Large Fierce Mammal

MV Miss Ally (Source: facebook via CBC News) – click the image to enlarge.

The search for the 13.5 meter (44 foot) fishing boat Miss Ally and her crew of five young Nova Scotia fishermen began last Sunday night when the Rescue Coordination Centre began receiving signals from the vessel’s emergency locator beacon (ELB). Designed to activate on immersion in salt water, the ELB signals from Miss Ally showed her to be 120 kilometers southeast of Liverpool, Nova Scotia. Sea state at the time would have subjected the boat and her crew to 10 meter (33 foot) waves driven by hurricane force winds in sub-freezing temperatures. No radio broadcasts were received from the crew before or after the ELB turned itself on.

The crew of Miss Ally (Source: facebook via CBC News).

Elements participating in the search included two Canadian Coast Guard vessels (CCGS Sir William Alexander and CCGS Earl Grey), a CC-130 Hercules, a CP-140 Aurora (Canadian variant of the Lockheed P-3 Orion), and a CH-149 Cormorant helicopter from the Royal Canadian Air Force , an aircraft contracted from Provincial Airlines by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, two United States Coast Guard aircraft, and several merchant vessels. At no small peril to life and limb, the crews of these vessels and aircraft did their duty with diligence right up to the moment when they were ordered to stand down late last night.

I grew up in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. A town that built its fame and fortune on fishing. A town that named its hospital “Fishermen’s Memorial” and that has an imposing monument on its waterfront, crafted of tall black granite monoliths arranged in the shape of a compass rose and inscribed with the names of those of its mariners who have sailed over the horizon never to return. Each name takes up so little space, and yet the size of the monument is striking.

Deep ocean fishing is an unbelievably hazardous endeavour, and I’ve written a bit about that previously in an earlier article. Even in this day of satellite navigation, emergency locator beacons, infrared scanning, radar, fast all weather aircraft, and all the rest of the magic, deep ocean fishing remains among those pursuits from which even the best prepared of practitioners may not come back alive.

Much criticism has been, and continues to be, leveled at the decision to withdraw official participation from the search, and declare it a missing persons case now under the auspices of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Many comments I’ve read echo a common sentiment – How can you cancel the search and abandon these men after only three days? This sentiment is understandable, but it does not reflect the reality of a situation such as this.

We are a week way from the end of February, a time of the year when water temperatures in the north Atlantic are at their coldest. The crew of the Miss Ally would have been equipped with immersion suits – otherwise called “survival suits” – to slow the onset of hypothermia. Slow. Not prevent. Every second in the water lends urgency to the search because we are working on borrowed time. Based on the time a distress signal is received, and a presumption that the crew were wearing survival suits, it’s not hard to calculate how much time we have before a rescue mission turns into a search for remains. We factor in a generous margin for error, hoping against hope, but there comes a time.

This sounds harsh, but the realities we’re dealing with in cases like this are harsh. If you’ve even once been in a situation in which your own survival depends absolutely on you and you alone, you’ll understand the grim reality of this. Continuation of the official search has lost its urgency because time is no longer of the essence,  and under current conditions, would be needlessly risking the lives of the brave men and women we’re going to need whole and healthy the next time somebody actually needs saving.