Maurice Kearley was 16 when he first went fishing on the Grand Banks in 1944, during an era often referred to as “the days of wooden ships and iron men.”
During the next 36 years — until he retired from the sea to work on land at age 52 — he fished on vessels that evolved from the wooden schooners to steel-side trawlers and then to steel-stern trawlers.
Each mode of fishing was always dangerous, and Kearley, 93, can speak first-hand of narrow escapes, harrowing experiences and the loss of a close family member to the unpredictable North Atlantic.
He was born and spent his early years at Baie de L’Eau, a small community of only eight families at the bottom of Fortune Bay. He started cod fishing with his father at age eight and then lobster fishing with his brother, Art, at age 12, when he earned enough money to buy his first suit of clothes.
Kearley, after going to school for a few years — only as far as Grade 4 — left home at age 13 for his first job, as a “water nipper”: carrying drinking water for the men laying cable across the island.
At 16, he signed on as a doryman, onboard the 12-dory schooner Tweedsmuir, owned by the Warehams of Harbour Buffett, with his father, Thomas, as his dorymate.
He spent nine years as a doryman on schooners going to the offshore banks, including seven years on the J. Petite and Sons vessel Palitana, with captain Victor Fiander of English Harbour West.
The late 1940s and early 1950s saw a major shift in the offshore fishery with the building of fresh-fish filleting plants around the island, ushering in the end of the schooner salt-fishery and the arrival of steel side-trawlers.
Many of the experienced schooner fishermen soon had trawler job offers. Kearley joined the crew of the Bonavista Cold Storage side trawler Blue Wave with captain Freeman Hatch, fishing out of Grand Bank. Although he continued to sail on the Wave for more than three years, it didn’t take him long to feel apprehensive about the dragger.
The introduction of stern trawlers in the mid-1960s was a real game-changer for the men who had previously manned the smaller side trawlers in the 1940s and ’50s. These newer and larger vessels — designed specifically to fish in our challenging North Atlantic waters — provided more comfort and safety for the men aboard.
With the traditional side trawler the net was hauled in over the side of the boat and, no matter how bad the weather, the men on deck had to handle the fish there. Cod would have to be gutted, whereas flatfish would be forked directly down the hold.
The design of the stern trawler changed that; now the netload of fish was winched up the ramp on the stern of the boat by conveyor belts and carried directly below to the factory deck, where it could then be handled in much more comfort, said Kearley: “Out of the wind and cold and working in much warmer conditions.”
Kearley, now a widower — his wife died in 2010 — will be 94 in August. He still drives his car, lives alone in his home and keeps active with his vegetable gardening. He enjoys talking about his days fishing on the offshore banks — but, he said, sometimes when he thinks about his days on the schooners and in the dories he wonders: “How did we ever do it?”
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