The captain who refused to abandon his boat
Captain Roger Stoddard paid the ultimate price when he refused to abandon his boat.
It sounded like a plane crash, a shuddering boom and scraping of metal as the Fisherman’s Provider II rammed up on Frying Pan Shoal, a lurking hunk of rock in the Atlantic Ocean, about two kilometres off Canso, N.S. The boat had pulled away from the wharf of the historic fishing village just a few hours before, geared up for a four- or five-day trip of catching halibut.
Now she was in trouble. Stuck fast, while her crew — Roy Campbell, Anthony Cooke and Brian Sinclair — were panicking. The three men had been in their bunks and were jolted awake upon impact. A quick survey of the area below-deck suggested the fish hold — where the fresh catch gets stored on ice — might have been breached. The men wrestled into their survival suits, deploying the life-raft, calling 911 and hollering for their captain, Roger Lynn Stoddard, to forget about the damn boat, put his suit on, get in the raft and come with them.
But Stoddard wasn’t budging. And he wasn’t panicked. He was at the helm, reversing the vessel, trying to work her off the rocks — and telling his crew that he wasn’t abandoning ship because he was going fishing. It was Feb. 6, right around 8 p.m. The sea off Canso was quiet. There was no moon, barely any wind, and a light snow was falling. The water temperature was a few degrees above freezing, the air temperature a few degrees below.
For the next three days, the Fisherman’s Provider II was stranded on that rock, its captain a ghost. For the next three days, the people of Canso watched helplessly from shore, waiting for a man to be rescued.
None of the authorities tasked with preserving life — not the Coast Guard, not the Canadian Armed Forces search and rescue, and not the RCMP — went aboard the boat and saved its captain. In the end, it was a group of six fishermen who risked their lives to find Stoddard — dead in his bunk, still in his fishermen’s coveralls — and bring his body home.
Months later, questions continue to swirl among Canso locals as to how those best equipped to save the captain, didn’t.
“As far as I am concerned, they left Roger out there to die,” says Stevie Goreham, a longtime family friend and one of six men who went in search of the body. “They left a good man to die.” When Roger Stoddard wasn’t fishing, he was talking about fishing, or working on his boat, getting her ready for the next trip out. The 64-year-old captain had a reputation for fishing hard. Going seven to 10 days at a stretch, with never more than a day or two ashore before heading out again. Stoddard had survived hurricanes, and battled the worst the Atlantic Ocean could toss at him over a 40-plus-year-career hauling in haddock, halibut, cod, shrimp and swordfish from the waters off Nova Scotia.
“Fishing was born right into Roger,” says Robey Hatfield, a childhood friend, who fished alongside Stoddard for several years out of the Port LaTour wharf in southern Nova Scotia. “Roger would go out in cold, hard weather, come in and go right back out again.
“He was driven.”
Life away from the water was more complicated — and cruel. Stoddard’s teenage daughter, Joline, was killed in a drunk driving wreck in 1998, while his son, Cody, was paralyzed in another accident. His marriage failed. But whatever heartache Stoddard suffered he kept to himself, at least around the docks and the men he worked with.
The Roger Stoddard that Robey Hatfield knew was intensely competitive. Best him by a few pounds on the weigh-in scales on the docks at the end of a trip out and he took it personally. Talk to him about it afterward, over a good meal, and he would laugh. If you needed help fixing your motor, patching a hole — anything — you asked Roger. Most of all, he knew where to find the fish; and would have had two thoughts in mind after hitting the shoal off Canso: getting the crew off the boat safely and getting his boat off the rock — a not uncommon impulse among veteran captains — so he could make necessary repairs and get back out.
“That would be the Roger I know,” Hatfield says. “Fishing wasn’t a way of life for Roger — it was his life.”
The mayday came crackling over maritime radio’s VHF emergency channel at 7:57 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 6. Cory Mackenzie, a shrimping and crabbing captain, grabbed a few men off the Canso wharf and gunned his boat, the Miss Lexi, toward the shoal, stopping short of it while the crew from the stranded vessel paddled over in a life-raft. They looked back at the Provider II, but it was too dark to see Stoddard.
