‘15 minutes out mama’: The tragic story of Port Dover fisherman Michael Smith who drowned in Lake Erie

“Good morning beautiful, I love you.”

They headed southwest around Long Point, the 40-kilometre sand spit that stretches nearly halfway across the lake.

Smith recorded video: the wheelhouse, engine rumbling, tote boxes awaiting some of the first smelt of the commercial fishing season. He pulled open a steel door through which the trawling net is pulled, to show the water rolling by.

He made it a ritual to kiss the net before releasing it to the lake.

“Come on baby,” he would say. “Get us lots.”

He posted a message on Facebook with the video:

“Currently heading out of Port Dover harbour aboard the Donna F. Stay safe and be happy. It may be tough with what is happening in the world today but … be happy.”

Folks in Dover ate up his posts, but especially this morning.

“Your video brought happiness and hope,” came one reply.

“My dad was a fisherman,” said another.

He ended his message March 23, 2020, the way he always did: “Love my little town.”

To people back home connected by the lake, history and blood, the pictures Smith often floated, of fiery sunrises and seabirds and teeming silvery fish, were like celebrations of what they held dear.

And odes to what they were losing.

Fear gripped captain Joe Zimba’s chest like a giant claw.

He couldn’t find Smith on the boat.

It was just after 10 a.m. that morning.

On the radio he said: “I’ve got a man in the water. And I can’t see him.”

Zimba knew what would happen next: search and rescue aircraft taking off, racing to them.

It felt like everything was falling out of him.

He wanted to drop to his knees and cry.

No, Zimba told himself.

Focus. Find him.

Seconds. Minutes.

Zimba wheeled the Donna F. around and scrambled to the top of the A-frame of the boat.

“Mike!” he shouted. “Mike!”

Binoculars pressed to his face, he scanned the lake, that was 30-metres deep at that spot, the height of a 10-storey building.

The water temperature hovered near freezing.

Back on land, Smith’s sister answered her phone.

Michael has fallen in the water, a voice told her. They are looking for him. Still in the rescue stage.

But she knew.

They all knew.

“There’s a certain kind of blood that flows / In a captain and his mates / And a certain kind of life that rolls / On the crest of the old Great Lakes.”

Port Dover folk legend Bruce (House) Milner sang and plucked his guitar, the salty baritone spinning maritime stories.

This was in the fall of 2019, when Milner played gigs at Port Dover’s Royal Canadian Legion branch to raise money for the food bank.

Smith was there, beer in hand, having walked to the legion around the corner from his house, a stone’s throw from the docks and channel leading to the harbour and lake.

He would tap his foot, slap his thigh, hoot and join in, revelling in music that invoked traditions of his job as a fisherman along the north shore of Lake Erie, from Dover east toward Port Maitland, and west toward Port Burwell.

Milner knew his material. He fished 20 years, including a summer living on a boat — called a tug in the industry — 100 kilometres west out of Port Stanley, where after work he grilled whitefish, with tequila and lemon slices on the side, while the unmarried crew members caroused in town.

He sang about the dangers of the lake, that was named by the Erie Indigenous people who lived on its southern shore.

Captains say when the wind howls like a train, the water is no place to be, not with Long Point’s reefs and shifting sandbars lurking.

Milner lost good friends out there.

“In this community,” he says, “when somebody goes, it really hits everybody.”

Smith took a video of Milner playing a song called “Devil’s Hole.”

“Many a ship has gone aground, upon this sandy shore / And many a good man swept away and never seen no more.”

Smith posted the video and wrote: “Love life.”

Milner was 72, and Smith about to turn 50 in December 2019. Milner knew of Smith growing up, “bumping around, drinking and carrying on with everyone else and just being a Dover guy.”

They had become close friends, but that wasn’t unusual for Smith, who seemed tight with everyone.

Known to childhood buddies as Smeet or Shmeet, at five-foot-10, 220 pounds he was a genial bear of a man, with a tattoo of a trident on his forearm, and anchor and rope on his shoulder with his two kids’ names.

Smith lit up rooms, never forgot a name and reflexively offered to help in any situation.

One Doverite said bumping into him was like meeting a bunch of puppies.

He had seemed an eternal bachelor until 2015 when, at 45, he surprised everyone and proposed to Sherry Hume, who lived a few blocks away growing up.

