On November 1, 1995, a tug with four men onboard, struck a rock in waters approximately 10 miles south of Nain, Labrador. Within a few minutes, the severely damaged Sea Alert sank. One man, engineer Dave Barnes, managed to get off the ship. His struggle to survive over the next 16 hours is almost incomprehensible. This is the continuation of Survivor Extreme.
When Dave ran from the engine room to the deck, he saw his three shipmates, Eph Skinner, Dave House and the tugboat’s captain Scott Kean, heading toward an aluminum boat to prepare for abandoning ship.
“All four of us went to the area of the ship behind the wheelhouse to launch a workboat, a small aluminum boat fitted with an outboard motor already attached to the boat’s counter and ready for use,” Dave explains.
As they tried to get the workboat down to the main deck, the ship was heaving and twisting because, by then, water was coming over the starboard side and aft section of the tug. In the chaos, the workboat struck the side of the vessel with such force the engine was knocked into the water.
Dave is not sure why, but with the loss of the workboat, his three shipmates decided to go down to the main deck and went toward the mid section of the vessel in the vicinity of two doors. One door led to the engine room that Dave had left moments earlier and the other one was the entry to the accommodation room.
Whatever their intent was in going in that area is unknown to Dave because he had a different idea. He knew that four large men would not fit in that small aluminum workboat anyway, so he decided to attempt to free a life raft that was located on the port side, the opposite side of where his shipmates were headed.
As the vessel listed further onto her beam-ends, both the steel doors near Scott, Eph and Dave House fell open, but not for long.
When the stern of the Sea Alert sank further below surface, the bow section pointed upwards. As seas came flooding over the gunwales and back from the front, the rapid flow of water forced the doors closed, but not before the seas had already washed the captain and his two shipmates inside. When the doors slammed shut, the three men were trapped.
Knowing he was totally powerless to try and fight the swirling seas to open the doors, Dave worked on getting the life raft free and save himself in a bitterly cold ocean. He managed to free the raft, but it was too late.
The Sea Alert was quickly sliding beneath the waves and the next thing Dave knew, the tug was gone and he was in the ocean struggling to stay afloat.
The raft that he had been working to inflate was still in the canister, but he must have managed to untie it earlier because it did float free.
At first, the canister was only 12-15 feet away and Dave tied swimming to it, but it floated quickly away from him propelled by 25 to 30-knot NNW winds.
“I figured the raft was my only means of survival, so I tried to swim toward it, but every time I blinked, it seemed like the raft was another couple of feet away from me,” he says.
Dave estimates that it was a matter of only eight or nine minutes from the time the tug hit Jenks Rock, until it was beneath the surface.
In the chaos, there was no time to get a survival suit or flotation device of any kind.
It was a struggle to avoid getting sucked down in the undertow as the Sea Alert slipped beneath the waves. Dave described the scene as like being in a flushing giant toilet bowl. But at 30, he was strong and managed to stay above water for most of the time until relative calm was restored when the ship sank into deep water.
Trying to asses his options, Dave could hardly think rationally amidst the turmoil, but determined to do something to survive he made several observations. Land was about a mile away and even if he could make it that far, he knew from being in that area earlier in the day that would have to smash his way through 20-30 feet of newly frozen hard ice before reaching the beach.
As the sun was setting, air temperatures dropped, compounding the problems he would face in zero-degree Celsius water. He also knew that darkness would be closing in within an hour and survival was all about making it to shore first and even then, he knew life was not going to suddenly be a picnic. In fact, he never had a single clue as to what to expect if he could make it to land.
Among other things, a partially-filled oil drum floated from the debris of the sunken tug. The drum was hard to hang on to, but Dave grabbed it anyway. With only a bit of the rim on the drum to grasp, the only thing Dave’s brain was telling him is that the drum floated and he needed something to help keep his head above the surface of the freezing water.
He laughs heartily now when he recalls trying to climb on top of the drum to sit on it. Eventually, he realized that he was expending much needed energy trying to accomplish the impossible and wisely gave up.
After several minutes clinging to the oil drum Dave had his first bit of good luck. An old-fashioned wood and styrofoam device floated to the surface nearby. Dave remembered it was located on the roof of the Sea Alert and somehow had broken free and bobbed to the surface just inches away from Dave.
It was a hand-made flotation device that was used as a life raft years ago. It resembled the bottom half of a rectangular wooden crate built of slats instead of a solid bottom, but for Dave Barnes that day it was a Godsend.
Dave had never seen one in service and wasn’t sure if there was a proper way to use it, so he did what looked like the most efficient method of application. He placed the raft under his body to give him buoyancy and started swimming — paddling with his arms
Not knowing exactly where he was, Dave decided to simply go in the direction the wind and waves were pushing him.
That was the second piece of luck that afternoon because, although he had no way of knowing, it was the best direction possible, given his circumstances.
It took about two hours before he drew close to the shoreline and despite the bitterly cold water and, by now, below-freezing air temperatures, it was a relatively uneventful swim.
The only thing he recalls, other than a million thoughts of “what if,” was his observance of a plane flying in the direction just to the right of where the sun was setting.
That’s when Dave’s innate survival skills kicked in once again. He knew from the position of the setting sun that the plane must have been headed to Nain. Armed with that knowledge, he knew he was approaching an area about one and half miles south of Ten Mile Bay where they dropped off the barge that morning.
He also knew from his observations that morning if he could make it to Ten Mile Bay, there was a camp there where he could possibly take refuge.
But that would not happen until he first survived the most torturous 15 hours of his life and then some.
Join us next month for Part III of Survivor Extreme.
