A decade has passed since the Miss Ally and her crew of five young fishermen from Shelburne County were lost to the sea during a bitter, winter North Atlantic storm.
The Miss Ally was on her way from a halibut fishing trip on Feb. 17, 2013 when it ran into trouble approximately 120 kilometres southeast of Liverpool. Waves higher than 10 metres and hurricane-force winds were battering the 45-foot fishing vessel. The emergency locator beacon activated at 11:06 p.m. The Canadian Coast Guard was dispatched but there would be no rescue.
Lost to the sea were Katlin Nickerson, 21, captain of the vessel, and crew members Joel Hopkins, 27, Steven Cole Nickerson, 28, Billy Jack Hatfield, 34, and Tyson Townsend, 25.
“Ten years, 10 days, it’s all the same to the family,” says Opal Malone, Katlin Nickerson’s aunt.
“It will always be another day of living without him. It’s a bad day every day. At some point through the day you’re reliving some part of it every day.”
Malone knew all of the Miss Ally crew. “They all came into the store. They were funny, every one of them. They all lived good lives,” she said.
“Some days it seems like yesterday but then some days it feels forever,” says Malone. “You live with it. It’s a void. It happened, but then that tragedy part kind of goes to the back of your mind and the good memories come. For the first year everything was bad now I can think back to the visits, the little things.”
The Miss Ally tragedy touched people from all over, says Malone, with tributes and mementos in many forms sent to family members and donations to support the families and children left behind pouring in for the first year or so.
One of the mementos Malone has on display is a special Miss Ally fishing fly tied by Gary Fraser of Bridgewater.
“I was tying flies the night the boat went missing and after seeing the stories all over social media the tragedy really hit home,” said Fraser. “I tied this fly using the colors of the boat. It’s just a simple thing but the story means a lot to a lot of people so that makes the fly a bit extra special to them.”
Fraser won’t sell the flies, but rather has gifted them to Miss Ally family members and others. The pattern is also listed and printed in several books. There is also a link on Global Fly Fisher to the fly pattern, he said.
“There are a lot of people that have suffered loss in the fishing industry. So I guess people connected to it more than I ever imagined,” says Fraser. “I never did it for recognition. It was just a simple gesture in memory of a group of guys that also loved the outdoors.”
Besides gifting them to people, Fraser says also ties the Miss Ally flies to fish with as they actually fish quite well.
Medals of bravery were awarded to four local divers who searched the capsized Miss Ally’s hull on Feb. 23, 2013, after it was found still floating by search planes on Feb. 19, 2013.
Led by seasoned commercial diver Donnie Mahaney and transported to the scene by local fishermen, the divers undertook the mission to give some answers to the families after officials refused to conduct the search, saying it was too dangerous.
Mahaney and fellow divers, Thomas Hennigar, Thomas Nickerson and Gary Thurber were awarded the Nova Scotia Medal of Bravery in 2013 for their actions.
