Church honors lost seafarers, dockworkers

PORTLAND – A Portland church with long-standing ties to the waterfront has held its first service in years for lost seafarers.

The Anglican Cathedral of St. Paul held the service Saturday after a spate of deaths of fishermen and workers on the waterfront. The service memorialized the lives of five fishermen, two oil rig workers and a tugboat deckhand who died in the last year.

Many were there to honor Christopher Cordeau, the 29-year-old deckhand from Portland who died last December, when he was crushed by a cable as his tugboat was setting a massive anchor used to secure an oil rig in Portland Harbor. A month after Cordeau was killed, Andrew Caldwell of Nova Scotia died while testing a lifeboat that fell 60 feet from the deck of the oil rig.

Portland Transportation Director Jeff Monroe said marine-related deaths remain a problem in Maine, but the last year was somewhat different.

“We’ve lost a lot of seafarers from Maine who’ve gone to sea, but we’ve had two people die right on the Portland waterfront,” he said.

Others memorialized Saturday were the crew of the Candy B II, which disappeared in the waters off Nantucket last October: Howard “Cappy” Crudell of Warren, Brandon Feyler of Union, Adrian Randall of Rockland and Ralph “Bubba” Boyington of Waldoboro.

Not all deaths were sea-related. James MacKenzie, who worked for Cianbro as a mechanical foreman on an oil derrick, died in July after his car collided with a workhorse.

Scarborough fisherman Janusz Glab was found dead in the water off the state pier in Narragansett, R.I., in January. The circumstances surrounding his death are still not clear.

The Very Rev. Lester York said the last service was held in the 1980s. He asked St. Nicholas, patron saint of seafarers, to continue looking after all men and women who work on the water.