An outreach worker in geriatric mental health, she was quiet and introverted, the flip side of Smith, who broke out in song off the cuff. She was amazed at how everyone he came across wanted to chat with him.

“Are you OK with marrying a fisherman?” he asked her.

He reminded her it paid poorly and there were risks.

His bald head sweated bullets the July afternoon they married in the backyard of his family home, to the strains of a bagpiper booked as a wedding gift by his youngest of two sisters, Alesha Smith.

The reception was at St. Paul’s church, where a blessing of the fishing nets ceremony is held in spring, and where the spire long served as a visual marker for captains aiming their boats toward the harbour.

They walked home through Powell Park, Sherry barefoot in the grass carrying her heels.

“Michael is an emotional guy and in most of the wedding pictures he’s crying, and I’m beaming,” she says.

When he was a teenager, Smith spent a couple of summers working on fish tugs, but in his adult life had jobs including construction and on a garbage truck like his father.

He couldn’t shake a calling to the lake that had always been nearly in his backyard. His cousins and uncles were fishermen; the boat the Leonard S. was named after his grandfather.

The fishing industry’s glory days have long been fading in Port Dover, a town of 6,000 that once boasted, as locals say, the world’s largest freshwater commercial fishing fleet.

Oldtimers talk about how years ago, 30 boats would line up heading into harbour at the end of the working day, two and three abreast. Now, there might be just five or six on a typical afternoon.

In the 1960s and 1970s, fish stocks were ravaged, and some species eliminated altogether, by pollution, invasive species and overfishing, but the lake bounced back.

About 80 per cent of commercial fishing in Ontario comes from Lake Erie. It holds roughly two per cent of the water of the Great Lakes, but nearly half the fish, thanks to its relatively shallow depths, warm temperatures, and abundance of plankton for food.

The tiny smelt, and then walleye and yellow perch, are the primary catches for Port Dover crews. Depending on the employer and boat, a deckhand might make $20,000 to $40,000 after a decent year, or in a bad season less than $10,000.

Tragedy on the water, meanwhile, is burned in the town’s collective memory.

In March 1974, two Dover brothers died when the Aletha B. capsized in a storm.

In April 1984, three fishermen died when the Stanley Clipper went down 11 km from the harbour, in 80 km/h wind gusts and three-metre high swells.

On March 18, 1991, the 18-metre trawler the Captain K. was sliced in two by a 71-metre coast guard ice breaker that crashed into it on the fog-shrouded lake. All three crew members died.

Sherry Hume was among the teenagers let out of school that day, to wait with most of the town on Port Dover Pier for the wreckage to return home.

Michael Smith worked four years on a tug called the Ironfish.

But in 2018, smelt was scarce, and money tight now that he was a father helping raise kids Grace and Evan.

He decided to leave the water for better paying work laying floors.

It was hard on his knees and spirit.

“Michael was quite jovial, and a morning person, always up doing things, he was not a lazy man,” says Sherry. “But he came home from flooring and was miserable.”

She encouraged him to return to the lake.

“You love fishing. It makes you happy.”

He took a job aboard the Donna F., captained by Zimba, and told him: “I’m lucky to have the wife I have.”

Zimba started in the industry at 16. He grew up in Hamilton and figured he’d work at Stelco like most in his family, but instead ended up on a boat in Port Maitland after his family moved to Dunnville.

Smith loved returning to his daily routine.

Each day he rose before 4:30 a.m., kissed Sherry goodbye, and waited outside for Zimba to pick him up and drive a minute to the docks.

“Mike never dwelled on the bad days,” Zimba says. “If we didn’t catch any he was always like, ‘We’ll get ’em next time. It will be better.’ ”

At day’s end, Sherry smelled him reeking of fish as soon as he came in the door. He would strip on the spot, clothes in the washer, and hit the shower with stray shiny smelt scales clinging to his skin.

Some days he’d text from the boat to let her know how close they were to docking — “15 minutes out mama” — and she would rush the kids to the pier, and wave at him coming in, and he’d yell how many totes they filled.

“The tourists would watch the tugs, and it was a thrill for us: that’s my husband; that’s our dad.”

To make more money, Smith twice headed to New Brunswick at season’s end, to fish for lobster off Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy in November and December.

