As crab fishermen, Mallory Harrigan and Cliff Russell know the beauty and power of the sea as well as anyone. In their years working the frigid, rough waters of the Labrador Sea, they have experienced mother nature at her most exquisite and her most treacherous. No day is the same.
Mallory and Cliff encounter novel sights and situations so frequently that they have come to expect the unexpected. But they were definitely not expecting to find what they did that morning in June.
Like any other workday, they had set out off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada with the hope of returning with heaps of the sea’s bounty. Snow crab is the primary catch, but coldwater shrimp, flounder, haddock and various other fish are all plentiful in this North Atlantic fishery. On this day, however, they would return with another type of creature entirely.
At first, they thought it was a seal. They figured he’d popped up from his watery home to sun himself on that iceberg. But they quickly realized that it wasn’t a seal. In fact, the animal wasn’t supposed to be in the water at all. The fishing boat crew could see that this terrified creature was in dire need of their help. Even in the face of profound danger, they knew they had to try.