New true stories about the lure of the Atlantic Ocean

Fred Dyke’s riveting memoir, Skipper Ches: As Tough as It Gets, lays bare what it was like to grow up in rural Newfoundland and Labrador at the midpoint of the twentieth century.

Skipper Ches chronicles the arc of his family’s life in post-Confederation Newfoundland. While the narrative centres chiefly on Dyke’s father Chesley — a renowned sailor and entrepreneur — the book takes a rich and satisfying deep dive into the social history of the second half of the twentieth century. As we come to know the various members of the Dyke clan, including Fred’s stoic mother Elsie and Fred’s spirited siblings, we trace the province’s history of economic growth, outward migration, cycles of boom and bust — and always, the lure and steadfast rhythm of the sea. Young Fred and his family experience hardships familiar to anyone living in this time and place — no indoor plumbing, a scarcity of fresh food, freak car accidents and the devastating deaths of young children — but it’s the resilience, familial love and the ever-present sense of adventure and curiosity that come through so warmly in the book.

The author says it was important to paint an accurate picture of his family. Remembering these times, he says, “Both my parents did what they had to do and never complained. They endured but they also enjoyed life.”

He started the book just before the beginning of the pandemic, sourcing stories from family members around the time of his parents’ funerals. During the pandemic, Dyke would rise early to write between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m. He estimates he wrote and rewrote fifteen drafts before sending the manuscript to Flanker Press. The memoir grew out of the family’s love of stories.

“We grew up listening to stories and quite often one or more of us witnessed them. When we get together as a family, we often relive them. I had been planning the book for years. I could have included many more stories of the times, but I decided to limit it to the ones involving my parents. The stories also came from the stories exchanged at the funerals of Mom and Dad.”

Donald J. Feltmate’s Building a Better Boat: How the Cape Island Longliner Saved the Nova Scotia Inshore Fishery spotlights another overlooked corner of Atlantic Canadian history. It’s a lucidly written volume that tracks the history of the Cape Island longliner, a type of small boat built for the lucrative shore fishery. Like Dyke’s memoir, Feltmate’s book documents a vital period of social and economic upheaval in Atlantic Canada. The author traces the boat’s creation to the heady years of the Antigonish Movement and the birth of regional fishing co-operatives. A satisfying tangent outlines the vital contributions priests Moses Coady and James Tompkins made to organizing rural fishing communities and advocating for better pay for fishermen.

Feltmate unpacks the birth of the United Maritime Fishermen and charts the changes to fisheries regulations and federal-provincial politics that ushered in the conditions for the birth of the Cape Island longliner, before nimbly charting its impact on the shore fishery and its eventual demise. For Feltmate, the book was a satisfying passion project.

“I grew up during the period when the Cape Island-type longliner was being introduced into the shore fishery and was old enough to see the impact this vessel was having on the economy of a number of fishing communities. I always had a deep personal affection for the longliner. As I grew older, my interest increased and I began to research and to appreciate that the development of such a fishing craft was not just the introduction of a ‘new tool’ and fishing method, but was tied directly to survival of the shore fishery itself.”

Like Dyke’s memoir, Building a Better Boat contributes to a better understanding of our region’s history. For Feltmate, that work is intentional.

“We as Maritimers have this habit of sort of taking our history for granted. The history of a specific industry, such as the shore fishery, is usually confined to those that worked in it and unless those outside the industry follow or connect the elements of the history or someone finally records this history, little attention is paid to it. As a result, the actual grassroots of the struggles, political indifference to how that industry survives, is rarely looked at from a collective perspective and is lost to time. This book is an attempt to bring the elements to the forefront and demonstrate the importance it had to the economics of the province as a whole.”

The meticulous social and technical research in Feltmate’s book will appeal not just to boat lovers, but to those interested in this pivotal period in Atlantic Canadian history. For Feltmate, given the economic and logistical challenges involved in accessing archives and historical records, it’s an important story to tell. “We have to make our history more accessible.”

Finally, Atlantic Salmon Treasury: 75th Anniversary Edition mines historical archives of a different sort to put together a handsome book. Selected and edited by Charles Gaines and Monte Burke, the collection offers readers a selection of the most interesting and insightful articles, essays, poems, pictures and paintings from the Atlantic Salmon Journal between the years 1975–2020. The book covers a period when salmon stocks experienced an alarming and precipitous drop. In their introduction, the editors note the decline of the population of “two-sea-winter” Atlantic salmon of North American origin “from a total of around 800,000 in 1975 to fewer than 100,000 in 1999.” The articles in the current Treasury chart trends such as the advent of catch-and-release practices and the threat posed by the Greenland commercial fishery, making this new volume one that is “more reflective of both the need and means to conserve that resource, and to viewing that conservation not so much as a means as an end.”

Taken together, these three engaging non-fiction titles illustrate the vital contribution our regional presses make to reflecting our rich and storied histories back out into the world. ■

TREVOR CORKUM’s novel The World After Us will debut with Doubleday Canada in early 2024. He lives on the South Shore of Prince Edward Island, where he co-hosts creative residencies and retreats for writers at The Hideout.