Captain Byron Oxford and his eight-man crew survived a harrowing ordeal after the fishing vessel Atlantic Charger sank south of Baffin Island in September 2015.
For some of the survivors, the experience will haunt them forever. Captain Oxford said he battled anxiety while at sea for several months after the incident.
For the vessel’s owner, his battle was different and started after the loss of the Charger.
For nearly nine months following the loss of his vessel, Brad Watkins dealt with regulatory agencies and bureaucrats, his insurance company and banks before he could begin planning to get back in business.
All the months of phone calls, meetings, interviews arguments, pleading, frustrations and anger was further aggravated by the fact that he had to come up with $8,000 a month to make mortgage interest payments on a vessel that lay at the bottom of the ocean.
But before those irritants became obvious, Brad was upset about a more immediate issue. He was vocal in media reports criticizing the lack of Coast Guard helicopter and Search and Rescue coverage for areas north of Labrador.
“Basically, there is none — if you get in trouble, you’re on your own,” he says, adding that as far as he can tell, a helicopter would have to be tasked from Gander and refuel in Goose Bay. But before it could carry out a rescue mission to lift nine men from a life raft in rough seas near Baffin Island, the chopper would need yet another fill up, possibly at Iqaluit.
Adding to all those hours, darkness and frequent severe weather that far north, mariners in distress in the Hudson Strait would likely have to wait an entire day or more to see a helicopter.
Ironically, the cold northern temperatures of both air and sea shortens survival time, making a fast rescue more important than in warmer conditions offshore Newfoundland, which in not exactly ideal waters to effect a rescue at sea.
Brad says he was unaware that a helicopter tasked to a far-north distress call would take so long. He explained that in recent years, more and more fishing vessels from Newfoundland and Labrador fish in that area, so a Search and Rescue presence is needed more than ever.
Before moving on to talk about his eight months of frustration, Brad wanted to make a clarification. It seems some media reports sounded as if he was critical of the men and women who crew Coast Guard helicopters. That is not the case at all, he says.
“I am critical of the system and the politics of the system, not the people in the choppers,” Brad says.
Dealing with the process of what happens after the loss of a vessel like the Atlantic Charger starts within days of the sinking.
A Transportation Safety Board (TSB) representative was on the wharf to meet the survivors when they docked in Harbour Grace on September 25, 2015. He interviewed all the crewmembers, as well as Brad. A few days later, a representative from the insurance company got the crew and Brad together at a hotel in Gander for an investigative session that Brad describes as “a bit nerve-racking.”
The TSB investigators simply try and determine what went wrong to cause the vessel to sink, but Brad noted the insurance companies go far beyond that.
Brad says the insurance companies are incredibly thorough in their investigation, including their questioning of him.
“They wanted to know if I had hired the right people during construction; if I did any work myself on the boat and how I had maintained the boat and all that stuff.”
Brad doesn’t say the investigation is unfair — it’s just that it is difficult to deal with when you feel like you’ve been accused of committing some kind of offence.
Obviously, when the stakes are high, everyone is nervous about their statements being misinterpreted and are cautious in how they proceed for fear of liability claims.
All that adds up to long and tedious months of talks. And for vessel owners like Brad Watkins, the frustrations of the process can often be almost unbearable.
“I was in an awful way,” Brad explains. “I couldn’t get a lawyer involved because that would trigger a lawsuit that would take years, so I was over a barrel because the banks wouldn’t give me money to get another boat to keep my business running until the insurance issue was settled. So here I was, watching my bank account bleeding down every month but yet unable to get a boat to fish my quotas to make the money I needed to meet my financial commitments to satisfy the bank.”
It was the classic “Catch 22” syndrome. In fact, Brad had to sell one of his enterprises to help stay afloat financially.
Finally, someone told Brad about an ombudsman who helps settle cases like his. He contacted the Centre for Fisheries Innovation in St. John’s and they connected Brad with someone in Ontario who acts as a conciliator/mediator to get everyone involved to start talking to each other. It was then, in the summer of 2016, the various parties agreed on an accommodation and the issue was settled.
For Brad, the whole process was so consuming and exhausting that he took several weeks to sit back and let his head clear before contemplating his next move. Looking back at his experience with the Atlantic Charger, Brad says it was a roller coaster ride of highs and lows.
“We ironed out the [start-up] problems and got her working good and when we did, she excelled, three times fold, she outperformed anything I had dreamed about, and then suddenly she was taken from me and went to the bottom. It took the wind out of my sails, I had a bitter taste in my mouth till about a month ago [October 2016] when I said ‘OK, it’s time for me to get back in this game, I can’t just dwell on what I had but is now gone.”
And while that next move is still in the planning stages, it seems he is thinking even bigger and better than ever, but with a difference.
“My plan now is for a vessel about 88 feet long with the newest technology, especially in an automated line system for maximum quality. We won’t do shrimp or otter trawling, but we will continue crab and more than likely, we will be fishing [groundfish] up in the Davis Strait again using 20,000 hooks, following the Scandinavian models.” He says his primary species will be cod, turbot and halibut and if all goes well, maybe hake or whatever other species he can get that is compatible with the automated longlining system he is planning to get.
At the time of this writing Brad was in the process of conducting financial feasibility assessments. If all goes well, he hopes to lay the keel on a new construction by February 2017 and start working the vessel in April 2018.
2016 was a bad year for Brad Watkins but he says he was only down — not out. With any luck, 2017 and especially 2018 will mark the beginning of a long and prosperous new fishery.
