“The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach—waiting for a gift from the sea.”
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Sandy Stoddard is no stranger to danger. In his forty-two-year career as a fisherman, captain of his own vessel for most of that time, the fifty-six-year-old veteran skipper from Woods Harbour, Nova Scotia, has never had a fatality on his boat, but he’s had five crew members go over the rails into the ocean on four separate incidents. One of those men was his brother.
The last of those incidents was on March 5, 2013. Now, more than three years later, some people are still scratching their heads as to what really happened that night. In what could easily have been a tragedy for all five men, two crew members were thrown overboard from the decks when a rogue wave came crashing into the side of the fishing vessel Logan & Morgan about seventy miles off Canso, Nova Scotia. Rogue waves are not uncommon and, sadly, neither are fatalities after those huge mountains of water overwhelm medium-sized fishing vessels, like the fifty-foot (forty-five feet plus a five-foot extension) vessel carrying Greg Nickerson, Gordie Rhyno, Jared Bishop, Daniel Crowell, and Captain Sandy Stoddard.
Most people familiar with the events of Monday night, March 5, 2013, say it is nothing short of miraculous that no one died, especially the two men who were flung overboard when the vessel was thrown up on a huge wall of water and then slammed back down on the other side. Sandy Stoddard smiles when asked why he thinks no one drowned.
“It was the hand of God,” he says quietly but confidently. “I am a Christian man, and there is no doubt in my mind that we were protected by God’s hand—there is no other explanation.”
Sandy on board Logan & Morgan filleting halibut.
Sandy Stoddard became a household name in the Maritime provinces just a couple of weeks before March 5, when he became the voice of both reason and expertise after the loss of the fishing vessel Miss Ally and all five men on board. Sandy was a friend and mentor of the Miss Ally’s young captain, Katlin Nickerson. The Miss Ally also operated out of Woods Harbour, and Sandy was a friend or acquaintance to all the crew members. In fact, Sandy called Billy Jack Hatfield, Joel Hopkins, Steven Cole Nickerson, and Tyson Townsend his “babies.” “I kind of took them under my wing to try and help them out—they were all hard-working young men,” he explains. Billy Jack was Sandy’s second cousin.
Sandy had been in touch with Katlin many times during that trip. Sometimes it was just idle chit-chat between friends, but other times the young twenty-four-year-old captain was eager for advice from the seasoned and respected Captain Stoddard.
Also fishing that week was Sandy’s son Chrisjon Stoddard, who often joined in the conversations with his dad and Katlin, along with others who were fishing in the vicinity.
Sandy called Chrisjon on the morning of Saturday, February 16, to discuss the most recent forecast. It showed two approaching low-pressure weather systems—one was heading their way from the southwest, and another was moving up from the Eastern Seaboard not far to the south of their fleet. The two systems looked like they might converge just about where the Woods Harbour boats were fishing.
With that foreboding forecast in mind, the father-and-son team decided that they would start hauling back their fishing gear on Saturday afternoon and head for port in Arichat, Nova Scotia, on Sunday morning.
After talking to Chrisjon, Sandy called Katlin on board the Miss Ally to let him know what was going on, especially in light of the impending bad weather. Katlin heard the sombre tone in Sandy’s voice and said he would take back their halibut gear in the afternoon.
But things didn’t go according to plan for Katlin. He couldn’t find his fishing gear for some time because of an equipment malfunction, and when he eventually did see his markers, the storm was getting closer.
Sandy was the last fisherman to speak to Katlin Nickerson.
The Miss Ally was proceeding to Sambro, and despite fairly rough weather, things were going along pretty well. However, due to a communication equipment problem on his boat, Katlin asked if Sandy would call the Coast Guard and let them know that he was on the way to Sambro. That was at 10:40 p.m. on Sunday. Twenty-six minutes later, the Miss Ally’s personal locator beacon (PRB) was activated. The Miss Ally was sighted bottom up the next day, but the bodies of Captain Katlin Nickerson and his four crew members were never found.
