Shout-Out to Yukon Story Laureate John Firth

 From Lowly Dish Washer to Swabbing the Deck in the Navy – all in six Months

Budding fisherman 

At  the age of 18, like most youth I was rudderless. With a lifetime ahead of me, I hadn't a clue what I wanted to do, other than fish, and there was no way I was going to make a living doing that full-time. 

After I obtained my driver’s license, Mom hinted, on more than one occasion that I should get a part-time job if I wanted to keep driving the family car. That was enough incentive to get me off the couch and out the door to find a job.

On a frigid week-night in January, 1976 I told Mom I was going to the Bayshore Shopping Centre to search for work. My first stop was at Le Quickie, a lunch counter-style restaurant that catered to shoppers at the normally busy mall in west-end Ottawa. Having no employment history, I knew the barrier to entry for a dish washer would be very low.

The mall was quiet and the restaurant near empty. I spied the one waitress on shift that evening and asked for the manager. She smiled at me and pointed toward a small office where the door was open and there sat a man all dressed in white, doing restaurant paperwork. I told him I was looking for part-time work and asked about openings. He looked up briefly from his forms to inform me his dish washer had just quit mid shift and I could start right away.

When I phoned Mom she was incredulous that I was offered a job on the spot at the first place I applied, and in the dead of winter, no less. The job was boring, but it had a few fringe benefits – all the sodas I could drink, plus pretty French waitresses dressed in pastel-pink tight-fitting outfits who regularly leaned over the counter passing me dishware. My high school French soon improved. Except for us lowly dish washers, all the servers and both cooks were Francophone.

I held this job until spring, when Mom nudged me to reconsider my future. She had cut out an advertisement from the Ottawa Citizen that HMCS Carleton, the naval reserve base at CFRB Dows Lake, was recruiting students for its summer basic training program.

Master Seaman Shackell

My father had been a naval officer for 25 years, retiring the previous year as a lieutenant commander. He had never pushed the Navy on me, though I had grown up in a household run like a tight ship. We had lived on a navy base, CFB Cornwallis Nova Scotia in the late 1960's, so we were fully immersed. Mom figured a summer in uniform would straighten up my backbone and give me a sense of purpose in life. I certainly needed a kick in the butt to get me through the rest of my adolescent years and focused on how I was going to make my way in the world independent from my parents. As it turned out the Navy was to become the perfect home away from home with three square meals a day, a wire rack to sleep on when shipboard and a pay cheque, albeit small, every two weeks.

Sail training on Chadburn Lake
within Whitehorse city limits

I hemmed and hawed for awhile before informing my parents I’d enlist. The basic training program was only eight weeks long and there was no obligation to join the ship's company at the end of the summer. After an extensive security screening I swore allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen, becoming a naval trainee along with 40 other raw recruits drawn from around the city and surrounding Ottawa Valley area.

That summer I learned how to march, spit polish boots, shoot a military rifle, present arms and endure the hard discipline handed out by petty officers whose job it was to put us through our paces. We received basic seamanship training too – knot tying and boat training on the 27-foot naval whaler which we rowed around Dows Lake in the hot summer sun like galley slaves. 

At $2.10 cents an hour ($16.80 a day) I wasn’t going to get rich, but it was a starting point.  By the end of the summer I had excelled enough in the training that the higher ups asked me to join the ship's company, which I accepted, thus becoming a primary naval reservist in the Bosun trade at the rank of ordinary seaman.

We trained one evening a week and one weekend a month, usually on old gate vessels, small ships originally designed to pull anti-submarine nets across the entrance to Halifax Harbour. We flew out to Halifax on C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, usually arriving late in the night for two days of training. Sometimes there was a gate vessel on the Great Lakes and we would bus down to Kingston to take command of the ship for the weekend, then back to Ottawa by military bus late Sunday afternoon.

  Gate vessels HMCS Port St. Loius and HMCS
 Port Dauphin at anchor in the Bay of Fundy

In 1978, after high school and before entering the journalism program at Algonquin College, I was deployed to serve aboard the naval supply vessel HMCS Preserver on NATO exercise in the Caribbean. By the late 1970's the Canadian Navy was relying on reservists to fill in crew shortages on its ship deployments.

After taking my junior leadership course and earning my small boat ticket at HMCS Esquimalt in Victoria in May 1978, the Navy sent me to Whitehorse where I would instruct northern cadets in the operation of naval whalers. I also assisted the cadet instructors in what the camp called "Watermanship", basic canoeing, a pursuit I had become proficient in during my teen years. I was spending more time teaching cadets simple canoe skills than how to operate the more complicated naval lifeboat rigged with sails and grudgingly propelled by cadets at the heavy oars.

Cadets rowing a whaler

The summer of 1979 I served aboard the naval reserve training vessel HMCS Port St. Louis where the ship and its sailors spent two months exercising off the coast of Nova Scotia, circumnavigating Prince Edward Island, and taking a side voyage to Saint John, New Brunswick, then south to Boston. It was scenic cruising without any of the luxury cruise ship perks.

      A Navy warship enters the Canso 
    Lock behind HMCS Port St. Louis  

There were port calls at picturesque fishing villages scattered along the rugged coastline. Almost fifty years later, I can still recall the many foggy days that summer on the Bay of Fundy where grey mist enveloped the ship and the repeated sound of the fog horn blared an alert to any vessels to our presence. This narrow body of water features the highest tides in the world -- 30 feet up and 30 feet down each day.

Then there was the night I was at the ship's helm during a gale-force storm off the coast of Cape Breton, when a rogue wave caught the starboard bow, crashed over the foc'sle, and temporarily flooded the well deck with tons of seawater. I must have rolled the captain out of his bunk because he entered the wheelhouse in a flash wearing his housecoat and slippers. He took charge of the chaotic scene, as the junior deck officer still wore a look of terror on his face from the impact of the wave that had just crashed over the bridge when he had stepped outside to assess the situation.                         

After my third year in the reserves, I had risen four ranks to become a master seaman. I was starting to catch the wind in my sails and feel the salt water in my veins. Should I join the regular Navy and become a career sailor like my Father? Despite requesting the East Coast for deployment in the summer of 1980 to gain more sea time, my home unit returned me to Whitehorse where the cadet camp brass had requested my services for another stint at the whaler program.

Master Seaman Shackell with canoe in hand
 directing cadets at Chadburn Lake Yukon

This fateful decision set my personal compass on a fixed northwest heading, one that was to hold steady for the next nine years (read my introductory post), By the end of my naval reserve time I had travelled much of Canada, sailed in ships on either coast and cruised the Yukon’s majestic southern lakes in whalers over two adventure-filled summers. I can't remember the exact pay rate at the end of my service, but it was getting close to $50 a day. People were paying hundreds of dollars a day to do what I was getting paid to do, so I was not complaining.

My Navy days were over, but a new chapter was about to open up at the Yukon News.

Cadets relax in a whaler on Lake Bennett as they are transported 

 to Carcoss Yukon after climbing the Chilkoot Trail, August, 1980