Some Saved … Some Lost
by Dennis Damon
It was past midnight on an August night in my seventeenth year. We were steaming down the Sound bound for Cranberry Isles. The herring had played out in the Sound and we thought we might find them hanging outside the Cranberries. I was returning to my post on the bow of the Mady Jo. Leon was waiting for me there.
Leon was part of the crew. He was old. But then, to a teenage boy, everyone over 30 seemed old. Reflecting on him now, he was probably in the neighborhood of my current age—and suddenly that doesn’t seem all that old! He smoked a corn-cob pipe. It was constantly in his mouth, even when it wasn’t going. I drew a picture of him once. He was sleeping in his bunk across the foc’sle from mine and the pipe was in his mouth. He looked like Popeye. He filled the pipe with Half and Half tobacco, claimed it was half horse…. and half hay chaff.
On the bow that night the pipe was in his mouth when he turned to me and said, “Cold ain’t cha, Musclehead.” I continue to think his nickname for me was a term of endearment.
“Yup, a little,” was my response.
“Why don’t you go down below and get yourself a cup of coffee and bring me back one of those galvanized ringbolts.” I knew “galvanized ringbolts” were donuts in Leonese.
Exiting the pilot house later with a hot coffee in my belly and Leon’s donut in one hand, I grabbed the cable-stay that lead from the deck to the masthead with the other hand and with considerably more athleticism than I now possess, bounded from the cockpit deck up to the rail.
To this day I have not figured out how or why it happened. Maybe there was a light coating of dew on the deck. The sea was calm. The deck wasn’t pitching or rolling. It’s still a mystery to me.
Whatever the cause, in less than an instant my feet had left the rail and I was in the water, hanging on to the cable with one hand and being dragged as the boat made its way. I could feel my grip loosening. I didn’t call out. I remember thinking if I let go I’d be pulled under the boat and the thought of the whirling propeller slicing me was terrifying. So when I finally had to let go I tried to push away from the hull. As I slipped beneath the surface I scrunched my head into my shoulders in my effort to avoid the blades.
Bobbing to the surface in the churning wake there was a huge sense of relief to know that I had avoided the slicing fear. That relief was short-lived though as I watched the boat continue to steam into the night AND when I remembered: I CAN’T SWIM!
My yells for them to come back were choked periodically as I kept sinking beneath the sea. Coughing, spitting, thrashing wildly to stay afloat I wanted more than anything to have them stop and come back. I distinctly remember kicking my legs as I struggled to get to the surface and both rolled up hip boots slid from my legs simultaneously. My buoyancy instantly improved.
Finally, in the far distance I heard a voice holler, “Man overboard!” and I heard that new Cummins diesel we put in earlier in the summer back down with such fury I thought she’d tear herself off her engine bed. The thought they were coming back was a relief but I didn’t know if I could stay afloat until they got to me. At one point as I fought to surface again for some air, I figured, “If I can just get my lungs full one more time perhaps I can get to bottom and walk ashore.” I was only a hundred yards or so off Hall’s Quarry (but the water is about 150 feet deep!). Desperate thoughts of a desperate boy.
The Mady Jo’s spotlight swept back and forth as she raced back toward me until it stopped on me and my thrashing. As the boat came closer the captain threw me a life-jacket. It landed about ten feet from me but it might as well have been ten miles… I couldn’t get to it. He couldn’t back the boat down to stop its headway for fear of sucking me into the prop. As the white hull was passing me by, a gnarled old fisherman’s hand emerged from the darkness into the circle of light and Leon’s gravelly voice hollered, “Hook on Musclehead!”
I reached my hand as far toward his as I possibly could and by whatever grace there is, the tips of our fingers touched… and hooked. With that, his other hand came into view grabbing my wrist in a grip that I knew would not loosen.
“David, I got him!” was all he said and in an instant he was joined by the captain. Together they hauled me over the side. I provided very little help by that time and they had to struggle some. Once they were able to grab my belt they dumped me onto the cockpit deck where I stayed for some time coughing and spitting up water. I am one of the lucky ones.
In March 1989 my nephew, Herb, was returning from a day’s fishing to Northeast Harbor on the Jennifer. As one of the crew of three he had been shrimping outside of Long Island. When the other deckhand went into the pilothouse to see if Herb was there because he wasn’t down below the captain immediately reversed direction to start the search. Herb was never found.
Three months later my wife’s cousin, Raymond, did not return to Bar Harbor. He had been ground fishing alone to the sou’ard of Schoodic. All the days of searching yielded only a section of the hatch cover. Herb and Raymond are but two of the hundreds we have lost to the sea.
Fishing is a dangerous business. It’s an unforgiving sea. Tragedy can strike in the blink of an eye or it can reveal itself more slowly as winds increase and seas mount. Gordon Lightfoot wrote a line in his “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” that comes to mind as I think of those perilous times. “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
The first Sunday in June is proclaimed by the Governor as Seafarer’s Memorial Day in Maine. In harbors up and down the coast we will honor our fishermen and bless our fleets. It is a time we all should pause to remember those who have gone to sea without returning. And it is a time when we should remind ourselves of the safety precautions necessary to ensure as best we can that we, our vessels and our crews all come home safely … to fish another day.