Four fishermen safely escape burning boat

By Chris Shannon

LOUISBOURG, N.S. — A burst of flames from the engine room of the fishing boat A Dream Away, some 150 kilometres southeast of Louisbourg, N.S. Sunday afternoon, disrupted what was supposed to be a trip to set more crab traps further out at sea.

Glenn Drake, a resident of Bateston, was the boat’s captain and only crewmember awake at the time of the explosion.

He said it was a matter of seconds before the other crewmembers were fully awake and cornered at one end of the deck because of the ballooning clouds of black smoke.

And it was only a couple of minutes after that, in which Drake, his brother Gary, Kenny Zablaska and John Zablaska were forced into two small rafts wearing survival suits.

“I put the fire out, I thought, but obviously not. It just exploded. Then I don’t know what happened, if the air got at it or whatever,” Drake said.

“I took a breath, ran in, grabbed the mic and stretched it out through the door and shut the door, and called another boat. The smoke was out on deck and we had about 20 feet of deck space. The rest of it was just heavy, black smoke.

“You couldn’t breathe that stuff. I don’t know what was burning but the smoke was toxic. It was bad.”

The mayday call was received by the coast guard at about 12:30 p.m. A Cormorant helicopter and Hercules aircraft from 14 Wing Greenwood responded to the distress call.

The next four hours were spent in the cold, choppy waters of the North Atlantic in a blanket of fog until the fishermen had a close encounter with a container ship bound for New York.

The 300-metre long container ship, M.O.L. Endowment, saw the men after Drake shot several flares into the sky. The ship’s crew hurried a lifeboat down to the stranded fishermen.

“They were coming directly straight towards us,” Drake said.

“They put us in an enclosed lifeboat and we then went under the shelter of the big ship. It was flat (water) under there.”

Within five minutes, the Louisbourg fisheries boat Seven Wonders arrived at the scene. The boat was more than 20 kilometres away when the first call for help was sent out by Drake.

The fishermen, all safe and sound, arrived back in Louisbourg shortly after 1 a.m. Monday, July 28 with family waiting anxiously.

“It was very scary for them but they’re professionals,” said Dannie Hansen, a project officer at Louisbourg Fisheries.

“The community is very, very grateful that this wasn’t a tragedy.”

Drake’s brother Gary owns the boat. There is insurance but Glenn Drake is not sure what’s going to happen now.

He is just glad that he made it back to shore alive.

“It’s the first and I hope it’s the last.”

It’s unclear what caused the fire and if the fishing boat sank. The coast guard was checking the area Monday to see if the abandoned vessel was still afloat.

(Chris Shannon is a journalist with Transcontinental Media’s Cape Breton Post, which is a contributor to the Sou’Wester.)