As the Miss Lexi wheeled around to take the shaken men ashore, a small flotilla of local boats began arriving near Frying Pan Shoal, a sizable landmark, slung low in the water, capable of wrecking boats that wandered too near. Stoddard knew the rock. Every fisherman did. But somehow, on that dark night, he had misjudged it, leaving his 13.5-metre, 46-tonne craft marooned opposite Canso lighthouse, like a beached whale, agonizingly close to the wharf he had pulled away from earlier.
Frying Pan Shoal wasn’t some remote hazard in the middle of the Atlantic; it is part of Canso’s scenery, a short trip from the town’s main docks and set by a major channel commercial fishing boats — even the Bluenose II, when she is under sail — regularly pass through. Stoddard may have been stranded, but he wasn’t lost at sea, or even lost from view of those ashore.
The captain’s would-be rescuers made repeated calls to his cellphone, with no answer. Multiple attempts were made to hail him on the VHF radio; the locals even tried hollering his name into the February night. Nothing.
Steve Meade and Anthony Baker, two Canso men, drew alongside the Fisherman’s Provider II in a speedboat at 9:49 p.m. But with the surf breaking over the shoal, they judged it too dangerous to try to climb aboard without the proper gear. So they secured a line around the Provider II’s stern, hitching her to another boat to hold her steady. Another line was attached to a life-raft in case Stoddard appeared. The locals kept up their vigil thereafter, hoping for some indication the captain was safe, hoping that when the Coast Guard arrived to take control of the rescue, the hard-driving fisherman would come off his boat.
“There was no fear of the Provider sinking at that point,” says Alen Newell, a Canso fisherman on scene on the Tuesday night.
“You’re concerned, because you’re not able to reach Roger — and you’re not able to see him — and you’re not able to ask him if he wants off the boat. There was no contact at all.”
Shortly after midnight the Coast Guard cutter Bickerton appeared, having made the four-hour trip from its base in eastern Nova Scotia. Accustomed to being the cavalry of the high seas — riding to the rescue and saving the day — the boat’s crew was met with a grave dilemma.
Stoddard’s last communication — with anybody — had been unequivocal: he was going fishing. That message was conveyed to the Coast Guard via the RCMP, who had interviewed the three crewmen upon their reaching the local wharf. The crew said Stoddard was of “sound mind” — and stubborn. He wasn’t leaving his boat.
“I have been on a lot of search and rescue (SAR) cases and I have never experienced someone not coming off the boat — when the time came,” says Major Mark Norris.
Norris is the commanding officer of the Joint Rescue Coordination Center (JRCC) in Halifax, a Hercules pilot and one of the quarterbacks of the failed rescue mission off Canso. He was in Toronto recently, wearing his Royal Canadian Air Force flight suit, having made the trip from Halifax with his Coast Guard counterpart, Marc Ouellette, and Lt.-Cmdr. Jordan Holder, a senior public affairs officer with the Armed Forces.
They had come to talk about Roger Stoddard and the Provider II, and were armed with detailed rescue centre logbooks and video footage of the boat from February, as it foundered upon the shoal, its captain onboard — but unseen. They had come to say that they had done everything they could to try to save him.
“This was a real tragedy,” Norris said. “We see a lot of stuff, every day, but this was a really challenging case.”
Even when an individual’s life is imperilled, the Coast Guard has no legal authority to force someone from a vessel. It is not a criminal offence to put oneself at risk at sea. On land, rules are different: a Toronto firefighter, for example, holding the rank of acting district chief or higher, can order the removal of an individual from their premises — without a warrant — if a fire is deemed to pose an “immediate threat to life.”
The mariner’s code is wrapped up in 19th-century notions of chivalry and custom, where a captain’s moral obligation was, and is, to save passengers and crew before saving themselves — hence the credo of the captain going down with the ship. But the only person that needed saving from the Fisherman’s Provider II was the captain, and he wasn’t asking to be saved. And as the hours ticked by and the situation, perhaps, evolved, from a captain not wanting to be rescued — to a man no longer able to ask for help, the Bickerton’s sailors had a question to answer: could they get their people aboard the boat without imperilling their own lives?
“They are trained that the safety of their crew comes first,” says Ouellette, a Coast Guard navigator by trade.
