Fishing Industry Participants Working to Help Their Own
When Stewart Franck began working with the Fisheries Safety Association of Nova Scotia (FSANS), he said seeing a fisherman wearing a personal flotation device was a rare thing.
Now, five years after getting the conversation going about implementing safe fishing practices in the commercial fishing industry, it is the opposite.
“It’s at the point now that fishers that don’t wear the PFDs are in the minority,” said Franck, the executive director of FSANS.
When asked how the ...
PFDs: Pure Idiocy Not to Wear Them
I have a lot of photographs of vessels leaving port on the annual ‘dumping day’ in south west Nova Scotia’s winter lobster fishing season.
There is always one thing that stands clear — fishing boats are heavily laden with lobster gear, there are usually three or four men aboard and in recent years the stern has a ramp instead of a rail — it’s wide open.
A crewman aboard one of the vessels in my collection, when discussing ship-board accidents, stated that the issue wasn’t if ...
Safety First
Stewart Franck thinks about safety at sea a lot.
In fact, the executive director of the Nova Scotia Fisheries Safety Association is paid to think about it and where possible, improve the safety record of the most dangerous commercial industry in the country.
Stewart was born in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia and still lives in the region, although he lived in Manitoba for several years when his parents moved there when Stewart was a boy.
Although Bridgewater is 15 miles inland from the ...
