sells his fish to our company and our kids have babysat his three kids for him. His wife phoned about 8 p.m. saying she hadn’t heard from him all day and he usually phoned, she’s never phoned here before worrying so I’m guessing she was having a bad feeling. I reassured her that he was later than this two days ago and with this pea soup thick fog the cell phone is not reliable but…there hasn’t been a response to the Coast Guard broadcast on the VHF radio so there is general concern and a feeling of being completely in the dark here on shore. I insisted that the life partner here call the wife as soon as he talked to the Coast Guard as they’d asked for the fishermen’s home phone number, thinking that they would call her and upset her even more. So I’m asking all the Occupational Health & Safety questions of the shore captain - Who does he have with him? He names two young fellows from the community. You’re worried he’s carrying too many fish? Yep he’s been lucky so far, it only takes one wave. He has a life raft right? Yes but I don’t think it’s been inspected for a while and there’s no hydrostatic release (when submerged it will deploy). He has an EPIRB? Nope (this is an emergency beacon that alerts if there’s trouble). So it could be that all of his communication (cell and radio) have failed? Could be. He could be broken down and waiting for someone to come along? Could be. He could be heavily loaded and a wave hit him broadside? Could be but it’s not that rough tonight. So his buddy on the way in from fishing headed in past where he was fishing and two Coast Guard vessels headed out to search - the Edward Cornwallis (buoy boat) underway from Lockeport and the Clark’s Harbour rescue cutter heading down and out from Ingomar. It’s at times like this we all remember why fishing is the most dangerous industry in the world. There were frequent phone calls during the night, Air Search & Rescue, the wife, other fishermen until finally a check with the Coast Guard at 7 a.m. with no further news. By 8 a.m. the chatter on the set was debris from the boat was found and no sign of the crew but….amazingly by 9 a.m. one of the searching fishermen located all three crew safe and sound drifting in the life raft and a relieved shore captain left that message. A quick call to the plant for details “almost into the wharf” the secretary tells me an hour later, “I can’t imagine what his wife went through last night”. There was definitely a guardian angel on the water last night.

A quick check with the neighbours reveals that their dogs had to stay the night after the vet and an assistant removed over a thousand quills from them. This AFTER the in-house major extractions already completed. They were awaiting a call from the vet to go pick them up.

I must run as the 1 hour and 55 minutes sleep I had during the night is starting to wear off so I need to keep busy.