It’s no wonder Sandy Stoddard considers himself safe in God’s hand. He’s had some extremely close calls himself and has had several crewmen go overboard, most of whom came close to dying, and in the last instance, there is no way to logically explain how his crew member Greg Nickerson survived. Even after several months of talking among themselves and going through detail after detail, it still defies logic, and what happened to Gordie Rhyno, another crewman on board the Logan & Morgan, on March 5, 2013, is perhaps the biggest mystery of all.
Sandy tells of an incident when he lost his first man overboard. It was in April, either 1982 or 1983—he’s not certain of the year. It was a touch-and-go situation for the man who fell from the deck of Sandy’s boat into zero-degree water, but they managed to retrieve him, and although he was pretty far gone, the crewman responded well and continued fishing after several hours. Coincidentally, exactly one year later to the day, Sandy’s brother Randy was swept overboard from Sandy’s vessel in exactly the same spot and under precisely the same circumstances. Randy also survived, but Sandy says both men in separate incidents were in hard shape when they got them back on board. On another occasion while fishing on Georges Bank, one of his crew fell overboard when the boat rolled, and Sandy hardly pauses to give details on that one. “It was summertime, the water was warm, so we got him back and he was okay,” he explains nonchalantly.
Sandy recalls times when he thought he and his crew were going to die when large waves nearly capsized the vessel.
“I remember a couple of times the boat rolled over so far that I was standing on the broadside wall of the wheelhouse,” Sandy says, adding that the boat’s keel must have been nearly parallel to the ocean surface.
“Back in the early days, we were given up for lost on a couple of occasions when we got caught out in storms and had no way of communicating to let them know back home that we were okay,” he says, adding that sometimes they’d be gone a couple of weeks before getting back. On one trip, one of his crewmen suffered a heart attack.
“He didn’t die on board the boat, but he did pass away later,” Sandy says.
When Sandy was sixteen and just starting out in the fishing business, he secured a trip on board the Coville Bay out of his hometown of Woods Harbour. For some unknown reason, Sandy’s father didn’t feel comfortable about his son taking that trip; although the elder Stoddard usually didn’t mind Sandy going fishing, he earnestly implored his son not to go on that particular trip. Sandy reluctantly decided to honour his dad’s wishes and stayed home. A few days later, on April 3, 1974, the Coville Bay sank on German Bank, about thirty miles from Yarmouth. Captain Victor Brannen and all six crew members died.
When Captain Sandy Stoddard and his crew of Greg Nickerson, Gordie Rhyno, Jared Bishop, and Daniel Crowell went halibut fishing two weeks after the fishing vessel Miss Ally went down on February 17, 2013, with all hands, the five men on board the Logan & Morgan were painfully aware of what could happen at sea. Just days before leaving port, Sandy and his crew attended a memorial service for their five friends and colleagues from their home port of Woods Harbour. This would be their first trip out after the tragedy that stunned the whole southwestern Nova Scotia region with grief.
Sandy had been close to the young men of the Miss Ally and was one of the last people to speak to the young captain of the ill-fated fishing vessel on February 17.
Logan & Morgan
But life goes on, and by late February, most of the boats in the Woods Harbour fleet had untied and gone back to work.
Things were going well for Sandy and the crew on their first fishing trip after the accident. The weather was typical for late winter, and fishing was good. By Tuesday, March 5, they were nearing the end of a successful halibut fishing trip following five or six days at sea.
Sandy and the four crew members were taking back their fishing gear on Tuesday, and by suppertime they had just two more strings of nets to haul. The weather was not ideal, but despite the forty-knot winds and moderate seas, the men were working in relative comfort about seventy-five miles off Canso.
The Logan & Morgan is a heavy, well-built boat and had worked in those conditions hundreds of times before, and even the two new deckhands, Gordie and Jared, were relaxed as they talked and joked while working along with the regular shipmates on the well-lit deck of the boat. Sandy was in the wheelhouse keeping the wind and seas on the port side of his vessel, jogging into it with appropriate power to allow for the maximum comfort of his crew.
It was all fairly routine stuff, but suddenly everything changed.
