Automated signal helps alert rescuers to fishers’ peril

By Eric McCarthy

FOR THE SOU’WESTER

Casey Gavin was wanting to see six o’clock.

That’s the time Sunday morning he had told family members and fellow fishers he’d be back in port in Tignish with his crab catch.

“I knew that shortly after that they would try to get us,” said Gavin.

His wife Joyce-Anne called him around 11:30 p.m. Saturday and learned that the crew of Toys for Big Boys had filled their spring snow crab quota and were on their way in with their catch and 60 crab pots.

“They were all done fishing, talking and laughing,” she said.

She turned in for the night but was awakened at 2 a.m. by a Canadian Coast Guard official advising her they had lost contact with the signal from the black box on her husband’s boat.

She spent the next half hour trying to contact her husband. Her anxiety heightened at 2:30 a.m. when Coast Guard alerted her of a passenger plane that had picked up a signal from Toys for Big Boys’ EPIRB. The Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon is activated when the device is submersed.

The crew did not have time to radio for help once they realized Toys for Big Boys was sinking.

Three of the four men survived the harrowing ordeal; the fourth man, Danny Ellsworth, has not been found.

Because they were not aware anyone was looking for them, Gavin said he knew family would grow wary if they did not make port by 6 a.m.

But search efforts were initiated.

The Coast Guard had requested aerial surveillance, and fishing boats in the area were being asked to be on the lookout. In the meantime, Gavin’s brother Jamie and his uncle Sidney set out from Tignish to look for Toys for Big Boys.

The Sambrendore from the Magdalene Islands was in the area and stopped fishing to join the search. At 3.57 a.m., more than three hours after Toys for Big Boys sank, the Sambrendore reported seeing flares, and rescued Gavin, Kyle Costain and Brian DesRoches at 4:11 a.m.

The crew provided the men with dry clothes and continued to search for the missing crewmember.

The men were subsequently taken to the Magdalene islands and returned home by car ferry via Souris on Tuesday.

Their return would have been so much more comforting, Mrs. Gavin said, if all four had returned.

“We can’t be too happy,” she said, “because we lost one of our men.”

(Eric McCarthy is a journalist with Transcontinental Media’s Journal Pioneer, which is a contributor to the Sou’Wester.)