Lives on the Line
They are the last hope for fishers working in one of the world’s deadliest industries
The brave men and women who watch over one of the world’s most dangerous industries.
It’s still dark on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, the water indistinguishable from the land when viewed from a Canadian Air Force CC-130 Hercules. Seen from the air, the white lights shining below look to be the familiar glow of verandah lights, street lights and cars. But as the sun rises above the horizon, it’s clear these white specks are actually floodlights streaming from hundreds of fishing boats heading out to sea from their ports.
“This is completely insane,” says f light commander Major Gregory Boone, who’s seated next to Captain Joseph Dobson at the controls. “It’s all the way to the horizon.”
The team on board the Hercules this morning is watching closely for an emergency. There are six in the cockpit, and the rest of the team – including two search-and-rescue technicians, a couple of civilian volunteer spotters and a military photographer – is gathered back in the plane’s hold. They’re perfectly at ease, even as the plane banks in stomach-churning motion left and right over and over again.
It’s November 28, 2017, and today is the first day of lobster season – or ‘dumping day’, the most dangerous day in one of Canada’s most deadliest industries. On the water this morning are roughly 1500 lobster boats totalling more than 5000 crew, from ports spanning near Halifax, all the way around the tip of Nova Scotia’s South Shore, and up to the Bay of Fundy. These are lobster fishing areas 33 and 34, the busiest in Canada, and the boats, typically with a crew of four, are heading out to drop traps for the areas’ lucrative six-month season – which runs from the last Monday in November until May 31. During that period in 20162017, licence holders in areas 33 and 34 landed 30,703 tonnes of lobster, worth half a billion dollars.
In the pre-dawn hours of dumping day, all these boats, loaded high with traps, make a mad dash for the most coveted positions. If a fisher wants to set their traps near a certain shoal or in a particular patch of water, they have to beat everyone else to that location. It’s a frenzy that often leads to serious injury, and occasionally death.
Despite some recent safety improvements – such as the use of larger, more powerful boats that can plough through rough conditions, CCTV cameras for monitoring dangerous work areas, and deckhands increasingly willing to wear life vests – fishing maintains the highest fatality rate
of any employment sector in Canada. More than 200 fishers have died on the job in Canada since 1999. That’s an average of almost one death per month. And according to a 2017 Globe and Mail investigation, deckhands are more likely to die at work than pilots, loggers or oil-and-gas drillers. Being a deckhand is 14 times deadlier than being a police officer.
This knowledge puts a lot of pressure on the rescue teams that keep fishers safe. Many people are simply not aware just how dangerous the lobster fishery is, or the lengths to which the Canadian government must go to provide protection and assistance. On dumping day, aircraft monitor them from above, and Coast Guard ships stay close, ready to act, though the hope is always that none of these measures will be needed.
While they waited for coffee and breakfast omelettes at the Canadian Forces Base (CFB) in Greenwood,
Nova Scotia, before take- off this morning, the Hercules’s flight crew discussed the tragic events of dumping day 2015, as if preparing themselves for the worst-case scenario.
The wind was moderate from the north on Monday, November 30, 2015, and the seas about a metre high – decent conditions for setting lobster pots. Nathan King and Wayne Atwood were crewing for King’s father that morning on the Nomada Queen I. The pair were standing on a tall stack of traps, tossing the first line of 20 traps over the stern of the boat when a rail, which had been supporting the stack on the starboard side, suddenly broke off. Gear, including the traps King and Atwood were standing on, spilled over the side. An avalanche of traps, heavy anchors, buoys and line plunged straight into the six-degree water, taking the two men down with
it. “My first thought was, This is going to be cold,” King says.
Underwater, King couldn’t swim because rope was tangled around his feet. He grabbed a knife he kept strapped to his boot and began frantically cutting, but the water was so filled with bubbles that it was impossible to see if he was actually slicing the line. Then, just before he ran out of breath, his life vest inflated, propelling him to the surface, where he emerged in the mess of gear. “It all happened so fast,” he says. “When I came to the top of the water I didn’t really know what was going on.”
