Sometimes good luck follows bad

BROOKSVILLE — No matter how hard a fisherman works to keep his boat in good order, bad luck and an unforgiving sea can still conspire to sink it.

But David Cousins is not complaining. If it was bad luck that flipped his boat, Haley’s Comet, it was amazingly good fortune that kept it afloat for 12 hours, and still more amazing that Cousins and his sternman lived to tell about it.

On Feb. 25, 1991, Cousins and Corliss Mitchell drove the 38-foot Haley’s Comet from its home port of Stonington to the waters off Schoodic Point for several days of scallop dragging. The weather was cold, but seas were moderate for February, and Haley’s Comet pulled in a good day’s catch.

Shortly before 6 p.m., as darkness set in, Cousins, 28, and Mitchell, 20, decided make one last drag while they cleaned up the boat for the night. It was a shorter run than usual, over bottom that was not especially rocky, so the 7-foot-wide dragging rig was relatively light when they brought it up from the bottom.

Cousins winched the drag up, Mitchell swung it over the stern and Cousins tried to release the winch to drop the drag in the bottom of the boat. It jammed. A wave rolled the boat to one side, and the drag began to swing out.

Mitchell tried to keep the rig centered over the boat, but it was too heavy to hold by hand. It rolled out a second time, swung back in, and as it started to swing back out a third time, a wave struck the boat broadside. In one quick motion, Haley’s Comet rolled over.

“Once it started going over, we were straight up and down in less than five seconds, I would say,” Cousins recalls, from the warm, dry comfort of his Brooksville home. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”

Mitchell was thrown from the boat. Cousins escaped through the pilothouse door.

By 6:15, Cousins says, he and Mitchell both sat atop the overturned hull, soaking wet and just beginning to feel the cold. Cousins had on long underwear, jeans and a sweatshirt; Mitchell wore oilskins. Both had kicked off their boots. Cousins jumped back in and tried to swim under the boat to retrieve their survival suits from the bow, but cold, darkness and underwater pressure foiled him.

He returned to the hull. The wind had shifted out of the northeast, blowing up to 20 knots. More than two miles from land, the men decided to stay aboard the boat as long as they could, preferring to freeze to death rather than drown.

“There was ice making on our clothes. We kind of had to hang onto each other, especially near the end. We could feel ourselves beginning to slip,” Cousins says. “We hung onto the keel. We even tried to get up and run in place.”

Most fishing boats that capsize sink within minutes, but the four-year-old Haley’s Comet somehow remained afloat. Around 4 a.m., with their feet dangling in the water, Cousins and Mitchell saw running lights, which they recognized as belonging to another Stonington scalloper heading east.

The boat, Prospector, came within several hundred yards and then hove to, its crew waiting for daylight to set a drag and unable to hear Cousins’ and Mitchell’s shouting.

Finally, at daybreak, Bobby Hull came on deck to get Prospector turned around to start dragging. He spotted Cousins and Mitchell waving their arms, and quickly came alongside and picked them up. The Coast Guard arrived just in time to get a line around the sinking Haley’s Comet, and transport the two fishermen to Bar Harbor, where they were treated for mild hypothermia — no frostbite — and released.

Cousins has salvaged his boat, except for the 5-day-old winch motor that had self-destructed and jammed. He fished with gill nets this summer, but chose to work ashore rather than drag for scallops this winter.

“As far as I’m concerned, if you take a lobster boat and haul that much weight over the side with a mast 16 to 18 feet in air, it’s not safe,” Cousins says. “I never cared for scalloping that much anyway.”