Jack Lane was born in Englee, on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula, in 1934. As a boy, he remembered spending time with Gideon Lane as he built boats next door to their family home. “Most everybody in Englee built their own boats. If they wanted a boat they built it.” In his youth, Jack lived in Exploits, Twillingate, and St. John’s before eventually returning to Twillingate to settle in 1965.
Sherwin Saunders was born in Main Brook, on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula, in 1950. Around the age of nine, he moved to St. Lunaire with his parents, Fred and Olive. “Dad used to fish summertime and he used to work in the woods wintertime with Bowater. I would have been nine or ten years old when we moved here [St. Lunaire] permanently,” said Sherwin.
Each spring, Jack Casey of Conche would set out in his rodney and row twelve to fourteen miles to the Grey Islands in search of seals. “It was a long row,” he remembered. “The worst part was when you wanted to come home,” he laughs, “if you could find seals to chase it’d be alright, but sometimes we wouldn’t see a seal for miles and miles.”
When building boats, Jack Casey uses a set of moulds that once belonged to his grandfather, Michael Casey. When Michael Casey arrived in Conche in 1850, he made a set of moulds which he used to build his fishing boats. Passed down to his son Michael Patrick, and from there to Jack, these moulds were used to build rodneys and punts for 160 years.
As is common practice in Newfoundland and Labrador, Jack Casey of Conche cut all his timber in the fall of the year.
“We had a camp in there, about 8 miles,” he told WBMNL researchers, “we’d walk in there and cut our timber and pile it up on stumps. And in the spring of the year, when the snow was hard in March month, that’s when we would go in and take it, haul it out then.”
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Jack Casey built his last boat, a sixteen foot row punt, in 2009 at eighty-eight years old. Used by Wally Skinner of Pasadena, she is twenty-seven inches deep and sixty inches wide at midships.
John (Jack) Thomas Casey was born on July 2, 1922 in Conche, a small fishing community on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula. One of eight children born to Michael and Nora Casey, Jack started working in the lumber woods at only seven years old and was fishing with his father by the age of thirteen.
The Casey family, including Jack’s grandfather Michael Casey, moved up the coast from St. John’s to Conche in 1850 to be closer to the Labrador fishing grounds. Jack spent all his life in Conche, earning his living as a fisherman in the summer and working in the woods in the winter.
Max Pollard was born in 1930 in Harbour Deep, a fishing and logging community on Newfoundland’s northern peninsula. One of eight children, Max began fishing with his father when he was 10 years old.
“My father had a motor boat that we’d use for fishing, about 23′ long,” says Max. “We were using hand and line then – baited hooks,” he adds. Max left school at the age of 12 to work with his father, fishing in the summer and logging in the winter. “It was year-round,” he says, “I didn’t stop.”
Boats were built in the spring of the year in Harbour Deep, “every fisherman would build their own” – sometimes with a helping hand – “because no one could afford to buy one anyway.”