On February 3, 2003 Irving Faulkner’s 22-foot speedboat capsized throwing all six men onboard into the frigid ocean near the shores of Offer Wadham Island on the northeast coast of Newfoundland. Only one survived. Irving’s son, Dion Faulkner, made it to the ice-covered rocks and despite below-freezing temperatures and being soaked to the bone, he started walking to the opposite end of the island. Dion hoped that some fellow bird hunters would be there and could rescue him. Against incredible odds he made it across the ice and snow and miraculously, lived to tell the tale.
This is Part III of “We’d Have Been Better Off Staying Home.”
When Dion Faulkner reached Wadhams Harbour he didn’t know what to think.
In his weakened and by then, nearly delirious state, he had hoped to see the longliner Lady Easton anchored just offshore. He remembered the conversation between Roger Hann and Captain Larry Easton a couple of hours earlier when Larry told Roger that he and his crew were headed to the island to be ready for duck hunting at dawn.
But Dion couldn’t see the lights of the Lady Easton offshore because of a dense fog that reduced visibility to nearly zero.
Meanwhile Dion, an experienced saltwater duck hunter, also knew that Larry and his friends wouldn’t hunt from the longliner — they would likely be in a speedboat near the shoreline waiting for daylight. Although he couldn’t see anyone, he called out a ‘hello’ and ‘help’ but he wasn’t able to muster enough strength give a loud yell.
Amazingly though, he was audible enough to get the job done. Just as Dion had hoped, Larry Easton, along with two of his buddies, Bob and Rod Gillingham were sitting quietly in their speedboat with guns ready and waiting for dawn when the ducks would take wing.
“It was just after 5 o’clock, I think, when one of the boys heard what he said sounded like a moan or something and asked us to listen. I’m a little hard of hearing and couldn’t hear anything but then the boys said they heard it again. We thought it might be an old seal or something on the rocks but decided to check on it anyway. I put the motor in reverse and backed in to where the boys thought the sound had come from and the boys were shining their flashlights and all of a sudden one of them said he thought he could see a man in there on the island,” Larry recalls. Drawing a little closer to the shoreline, their suspicions were confirmed — it was a man.
Larry manoeuvred the speedboat to the shoreline and Rod and Bob jumped out to see what the man was doing there.
The Gillinghams and Larry didn’t know what to expect but intuitively, they knew something was seriously wrong. Just a few seconds later they recognized the man as Dion Faulkner and he was in bad shape, barely able to stand.
“Not only was he exhausted, he was literally stiff, like he was frozen. When the boys tried to help him from the rocks to the speedboat, he couldn’t raise his arms. They had to take his arms and put them over their shoulders and bring him, sort-of-drag him, to the boat,” Larry says.
Dion also recalls the moment when he realized that Larry and the Gillinghams knew he was there.
“That’s when I lost it,” he says, explaining that some of the extreme stress and tension drained from his body and he practically collapsed.
Although Dion’s worry about being rescued was gone, his emotional anxiety over the loss of his father, two brothers and two friends was greater than ever.
“Dion kept saying ‘they’re all gone – the five of them are gone — they’re all gone,’ he kept repeating it over and over,” Larry recalls, adding that they knew who the five were, but the enormity of the possible tragedy was beyond comprehension at that time.
After getting Dion into the speedboat, Larry quickly headed toward his longliner, Lady Easton, where they could get Dion in the warmth and comfort of a bunk to help regain his strength. Larry’s father and three other friends were onboard the longliner.
They had come along mostly as a recreational trip because the plan was to overnight on board, enjoy a nice meal of fresh saltwater duck that evening, enjoy a beer and then take their daily bag limit of ducks again the next morning before heading back home to Carmanville the next afternoon.
“We got Dion onboard the longliner and dad and them got the freezing, wet clothes off, wrapped him in blankets and got him in a bunk. They took a few of those large Pepsi bottles and filled them with warm water and put them near his feet and so on — they took real good care of him.”
Meanwhile, Larry got busy on the VHF contacting the Coast Guard, police and other authorities to notify them of what was transpiring on Offer Wadham Island. He also sought medical advice about how to give Dion the best care possible while they steamed back to Musgrave Harbour. While Larry was making calls, Brian Mouland, also a fisherman and vessel owner, took control of the Lady Easton and set course for Musgrave Harbour. After a couple of minutes Larry realized that they were instinctively responding to getting Dion to a hospital but perhaps that should not be their priority.
“I reached over and pulled back the throttle and said to Brian that maybe we weren’t doing the right thing. I didn’t want to leave the island without searching for other survivors. Dion was saying they were all gone but he couldn’t know that for sure so what if he was wrong?”
Larry asked for guidance from the Coast Guard and was told to use his own discretion, but indicated that if Larry and his people didn’t think Dion was in immediate danger of dying it would be prudent to see if there were other survivors.
Brian is Dion’s uncle and Larry asked him to go below and talk to his nephew and get a feel for how Dion was doing. Brian came back and said Dion was alert and seemingly progressing satisfactorily, albeit slowly, so they determined to go to the site of the accident and search for the others.
“If I left there, I don’t think I could live with myself because I’d be always wondering if there was one or more of the boys still alive that we could have saved because we knew it would take a while before the Coast Guard and others to arrive and in cases like that, a few minutes can mean the difference between life and death,” Larry says.
Larry and three of his crew went ashore on the island and soon saw the smaller of the two Faulkner boats wedged between rocks, half submerged but still upright.
“There was a lot debris — stuff like gas cans and things floating around there too so we knew this is where it happened,” Larry explains.
Shortly after spotting the small boat, someone saw a body at the water’s edge. It was Roger Hann.
After securing Roger’s body to higher ground, safely away from the sea, the searchers saw another body several feet away. It was Darren Faulkner. The men placed the bodies of their friends together and continued searching for others.
“All the debris was floating to the east. And since most of it [debris] was half submerged, we figured that a person would float in that direction as well so we started combing the shoreline to the east but there was nothing to be seen,” Larry said.
After satisfying themselves that it was highly probable that there were no survivors, the four men decided they could now get on with taking Dion to Musgrave Harbour.
“But before we did, I decided to take a look to the west of where we found Roger and Darren, just in case, but I didn’t see anything and when I heard the Coast Guard helicopter coming, I felt satisfied to move on so I turned around and went back.”
Little did Larry know that if he had gone just a few feet further he might have seen the bodies of two more of the ill-fated duck hunters.
Join us next month for Part IV of ‘We’d Have Been Better Off Staying Home.”
