Battling the north

A shift of the ice could spell doom for sealers

For sealer Dave Patey, each trip out seal hunting is a potential battle against those northern forces of nature that make their way toward the Northern Peninsula waters each spring.

“It’s always dangerous sealing. You only need to strike a pan (of ice) the wrong way and your boat can go bottom-up in no time,” said Patey.

Once, in the 1980s, Patey got caught in the ice for three days on a seal hunting trip by speedboat. Thankfully, a nearby longliner had also gotten caught in the ice. Patey and his father shacked up there until the ice cleared days later.

“If they hadn’t took us aboard we would have died then,” he said. “Being left in an open speedboat on a pan of ice in the middle of the ocean — we would’ve froze to death. My father was up in age then and we were already wet by the time we got stuck; we wouldn’t have lasted.”

With ice so thick and impenetrable that even a 39-foot-11 longliner is not powerful enough to break through, there’s few options sealers have to escape it. Patey says calling the Coast Guard for assistance and waiting for the natural elements to work in their favour is often the only solution at hand.

The year 2017 was a difficult one for ice along much of Newfoundland and Labrador. Harbour ice had stayed so late into the summer on many coastlines of the province that the crab season did not open until late June. This prevented many sealers on the Northern Peninsula from hunting last year.

But if the weather and ice charts appear promising, Patey says he will be back aboard the boat this April to hunt seals. Even with the difficult and life-threatening obstacles that can come his way, Patey has a clearly unbreakable attachment to a way of life he’s been a part of since boyhood.