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Monday, August 14, 2006
Whirling waters
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EASTPORT — The captain of the Sylvina W. Beal yanked on the wheel of his 84-foot schooner with both hands as he competed with swirling currents between Eastport and Deer Island, New Brunswick. A few hundred yards from its home berth at the Eastport breakwater, the two-masted sailboat was in the midst of the Old Sow Whirlpool, a 250-foot-wide clash of currents, countercurrents and tide rips rotating around a point near the international boundary. "Oh boy, she's spinning us hard now," said the captain, James "J.P." Pearson, wrestling the wheel. Next to the boat, funnels the size of 5-gallon buckets, or "piglets," swirled down the side of the hull. Relying on the boat's engine, Pearson began picking his way through the whirlpool, choosing the right flows to slingshot the boat into calmer water. "You hop from eddy back to eddy. It's like playing leapfrog," he said. Almost too quickly, the Sylvina W. Beal emerged from the whirlpool and the captain was steering with one hand through a glassy, jade-colored sea. Many people - including those who have just passed through it - might be surprised to learn that the largest whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere is found in Passamaquoddy Bay. Even those who come to the very eastern tip of the nation to see world's second-biggest whirlpool, second only to the Maelstrom on the west coast of Norway, say it isn't what they envisioned. "People think of this horrible hole in the water, this hideous maw," said Robert Godfrey, an Eastport resident who has made a pastime of studying the local phenomenon. "There's no drain there." Those who know it say the Old Sow isn't entirely benign, either. The whirlpool, which extends across both sides of the international boundary but is usually centered on the Canadian side, varies in intensity according to the cycle of the tides. It is at its most powerful on a large incoming tide, which runs more than 20 feet in this region, a few hours before the water crests. It is then that the maximum volume of water pours through a 400-foot-deep trench alongside Deer Island and collides with an undersea mountain just north of Eastport and a countercurrent sweeping south along the island's western shore. The upwelling creates a turbulent flow of water marked by troughs, boiling hummocks, and sometimes a funnel of up to 12 feet in diameter. Currents of up to 6 knots have the potential to flip boats and send unwary mariners spinning in circles, or worse. Godfrey has collected numerous accounts of vessels and lives being lost in the Old Sow over the last 200 years. In recent times, the most severe mishaps have involved loss of property and near misses rather than loss of life. In 1995, a 55-foot Deer Island fishing boat, the Fundy Star II, rolled over in the whirlpool when it became caught in a cross current. A nearby boat rescued the three crew members. A few years later, another rescue was launched for a kayaker who had been drawn into the Old Sow. Pearson, who ventures into the whirlpool daily as part of a whale-watching cruise he captains, also knows something about its pull. Once he watched the rubber dinghy that he tows disappear under water, sucked down by the currents. Other times he has run the schooner's four-cylinder diesel engine for nearly an hour without making headway against the powerful currents. But like the porpoises that surface in the midst of the churning whirlpool and the seabirds that sit on its surface and spin, most Eastport boat owners seem to have reached a comfortable accommodation with the tidal phenomenon. When the currents are at their worst, many say they simply stay away. Other times, locals say the swirling mass of water is not too treacherous as long as one remains alert and patient. Some have no choice but to pass through the Old Sow. Until 1990, the Quoddy Tides, a weekly newspaper in Eastport covering the communities of Passamaquoddy Bay, was typeset in a small print shop on Deer Island. Before modems, faxes or e-mail, getting the paper out involved sending typewritten copy by boat through the whirlpool every week, on deadline, and bringing paste-up pages back through the Old Sow. "We didn't lose an issue," Quoddy Tides writer Susan Esposito said. In the summer, the paper could rely on the public ferry. In the off-season, the late Quoddy Tides photographer, writer and printer Stirling Lambert of Deer Island made arrangements with other captains or carried the paper himself in a small outboard skiff. "Perhaps the greatest difficulty over the years has been in getting news copy from Eastport to Deer Island and the finished product back to Eastport," Lambert wrote on the paper's 20th anniversary in 1988. "It has been transported in everything from a punt to a tugboat - through everything from fog, gales, vapor, snowstorms, and The Old Sow Whirlpool, which has proven to be rather friendly over the years." As a marketing device, it might seem that Eastport residents would prefer to emphasize the Old Sow's potential dangers rather than the mostly peaceful coexistence they share with the whirlpool. Yet they resist this temptation. Godfrey said he was contacted recently by producers of a reality TV show who expressed interest in dropping one of their participants into the whirlpool. "I said, 'No!' " Godfrey said. "You don't want to put a person in there." Staff Writer Seth Harkness can be contacted at 282-8225 or at:
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