King was shocked by the cold. He couldn’t breathe. Heavy gear was still falling all around him from the boat. And he could hear Atwood in the water nearby screaming: “We’re gonna die! We’re gonna drown!”
The two men managed to swim to each other, and then cling to the hull near the wheelhouse at the front of the boat to avoid the traps falling off the side and stern. They both stayed there, in the near-freezing water, for more than 30 minutes before their crewmates were able to haul them aboard. King was OK, just soaked and cold. But Atwood needed medical attention for shock and mild hypothermia.
A Cormorant helicopter flew over, lowering two search- and-rescue technicians to retrieve Atwood and take him to shore. He spent the night in hospital and resigned the next day.
Around an hour after King and Atwood fell from their boat, about 35 kilometres away from that accident, Captain Todd Nickerson was at the wheel of the Cock-a-Wit Lady as his crew set their first string of traps off Cape Sable Island. Veteran crew member Keith Stubbert was at the stern when a trap snagged on the port-side guardrail. As Stubbert went over to free it, he stepped on a coil of fishing line just as it started to pull tight. The rope coiled like a snare around his leg, and as the traps and the line went into the water, they pulled him down, too.
Like King and Atwood, Stubbert was wearing a life vest, but this time it didn’t matter: the weight of the traps held him underwater. And when the crew tried to pull him up, the line snapped. After some effort, they managed to grab the other end of the line, hauled up three traps and then Stubbert. He’d been under water for ten minutes and didn’t have a pulse.
The crew sent out a distress call, which was picked up by a patrolling Hercules. But there were around 30 similar Cape Sable Island lobster boats in the area, and rescue technicians ended up parachuting down to the wrong one.
The rescuers eventually made it to the correct boat, but it was too late. Stubbert was airlifted to hospital, and pronounced dead shortly afterwards.
In mid-November of 2017 at the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre (JRCC) in Halifax, Major Mark Norris, a 37-year-old Hercules pilot with the Canadian Forces’ searchand-rescue unit, was poring over the plan for dumping day. “We want to be able to respond as quickly and as efficiently as possible,” he says of his preparation.
The Halifax JRCC is one of three rescue centres run jointly by the military and the Canadian Coast Guard. It’s staffed day and night by five coordinators – a mix of Coast Guard and Air Force officers responsible for managing all air and marine searchand-rescue operations in an area totalling 5.5 million square kilometres, 80 per cent of which is covered by water. A large satellite photo hanging outside the JRCC’s operations room displays that enormous expanse.
On that same wall, there’s a list of Coast Guard and military personnel who died during search-and-rescue operations in the area since 1953: 29 Air Force members and seven Coast Guard officers. At the bottom of the list is a motto: ‘That Others May Live’.
During emergencies, the JRCC Halifax team collects and distributes information, investigates and coordinates the deployment and movement of rescue assets – typically Coast Guard vessels and Air Force Hercules planes and Cormorant helicopters, two of which are permanently on standby at CFB Greenwood for missions.
Norris says JRCC’s planning for dumping day begins six months before, when rescue personnel meet with local fishing associations to talk about safety preparations. All the ship captains are encouraged to register their emergency-positionindicating radio beacons with the Canadian Beacon Registry in Ontario. When set off by a crew, or activated automatically underwater, these notify rescue teams of a boat’s location, giving information about the vessel and its crew. Then, in the weeks leading up to dumping day, JRCC personnel book planes and helicopters, and schedule extra Coast Guard crews.