He had put on a few unwanted pounds but was strong and agile, a student of karate, and meticulous in planning and preparation for everything he did, but Sherry still worried about him working in an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean.

He told her crew members had survival suits ready in case it all went sideways, if they ended up overboard.

Smith loved what he called “the salt life” out East.

He returned to Port Dover with giant yellow rubber fishing boots, and clunked all over town wearing them, as though he was a character who had just strode off the pages of “Moby Dick.”

He lost family to Lake Erie early in the new year.

On Feb. 15, 2020, his cousin, Alex Ottley, a nine-year old boy from nearby Peacock Point, jumped in the water to help a friend who had fallen in.

Alex became trapped under the ice and drowned.

As the town grieved, the boy vanished in the lake. A rescue mission to save him changed to a recovery operation.

The OPP’s police dive team searched 11 days before it was called off, with Alex still missing.

Smith wrote on his Facebook page that his little cousin was a hero.

On March 11, Smith was back on the water.

“Currently heading SE aboard the Donna F.,” he wrote. “The start of the 2020 smelt trawling season! Clouded over just before dawn. A steel grey kinda mornin. Love my little town.”

He got on the radio and told boat crews to keep on the lookout for his cousin Alex.

He was back out March 18, and again on March 19, “fishing for the elusive smelt.”

Commercial fishing forecasts called for a poor catch in spring and summer.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 shutdown threatened to stop work on the lake entirely.

On Monday, March 23 it snowed early in the area, before the temperature climbed to 4 C.

Smith was up and dressed three hours before sunrise.

He pressed his lips to Sherry’s in the dark.

“See you soon,” he said. “Love you.”

She pulled him close to her in the bed, lingering longer than usual.

It made him laugh: “Now I really have to go.”

Seven hours later, just after 11 a.m., she was working at home when her phone rang.

She did not recognize the number and ignored it.

Soon after that she heard a knock at the door.

She saw that it was Rick Misner, a veteran fisherman.

He didn’t want Sherry to hear it first from the police.

“Michael is missing,” he said.

“What?”

“He’s missing on the lake.”

She felt like everything was spinning. He hugged her tight.

She phoned Michael’s sister, Alesha, who rushed to the house.

Police were there. So was Smith’s father, who lived in the rear portion of the duplex home.

Alesha asked a police officer: how long does he have?

He said five and a half hours was the threshold for calling off the ongoing rescue operation.

Smith’s father said: “He’s gone.”

The Donna F. had headed out at dawn that morning alongside another tug, the Omsteader.

The water started choppy but calmed. At about 10 a.m., west of Long Point, the Omsteader’s sonar appeared to show schools of smelt.

At the back of the boat, Smith was teaching a new deckhand how to get prepared to set the trawling net.

Smith sent him to the front to store some buoys. When Zimba and the deckhand returned to the back a few minutes later, to take next steps to set the net, Smith was gone.

He had to fall in the water through either the back or side openings for the net — but the net had not been set. It made no sense. No one could recall a Dover fisherman falling over like that.

Sherry asked police if he had been taking pictures when he fell.

Photos on his Facebook page include one of him balancing on the outside edge of a boat to get a shot.

Had he been careless leaning out the door? Please, she said, tell me that is not what happened.

No: his phone was found in his bag in the wheelhouse.

The emergency call from the Donna F. that morning had triggered a response from the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre, run by the Canadian Armed Forces out of its base in Trenton, one hour west of Kingston.

It receives about 4,000 rescue calls each year, with 70 per cent for maritime emergencies.

A RCAF CC-130H Hercules took off from Trenton at 10:30 a.m. and arrived to search at 11:40 a.m. At the same time, with freezing rain grounding a helicopter at the base, a U.S. Coast Guard chopper flew in from Detroit.

The Hercules flew four hours over the area, but visibility was poor with the cloud cover. Port Dover tugs, and the helicopter, searched longer still, as the sun started to set after 7 p.m., nine hours after Smith had fallen in.

On land, OPP officers on ATVs searched Long Point, in case Smith had somehow made it 12 km to shore.

“You hope against hope,” Sherry says. “Michael had survival skills. If anyone could do it, it’s Michael. But the water was so cold.”

At about 7:30 p.m. police spoke to her again.

