Looking over the Atlantic fishery
Jim Wellman’s ‘Challengers of the Sea’ reflects his passion for the industry
Challengers of the Sea by Jim Wellman Flanker Press $19.95 218 pages
Jim Wellman, so familiar to many of us as the voice of CBC Radio’s The (then) Fishermen’s Broadcast, has carried his — passion is not too strong a word I think — for our province’s most integral industry into a post-radio career with The Navigator and several nonfiction books. His latest, “Challengers of the Sea,” is a broad and trenchant (over)view of the Atlantic fishery, from interlaying perspectives of initiative, emergency, regulation, and character.
The first chapter relays a real-life adventure, and, just as important, its aftermath. “You Can’t Fix It” tells of the Seafaring Legend, which ran into trouble heading to Twillingate in 2009. Captain Corey Starkes issued a mayday and ordered the three crewmen into survival suits; not everyone was saved.
The details of the incident are gripping enough, but so is the stress and anxiety which follow. Starkes describes a phone call from “a fellow fishing captain” who had been through a similar experience. “He said, ‘I want to tell you what you are going to try to do ... You’re going to try to fix it — but I want to tell you that you can’t fix it.” It was years before Starkes could go on a boat again (although he could scuba dive). He’s never returned to work as a fishing captain.
This is followed by one of several interviews focused on fishing industry safety standards, and official regulations and response.
Stewart Franck is executive director of the Nova Scotia Fisheries Safety Association.
“On average, one fisherman a month dies at sea in Canada. That makes the industry the most dangerous occupation outside the military or policing.” And then there’s Search and Rescue. Accidents tend to happen in terrible conditions. “‘It’s not like us,”’ Franck says. ‘You and I can just say, “No I’m not going to work today because driving conditions or whatever are not safe.” These people don’t have that option.’”
Then Wellman talks to Teri Childs, a pilot with PAL Aerospace, whose clients include federal Fisheries, the Department of National Defence, and Environment Canada. She surveys fishing vessels foreign and domestic, whales and sea turtles, and, perhaps most vitally, tracks icebergs.
There’s a fascinating aside with Garry Smith, who fished out of Trinity Bay and in 1987 was hired by an RCMP officer to sail to a nearby resettled community — Ireland’s Eye. The officer asked Gary if he knew why they were going there. ‘“I said I had no inkling whatsoever, and then he told me they were going to pick up a huge stash of illegal drugs – hashish ... It was just like a scene out of a movie.’”
Smith also collects old things — radios, a gramophone, guns, a humidor — and make-andbreaks. “A mere mention of make-and-break engines to folk of a certain “age” who grew up in coastal Newfoundland and Labrador suddenly renders them to blathering blobs of nostalgia,” Wellman writes.
Then Wellman takes another intriguing tack, bringing in a visual artist, Florence Pinhorn, who, in her Winterton studio, created “Concerning multispecies”, a solo exhibition of 21 paintings that opened at the Ocean View Art Gallery in Carbonear in August 2016.
Her representational naturalistic pieces were accompanied by notes explaining, for example “that redfish live up to forty years and that, unlike other flatfish, turbot can swim vertically because their eyes did not migrate as far to the right side of their body.”
He also talks with Jana Jeffrey, born in Ottawa but now based in Yarmouth, who worked primarily as a photographer before founding her own singular and thriving business: cleaning fishing vessels. It’s a challenge, as they are “cramped, electronic devices and panels are everywhere, and cleaning those requires caution and special knowledge.” Engine rooms are particularly time consuming. But it’s a needed, welcomed expertise, and fishermen treat the cleaning staff with respect.
There are short profiles, some black-and-white photos, and index.
Some very memorable passages are the words of people who’ve lost family to the sea. Della Sears Newell was one of many affected by the sinking of the Miss Ally off Nova Scotia in February 2013. Her son Katlin Nickerson was the owner and captain, though just 21.
“‘I think of him every day, I speak his name every day, but I have moved to a place where I am no longer in the water.’”
One of the most exciting sections concerns the Atlantic Charter, swamped just south of the Arctic circle in September 2015. The events are given beat-by-beat: “As their raft was pulled closer to the side of the ore carrier, [Captain] Byron [Oxford] saw a rope ladder dangling loosely on the side of the ship.
Someone on the deck yelled that the men would have to jump from the raft and grab the hanging rope and then climb up.”
With this book Wellman continues his probing, thoughtful coverage of an industry he knows so well yet remains so curious about.