'Stop! Stop!' sealer screamed at icebreaker

Wayne Dickson says he screamed helplessly at the captain of an icebreaker as he watched his friends' fishing vessel capsize in the icy waters near Cape Breton over the weekend.

"When she went against the ice cake, I started to call the icebreaker to tell them to stop. I said, 'Hey stop! Stop! … You're gonna upset the boat,'" said Dickson, captain of the Madelinot War Lord.

Dickson's boat was trailing behind the towed L' Acadien II in the Gulf of St. Lawrence when the tragedy happened in the early hours of Saturday. Of the six men aboard the L' Acadien, three sealers died and a fourth is presumed dead.

But when Dickson radioed the icebreaker Sir William Alexander, there was no response, he told CBC News.

He criticized the coast guard, saying two men who had previously been on deck to watch the operation were no longer there when the accident happened.

"The two guys that were there were gone, I don't know where they went," said Dickson, though he admits they could've been out of his sight.

In a separate interview with the Canadian Press, Dickson also questioned how the icebreaker's crew tied two tow lines to the sides of the fishing boat, saying that made the small boat more unstable. 

The captain said even before the accident, the small boat was fishtailing in the icebreaker's wake and had been pulled up onto the ice floes.

At least once before, the 12-metre trawler was pulled up onto an ice cake and pitched to the side before righting itself as the icebreaker continued plowing ahead, says Dickson.

But around 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, the small vessel hit an ice cake the size of a truck and overturned.

'Not very good'

"Oh my God, it wasn't a very good thing to see. Not very good," said Dickson.

He and his six-man crew managed to pluck two survivors from the chilly waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

"If we hadn't been there, the two people that we saved wouldn't be here today," said Paul Dickson, the captain's son, who was aboard his father's ship at the time and helped with the rescue.

The Dicksons are from the same small community of Magdalen Islands, Que., that was home to the three dead sealers.

The mayor of the archipelago, Joel Arseneau, called Dickson's account "pretty troubling."

Call for public inquiry

He and some of the sealers have been calling for a full public inquiry.

"Obviously, the procedures followed by the coast guard are deficient in many ways and that's why we have so many questions to ask and that’s why we're asking for a complete and impartial inquiry," Arseneau told CBC News.

The incident is under investigation by the RCMP, the coast guard and the Transportation Safety Board, which announced it would launch a full probe.

An official from the federal Fisheries department said there is a fleet safety and security manual for coast guard crews conducting tows, but many of the procedures are unwritten conventions left to the discretion of the commanding officer.

The official said it's "general practice" for someone to be monitoring the tow from the stern, contrary to accounts from witnesses and a survivor who said no one appeared to be watching from the icebreaker.

The official also said it's up to the captain of the stricken vessel to decide whether his crew should leave the boat while being towed.

The L' Acadien II reported a steering malfunction while navigating in thick ice late Friday, 70 kilometres north of Cape Breton. The Sir William Alexander was called to tow the boat to Sydney, N.S.