The daring dorymen: Land and Sea digs into the rich history of the Grand Banks schooners

When Maurice Kearley looks out his dining room window at his front lawn in Fortune, he's reminded of his youth and happy days out on the ocean.

There, on the grass, sits a big model schooner that he keeps neatly painted. It's complete with all the sails and rigging and small wooden dories stacked on its deck.

Kearley, who went to work on the Grand Banks schooners when he was just 16, remembers his mother trying to steer him away from a life at sea.

"She said, Maurice, only 16 years old, no, you can't go down there on them schooners," he recalled during a recent interview. 

Kearley is part of a new Land and Sea episode about the history of the schooners that, from the late 1800s until the 1940s, travelled to the rich fishing grounds known as the Grand Banks.

Their decks were stacked with smaller wooden boats that were lowered over the side.

Cod was king in this fishery and the men at the very heart of it were the dorymen.

Now, at 96, Kearley, who fished from dories alongside his father and uncle for many years, is among the last living dorymen of the Grand Banks schooner fishery.

"Grand Bank was one of the greatest schooner fisheries and schooner trades in Eastern North American, probably next to Lunenburg and Gloucester," said Robert Parsons of Grand Bank, who has been writing about the fishery in Newfoundland and Labrador for decades. 

"Pretty well everyone had a grandfather or father or uncle who sailed on foreign going ships or they were dory fishermen and the stories were passed down through generations." 

Most of the men who can tell the stories first hand from that period of Newfoundland and Labrador's fishery have passed away.

"It's kind of like part of our history that's quickly disappearing and people like Mr. Kearley are few and far between, men who actually went on a dory and hauled a trawl for codfish," said Parsons.

Kearley's memories of his days in the dory are sharp. There was the time he and his father got lost in the fog and spent a frightening night bobbing around in their little open boat wondering if they'd be found. By the light of morning, they had safely rowed back to the mothership.

And then, there was the time hungry sharks attacked their boat.

"Two sharks come right out of the water and stuck their teeth in the gunwale of the dory and held on," said Kealey, who pounded one shark while his uncle used a paddle to get rid of the other. 

"That was scary. Those sons o' guns could have come right up in the dory, eh?… The mouths on those big sharks."

The men would be gone for more than three weeks at a time when they fished aboard schooners.

The hard labour at sea made the time at home with family even sweeter.

"That was the day, boy, everybody was happy," said Kearley.

See the full episode of Land & Sea by clicking on the video player above. 

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