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Photo Pru Sowers
Chris King, the son of Capt. Billy King, skipper of the Patricia Marie, has stayed in the commercial fishing business despite the disaster that cost him his father.
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Photo Pru Sowers
Provincetown painter Sal Del Deo with “The Shuckers,” one of the three paintings he did to commemorate the sinking of the Patricia Marie. “The Shuckers” is on display through November at Berta Walker Gallery, 208 Bradford St. All of the models for these paintings are local fishermen, including the son and grandson of Capt. Billy King.
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30-year anniversary of the Patricia Marie disaster
By Pru Sowers
Banner Staff
PROVINCETOWN — It was the mother lode of scallops, appearing just in time to offset the sudden, unexplained disappearance of codfish in the summer of 1976.
A giant, unfathomable bed of scallops, found about 10 miles offshore, near a place called Pollock Rip. No one knew how long the bed would keep producing, but day after day, boatload after boatload, the scallops kept coming up in the bags tossed out by Provincetown fishermen, who had changed the rigging on their boats to dredges, replacing the nets that had been used to troll for cod and flounder. The scallop bed kept going, until 50 or 60 boats a day from New Bedford, Harwich and other ports were steaming to the same few square miles to fill their holds and decks with scallops, which in the fall of 1976 were going for $2.50 a pound shucked, a fortune in those days.
“It was the golden age of scallops, like the gold rush in California. Prices were sky high. Everybody converted to scalloping because it was so lucrative,” says Sal Del Deo, now a renowned painter who had fished himself for a few summers back then. “The captains recruited anyone who could walk, male or female, to shuck scallops that fall.”
One of the boats that kept going out empty and coming back so laden with scallops that the men on deck could barely see over the piles, was the Patricia Marie, a 50-foot fishing vessel owned by Capt. Billy King. He set out on Oct. 24, 1976, with six crewmembers, going back for yet another load of scallops, just like he had been doing for weeks. But this time the story ended tragically. None of the crew of the Patricia Marie came back alive. It was the worst fishing disaster in Provincetown since 1908.
The facts are known: several boats were heading back to Provincetown, loaded with scallops, trailing each other in a ragged line that stretched out a bit. It was dark, and the boats were only a few miles offshore, running along the north arm of the Outer Cape. It was a fair sea, although the waves were running about 10 feet as the wind had picked up to about 25 knots. Dicey weather, but not enough to worry experienced captains like King.
It was late, so the crews were below-deck sleeping while King was in the pilothouse. He was talking on the radio with another skipper, and because all the captains were on the same channel, they all heard King say he was going to check on something, he’d be right back. He was probably stepping out of the wheelhouse.
The Patricia Marie was on the radar screen of the fishing vessel right in front of it in the string of boats heading home. And the next minute, it was gone, evaporated.
“Billy King was coming back after a trip, loaded to the scuppers. One minute he was there, and then he wasn’t. They never had a chance,” Del Deo said.
The other skippers immediately turned around and headed to the Patricia Marie’s last location. Reports said that one captain heard a man, or perhaps more than one, in the water screaming for help. But it was dark and the water temperature was 50 degrees. The boats steamed back and forth but couldn’t find any survivors. And in a few short minutes, an infinitesimal moment in the generations of men who have fished Provincetown’s waters, a town was brought to its knees.
Just like that, a crew of seven — a father and son, a high school basketball star who was engaged to marry the cheerleader squad captain, a troubled man who was at peace perhaps only on the sea, two regular crew and Billy King — were lost, leaving behind a town that in some ways still hasn’t recovered.
“To lose seven people in one fell swoop knocked everybody on their butt,” said Napi Van Dereck, who was particularly close friends with Richard “Dicky” Oldenquist, a man with a quick temper who had told Van Dereck the trip on Oct. 24 was going to be his last on the Patricia Marie. “Nobody was prepared for so many people to go down.”
The theory of what happened was that a large wave washed over the bow of the boat. Normally, the water would flow off the decks and back into the sea. But the scallops, piled so high on the deck, may have clogged the openings in the rails, pushing the nose down, allowing more water to flood the boat. With the engines now driving the boat towards the bottom of the sea, it would have been submerged in seconds.
There was no mayday call and no time for a life raft. Billy King’s body was found around midday the next day, wearing a life vest. The body of Walter Marshall was dragged up in a fishing net a week later. When the Patricia Marie was finally found, sitting undamaged in 135 feet of water, loaded with scallops, the bodies of the rest of the crew were not there.
“It shook the town to its foundations,” said Chris King, the son of Billy King, who was a sophomore in Provincetown High School at the time of the accident. “Nobody of those generations had seen a disaster like that or had been part of a disaster like that.”
As small towns do in the face of disaster, Provincetown quickly organized memorials to help in a practical way to raise money for the families of the seven crewmembers. But Chris King remembers the emotional aftershocks kept coming, as slowly, eventually, every body except Dicky Oldenquist’s was found.
“People were just getting over it and then they would find another body. That went on for six months,” King said. “But everybody had each other. Everyone was together. No one grieved alone. I’ve never seen anything affect this town like that since. And I’ve lived here my whole life.”
An emotional corner was turned sometime later that fall. King was on the Provincetown High School football team, usually the smallest and worst in the league. In fact, the fall of 1976 was the last year the high school had a football team.
As usual, the Provincetown team was losing, down 14-0 at the half. But then something unusual happened. Three local fishing captains came into the locker room during half-time, something that had never happened before despite the fact the entire fishing community came to the games each week, changing their schedule to fish on Friday — which they usually took off — so they would be free on football Saturdays.
“I remember these guys saying, ‘You don’t know how much this game means to us,’” King said. “All the kids had their heads between their legs. It had been a bad week. But it pushed everybody to do more than they usually do. And we won that game 34-14. It seems like a funny thing to remember, but 30 years later that particular series of events sticks in my mind.
“It seemed like it was the end of the world. But for the young people at least, [that win] made it seem like we could go on. Everybody realized they could go on from here. They came together, they grieved together and they went on together.”
psowers@provincetownbanner.com
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McCowen murder trial Day 2
McCowen murder trial: Day 1
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In the News
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Oct 19th, 2006