“The first thing I noticed was I felt the boat move kind of funny, and then I saw—I had the big lights on because it was real dark, and I saw this big mountain of water coming at us. I didn’t have time to do anything. In my forty-two years fishing I’d never seen anything like it. My boat is a big heavy boat, built heavy, big power, two thousand gallons of fuel, a lot of water in the tank . . . but this wave picked that boat up and she rode it up to the top, but what I think happened, she couldn’t bend over the top, and instead she fell from the crest of the wave down into the trough on her broad side. There was a moment there that it’s even possible that nothing, not even the keel, was touching water—I’ve never seen anything like it—and when she landed, she landed right on her broad side, and I thought that she was gone over to stay. And what kept her from going over all the way, only God knows, because I don’t,” Sandy muses, still in disbelief of the events of that memorable night.
As the Logan & Morgan eventually uprighted, there was no time for analysis on why she did not capsize, because it soon became obvious that there was trouble on deck—big trouble.
“All the men went flying when the boat went over the top of the wave and fell into the trough. Danny hit the rail, and his arm came up like he was in a position to arm-wrestle, and he hung on, and so did Jared, but Gordie went overboard. The strange thing was when the boat uprighted, Gordie came flying back on board—I can’t explain it. I can’t describe it, either. All I can say is he looked like he was a dolphin jumping out of the water on board the boat. And it looked like he wasn’t even wet. But besides all that, the next thing I remember, I heard Gordie shouting, ‘He’s gone, he’s gone!’ I said, ‘Who’s gone?’ He said, ‘Gregory’s gone,’ and I said, ‘Gone where?’ ‘He’s overboard,’ Gordie said as he ran right back toward the stern, shouting, ‘He’s down there, I know it,’ pointing to the area underneath the overhang. How he knew that’s where Greg was I don’t understand, but he had to climb over all kinds of stuff to get back there, because all the gear and everything that was on the deck was thrown everywhere, most of it upside down and everything after we were struck. But Gordie was certain he knew where Greg had disappeared to, somehow, yet he couldn’t see him.
“Another phenomenal thing that happened then was the young Bishop boy, Jared. He is just a young man, and he yelled, ‘Get the life ring!’ I never even thought of it. I’ve been at this business forty-two years and I never thought of the life ring, but this young fellow did.”
The “unexplained” events that happened in the chaos that followed the rogue wave didn’t stop, when the Logan & Morgan uprighted in what Sandy remembers as a “strangely calm ocean” considering the violent seas just a couple of minutes prior.
Leaning over the rails at the stern of the boat, Gordie was calling out to Greg, and sure enough, Greg eventually responded. It was only once, but it was long enough to confirm Gordie’s belief that Greg was indeed underneath the overhang, just as he had eerily predicted.
Greg was alive but in bad shape. He had ingested a lot of water and was already becoming delirious in the two-degree ocean, when he thought about his friends, especially Joel Hopkins, his close friend who died in almost identical circumstances on the Miss Ally. When he was thrown overboard, Greg got sucked under the vessel and eventually surfaced on the other side, and then another strange thing happened.
“Suddenly I found myself under the overhang, and it was almost like something or someone pushed or guided me there. It had to be Joel and the boys,” he says now.
Whatever “force” brought Greg to the stern of the boat did a good thing, because he stayed conscious enough to reach up and grab one of the braces supporting the overhang, and although weakening rapidly, he still had enough strength to hold on.
Gordie threw the life ring over the aft rail and tried to drop it to where he believed his friend was clinging to a bracket supporting the overhang. He tried three times and, not surprisingly, was not successful in reaching Greg in the water. After all, Gordie couldn’t see beneath the overhang, and because Greg was exhausted, he wasn’t able to call out to let Gordie know where to direct the life ring. In fact, Greg was probably incapable of grabbing the ring even if it did come close.
But then, according to Sandy, another mysterious thing happened.
“On his fourth try, I heard Gordie sing out, ‘I got him, I got him.’”
“What do you mean you got him?’” Sandy called back.
“I got him in the life ring!” Gordie shouted.
How anyone could get a life ring around Greg and down over his shoulders under those circumstances is bewildering. Sandy says it would have been impossible to get the ring over Greg’s chest and underneath his arms if they were standing on dry land, let alone in those circumstances. You would have to get in feet first and then pull it up around your body. How the ring got around Greg is just one more mystery—but the list of unexplained incidents that night doesn’t end there.
“Picture this,” Sandy continues.
