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;
— The ships pitched a lot, especially on the open ocean, giving rise to the term, 'tin cans.’
You KNEW you were in for a lot of rolling in rough seas when you served on a minesweeper. The only way to get any sleep was after you could find a space to string a hammock!
— Many of these ships were so old that the Captain, helmsman and other personnel would have to stand on an open bridge, in all kinds of weather!
My Dad's duffel coat showed the signs of having been worn in driving rain and snow during these long 4-hour shifts on station.
— There was a constant noise of the engines and the smell of oil throughout the ships.
The sailors would try without much success to improve the quality of their rations by adding large amounts of ketchup, otherwise known as 'red lead.'
After that, my Dad would never eat ketchup or ANY form of tomato, for that reason, except if it were blended into one of his favourite foods: pizza!
-- And, of course, convoy duty between Halifax and Liverpool, England, was especially dangerous because of the constant threat of sudden U-boat attacks in any of the shipping channels.
He survived more than one serious torpedo attack, having to be plucked out of the sea, but he never talked about that very much.
Because he was familiar with the coastlines and tides of the Maritimes, especially the Gulf of St. Lawrence, he was assigned to harbour patrol duty.
He was posted to a number of strategic ports along the major shipping routes between Halifax and Montréal:
— Mulgrave, Nova Scotia, on the Strait of Canso, where local shipping took a shortcut instead of sailing around Cape Breton;
— Louisburg (as it was spelled then) Harbour, at the mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
He married my Mother in September, 1943, while he was stationed there.
— St. John’s, in the British colony of Newfoundland, the easternmost port in North America, until the end of the war.
After he was ‘demobbed’ at the Halifax Armouries, he did some marine-related tasks, such as building boats, ferrying yachts and even spending a year as a lighthouse keeper!
He later worked in highway construction and even later as a postal clerk in St. Peter’s.
He never lost his love for the sea:
-- He was a keen observer of the weather, checked the barometer ('reading the glass') every few hours, and from our house on St. Peter's Bay, he could oberve the water and record these and other events each day in his log book.
At the time, he would also observe the activities of foreign fishing trawlers, sometime not even needing his trusty binoculars, until the uproar forced the Canadian fisheries department to extend the coastal fishing limit.
-- He had kept a number of marine maps and charts of Cape Breton and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, marked in fathoms, which were decades old, but not outdated.
I mention them here because they came in handy one morning in February, 1970, when the oil tanker 'Arrow' ran aground in the Strait of Canso, spilling millions of barrels of 'buncker C' oil.
Consulting those charts, my Dad knew exactly where she was, pointing to a schoal called 'Cerebrus Rock,' sticking up right in the middle of the channel.
It turned out that the ship's Captain admitted that he didn't have any charts for that area!
It was one of the early oil spills of the current era, and Government engineers had to come up with a series of new but untested methods to clean up the hundreds of miles of coastline that had been inundated.
-- From his service at sea on minesweepers, he always maintained that his most comfortable sleeping style required a hammock.
During his final months and days, living in a seniors care residence overlooking a busy Halifax Harbour, he was provided with one to make him comfortable.
He was lying in it when I witnessed his passing.
'H POTTIE' was 87.