Every lowly Coast Guard trainee knows the story of Middle Cove, N.L.; a cautionary horror from October 1989, where a diver went missing and three Coast Guard sailors went to recover the body — in an open boat, in rough seas — and were capsized by a wave and killed. The institutional takeaway: if it is too risky, don’t try it, because the last thing a team needs is to go from having to rescue a person in distress to having to rescue two people in distress — including one of its own.
At several points during the night, the Bickerton’s crew drew alongside the Provider II in a Zodiac. Hammering on the hull, beaming their lights through the windows, using a bullhorn to call for the captain, while making repeated attempts to get aboard, only to be thwarted by the dangerous heave and roll of the stranded vessel.
“Everybody kept coming back and saying it is not safe to go,” Ouellette says, adding his people would have “pushed” harder — had there been an indication from Stoddard that he needed help. But there was no indication. So they didn’t push.
Mike Geddes was among the flotilla of locals at Frying Pan Shoal on Tuesday. He got in sometime after midnight, fired with adrenalin. Geddes knew Stoddard from around the waterfront, and he fully expected to see him Wednesday morning — on the stricken boat’s deck, signalling he wanted to be picked up.
“It was just a terrible feeling, knowing he was still out there,” he says. “I look out my bedroom window and I am looking right at Frying Pan Shoal. I went to bed Tuesday night hoping that come daybreak he’d be on the deck. When he wasn’t, I didn’t have a very good feeling.”
Geddes is a commercial diver, fish buyer and manager of the local marina. His wife, Sheri, often photographs sunrises, blazing up over the shoal. There is beauty in the first morning light, even in winter, her husband says. But on Wednesday morning there was something else washing over Canso — a fishing village of 900 souls that has been pulling its living from the sea since the 16th century — a rising tide of unease. There was a man out there. Not beyond reach, but in the community’s front yard, a man with a family who, like so many of the men in the community, made a living from the sea.
People began appearing on the wharf first thing Wednesday morning. Parking their cars, pulling out cameras and binoculars, peering out to the shoal — waiting for a Coast Guard rescue that didn’t come.
“We were waiting for the helicopters,” Geddes says. “We were all waiting for the Coast Guard to get aboard that boat.”
At 6:56 a.m. Wednesday, the Coast Guard sent a message to the RCMP requesting police be ferried out to the vessel in the hopes of ordering its captain off the boat, as per their authority as peace officers. Four hours later, the RCMP denied the request. Meantime, the Provider was becoming a wreck; leaking oil, rocking to and fro in the breakers, with fishing gear sloped all over her deck and waves washing through a hole in her port side.
Overhead were blue skies, where a Transport Canada flight was circling with infrared gear, zeroing in on the boat, searching for a heat signature to indicate her captain was alive. Someone Stoddard’s age and profile could, at best, survive four to six hours immersed in the ocean — without a survival suit. Stoddard had refused to put his suit on when the initial mayday was sent. The JRCC team in Halifax received a message at 11:28 a.m.: no heat signature.
Stevie Goreham went to high school with Stoddard’s children in Barrington Passage, N.S. Like their father, he became a fishing captain. When Goreham learned Wednesday from another fisherman that Roger had run aground and the Coast Guard was searching for him, he drove straight to his daughter, Sandie Lee Stoddard’s place.
“Sandie Lee hadn’t even heard yet,” he says. “None of Roger’s kids had heard a thing. It was a freaking sin.”
Goreham lives in Upper Clyde River, about seven hours from Canso. The friend mentioned some Canso locals were talking about going out to the boat to get Roger themselves. Goreham got in his black sports car and started driving.
“We had to do something,” he says. “This was our brother, right?”
Overnight Wednesday the weather turned. By 7 a.m. Thursday the Provider II was being buffeted by wind gusts of up to 80 km/h. A CH-149 Air Force search and rescue (SAR) helicopter touched down on the shoal. Its SAR technicians geared up, and discussed swimming to the boat to conduct an underwater search, but again concluded it just wasn’t safe. The search for Stoddard was officially called off at last light Thursday, and the file turned over to the RCMP as a missing persons case.
