Crew of Fundy Legend saved after fishing vessel sinks off Yarmouth

By Tina Comeau

THE VANGUARD

NovaNewsNow.com

It didn’t take the crew of the fishing vessel Fundy Legend long to realize their best chance for survival was to abandon their sinking ship on Tuesday morning.

Not that the decision was theirs to make.

In the darkness the ocean was swallowing up the 45-foot dragger and threatened to do the same to the three-person crew.

But then given the choice between their life raft and plunging themselves into the cold, sloppy water, they were forced to go with the latter.

“The life raft was going, BANG, right into the boat and getting stuck underneath the a-frame, the wheelhouse…I said I’m getting the hell out of here,” crewmember Colin Nickerson said in recounting the crew’s experience, just minutes after arriving safely at the wharf in Pinkney’s Point aboard the Midnight Mariner – the fishing vessel that came to the aid of the Fundy Legend’s crew.

Nickerson, captain Scott Phillips and crewmate Matthew Goodwin were heading back to Yarmouth on Tuesday, Oct. 7, after a three-day fishing trip. They had a good catch onboard their 45-foot dragger and were coming in to unload their fish and head back out to the fishing grounds. They were about 45 miles south of Yarmouth.

Two out of three things never made it back to the wharf: not the fish, and not the vessel.

Thankfully the crew did.

“I was on watch and I went to wake Colin up. I went to bed and the next thing I knew, he woke me up and said put on the survival suit,” said Goodwin, trembling from the cold wind whipping across the Pinkney’s Point wharf, and still obviously shaken from the experience.

Nickerson said after being woken up by Goodwin, it was obvious something was wrong.

“You could tell from the way the boat was squatting,” Nickerson said. “From the time I woke the boys up and said we’ve got a problem, and we called Coast Guard, to the time the boat sank was probably half an hour.”

What gave away the fact that they were in trouble? There was no water in the engine room Nickerson said, and considering they had a full load, it wasn’t unusual that you would see water on the stern.

But the thing is, he said, the water kept creeping.

So with everyone now awake, there were phone calls to make. They called the Coast Guard.

Joint Task Force Atlantic dispatched a Cormorant helicopter and a Hercules aircraft from 14 Wing Greenwood. The Coast Guard also dispatched the cutter Spray.

Meanwhile other help was close by. Melbourne fisherman Dean Saulnier, captain of the Midnight Mariner, already knew from talking to the Fundy Legend crew that things weren’t good. When he caught up with the boat and saw what was happening, it was evident things were even worse.

“I knew it was just going to be a matter of time,” Saulnier said, about when the boat would sink.

Onboard the Fundy Legend cables were flapping violently on the boat, even slapping Nickerson across the face, and other items were being tossed around. The sinking may have taken its toll on their nerves, but Nickerson said the items flying around on the boat left them battered and bruised.

“It was sloppy and we knew the time was coming. You get to the point where you never want to leave your boat because sometimes that’s your only salvation,” he said. “But when it went down, and then the way it went up, the stern, we said let’s get off.”

With debris floating in the water, and the crew all in their survival suits, they climbed into their life raft. It soon became pretty evident the life raft was not going to be their savior. Nickerson said he wasn’t scared to be in the water. But he was scared to be in the life raft.

“We just couldn’t get away from the boat. We jammed underneath the net drum, jammed underneath the frame,” he said.

Goodwin, the youngest member of the crew, didn’t want to have to go into the water. Nickerson kept trying to calm him down, ironically by yelling at him, telling him they were going to be all right.

After being thrown out of the life raft two or three times, the crew figured enough was enough.

“All three of us bailed out and the boat turned over and sunk,” said Nickerson. “I could not stay in that life raft, it just kept ramming us into the boat.”

So there they were in the water. Nickerson could hear Phillips shouting.

“Where’s Matt, he kept saying.”

Nickerson yelled back that Goodwin was next to him, but with the direction of the wind he wasn’t sure his captain could hear him.

In the darkness and with the wave swells crashing over them, it was difficult for the crew to see each other. And of course in their minds they were thinking: If we can’t see each other, can Saulnier, the captain of the Midnight Mariner, see us at all? Saulnier admits when he arrived on the scene, he could only see two of the fishermen in the water.

Aside from the debris floating in the water, diesel fuel was spilling from the vessel. Phillips got the worst of that. He was covered in diesel fuel, and may have even ingested some when he swallowed sea water.

The crew spent about 15 minutes in the water. Phillips was the last person hauled aboard the Midnight Mariner.

“They picked me up first and then we got Matt, and we saw Scott, he was laying lifeless,” Nickerson said. “I was yelling wake up, wake up. I threw the life ring and it hit him. He got an arm in but he was so covered with diesel fuel, and heavy, we couldn’t get him up.”

But they certainly weren’t going to let him go.

“We got him by the hood, the scruff of the neck. We were choking him but I said, “I don’t care. You’re coming aboard,’” said Nickerson.

Phillips was later hoisted into the Cormorant helicopter and flown to the Yarmouth Regional Hospital.

At the wharf in Pinkney’s Point around 2 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon, a grateful and relieved Denise Phillips threw her arms around her son Matthew, as did Goodwin’s girlfriend. Phillips said her husband Scott will be fine and she provided even more of a glimpse of how dicey things were. She said her husband told her he was caught in rope while in the water.

“He said he could see him (Dean Saulnier) and he didn’t think he would be able to find him,” she said. “He got caught in the net and he went under with the boat and took on water.

“He said he couldn’t find Matt and that was killing him. He said he could hear Colin, but he couldn’t hear Matt hollering.”

A spokesperson for the hospital said shortly after 1 p.m. this afternoon that the fisherman’s condition was rated as good, meaning he was doing well and likely would not have to stay too long before being discharged.

“What a night,” Denise Phillips said at the wharf, before she, her son and his girlfriend Sarah Goodwin together all held hands and walked back to their vehicle.

What a night, indeed.

The two crewmembers who hitched a ride back to shore onboard the Midnight Mariner had no shoes on when they climbed off of the boat and onto the wharf. And while wearing a change of clothes they carried their wet clothes from the sinking in plastic garbage bags. Nickerson called them his lucky clothes.

Whether it was the clothes or something else, there is no doubt luck was on the side of the crew of the Fundy Legend.

Because while they lost their boat, and they lost their catch, they came back with what matters most – their lives.