July 30, 2015 — On the morning of June 1, 2013, Venard Samson motored across the mouth of Petit-de-Grat Harbour in a small fishing boat. The narrow harbor, off the southeastern coast of Nova Scotia, is wedged between Petit-de-Grat Island, where he lives, and the wooded tail end of a larger island known as Isle Madame. By 6:30 a.m., he’d pulled one line of lobster traps and glided past a green navigational buoy. The North Atlantic, known for its rough winds and heavy swell, stretched out before him, so flat he could have passed a straight razor over its surface. “The water was right dead and calm,” he later recalled. “It was a nice damn day, clear, you could see anything.”
Then, he spotted the dark shape. It was floating along an uninhabited stretch of shoreline the fishermen all knew as Mackerel Cove. At first, Venard thought little of it; he had seen dead deer there before. But as Venard pulled closer, he discovered a banged-up fiberglass skiff, a small oceangoing vessel. It was waterlogged, its sideboards cracked and its bow barely a foot above the water line. No one was on board.
Venard circled the damaged boat three times, and discovered a floating gas tank and some green rope tangled around an anchor. The skiff’s outboard motor was missing, and its bowline, the rope that ties to the front of a boat, was apparently cut. Venard, a short man with a laborer’s physique who often speaks in an excitable squawk, picked up his radio and called the Canadian Coast Guard in Halifax, some 120 miles to the southeast. No, his GPS plotter wasn’t working. He’d have to drop a lobster trap to mark the spot. Around 6:55 a.m., the marine VHF radio cackled with a universal distress call: Pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan. All mariners were requested to be on the lookout and report any sightings of a man overboard.
Venard towed the skiff back toward the wharf and handed it off to another lobsterman. In some 50 years of fishing, neither man had encountered a situation like this. But both immediately wondered what had happened to Philip “Bowser,” who often roared around in the beat-up skiff, which he christened the Midnight Slider. The missing man’s full name was Philip Joseph Boudreau, but no one called him that because another local fisherman had the same name. A bull-necked man, 43 and going soft around the waist, Philip didn’t have a license to go lobster fishing. Islanders caught glimpses of him and Brodie, his blonde Labrador, cruising around under the light of the moon.
Later that morning, a ball cap washed ashore and a pair of boots were found floating in the harbor. It seemed Philip Boudreau was gone.
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