(Above) John Gillett sitting on the deck of his house in Twillingate during an evening of story telling, 2014
On October 28, 1971, John Gillett and his friend Clarence Oxford were turr hunting when John had a sudden premonition of impending danger. His strange feeling was strong enough for John to suggest they should turn around and head for home in Twillingate. It was a calm morning and turrs were plentiful, but Clarence knew the forecast called for strong winds in the afternoon so he agreed with John and suggested they may get a few more turrs on their way back to add to their take of approximately 50 birds already. But, that was not how things turned out. This is Part II of A Red Sky at Morning.
Feeling relieved that Clarence didn’t insist on going farther offshore to do more hunting, John was satisfied that everything was fine.
But his feeling of contentment didn’t last long.
“I’d say we were no more than a quarter-mile back when all of a sudden, the engine shut down,” John recalls.
After a short discussion, the two hunters decided the problem was a broken drive shaft and since they didn’t have the resources to fix it, their only option was to start rowing toward land.
“I sat down and rowed in the normal rowing fashion and Clarence stood up facing me and also pushed on the paddles [oars] to provide a little more horsepower so to speak,” John said.
With nearly seven miles between them and Twillingate Island, it would take several hours rowing on a calm day, but with any luck, they would soon see some of their fellow hunters or fishermen and get towed back to port.
However, it wasn’t calm for long.
The southeast winds freshened moderately at first and soon there were white caps on the ocean, slowing their progress considerably. To make matters worse, a riptide also worked against them, slowing their speed to less than half what they were traveling at first.
Clarence decided they needed help right away. Putting his rubber jacket over a dip net, he rigged the net pole into an opening on the boat. Hoisting a jacket or other materials was a common practice among small boat fishermen and bird hunters to send a signal to other boaters that there was trouble. In this case however, the rubber jacket behaved more like a sail and made rowing even more difficult with the wind coming from the direction of the bow of the speedboat.
John told Clarence about the problem, but the older, more experienced bird hunter felt it was their best hope to be seen and left the jacket hoisted in the air hoping that if fishermen or other hunters couldn’t see them, the lighthouse keepers on Twillingate-Long Point would notice and send help.
John kept rowing hard, although making very little headway, while Clarence scanned the ocean hoping to see if another boat was in sight.
There were none. As the winds increased and waves grew higher and more menacing, Clarence became deeply worried.
“At one point he looked at me real serious like and said ‘John, I think we’re finished.’”
John says Clarence seemed more concerned about his aging mother than he was about his own demise. She had already lost one son to the ocean and losing Clarence would be more than she could bear. His brother Harry Oxford drowned when he was washed overboard from the schooner Grace Boehner in 1940, eight miles east off Cape Race. His body was never recovered.
Defiant, John told his friend they weren’t finished yet and that he didn’t want to hear that kind of talk anymore and rowed harder than ever. But it was useless.
In John’s words, they started losing ground. As the winds grew stronger, water was coming in over the bow and they had to constantly bail water out of the small speedboat to keep it from getting too low in the water.
Two more hours passed and John had been rowing so hard his hands began bleeding. Eventually he had to stop and wash away the blood in cold water. While letting his hands cool to ease the pain, John saw what he first thought was a ship in the distance. The vessel was closer to land than they were and it was headed in their direction.
Filled with optimism and thoughts of being rescued, John and Clarence rowed as hard as they could to make sure they would be directly in the path of the approaching boat. As they rowed, the men developed a plan to make sure the people on the approaching vessel wouldn’t miss them. They planned to cut a sleeve from John’s sweater and soak it in gas and light it on fire.
As the boat drew closer they could see it wasn’t a ship but a cod trap vessel towing a punt which made it look like a much larger vessel from a distance earlier. Certain they were going to be rescued, Clarence and John decided not to burn the sweater because the boat was so close they couldn’t miss seeing their speedboat — or so they thought.
Clarence began waving the coat on the dip net, John fired several gunshots to attract attention but to their astonishment, the boat steamed right past them. Clarence and John could only stare in disbelief as the trap boat started to fade in the distance.
“How could they possibly not see us — they were so close?” John wondered out loud.
With the southeast winds growing stronger and seas getting higher, most fishermen and fellow hunters would soon be heading for their home ports, so John and Clarence knew this would likely be their only hope of being rescued.
But there was one remaining glimmer of hope to cling too.
They could still see the trap boat east of them and it appeared it had either stopped or slowed down. John and Clarence wondered if the hunters had seen more turrs and were taking them. Without taking their eyes off the trap boat for a single moment, they thought the potential rescue boat was turning around and once again heading their way. Afraid they might be hallucinating or simply wishing too hard, both men were afraid to say anything.
However, a few minutes later, there was no doubt — the boat was indeed intentionally steaming toward them. Once again, joy filled their heads but after a sad letdown a half hour earlier, both held their breath, watching the boats every move.
Happily, it wasn’t long before the trap boat with three men onboard was only 200-300 feet away —close enough that John and Clarence recognized Roy Anstey from Purcell’s Harbour located on the east end of Twillingate Island. The other two men were friends of Roy from St. John’s.
“My God, what a wonderful feeling it was to see Roy and his friends come alongside,” John says. “For a while, I was afraid we were gone.”
Roy said he saw the little speedboat when he passed by earlier, but didn’t think that Clarence and John were in immediate danger so they steamed to where they had seen a number of turrs land on the water a few minutes prior.
John and Clarence climbed over the gunwales and onboard Roy’s trap boat as Roy hooked a towline to the speedboat. As they approached Twillingate Island, Roy saw Harvey Pelly who was wrapping up his day fishing. Harvey lived near Clarence and John, so they got onboard with him and were soon back home is Gillesport/Twillingate.
John Gillett and Clarence Oxford didn’t sleep that night.
A raging wind and rainstorm whipped across the Twillingate area. The sound of the howling winds and rain beating against their houses kept them awake. So did dark thoughts about what had almost happened earlier that day kept running through their mind as well.
John was in his 20s in 1971 and went on to make a living from the sea as a career fisherman. Clarence, in 40s at the time, lost interest in going back on the ocean. With the terrible memory of losing his brother to the sea and now his own close call uppermost on his mind, he rarely went fishing or saltwater bird hunting again.
