The best landing of all – a life

By Carla Allen

FOR THE SOU’WESTER

By mid-afternoon on dumping day in southwestern Nova Scotia, close to half of Savana & Jax’s 375-traps had been off-loaded and the men were ready to start pulling off another tier.

Support straps and rope secured the pots so Josh Malone had to climb atop, go over the starboard rail and cut the rope.

Perched 20 feet above the waterline he made his cut just as the boat took an unexpected roll.

“I went to grab with my right hand and missed the rail and I remember thinking…. I’m going in,” said Malone. “I knew it wasn’t the best scenario but I didn’t realize the extent of the danger.”

His clothes – five shirts and two pairs of pants quickly sopped up water. Rubber boots and oil gear also added deadly weight.

“I’m not a panicky person,” he later recalled. “I knew that the only thing I could do was tread water.”

The Savana & Jax, owned and skippered by Tommy d’Entremont, had left the East Pubnico, N.S. wharf for west of the German Banks at 5 a.m. that Nov. 29 morning. It was a choppy sea, with a southwesterly blowing at 25 knots.

Mitchell Messenger and Matthew Banks crewed the boat with Malone, a seasonal Woods Harbour, N.L. resident with five years of fishing experience. Malone, the co-owner of a painting business in New Minas and a university student, is studying to be a teacher.

In the beginning he says he dreaded fishing. He didn’t like the monotony of it. But the camaraderie of being part of the crew began to grow on him.

He remembers hollering as he fell into the ocean and the cry of alarm, ‘Man Overboard,’ was quickly relayed to the captain, who slammed the boat into reverse.

Malone caught a rail-tied rope thrown by Messenger with his first swipe but it was all he could do to wrap it around one of his hands.

The men hauled him close and tried to pull him out of the water but the combined weight of his waterlogged clothes and body and the constant pitching of the boat defeated their attempts.

At that point, Malone says he felt he had the easy job… just treading water.

The crew had to plan what actions to take in the highly stressful situation.

“They were more upset than I was. You’re basically watching somebody drown. Even though they are 10 feet away they might as well be a mile,” he said.

Super-charged with adrenalin, Malone says he didn’t even feel the coldness of the water but his head was dunked under with each wave and he was swallowing a lot of seawater.

His crewmates again tried to haul him up by his oilcloths but he continually slipped out of their grip. Ten minutes had gone by.

“What’s going through my head at this point is ‘I’m going to die.’ I wasn’t hollering or anything. I just felt sort of sad. I thought of my son,” said Malone, father to five-year-old Desmond.

Banks says he remembers Malone going under many times. He began to think they weren’t going to be able to get him back.

“That’s when I started getting sick to my stomach,” he says.

A life ring retrieved from the wheelhouse was thrown to the drowning man. He struggled to free himself from the other line and get his upper body through. He recalls it was difficult to think clearly by then.

The men were finally able to haul him up over the stern and he lay on the deck vomiting salt water, unable to move or talk. There were whoops of joy and hugs.

Quickly stripped of his oil gear, Malone was helped up over the tiered pots, across the top of the wheelhouse and lowered through the skylight of the cud. The rest of his clothes were removed and the heater was turned up full blast as he began shaking.

“At the end of the ordeal I was more exhausted than I’ve ever been in my life,” he says.

He remained in the bunk for the next day, with no desire for food. Over the next two days every time he thought of salt water he threw up.

The Savana & Jax dumped the rest of her pots and returned to the wharf around Friday, Nov. 30 at midnight.

Malone continues to fish lobsters. His way of dealing with his close call is to talk about it and joke. His crewmates help.

“Banks told me I’d swallowed so much of the sea the boats next to us thought the tide was going down,” he chuckles.

Beneath it all, there is the brotherhood and unspoken pact between all fishermen.

“Guys aren’t too emotional very often. I thanked them. They know I would have done the same for them,” says Malone.

“If we had of lost him, it wouldn’t have mattered how much money we made,” says Banks.

“If we had of lost him, I don’t think I would have been able to go lobstering anymore,” says Messenger.