With that and a prayer, the skipper was able to steer the freighter to safety. Finally, the propeller caught water again. Steering her was futile, and the vessel slid slowly down the wall of the gyre. A funnel opened beneath its bow, and the ship dropped precipitously forward into the hole. Andrews, New Brunswick, passed over the Old Sow at precisely the wrong moment. In the 1940s, a motorized freighter carrying sardines from Lubec, Maine, to St. The men, the logs and the barge simply vanished. One fellow, along with his mate, ran into the Old Sow on a barge loaded with logs. She went down in the whirlpool while the poor boys' mother watched in horror from shore as the schooner sank helplessly. In one tragic event in 1835, a two-masted schooner from Deer Island set sail with two brothers aboard. Even recently, I've watched motor-powered sailboats straining for more than half an hour, barely making headway against the tremendous currents of the maw. When heavy winds coincide with especially high tides, it becomes liquid chaos and disaster for the unwitting seafarer.īefore the time of motorized vessels, the Old Sow regularly swallowed up boats unable to overpower its forces. All that water flooding into the bay has to negotiate a right-angle turn to get around Deer Island Point, and then it slams into that undersea mountain. Bisecting the trench is a 281-foot undersea mountain. There's a 400-foot-deep trench to the southwest of New Brunswick's Deer Island Point that continues as a 327-foot trench to the northwest. To begin with, some 40 billion cubic feet of water floods into Passamaquoddy Bay with each incoming tide and mixes with the countercurrents from the St. What I resented was havin' to row uphill to get out!" But the numerous accounts of tragic encounters give me and the folks around here a cautious respect for what we know to be the largest whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere, and the second largest in the world. ![]() I can chuckle at the fisherman who once said, "I didn't mind so much gettin' caught in it. She'd rather catch the naive or careless unawares, and from up close, in a boat.in the "sty."Īs the self-appointed President for Life of the Old Sow Whirlpool Survivors' Association, I make it my business to know who has met up with her, and how he or she has fared in her clutches. She's reluctant to disclose her mysteries from a distance. But the Old Sow, as she's called, often disappoints. We know without asking that he's searching for the sinister maw of our whirlpool. Here on the Maine-New Brunswick border, we've grown accustomed to seeing the occasional traveler take up position along the northeastern shore of Moose Island and stare out across the water.
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