“When we officially reduce a search, it’s because we believe we’ve made every effort available and we do not reasonably think the person would be located alive,” Ouellette told a news conference in Halifax.
In Canso, Mike Geddes kept looking out his window.
“You could notice the boat starting to break up,” he says. “You couldn’t get it out of your mind. And I was thinking, ‘Jesus, if nothing gets done, and we get one little storm, that boat is going to be gone and we’ll be lucky if Roger’s body washes ashore some day.’
“And that just isn’t right.” For Alen Newell, the situation uncorked a swell of emotions. He didn’t know Stoddard. But he understands loss. His father, Mike, was killed in a fishing mishap after getting tangled up in his equipment and dragged from his boat. When his father was lost, the community went looking, and brought the body home. That feeling of waiting, says Newell, of not knowing — of wanting to say goodbye — is unbearable. And all he could think about was another family suffering. (The Stoddard family declined to be interviewed for this story).
“It became personal for me,” Newell says. “You could feel the frustration growing in our community. So we made a decision to go out and see if we could make a difference.”
Newell, Geddes, Steve Meade, his son, Garth, and Gregory MacDonald studied the tide and weather charts. Stevie Goreham was told to meet them at the wharf at daybreak Friday. Low tide, light winds and slightly choppy seas were forecast. The Provider II would be sitting up out of the water, giving them their best shot at getting aboard. They’d have an hour, maybe two, before the winds began blowing, and the boat got beaten to pieces and Stoddard was lost for good. They had chainsaws, flashlights, knives for cutting rope, survival suits, ladders, diving gear, charged cellphones, hot coffee, a body bag and about 200 years of fishing experience.
They left the wharf at 7:05 a.m.
“I had been thinking it was going to be a hell of a trip out,” Goreham says. “But I didn’t even need my dive gear, my flippers, nothing — we just climbed aboard the boat. She was beat up pretty bad.”
Newell’s shrimping and lobster vessel, the Ole Sock, acted as a base camp, while an 18-foot outboard dropped Goreham and Geddes — the two divers — at the Provider II. She was sitting at a 45-degree angle with a hole in her side. Her engine was gone. The wheelhouse was icedover, and the area below deck was a tangled mess of plywood, fishing gear, supplies, ropes and nets, halibut hooks and knee-deep water.
Geddes and Goreham fired up the chainsaw, cutting a hole in the deck to access the boat’s sleeping area. Goreham, muscled from years working in the fishery, attacked the debris.
“Stevie Goreham had the heart and determination of 10 men,” Newell says.
The fishermen worked and talked, about everything and nothing, uncertain of what they might find — if anything — until they found Roger Lynn Stoddard lying in his bunk with his boots off, dressed in the same coveralls he had been wearing on the night he left the wharf. He looked as though he was sleeping. To Mike Geddes, he looked to be at peace.
“We found Roger, and it was a relief, but it was also an incredibly hopeless feeling — because you just wish you could have done more,” he says.
Goreham handed Geddes a knife. He scrambled on deck and cut some lengths of rope, fashioning them into a sling. Then the two men wrapped the captain in a heavy blanket and gently hoisted him from his resting place, wading away from the shoal in chest deep water, placing the body in the 18-footer and clambering back aboard the Ole Sock.
“We tried to wrap him up as good as you can, for dignity,” Geddes says.
When they got to the wharf, the RCMP was waiting with an ambulance. The six fishermen handed the body over to the authorities at 8:30 a.m., feeling dazed by what they had done. Their search was over. The captain was going home. There wasn’t much left to say.
“Nobody was being a hero,” Goreham says. “We just did what we did, and Roger would have done the same for us. This is going to haunt me for the rest of my life. But knowing Roger, he’d just look at me, pat me on the back and say, ‘Boy, you got to keep going.’ ”
“We are fishing people. It is what we do.”
“YOU COULDN’T GET IT OUT OF YOUR MIND. AND I WAS THINKING, ‘JESUS, IF NOTHING GETS DONE, AND WE GET ONE LITTLE STORM, THAT BOAT IS GOING TO BE GONE AND WE’LL BE LUCKY IF ROGER’S BODY WASHES ASHORE SOME DAY.’ AND THAT JUST ISN’T RIGHT. — MIKE GEDDES