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A group of sealers passed the time visiting or sitting on their own vessels. Dave Patey says a pathway of stable ice was made for travelling from boat to boat, and often the sealers would get together for a meal or to play cards. (Photo courtesy of Dave Patey)
Part 5: Northern ice becoming more dangerous, says sealer stuck 23 days in frozen expanse
KYLE GREENHAM The Northern Pen
Published March 15, 2018 - 5:00am
Last Updated March 15, 2018 - 6:57am
ST. ANTHONY BIGHT, N.L. — The memory of 23 long, cold and uncertain days trapped in the Atlantic ice is never far from the recollection of fisherman and sealer Dave Patey.
The 59-year-old St. Anthony Bight resident has hunted seals since he was a boy. Growing up on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula, he spent many spring days of his youth getting out of school and jumping aboard a boat with his father and uncle to take part in the hunt.
• Part 1: Our Changing Arctic
• Part 2: Canada's overworked icebreaker fleet waiting for relief
• Part 3: From fisherman to Arctic explorer
• Part 4: Port Hawkesbury research fleet looks North for opportunities
If there’s anyone capable of rivalling the Inuits’ knowledge of how to work a small boat in the ice, it would be Newfoundland and Labrador’s fishermen/sealers.
Patey is still involved with the seal hunt, though he says the northern ice is becoming more compacted and difficult to conquer.
The roughest year to date was 2007, when ice from northern Labrador made its way south and ensnared more than 200 boats.
In 2007, Dave Patey of St. Anthony Bight, N.L., his brother Dean and three other crew members were trapped in the ice along with over 200 other boats.
(KYLE GREENHAM / The Northern Pen)
“It’s tighter ice all the time; the tides have changed and the ice seems clustered together,” said Patey. “Years ago you could get in a speedboat and go on for miles and miles. Now you get through eight or 10 miles of loose ice and then you hit a solid wall all along the coast. You can’t get through it.”
Patey, his brother Dean and three other crew members were caged in that ice for 23 days.
“You could get killed … you didn’t know.”
Patey says his longliner was only 24 kilometres from the coast of St. Anthony when they got trapped. Over the next few weeks, the ice took them another 130-145 kilometres away from home.
“It happened suddenly. All of a sudden you couldn’t go no farther,” he said. “And that was it, you couldn’t get back and you couldn’t get out. Everyone was caught.”
It wasn’t the first time the crew had been stuck in frozen waters. Most often, they would only have to wait a few hours, or overnight at most, for the ice to begin to separate. A typical technique used to get the boat free was to bring the motor repeatedly into forward and reverse to break through. But this time, the ice was too immense for that manoeuvre.
Many evenings were spent in fear that the changing tide would make the ice crush the boat and sink it to the bottom of the sea.
Patey says it reminded him of the underground monster movie Tremors, where at any moment his longliner could have been pulled from beneath his feet and never seen again.
“You didn’t know what was going to happen next; some days we were pretty nervous,” said Patey. “Big boulders of ice would be pressing together and lifting, tilting, your boat. “In the middle of the night everyone would be scrambling out of the boat and out onto a pan of ice, because you didn’t know if the whole thing was going to be crushed.”
Patey recalled that trying to get a decent sleep in a bunk bed was rarely an option. If the tides began to tilt the vessel, the person was bound to fall out and have quite a wake-up call.
“You could get killed staying in your bunk; you didn’t know. It wasn’t a good experience,” Patey said.
The crew would have to find a good pan of ice to set foot on as their hefty watercraft shifted along. Often, the crew would spend the evening on another boat that was trapped in a more stable area.
Many vessels took a considerable beating. Most had speedboats along with them, and sealers would take them off their longliners and onto a sturdy pan of ice, so if their longliner sunk, they’d still have a craft to travel home in.
“Some boats had more trouble than others,” Patey reminisced. “Some were sure they would have to leave theirs behind, figured it was going to crush any day.
“You had to take everything into consideration that could happen; you couldn’t just wait around for it to happen.”
Many vessels remained trapped within the ice in the spring of 2007 spring for several weeks.
(Photo courtesy of Dave Patey)
But those rough and nerve-wracking evenings came in spurts. There were many calm nights with no sudden jolts to send crews jumping from their ship.
As the days went on, the sealers found ways to pass the time. Patey says a pathway of stable ice was made for travelling from boat to boat, and often the sealers would get together for a meal or to play cards.
The Canadian Coast Guard often sent a helicopter in with food and supplies. Patey spoke with his family every day, and his wife once gave some chicken to the coast guard to bring out to her husband. When he finally did get home, Patey found himself with a $1,000 phone bill.
To keep beverages and food cold, Patey’s crew tied a rope around a cooler and left it in nearby water.
“If you ran out of water, you’d come across a big old pan of ice with blue in it. That blue was all fresh water,” said Patey.
To wash themselves, they heated water in a pot over the boat’s kitchen stove.
“The coast guard wanted us to leave our boats and go on, but we wouldn’t leave the boats like that,” Patey recalled. “The boat was our livelihood. To save your fishing boat you’d take whatever comes.”
But after 23 days, there was still no sure sign of getting their longliner out of the ice’s snare. When one of his crew members got gout, they had no choice but to get the coast guard to transport them to Fogo Island.
After two weeks, the weather appeared to have cleared enough and the crew travelled back out and safely rescued their boat.
The risk of the hunt
For Patey, it’s an experience he’ll never forget. He says it shows the danger involved when one risks their life for prime seal hunting. Each trip is a potential battle against the forces of nature that make their way toward the Northern Peninsula waters each spring.
“It’s always dangerous, sealing. You only need to strike a pan the wrong way and your boat can go bottom-up in no time,” said Patey.
Once, in the 1980s, Patey got caught in the ice for three days on a seal hunting trip in a speedboat. Thankfully, a nearby longliner had also gotten caught in the ice. Patey and his father shacked up there until the ice cleared days later.
“If they hadn’t took us aboard we would have died then,” he said. “Being left in an open speedboat on a pan of ice in the middle of the ocean — we would’ve froze to death. My father was up in age then and we were already wet by the time we got stuck. We wouldn’t have lasted.”
With ice so thick and impenetrable that even a 12-metre longliner is not powerful enough to break through, there are few options sealers have for escape. Patey says calling the coast guard for assistance and waiting for the natural elements to work in their favour is often the only solution at hand.
In 2017, much of Newfoundland and Labrador saw harbour ice stay so late into the summer on many coastlines that crab season did not begin until late June, preventing many sealers on the Northern Peninsula from seal hunting.
But if the weather and ice charts are promising, Patey says, he’ll back aboard his boat this April to hunt seals. Even with the difficult and life-threatening obstacles that can come his way, Patey has a clearly unbreakable attachment to a way of life he’s been a part of since boyhood.
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