They told her the operation had been changed to a recovery mission.

“Everyone was so kind and compassionate,” she says. “But that was the worst moment.”

In movies, drowning victims float to the surface. The reality is otherwise.

Smith had sunk to the bottom of the lake, enveloped in darkness.

The weight of the water on top of him, and cold temperature, meant that his body, even with decomposition gases building, would not rise.

“I just wanted him home. All I wanted was to be near my Michael again, to sit next to him.”

If someone didn’t find him now he was likely gone forever.

Sgt. Mike Coo’s phone rang at home near Gravenhurst, north of Barrie.

A fisherman was missing on Lake Erie.

Coo texted fellow members on the OPP’s underwater search and recovery unit.

The unit has two teams of six officers. Coo’s team was on days off, but the second team was searching for a drowning victim south of Ottawa.

Coo met four of his divers the next day, March 24, at 7 a.m., loaded scuba gear and sonar equipment, and made the three-hour drive south to Port Dover.

It was just over a month earlier that his team had searched in vain there for young Alex Ottley.

The dive unit covers the entire province, tapped to search for drowning victims, and also weapons or explosives in bodies of water.

In 2019, the unit did 75 underwater searches and recovered 52 bodies.

Divers can’t save victims but can help families in pain find closure, Coo says.

“The worst part is not bringing someone home, and telling the family we have to call off the search, when you know there is a chance they will never see their loved one again.”

When Coo started on the team 14 years ago, a veteran diver told him the work would change him.

“He said I would slowly go from saying I’m a police officer to saying I’m a diver who is with the OPP. It’s just a different breed, the team is bigger than the individual. We support each other, and you have to do that dealing with death on a regular basis.”

The Smith recovery mission seemed doomed from the start.

Their first day in Port Dover, Coo met with Zimba, who gave him co-ordinates of the area where the Donna F. had been when Smith went missing.

The lake was calm when the dive team headed out on a police boat, but it broke down 20 minutes later, and took two hours to idle it back to the dock.

The second day on the lake they drove back and forth over the search area, using their side-scan sonar that covers a 120-metre wide swath.

Rocks and logs in the water can be misleading on sonar, and they don’t dive unless they narrow the target. A diver has 15 minutes on a deep dive before nitrogen builds up in the body, which at a certain point can lead to a fatal embolism.

That far from shore, Coo expected to see a barren lake bottom on the sonar, but there were blotches he couldn’t identify. And no sign of Smith.

The third day, the water was too rough for their small seven-metre boat.

Coo phoned Zimba and asked if he would meet to look at their sonar images.

They talked on board Zimba’s boat. Coo asked if he had a theory about the blotches. Zimba said it was probably schools of smelt.

As they talked, Coo noticed the GPS on the Donna F. It looked compatible with their software.

He downloaded the data to their device, and was excited to discover Zimba had recorded detailed GPS tracks on the fatal day.

After removing tracks before and after Smith went missing, the area was narrowed by more than two kilometres.

A big break.

“You’ve taken our needle in a haystack and given us a search area,” Coo said.

But the problem was they couldn’t launch, not with the lake whipped-up by 30 km/h northwest winds.

“My boat can go out in this,” Zimba said.

For the first time in Coo’s career they loaded their gear on a 21-metre fish tug.

Zimba plowed the Donna F. through the chop, out 40 km around Long Point, retracing his path.

Closing in on the spot, he circled again and again, as the dive team dropped floating markers to narrow the search. Coo marvelled at how Zimba handled the vessel.

An image with human dimensions popped-up on the sonar.

Coo suited-up and went down. He descended 27 metres (90 feet), hovering above the bottom to avoid stirring-up silt.

The light attached to his wrist malfunctioned. It was pitch black and he couldn’t see.

He swam in narrowing circles, reached out to touch the bottom, hoping to feel something by chance, his 15 minutes running out.

Nothing.

He angrily announced over his audio link that he had to surface.

The next day they returned in calmer weather on the police boat, and reset their markers.

Coo dove down again to the bottom, his light working.

There.

“Got him,” he said.

He swam to Smith. He now could tell that he had been nearly in arms-reach the day before.

Following protocol, he checked for injuries.

If a drowning victim has traumatic wounds, Coo would have to leave him undisturbed in the moment, because it could be considered a crime scene.

