Martin Woodward on Saving Lives at Sea

Later in the ‘70’s, ones that I remember probably more clearly than the others are a ship called the ‘Poole Fisher’ which capsized and sank off St Catherine’s in an awful storm in November 1979 and all but two of the crew drowned on that.

I think it was 13 dead and two survivors. The two young lads that survived and that was an awful night.

It was really, really quite bad weather, a sort of Westerly gale and this ship had literally taken water and then capsized, and we were out there for I think probably about 20 hours, looking for the survivors of this ship.

No one quite knew where it had sunk because all that Niton Radio got was a very quick ‘Mayday’ on the ship to shore channel, not on the distress channel. So obviously they were making a ship to shore call on channel 28 and they were obviously making a ship to shore call on the ship to shore channel 28 and it happened so quickly that the guy just picked up the radio and put out the ‘Mayday’ on that channel rather than the distress channel 16.

All he said was, “This is the Poole Fisher, we’re going down southwest of St Catherine’s.” That’s all and then it was over basically, and they all tried to abandon ship and obviously only two survived.

That was a bad one, and it was confusing because there was another ship that had sunk just to the West that same week, called the ‘Aeolian Sky’ down off Portland, another big ship, and all the cargo from that and all the wreckage was floating around the Channel so we couldn’t identify which was from the ‘Poole Fisher’, whether we were in the right area for that or whether it was just debris from the ‘Aeolian Sky’.