“There are two rails on the back of the boat. Gordie is standing on top of the first rail and leaning out over the top one, so he would have been about seven feet above where Gregory was. He’s leaning out over and hauling on the rope to the life ring with one hand and holding on to the rail with the other. But somehow he managed to get that man, who I figure must have weighed about three hundred pounds with his clothes filled with water and everything, and he got him up close enough that I saw the top of his head over the rail, and I ran and grabbed him by the hair of the head. Then Gordie managed to get his hand inside the life ring itself, and I heard him give a mighty groan, and the next thing I knew, Gregory was coming over the rail, life ring and all, onto the deck.”
What had just occurred was a feat of superhuman strength and endurance, but there was no time to reflect on mysteries. Although Greg was safely on board, he was in very serious condition and required immediate attention to keep him from dying.
“He was gone—he was literally gone,” Sandy says. “Water was spewing out of him and he wasn’t moving a limb, so we hauled him across the deck and into the wheelhouse and got the clothes off him right away and then dragged him down forward, where it was warmer. We saw a bit of movement from him after a while, but water was still coming out of his mouth and everything. We wrapped him in a blanket and started heating up towels and whatever we could get and placing them under his arms and around his chest cavity, between his legs and so on, and about an hour later, Greg was finally coming back to life—but it took a long time,” Sandy explains.
As sometimes happens when people pull through a near-death incident, there is an occasional lighter-side moment along the way. This was no exception. Even before Greg’s survival was apparent, Sandy was asking him questions to see if his crewman would respond, and even if he could speak. Sandy needed to know how lucid the young man was, so he kept asking questions, waiting and hoping for a response that would indicate that Greg hadn’t suffered brain damage.
At this point Sandy pauses to explain that Greg didn’t have an appropriate pair of rubber boots when Sandy asked him to join him as a temporary crewman for this trip. Rubber boots are necessary when fishing halibut, so Sandy decided to buy Greg a new pair, and the deal was settled.
“So, back to that night—just as he seemed to be responding and aware of his surroundings and everything, I said, ‘Greg, can you hear me okay?’
“‘I lost my boots,’ Greg said. “It was funny—the first thing he said to me was, ‘I lost my boots,’” Sandy laughs.
But returning to the broader and more sombre picture of the most unforgettable night of his fifty-two-year career, Sandy gets back to the seriousness of it all and talks more about his conversation with Greg, and also about the mystery surrounding Gordie’s survival, and then his superhuman role in rescuing Greg.
“Gordie went overboard. He was in the water, there’s no mistake about that,” Sandy emphasizes, to avoid any suggestion that Gordie had merely flipped over the top of the rail and managed to get back on deck without going in the water.
“But here’s the strange part. He came flying back on board and, to me anyway, he didn’t look like he was even wet. I talked to Gordie later and asked what happened, and he said he didn’t know, but he said it felt like he stood on something, and whatever it was, it seemed to throw him from the ocean and back on board the boat. And then how he knew exactly where Gregory was is another mystery, but he did know, somehow,” Sandy explains excitedly.
Finally, Sandy talks about how Gordie managed to lift Greg from the ocean to the deck of the Logan & Morgan—another feat that also defies logic.
“I don’t care who you get, and put him in those circumstances—bring me the biggest bodybuilder in the world, and I’ll bet you anything there is no way he could stand on the rail of a boat rollin’ in seas, hanging on to the rail with one hand and hauling about three hundred pounds dead weight with a quarter-inch rope in the other hand and get that man up and in over the rail. Besides lifting all that weight, the hand wouldn’t be able to stand the rope, but that’s what Gordie did,” Sandy explains, not wanting to detract from Gordie’s heroism in any way. “Gordie did all the work—not me or anyone else,” he says, explaining that he was behind Gordie but just taking the slack rope and hitching it on to something in case Gordie lost his grip.
There are often unexplained events when people die tragically, but there also as many mysteries surrounding rescues at sea when no one dies. But the number of “miracles” that happened on board the Logan & Morgan on the night of March 5, 2013, is exceptional and would challenge the most scientific brains in the country to offer possible explanations. To Sandy Stoddard, though, it’s not complicated at all.
“Like I said to you before, it was simply the hand of God—it wasn’t Gordie’s time, and it wasn’t Gregory’s time to go,” he says.