Hedley Pardy
In Little Harbour, Twillingate, Hedley Pardy grew up surrounded by boats. “Everybody built boats out of necessity… You were fishing, you couldn’t afford to buy a boat, you had to build it.” Coming from a long line of reputable boat builders, Hedley learned how to build boats from his father, Harold. “Seemed like it came natural I don’t know… He wasn’t there all the time with me, but I guess from watching him build boats over the years.”
Using moulds passed down from their father, Hedley built mostly speed boats and one twenty-six foot trap skiff with his late brother, Hebert. “You use a mould to cut your three bend: forehook, midhsip bend, and afterhook we call them. And your counter of course. And the stem, well, it could be all different shapes depending on the piece of wood you’ve got, you know? But we try to get it half decent looking: not too upright.”
Hedley always used to cut his own timber frames, harvested from the roots of trees. “I can remember going with my dad over in the woods. Go down around Cobb’s Arm or over on some of the islands around Port Albert… Get some timbers for a boat for next year and get your firewood. You’d be gone a couple of nights probably.”
Hedley spent twenty-five years working in the fishery, harvesting cod, lobster, capelin, herring, mackerel and crab with his brother Hebert. “We had cod traps out. So we used a skiff for that… Just two of us, even with the cod trap, just the two of us... We managed, but it was a lot of hard work… You needed four guys really, but we managed anyways. The fishery was just about over when we started then, and it seemed like it was going down all the time… ‘99 we stopped. Moratorium was...‘92 I think it started, but we kept on at the crab for a few years.”