Three fishermen rescued

The Coastal Raider left Sunday, July 15 from the Ingomar wharf with Captain Toby Perry and crew Richard Hiltz and Chris Perry.

“We were getting pretty close to being done the day with two strings left to haul of six total and were starting to get a bit of weight on board,” recalls Hiltz, adding the weight of the dogfish they were catching was not nearly as much as usual.

Sometime between noon and one Sunday the Captain turned the boat to head for home, when a swell lifted over the side of the turning boat, adding even more weight to the doomed vessel.

More swells kept coming and the pumps were unable to keep up with the rising water.

“The Captain pointed the head to the wind, came onto the throttle and she basically stood up on end and started to slide back under the water,” explains Hiltz.

“There wasn’t much time to be scared,” he said, “you just had to get the jobs done that needed to be done.”

And so while the boat quickly sank the crew grabbed the lifeboat, inflated it and attempted to clear the small floatation device far enough as to not be brought down as well.

“The captain was the last man off and he had to swim out from underneath the water to get off of the boat.

According to Hiltz, the boat sank so quickly that when Captain Perry went below to the wheelhouse to locate the survival suits, he had time to only grab one for the three men, when he went to return he was hit and knocked back by the water and was able to swim out to the surface.

At this point Chris pulled the captain onto the life raft where they would spend the next 21-hours, attempting to ward off the cold and hoping for a rescue.

The crew tried to make it as comfortable as they could by sopping up the water at the bottom of the raft with their wet clothes and ringing them out over the side.

“There wasn’t a lot of conversation at all,” said Hiltz, “we thought we would be rescued in an hour or two.”

Their call for distress went unnoticed by the other fishing boats that were close by and once night fell upon the three men they knew they were in for the long haul.

“We tried to stay positive,” said Hiltz, “we knew we were going to be found but we were worried about what people at home were thinking and wished we could have some way we could keep them from worrying.”

The three men lay huddling close together to keep warm and sitting on their rubber boots as to not touch the wet floor while the cold of the foggy night and sharp wind cut through them.

“I just wanted to be out of there in the worst possible way while trying to have patience,” said Hiltz.

The search did not begin until morning when people realized that the boat was most likely lost.

Close to 20 boats left from Ingomar Harbour and by 9:30 a.m. Monday, the wharf began to fill with worried friends and family of the missing crew.

One of the boats, Joyce and Boys, with Captain Corey Crowell, Bill Kean and Todd Smith were the ones to happen upon the survivors through the thick fog.

They slowed down when they saw wharf boxes floating in the water, and knew immediately that the Coastal Raider had sunk.

The crew aboard the life vessel heard the motor running and slowing down and lit a flare.

It did not work.

Most of the flares they attempted to light that morning did not work at all. Then suddenly one sparked and flared when Captain Perry attempted to light it signaling their position through the dense air.

“They didn’t work for whatever reason, I guess fate, but the one that needed to work did,” said Hiltz.

Meanwhile their flare did not go unnoticed.

“We were looking and looking and the fog was so thick when all of a sudden there was a bright light off to the side,” said Kean, one of the rescuers.

They found the men wearing nothing but their underwear as their clothes had become too saturated with wet and cold to wear.

“It was a tremendous sense of relief when we got aboard the boat,” said Hiltz, “we were all friends from before, although I would have hugged a complete stranger in that situation, I just told them how proud I was of them and that they knew their stuff.”

Kean recalls them finding the three missing men with relief, “were they ever so happy to see us,” he said, “and we were just as happy to see them. When we saw the wharf boxes floating we were pretty scared.”

They headed back to Ingomar wharf and were met by around 60 friends and family, cheering their arrival to safety.

It was a tearful reunion as the missing crew stepped onto the wharf.

“It was the best feeling knowing that everyone cared that much to be there,” said Hiltz and laughing, “it was nice to see everybody so relieved that we were back when we were probably more worried about them.”