A Remarkable Sailor - 2

During my Dad's wartime service in the Royal Canadian Navy, he took part in a variety of assignments.
He was now in his early 40s, and because he was always the oldest member of the crew, he was usually known as: ‘Pops.'

He began serving on minesweepers, doing convoy duty from Halifax (known by military men as: ’Slackers,’ where all the desk officers were stationed) to the British Isles.
Minesweepers were the ‘poor’ members of the fleet: the older ones had been conscripted from private sources, and the newer had been 'thrown together’ in a hurry at a number of shipyards, near and far.
As you can imagine, life was especially tough for the crews;

A Remarkable Sailor

We are marking Father's Day this weekend, so I decided to write this tribute to my Dad.
Hyacinth Pottie was born in April, 1900, in Hawker, Cape Breton. (This post office ‘station,’ located on the west side of River Bourgeois, no longer exists.)
As many of the local boys did, he left school at age 14, to go to work. He worked as a sailor for the next 40 years.

It was wartime, during the waning of the age of sail, and he began by working on the 'coal boats,’ mostly schooners, which carried coal from the bustling mines of Cape Breton to ports in the Maritimes, Newfoundland (which was a British colony until 1949), and beyond.
Older boys — and others who lied about their age —