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Calamities at sea

The sinkings of the charter fishing boat Comet and the commercial fishing vessel Lobsta I are now part of South County lore, but the decade also saw an equally wrenching event linked to the sea -- the departure of the Navy from North Kingstown and Charlestown.

By GERRY GOLDSTEIN
Journal Staff Writer

Just after 6 p.m. on a late-September Friday in 1978, a lobster boat murmured at dockside in Galilee, its big diesel engine warming for an extended trip to deep-water fishing grounds.

The 27-year-old ship's cook, Nigel Allan, lugged six bags of groceries aboard. Then he drove the mile to his home and picked up his wife, Chris, 24, and their son, Simon, almost 2.

By 6:30, the 75-foot boat, steel-hulled and loaded with the latest in safety and communications gear, was ready to cast off.

But Allan and his wife, who was pregnant with their second son, didn't go directly to the pier. Holding to a family tradition, they drove past the boat at Handrigan Seafood, which owned it, and stole a few moments for a quiet good-bye at the Galilee breachway.

Then they headed for the pier. As the tall, lanky Allan walked away from his young family, he called out to his little boy: ``Take care of your mom.''

By the time he stepped aboard -- 21 years ago last Wednesday -- darkness had cloaked the port; a passerby from any distance could not have read the name on the bow: LOBSTA I.

The lettering would be seen only twice more -- once in a Coast Guard photo taken the next day of the vessel lurching upside down in the Atlantic, and weeks later, on a haunting videotape taken by a Navy drone camera on the ocean floor, 234 feet down.

Whatever sank the Lobsta I seemed cataclysmic; the crew of five went down without even sending a distress message.

Despite an eight-month investigation by the Coast Guard, the cause remains a mystery. Considered the worst accident ever to befall the commercial fishing fleet at Galilee, the unexplained destiny of the Lobsta I is still a grim memory for many long-time residents.

Even though its impact was particularly severe here because all the victims were local, the sinking of the Lobsta I was not the worst marine disaster that South County witnessed in the '70s.

That macabre distinction belongs to the sinking of the Comet, a leaky, Wickford-based charter fishing boat.

Booked by 27 convivial men from the Blackstone Valley -- many of them drinking and poker buddies -- the Comet left Galilee on May 19, 1973. Seven miles at sea, it broke up, plunging everyone aboard into deadly, 48-degree water.

Sixteen in the group perished. Two years before, an inquiry revealed, the Comet had failed a Coast Guard inspection for seaworthiness; its wood hull was so decayed that a screwdriver could easily be pushed through it.

While there was little mystery about the sinking, sorrow ran deep.

Among the most stunning tales was one told to former Journal reporter Dave Crombie by 16-year-old Bill Gercey, of Lincoln, who was on the sinking Comet with his older brother, Steve.

Crombie recounted how the younger Gercey had perched for hours atop a small rubber life raft -- clutching his older brother, who was in the frigid water.

Bill's arms were weary, and Steve, realizing that both might go under, locked his eyes on his kid brother's and said, ``Let me go, Bill. It's okay. Save yourself. It's okay.''

According to Crombie's story, Steve pulled away, ``and as he went under he said to his brother, `I love you, Bill. I love you.' Bill shouted back at his brother, `I love you, too, Steve.' And it was all over.''

Of course, there was much more to the '70s than two disasters at sea; it was, for instance, the decade that saw the Navy pull its considerable presence out of North Kingstown and close its auxiliary base in Charlestown, where so many World War II pilots -- including former President George Bush -- were trained in night flying.

And the '70s also saw the ``urban''-renewal project that forever changed the face of Narragansett Pier, as it had been known to generations of Rhode Islanders and tourists.

The two sinkings are still compelling after so many years -- likely because South County is and forever will be closely linked to the sea. Tragedy on the water cuts to the essence of life along our shores.

T. Brian Handrigan, who now operates Champlin's Seafood at Galilee, in addition to being president of the Narragansett Town Council, was running Handrigan's when the Lobsta I went down.

Today, Champlin's owns and operates two lobster boats of its own, the 90-foot Courtney Elizabeth and the 60-foot Monitor. The manager of both boats, who still goes to sea with them, is Brian Handrigan's 37-year-old son, Tim, himself the father of four.

The elder Handrigan says that in view of the rugged and inherently dangerous nature of the work, it's impossible to forget the truth brought home when the Lobsta I went under.

Whenever a boat casts off, he says, the risks of going down to the sea in ships ``is always in the back of your head.''

So it is everywhere. Fishermen in Scotland, for instance, who value herring so greatly that they affectionately call them ``silver darlings,'' inspired a song that's as valid for Galilee as it is for Aberdeen:

With ice in the rigging

And death down below,

With the wind howlin' wild

And the glass readin' low,

The wives and the sweethearts

Are women who know

The true cost of the silver darlings.