"Either I jump ship, or I go down with the ship. As for the first possibility, I thought about it for a while until I realized that they'd hammered all the hatches down. I thought, 'God, I'll never get off this friggin' boat, it will be my tomb.' So I figured I'd do whatever I had to do at the time, and there was no point in really thinking about it because it was just too frightening. I was just gripped by this feeling that I was going to have to do something very unpleasant. You know, like drowning is not going to be pleasant. And it wasn't until the moment we lost steerage that I actually thought we were going to die. I mean, I knew there was a real possibility, and I was going to have to face that."
Soon after losing steerage, a communications officer in New York asks Reeves how it's going. Not too well, she says. Is your survival suit out? Yeah, it's here, she says. Well, how many Japanese can you fit into it? Reeves laughs; even that slight joke is enough to ease the desperateness of the situation. A couple of hours later the satellite phone rings. Improbably, it's a Canadian radio reporter who wants to interview her. His name is Rick Howe.
Miss Reeves, is it rough out there? Howe asks, over the static and wind-shriek.
It's pretty rough.
What about the trawler, what's the problem?
It's not a trawler, it's a longliner. The problem is we took three windows out of the bridge earlier this morning and lost all our instrumentation.
Are you in any danger or are you confident everything's going to work out all right?
Well, we're in danger, definitely we're in danger. We're drifting in twelve meter swells and between fifty and sixty knot winds. If we get any more water coming through the bridge that's gonna wipe out any communication that we have left. So we're definitely in danger right now.
Do you know how dose the nearest ship to you is?
We're looking at about a hundred miles. If we have to abandon ship there are helicopters that can be here in three-and-a-half hours. Unfortunately they won't be able to come in the dark, so if anything happens in the dark, we're goners.
You mentioned that you expect the weather to clear up later in the day. What more can you tell us about that?
The swell size is supposed to go down to five to eight meters and the winds come around to the east, twenty-five to thirty-five knots. So that will take a lot of the edge off the fear I have right now, which is of sustaining a direct hit. If we take a direct hit, and the boat goes over, and we take another hit, the boat goes down. And we're all shored up here, everything is battened down, hatched and practically nailed shut. If she goes over there's no way anybody's gonna get out, over.
Now is there a point where you may have to abandon ship, and is the crew and yourself prepared for that eventuality?
Well, to tell you the absolute truth I don't think the crew is very prepared for an emergency. They have no emergency beacon and don't seem very up on their emergency procedure, which is a little frightening. I'm the only one who has a survival suit. But, in a swell like we have today, it wouldn't do me much good.
Yeah, right. Well, listen, I thank you for talking to us, and the whole of the province is praying for your safe return.
Thank you.
With that, Reeves turns back to the business at hand.
AFTER talking to Tommy Barrie, Billy is probably able to steam northwest another two or three hours before the seas get too rough to take on his stern. That would place him just north of data buoy #44139 and on the edge of Banquereau, one of the old fishing grounds off Nova Scotia. The 200-fathom line turns a corner at Banquereau, running north up the St. Lawrence Channel and south-southwest to Sable Island. About sixty miles due east is an underwater canyon called "The Gully," and then the Sable Island shallows start.