Owner of sunken lobster vessel says he'll be back on the water soon with replacement boat

None of the four crewmembers were injured during the incident.

In an interview on Wednesday the boat’s owner, Kevin Amirault of East Pubnico, Yarmouth County, said he hoped to be back out on the water sometime this week with a replacement vessel.

“We wanted to get the holidays over first and then get back on track,� he said.

For reasons still unknown to Amirault, his vessel started taking on water while its crew was fishing for lobster on Dec. 23, just two days before Christmas. Amirault noticed the engine room was filling up with water. He says another vessel put out a mayday call for them.

According to the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre, that mayday call went out at about 1:10 p.m. The troubled vessel was about 85 kilometres south southeast of Yarmouth.

Fortunately for its crew, there were four other lobster boats in the vicinity – the Persistence, the Gladiator, the Jasmine and the Spoiled Brat – that were able to come to the crew’s aid. The first boats were on the scene not long after the mayday call went out.

The rescue coordination centre had also tasked a Hercules aircraft and a Cormorant helicopter from 14 Wing Greenwood in case they were needed.

Onboard the Monster Inc., during what had started out as just a normal day on the water, Amirault says there was little they could do to stop the onslaught of water.

“The water got so bad we just couldn’t keep up with it,� he says. “We got off at the last minute. She went down about 10 minutes after we got off.�

The crew was brought back to shore onboard another fishing vessel.

Lieutenant Commander Ken MacKillop of the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre says the crew was fortunate to have escape unharmed.

“They were all in survival suits and they also had the life raft ready to go just in case, so they were well prepared, which is fortunate,� said MacKillop. “And as well, having the fishing vessels within the nearby vicinity certainly helped out in this case.�

Amirault had had the vessel – named by his kids – for four years. It had been in the news last summer, albeit for a happier reason. The vessel had the high boat total – 2,940 pounds – during the annual Shark Scramble in Yarmouth.

“Yes, we had won that and we had been to Martha’s Vineyard with the boat, we had been to Nantucket Island last summer shark fishing, we’ve been all over the place, she was well known,� said Amirault, who was pretty accepting of the hand that had been dealt to him and his crew just barely a month into the commercial lobster fishery off of southwestern Nova Scotia.

‘That’s our living, that’s what we do,� he said Wednesday. “There’s not much we can do about that.