Greg Blackler said the chances of finding a 42-foot lobster boat floating free, in 30-foot seas, 135 miles off shore, were hard to estimate.
Blacker, of Waldoboro, works in the offshore lobster fishery for Newington, N.H.-based Shaftmaster Corp. In the spring he catches glass eels, also known as elvers. He was working aboard Shaftmaster’s 86-foot steel offshore lobster boat Amy Philbrook last week when he and a fellow crew member saw the lobster boat XTreme Measures, adrift in the choppy sea.
On Feb. 10 Jason Hooper reported XTreme Measures missing from its mooring in Spruce Head, during a storm in which wind gusts were reported at 60 mph and higher.
XTreme Measures was found at “northern edge of Georges Bank, right around the Acadian Line,” Blacker said Feb. 21. “In another four, five miles southwest, it would have been in Canadian waters.”
Blacker said his usual trip for Shaftmaster lasts 10-12 days.
“This trip was to be quite a bit longer, because of the weather,” he said. “It was pretty gnarly out there for a couple of days.”
He said Amy Philbrook was eight or nine days out of its homeport of Portsmouth, on Georges Bank, when they spotted XTreme Measures.
“We had no idea that the boat was out there,” he said. “Myself and my friend, Gravy, he’s called, my friend Dave. We were both staring at the horizon. We’d just finished hauling our trawl and were turning to set it back out and we saw it, maybe a quarter-mile away. It didn’t even show up on the radar.”
“We let the captain know,” Blackler said. “He made a quick u-turn to see what was going on.”
Blackler said he could see, once they got close enough, that the boat had snapped its mooring lines.
“There were mooring lines hanging off the bow,” he said, adding there were no lights nor any other sign of life, and no water in the boat, but conditions were too rough for anyone to board and make a more detailed inspection at that time.
“We had to make a decision then and there whether to complete our trip and try to keep an eye on it, or get it now and go, because the weather was going to get worse,” he said.
The Amy Philbrook took XTreme Measures in tow and, after about 35 hours of traveling at 4 knots, “We finally go to the mouth of the river in Portsmouth where it was calm enough to get a look at the boat.”
“We pulled it alongside on the starboard side and tied it nice and tight, put a bunch of poly balls on it so it wouldn’t bang and went up the river that way, side by side,” Blackler said.
He said the boat was locked up and the only thing that appeared to be missing was the life raft, which Blackler said probably launched itself using a hydrostatic release.
“They’re made to do that,” he said. “It’s good to see that it worked.”
Blacker said the Amy Philbrook carries a captain and three crew members and that all were in agreement about ending their trip early and bringing XTreme Measures back to Portsmouth.
“It was definitely the right thing to do,” he said. “It’s a beautiful boat. There wasn’t anything wrong with it. You’d like to think that, if it was your boat, someone would do that for you.”
“The fact that boat made it through those 10 or so days … I’m pretty amazed,” he said. “I’m certainly impressed about how seaworthy that boat was. I know. I was out there… I’d feel safe anywhere in the world in that boat.”
He said they also found a floating buoy belonging to Donald Simmons, of Friendship, whom Blackler had worked for in the past.
Blackler said it was interesting that someone from the Midcoast was aboard the boat that found XTreme Measures. Blackler started out as a sternman in Friendship while in college and graduate school, where he studied economics.
After school, he began working offshore.
“I made more money,” he said. “You can’t spend any money when you’re offshore. It has been a really good job… In this job, there’s something different every day.”
