Above: Island Lady. Photo by Joe Jenkins
Fishing is one of the most dangerous commercial occupations on the planet.
Statistically, Atlantic Canada has lost an average of about one fisherman per month over the past six or seven decades despite just about everything else in the industry going through dramatic change in that period. In fact, the death rate is even higher these days if compared on a percentage basis — there are fewer people fishing but the number of lives lost remain the same.
One of the reasons for that is because vessels are larger. Years ago, a tragedy at sea usually claimed one or sometimes two lives. Nowadays, there are accidents when four, five or even six men go down with their vessel.
There is a growing throng of people who say the search and rescue (SAR) system needs to improve. Nobody has issues with the rescuers, it’s the structure that needs overhaul. Critics, many of them surviving family members of victims, say the SAR model is outdated and inadequate, especially in some regions.
Job one is to provide a network that provides rescuers with every means possible to prevent fishermen and mariners from dying on the job. And there are the other victims that should always be considered as well.
Tragic death creates the most painful grief that a family can ever experience but during my 23 years writing a series called Final Voyages for The Navigator Magazine, I learned that a loss to the ocean has an added element of cruelty.
Tragedy at sea is different than in other industries.
In construction, forestry, and most other land-based work, there is almost always a body remaining when a person dies in an industrial accident. Having physical evidence that a loved one was indeed the victim gives family members a degree of closure. When a fishing vessel sinks it is very often a different story. All too often there is no trace of at least one or two and sometimes all crewmembers are never found. That’s when the grief for family elevates from excruciating to indescribable and sometimes unbearable pain.
Everyone suffers intensely but my experience strongly suggests that mothers of young sons who were never found must cope with some special level of pain that often causes abnormal behaviour which is often hard to describe.
As one of them told me; “It’s like my brain is functioning at a totally different and surreal level than it was before the accident.” One mom believed she was living in the ocean for more than a year after her 21-year-old son was lost with all his crewmembers off Nova Scotia. She was down there searching for her “boy.”
A mom in Newfoundland lost several members of her family including her husband, son, father-in-law and a close family friend. She was so traumatized that several months went by before she became aware that her husband wasn’t at home anymore.
Those are examples of the more extreme cases but almost all the people I met and interviewed who were left to grieve for a son, husband, father or brother who was never recovered talked about their fantasies that their loved ones had survived and were living on an uncharted island and will be found alive someday. Others imagine that a foreign vessel rescued their loved one, but that he suffered amnesia and didn’t know how to contact them. Imagination is endless in such incidents, but the pain is always severe, and some even contemplate suicide.
Survivors of lost fishermen deal with their grief in their own way. No two are the same. Some turn their grief into advocacy. They want to do their bit to improve safety and prevent fishermen from dying and save families from dealing with such intense grief. Advocacy is becoming more prevalent these days. Della Sears, the mother in Nova Scotia we mentioned above, made herself available to safety seminars and inquiries to present her insights on ways to deal with safety issues.
She often singled out the need to make personal EPIRBS (emergency locating devices) available to fishermen. EPIRBS are mandatory on large vessels but not on small inshore boats. Della would like EPIRBS made mandatory on all fishing vessels and to be widely available for individuals to carry in their pockets when they are working at sea.
Jeanette Russell lost her son Marc Russell along with his friend and crewman Joey Jenkins off Mary’s Harbour, Labrador, on September 17, 2021. The two young men were retrieving their fishing gear on the last day of the season when something went wrong. It must have happened quickly because they didn’t have time to send notification that they were in trouble. There was no trace of the two men or their vessel, Island Lady. Marc turned 25 just nine days before the accident. He was the son of a successful fishing captain, Dwight Russell, and practically grew up in a fishing boat. Marc was known to be very a competent young skipper.
The Russell and Jenkins’ families are still grieving, but Jeanette Russell is determined to spend the rest of her life trying to make the fishing industry safer. She has already formed the Labrador Coalition for Search and Rescue that she will use as a foundation to set guidelines and planning for her future advocacy work.
Like Della Sears, Jeanette is advocating for all vessels, regardless of size, to be required to carry EPIRBS. In her own ordeal Jeanette says there was little or no communication among the various agencies that eventually carried out a search and rescue operation. It was often a matter of too little, too late she says. But she dreams of improving much more than mandatory EPIRBS and communications, especially in Labrador.
Jeanette, who holds a master’s degree in counselling psychology, has big ideas to reach her goals. She says she will push to have the Canadian Air Force Base 5-Wing Goose Bay upgraded to include a full-fledged search and rescue operation. She points out that Labrador has nearly the same length of coastline as the island of Newfoundland but other than a marine rescue auxiliary comprised of fishing vessels, there is nothing else to service the needs of fishermen and other marine traffic in times of trouble at sea off Labrador. In fact, Jeanette says the auxiliary were not contacted when the Island Lady went missing.
She has already managed to have face-to-face audiences with provincial and federal government officials and politicians including one meeting with Bill Blair, Canada’s Minister of Defence. Jeanette has other ideas and, despite still struggling with extreme grief, I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of Jeanette Russell yet.
Governments might be wise to pay attention to the likes of Jeanette Russell and Della Sears. I suspect they are merely the frontrunners of many more activists to come because people will no longer accept having to deal with the unbearable pain of losing a loved one who might have been rescued if adequate SAR facilities were provided.
What Jeanette, Della and others are asking for is not unreasonable. No one expects a major air and sea search and rescue centre for every few hundred miles of shoreline but on a coast that stretches thousands of miles, surely some air capability and several strategically located fast-rescue craft would be a good start. That’s why Jeanette Russell is also calling for a full government inquiry to investigate the shortcomings into search and rescue operations in the region. That inquiry would provide recommendations that would give the country’s leaders a blueprint to build a better safety net for Labrador and indeed, all of Atlantic Canada.
I don’t know if those extreme conditions are some form of defense mechanisms to protect the person from even worse behaviour or what it is. I do know that it says a lot about losing loved ones to the ocean.
On September 17, 2021, the Island Lady was lost off Mary’s Harbour, Labrador. Marc Russell and Joey Jenkins went down with the vessel and were never recovered. Marc’s mother, Jeanette Russell, wrote a poem about the agony of losing a son to the ocean and never seen again. She called it: Shipwrecked.
Shipwrecked
WE are the shipwrecked
the living debris of love
claimed by the sea
The wreckage
trapped in a ceaseless cesspool
drowning daily in despair
The desolate
stranded on the brink
facing the ocean deep where our hearts rest
Held hostage by the weight of water
until we reach that distant shore
reunited
Until that day WE are the flotsam
wrought by the sea
forever flailing in the ravage waves
called GRIEF
VJR
March 2024
