In 1991, Captain Raymond Ryan from Port Saunders, Newfoundland, was pondering his future.
Some days he thought it might be time to get out of the fishing business. At 59, some would consider retirement, but Raymond was still too active for that so he wondered what else he could do with his life.
The cod fishery had been declining for several years and it was difficult to make ends meet, let alone make a decent living. On his last trip of the cod-fishing season in 1991, fate played a hand in Raymond’s decision. The trip became perilously close to being his last trip ever but despite that occurrence, his future plans might have surprised some people.
Raymond’s enterprise was very much a family concern. He owned a 52-foot wooden-hulled inshore dragger, Dolores R, named in honour of his daughter. His crew consisted of his two sons, Maurice and Rene.
The marine weather forecast for Wednesday, August 7, 1991 called for cloudy skies and northwest winds ranging from 20 to 25 nautical miles per hour, increasing in the afternoon — not ideal fishing weather on the northwest coast of Newfoundland but nothing that a 52-foot dragger couldn’t handle.
The Ryans had just 4,500 pounds of codfish left to catch in their season’s quota and the men figured they could land that amount in a couple of tows and be back in port by afternoon before the winds increased.
Everything went according to plan early in the morning.
The Dolores R steamed out from Port Saunders at approximately 7 a.m. and although there was a large swell on the water that morning, they were about 12 miles offshore by 8:30 and preparing to shoot away for their first tow of the day.
About an hour later when the men took back their net, they estimated the bag contained all of the 4,500 pounds needed to fill their quota. For a while, it looked like they would be back home earlier than expected, but that suddenly changed.
Just as they had the net and fish over the stern, a stay (cable) attached to the A-frame jammed which, in turn, deactivated the net roller. Without the appropriate hydraulics working to keep the net in place, the net slid to the aft deck on the port side causing the vessel to list to port while, at the same time, the weight of the fish pushed the stern of the Dolores R low in the water.
Maurice took control in the wheelhouse and headed the vessel to port while Rene and Raymond tried to fix the problem with the jammed cable to move the fish further forward and to the center of the deck, but it was jammed too solidly.
When they were about halfway home, the Ryans noticed the stern of the vessel getting lower and lower in the water. Someone checked the engine room and the fish hold but everything was fine there. They couldn’t check the compartment furthest aft known as the lazarette because the cover was on deck and the disabled net, with more than two tonnes of fish in it, was on top of the cover.
Whether the hatch to the lazarette was forced open by the sliding net, allowing water coming over the stern to flow down into the compartment is not known. Raymond thinks that is a strong possibility, but the only thing certain was that the vessel was taking on water from somewhere and when they were about four or five miles from Port Saunders, the Dolores R started going down rapidly, stern first.
All three men knew they had to get away from the vessel as quickly as possible.
Raymond ran to the wheelhouse, grabbed the microphone and issued a mayday, although he couldn’t wait to hear if anyone heard his call because water was flooding into the wheelhouse door and with the stern already partly submerged, he had to get out while he still could.
Rene went to the galley/bunk area to look for lifejackets and Maurice tried to free a life raft.
With the Dolores R going down quickly, there was no time for the father/sons crew to coordinate a survival plan, so it became a matter of simply getting off the boat immediately. Rene managed to get his lifejacket on, but there was no time to retrieve the others so he ran to the deck and prepared to jump.
“Come on Maurice, we gotta go,” Rene called to his brother.
“Hang on, I’m trying to get the life raft,” Maurice called back.
Rene couldn’t wait any longer and jumped over the side of the boat and started swimming.
Meanwhile, Maurice was frantically trying to free the life raft but couldn’t spend any more time at it because the situation had reached an extremely dangerous point. Maurice was telling his father to jump but Raymond wanted to stay with the boat until the last minute and certainly not leave until Maurice was with him.
Maurice was very worried that the vessel might roll end over end and the bow section could possibly crash down on top of them sending both men to their doom.
There was only one thing left to do.
Even without lifejackets or the raft, it was time to jump.
Raymond and Maurice surfaced close together, but Rene was nowhere to be seen. Maurice and his dad didn’t know that Rene had managed to get his lifejacket on and that he decided to try and make it to shore to get help. When several minutes passed and there was still no sign of Rene, his father and brother feared that he had drowned.
Fortunately for Raymond and Maurice, a wooden fish chute had washed away from the deck of the Dolores R and drifted near enough for one of them to grab. The chute was a homemade device used to guide fish from the deck to the fish hold. It measured five feet long and approximately 18 inches wide and provided enough buoyancy to keep both men afloat by holding on with one hand and kicking their feet in the water at the same time.
With the wooden chute keeping them surfaced, Raymond and Maurice finally had time to assess their situation.
They saw the Dolores R about 90 per cent submerged with just the bow sticking up. They also calculated that they were far enough away from the boat that if it suddenly slid all the way down, they were out of harms way of being hit or sucked down by the undertow.
It was only when they had nothing more than their heads above water the men realized just how large the ocean swells were. When they were at the troth of the swell, they could see nothing but walls of water on all sides as far as 14-16 feet above them, but when they rose to the top, they could see for miles.
“In fact, I could see my own house in a subdivision on the road at the end of Port Saunders,” Maurice says.
They knew that from their last calculations, before things started to go wrong, that they were approximately five miles from home, but Port Saunders was located on a lengthy inlet and that the nearest point of land was much closer. The men estimated they were about two miles offshore from a place called Spirity Cove, a resettled community but still used as a fishing port by several inshore fishermen from various fishing towns on the northwest coast of Newfoundland.
And, as luck would have it, the winds, current and the large sea swells were pushing them in that direction.
Luck may sound like a strange concept when the distance between life and death is separated merely by a small wooden fish chute, but many strokes of luck turned out to be the key feature for the Ryan brothers and their dad that day.
The outcome might have been much different if even a single one of those strokes hadn’t happened.
Join us next month for the exciting conclusion of As Luck Would Have It.