But he looked unharmed. He still wore his jacket, gloves, and workboots. His shirt was tucked-in.

Coo wrapped his arms around big Michael Smith in a bear hug and tied a line around him.

“Everything is done as if you are handling a member of your own family,” he says.

“You bring them up slow.”

Sherry’s phone rang. It was a police officer. Michael was on the way back to shore.

Later, Coo met with Zimba to thank him. His help with the search makes him a hero, Coo says.

The team presented Zimba with a dive unit challenge coin medallion in appreciation.

The divers loaded up and headed out of town.

Coo arrived back home, to hugs from his wife and two young sons.

He lives on in a painting: a Dover guy with big tanned arms, reeling in a net with fish leaping, framed by a Canadian flag.

The mural hangs in The Beach House restaurant in Port Dover, in a room facing the lake.

A couple of years ago, local artist Elizabeth Milner was asked to craft the piece, that depicts the soul of the town. Over several months she painted a collage of images on a big piece of plywood.

As was his habit, Smith offered to help her hang it.

When it was up, she let him in on a secret: the fisherman in the mural? It’s you.

Smith grinned.

“Michael really enjoyed that,” she says.

Up the hill, across the bridge, Zimba sits outside his home after a fishing day.

He thinks about Smith all the time, but tries not to dwell on what his friend was thinking, and feeling, in the final moments.

“Lots of times out there on the water I talk to Mike: ‘Where we going today Mike? Come on Mike, where’s the fish?’ He was such a good-hearted guy. The best kind of guy.”

No one will ever know how Smith ended up in the water.

The autopsy showed no sign of trauma to his body, or a heart attack that might have contributed to a fall.

Sometimes fishermen slip and fall into the water when urinating off the edge of the boat. But Smith’s pants were done-up and zipped.

Police investigators asked Zimba if Smith might have jumped.

Not a chance in the world, he said.

“He loved his little town, his family, his job.”

For a long time, Zimba didn’t want to go back on the lake, and when he finally did, he was on edge.

“Sometimes I bust myself up about it. I wonder, did we really need to go out that day? But it was a day we would’ve went, you know? Some days, the weather is rough and you go anyway. But it wasn’t a day like that. It was a day that you should be out there doing your thing, doing your job.”

He figures it was meant to be, that he helped the divers find him. And also, that he wasn’t there to see Smith brought to the surface.

He feels for Sherry.

Five years ago, Zimba lost his wife, when she collapsed in his arms one night from a heart attack. When the paramedics arrived he was soaked in sweat on the floor performing CPR in vain.

“Loss is tough. People don’t know what to say to you.”

It’s a small town, everyone knows Sherry, and feels a connection to her husband.

She appreciates words of condolence, but it’s hard to be reminded of what is gone.

Simply seeing the water in the distance does it to her, so she avoids looking.

“It’s a strange feeling, to have my life destroyed by something I’ve always loved so much: this lake and the industry that put food on our table.”

What she can’t escape is the sound of the fish tug horns, that strikes her heart each time.

Meanwhile, the house is too quiet, absent Michael playing Celtic music at top volume, or launching into a Dean Martin impression, or an impromptu “woo!”

He doted on the kids, who are now 16 and 12. He had a routine that whenever they came in the door, he’d tell them to sit at the kitchen table and he would say: “Tell me a story.”

“He did that with me, too,” says Sherry. “He wanted to hear what you had to say. He wanted to know.”

He anticipated her needs, without fail every day: laying out her towels and soap, her coffee always ready.

“We didn’t settle down together until kind of later in life. We were just beginning and had so much left to do together. He was our provider and protector.”

She sits outside their home, a yellowed old map of Lake Erie on the wall. Wooden wind chimes clack gently in the breeze.

A sun shade is drawn across the porch in the twilight.

On her side, she sees those who pass by, but no one can see her. She likes it that way.

“It’s a tragic accident and you can’t stop it. But it’s always with you, as soon as you wake up, that this is how it is now.”

One day, Smith’s family will host a big event to remember his life. There will be music, stories, laughter, and tiny “old lady sandwiches” made by volunteers at the legion that he loved to gobble-up.

His cousin James Misner organized fundraising for a memorial bench, and ensured a spot for it at the harbour.

