Volunteers hoping to recover the bodies of two fishermen believed to have died over the weekend have hired divers to inspect the site where their boat may have sunk.
Chester Barrett and his adult son Aaron Barrett have been missing since Saturday, when their scallop dragger disappeared. The Addison residents had been moving the dragger, Sudden Impact, from Edmunds on Cobscook Bay, where scallop fishing had just been closed for the season, to their home port of South Addison, where they hoped to resume fishing on Monday.
Dean Barrett, Chester’s nephew and Aaron’s cousin, believes the boat sank in 160 feet of water near Moose Cove off the town of Trescott. Fishermen who searched the area over the weekend said a depth sounder reading revealed what appeared to be the boat on the ocean bottom.
Barrett and others have been organizing an effort to recover the boat. After initially trying to do so over the weekend, they stopped because the Coast Guard said the conditions were unsafe. Now, Barrett plans to have divers inspect the suspected site of the sinking on Wednesday.
Barrett wants the divers to recover what they can from the boat by hand — including possibly the bodies of his uncle and cousin — before it is hauled up to the surface. Barrett, who is also a fisherman, said his boat and that of another volunteer should be able to pull up the vessel together.
“That’s the best bet so I don’t lose anything that’s in the boat,” he said, referring to Sudden Impact.
Once the dive team has recovered what it can and has returned to the surface, Barrett said the plan is to bring the sunken dragger back up and to shore.
“We’ll tow it to a salvage site where the boat will be put to rest,” he said.
The father-and-son duo vanished Saturday after encountering rough seas on the trip between West Quoddy Head and Cutler. They texted a friend that “it’s wild out here” and said they were going to try to make it to Cutler to get out of the bad weather.
Their boat never made it into port. After they were reported to the Coast Guard as overdue, that agency and Maine Marine Patrol searched for the boat Saturday evening and then again on Sunday, along with fishermen from the area in their own vessels.
While Dean Barrett is organizing the recovery effort, others are raising funds for Melanie Barrett, who was Chester’s wife and Aaron’s mother.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the online campaign had raised $16,000.
“They simply loved the water,” Stephanie Chambers, who is Melanie Barrett’s sister, wrote on the fundraising page. “Bass fishing, boating, and the infamous rope swing at their lifetime camp at Schoodic Lake, lobster fishing out of South Addison and scallop dragging out of Cobscook Bay.
“Chet and Aaron always had a story or two (or twenty),” Chambers wrote. “Every work day, camp day, home project or whatever adventure they had thought up…always ended with a story. Many stories shared over a few cold beverages and a smoke in the screenhouse or around the fire pit upta camp. Story for story, eyes twinkling, contagious laughs and your day was ‘suddenly impacted’ by these two men, because laughter is the best medicine.”