On dumping day, Norris will have four Coast Guard cutters (vessels built for speed) on the water, along with two ‘high-endurance’ vessels, the 62-metre Cape Roger and the 68-metre Sir Wilfred Grenfell. And
ON DUMPING DAY, SEARCH AND RESCUE PERSONNEL STAND READY. “WE'RE ANTICIPATING THAT SOMETHING IS GOING TO GO WRONG”
as the lobster boats in area 34 head out at 6am, a Hercules (which has a flying-time operating cost of $13,350* per hour), and a Cormorant helicopter (which flies at $21,150 per hour), will take off from CFB Greenwood. “We’re pre-positioning,” says Norris. “We’re anticipating that something is going to go wrong.”
On Friday, November 24, Jim Newell is sitting at his desk in the Clark’s Harbour Coast Guard Station on Cape Sable Island, 200 kilometres southwest of Halifax. He’s an ex-fisherman who grew up in Clark’s Harbour and started in the Coast Guard after a downturn in the fishing industry in the early 1980s. This time of year always makes him anxious. “I didn’t sleep the night before dumping day when I was fishing,” says Newell. “And I don’t sleep the night before dumping day now.”
The station’s crew has all their equipment double- checked, and they’ve started monitoring the longrange weather forecast. All there is to do now is wait for the results of an upcoming conference call between various fishing, transport and environmental authorities; that discussion will decide whether dumping day will go ahead on Monday as scheduled, or whether they’ll have to postpone until Tuesday because of bad weather.
Newell gets up from his desk and heads to the wharf where he boards the Clarks Harbour, the Coast Guard Station’s cutter, and one of the two Coast Guard boats heading out on dumping day. Both boats will be stocked with extra pumps, a stretcher, bottles of oxygen and a first-aid station at the stern.
The events of 2015 stand out for Newell. Stubbert’s death, especially, lingers with him. Something became clear to him then: the drills, preparation and inspections sometimes just aren’t enough to keep every fisher
alive. “Accidents happen. It’s a sad reality of this business,” says Newell. “There are going to be times when everything is done perfectly and people are still going to die.”
Nearby, Todd Newell – a distant relation of Jim’s – is one of few captains at the West Head wharf loading his traps and baiting them with mackerel and redfish. The possibility of postponement has kept most of the fishers at home.
Todd admits he’s worried about the coming season. “I’m a nervous type,” he says. “I’m anxious to get going.”
This will be the 42 year old’s first year as captain, and his first fishing trip without his father, Teddy, who died that June at age 69. “He was one of them old-school fishermen,” he says of his father. “I just wish he was here, just to lean on him for advice.”
He’s trying to acquaint himself with a new boat called Ted’s Legacy. At $550,000, it’s a massive investment in an industry known for up-anddown revenues. “On our old boat,” he says, “I knew exactly where to put every pot because we loaded it the same for so many years.” He turns to join a crewman, lugging the heavy traps into place. It will take them seven or eight hours to load their limit of 375 traps.
AHercules plane is a military workhorse, capable of hauling nearly 45 metric tonnes of cargo. Today the plane is carrying a slew of search-and-rescue equipment, including four pump kits, self-inf lating life rafts and satellite locator buoys, which can be parachuted off the rear cargo ramp to boats below.
The belly of a Hercules is cold, loud and cavernous. The four propellers outside rattle the fuselage like a toy. Back in the hold, Master Corporal Ashley Barker, a search-and-rescue tech for five years, is waterproofing a medical kit. Her partner, Sergeant Robert Featherstone, fills an insulated mug with coffee. The pair appears completely relaxed, considering that they could get a distress call any given moment and be jumping out the back of the plane.
Up front, Dobson steers the plane side to side, so the crew in the cockpit and two spotters in the hold get a good view of the action below. At one point they spot a strobe light flashing on a boat below, and circle to investigate, but there’s no emergency. Later, they spot steam spewing from another vessel but, again, no crisis. And after six hours of flying, and no emergency calls, the crew turns the plane back towards home. The day ends without a serious incident – exactly what everyone was hoping for. But with six months of winter and spring fishing ahead, they know there will be plenty of distress calls to come.
*Canadian dollars