Alesha says her brother’s death shattered their family, still healing from losing their mother 10 years ago.

“And it’s not just people who knew Michael that are hurting. This is a port town built on fishing, and a fisherman went down.”

He was her confidant, and the muscle whenever she needed help with a job. When her marriage broke down she lived at his place.

The hardest time, she says, is when she catches a sunrise working an early shift, and imagines him heading out on the lake.

She had made plans with him to build a garden, and a week before he died she bought a little greenhouse. She continued the project alone through the spring, seed by seed. Many days she would be out there, on her knees in the dirt, talking to her brother, and crying hard.

Smith would have appreciated the epilogue to his story, written the day after he went in the water.

That was the day Alex Ottley, missing more than a month, came home.

The boy’s body was spotted near the shoreline.

The timing was eerie, and for some it seemed more than that, given the unexplained circumstances behind Smith’s death.

A few people wrote Sherry and said they believed that her husband gave himself up to bring his little cousin back.

House Milner understands the sentiment. The singer sits in his yard outside town, on a blue sky September day, next to the rustic farmhouse he says is hillbilly heaven.

“It’s the kind of thing that gets into your psyche, because Michael was so concerned with everybody else’s well being,” he says. “I’m not saying I believe that’s what happened, but what I’m saying is, if somehow he was given that choice, he would have taken it, because that’s who Michael was.”

Milner posted a couple of songs on social media in tribute. One is called “Sailors on the Wind.”

It was written by his late friend Bill Ledgerwood, after he had been in a bar on Turkey Point, listening to a VHF radio broadcast final words from the crew of the Stanley Clipper the day it went under in ’84.

“He heard one of the guys on the radio say, ‘What a way to go; what an ’effin way to go.’ ”

In his yard, Milner picks up a guitar.

“Standing on these golden cliffs of Dover, looking out across the sky / I feel the peace and it looks so lovely / I wonder why they had to die / Can’t you hear the sound of voices as they’re crying / For the loved ones that are gone / These are the dreams too early that were taken / Sailors riding on the wind.”

A few minutes drive from Milner’s place, down on the water at about 6 p.m., a fish tug appears off Port Dover Pier, and then another, gulls squawking to usher the boats into harbour.

There’s a little store hard on the docks called Pleasant Port Fish Company. There was a time you could choose from the fresh catch each day, at a half dozen places in town, now there is just one.

On the other side of the channel, next to the Port Dover Harbour Museum, a condo building rises where the fish processing plant used to hum. Some feel the condo is progress, and others can barely stand to look at it.

A third tug rumbles into dock. It’s the Omsteader, captained by Al MacDonald. He was out there searching the day Smith was lost.

He’s worked on the water 56 years and been running boats since he was 20. He looks solid at 72 in a T-shirt adorned with skull art.

Ten years ago, a cable sliced a chunk off his finger; another time the boat jumped in rough water and he cut his head in the engine room and needed 25 staples to close the wound.

It wasn’t fishing, but a motorcycle accident in his 30s put a plate with 26 screws in his leg. That was back when he thought he was indestructible.

His great grandfather, Noble MacDonald, was swept off an open-deck fishing boat in a storm and never found. His name graces a fisherman’s memorial at the pier.

He tries not to think about loss.

“Accidents happen and you try your best to make it so they don’t happen.”

After unloading the Omsteader with his two crew, he speaks quietly, choosing words with precision, his forehead beaded with moisture in the sun.

“I look around and think: I don’t know how much longer this will go on.”

Today, though, was bountiful. He says his boat landed 11,400 pounds of smelt, filling 19 totes.

After a poor spring for trawling, the summer was the best in years, and extended through September, defying all forecasts.

“There was a large hatch. People who were supposed to know didn’t predict that.”

Come on baby. Get us lots.

MacDonald sits on a bench dedicated to his son, who worked in the industry and who died young from cancer.

“It’s not quite the end. I guess you’d say it’s more a rotation of how Mother Nature operates.”

There’s a spot ready for Michael John Smith’s memorial, a bench decorated with cut-outs in the dark iron, of fish, the words “love my little town,” and beneath his name: “Fisherman.”

It will face the channel that heads past the lighthouse, south to water that looks green-gold in the dying light, and horizon of the lake that gives and takes away.