He liked to talk about the crew and skipper, who were all friends from home and were like a second family. He would tell her about going offshore, and the massive currents and the bad weather, and the way the waves can get up onto the boat. He would show her where the boat had just returned from, or where they would be heading off next, on the spare chart of the Gulf of Maine that he kept at home. He wanted to frame that chart one day. “They don’t know what happened, and that’s the worst part,” Faye says, while the couple’s 2-year-old son Cody plays in the next room. “It was a calm day, maybe 4- to 6-foot waves, which is nothing out there. He said he was going to use the bathroom. It had been 10 or 15 minutes, and Brett asked, ‘Where’s Hoppy?’ They said, ‘In the bathroom.’ And they said it was another 15 or 20 minutes before they started looking for him. The only thing anyone came up with – and I don’t know if I believe it – is he might have gone up on the bow with the satellite phone to try to call me. But he never used to call me in the middle of the day, and he had just called me the night before. He had said, ‘I’ll be home soon.’ But the satellite phone is missing, so that’s why they think that. They think he might have slipped and hit his head.” At mid-day on Sept. 11, Christopher James Hopkins, 32, fell overboard from the 63-foot stern trawler Bella Rose, homeported in Bass Harbor, about 125 miles east of Truro, Mass. The crew radioed for help when they realized he was missing. Along with the Bella Rose and four other fishing boats, the Coast Guard conducted a search by air and sea. Chris was never found. Faye has heard several theories about what might have happened that day. None of them have to do with sea conditions, because it was a relatively calm day, with waves at about six feet and a 15-mph wind. She finds it unlikely that he fell off the stern because there was a railing, and someone would have seen him. People in New Bedford, she hears, are saying he might have purposely jumped. Otherwise, how to explain the loss of a crewman off a highly experienced and safety-conscious skipper’s boat? She thinks maybe he saw some sort of sea life and went up to take a look, slipped, and hit his head. He would have had to be unconscious when he went overboard, because he was a big, strong man who would have put up quite a fight to be noticed and to survive. “I think he hit his head and went over,” she says. “I like to hope that he didn’t suffer. He had asthma ever since he was a little kid, and I’d hate to think of him suffocating. He was such a good person and such a good father, and I feel really cheated. People say that God has his reasons. But I don’t think God has anything to do with it. I think that area sucks men’s souls.” Like anyone with a spouse engaged in one of the world’s most dangerous professions, Faye has had her share of worry as her husband headed out for two to three weeks at a time, eight months of the year, steaming as far south as New Jersey. “In the beginning, I used to worry all the time,” she says. “But he always came home and he always said, ‘Don’t worry about me.’ I worried more about the boat catching fire or a hurricane coming up out of nowhere.” Chris first crewed on a dragger in 1998. He had taken cooking classes, cooked for a while in restaurants, then asked for a chance to crew on the boat, which was owned by a friend of his. Pretty soon, he experienced his first mishap, when the boat ran up on a ledge off the Cranberry Isles. Chris was able to get into his survival suit and swim to shore. “His father said, ‘Is the money worth the risk to your life?’” Faye says. “And Chris said he didn’t do it for the money. He did it because he loved it.” Chris moved up to a larger dragger, the Challenge, and then the Bella Rose, where he started out as a deckhand, then took over the cooking. Chris would tell Faye what a pain in the neck cooking was out to sea. “But he still put his whole heart into it and made wholesome meals, and didn’t just give them frozen food, like some cooks did,” she says. “Chicken cordon bleu, boiled dinner, he barbecued for them – he always made a list for every trip. He made ‘Hoppy Joes’ instead of sloppy Joes.” Chris was also the man who would do just about anything. He was fearless, and wasn’t afraid of heights, so if something needed to be done in the rigging, he’d be the one. Like his skipper, Chris was safety-conscious. The Bella Rose is very well run, says Faye, and she was always reassured by the captain’s refusal to go out in a storm and by his continual safety drills. Chris himself excelled in a Coast Guard safety course in New Bedford. But the time came when Chris wasn’t ready, and Faye finds it unimaginably hard to believe. “I think he liked working hard in general,” Faye says. “Even when he was home, he worked hard. He loved the ocean. I think fishing made him the person he was. Before we met, he used to kind of get in trouble. He didn’t have a direction in his life. Then once he started fishing, it made him feel he was something now, that he was a fisherman.” Faye and her son suddenly have no income or savings. As she figures out what to do, donations would be gratefully accepted to keep the family afloat. For those who would like to send a donation in honor of Chris for his family can do so to ‘The Chris Hopkins Family Memorial Fund’ c/o Bar Harbor Banking and Trust Co. |
