Tag Archives: Johnston Net and Twine
From Wheatley: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (Part 2)
Cec Balkwell is at the helm of the Lake Erie gillnetter, Everett H, owned at the time by Omstead Foods of Wheatley. Doug Johnston, his twin brother Don, Jim Whitesell and Gary Hickson are working the deck. Setting net in about 10 metres of water, just off Hen Island – 25 kilometres due south of Kingsville. Doug Johnston continues his story. “The anchor was on the rail at the stern. Cec gunned the engine; nothing unusual about that. There was a knot in the anchor line; it caught on my wedding ring. Before I knew it, I was over the stern going to the bottom.” >click to read< 08:09
From Wheatley: Voyage to the bottom of the sea (Part 1)
I came to be speaking with Doug Johnston in the net repair room of Johnston Net and Twine, the shop, on County Road 3 on the east side of Wheatley, that Doug co-owns with his son, Rob. Doug has been in the Lake Erie commercial fishing industry for 67 of his 79 years. Of those, Doug was on Lake Erie for 34 years, and for about four years on Lake Huron, as a deckhand, and then captain and boat owner. To this day, he co-owns, with his son Rob, the Dorothy J – a 68-foot, 300-horsepower Lake Erie fish tug built in 1957 at Dunnville on the Grand River.Like most people who make their living in the commercial fishing industry, Doug has seen a lot of things: years when fish were plentiful, years when it seemed they had vanished; spectacular sunrises on smooth-as-glass water; and terrifying storms and fellow-fishermen lost and rescued. >click to read< 10:06
