It's all quiet off the North East coast today, but 50 years ago a beached vessel at Tynemouth made the headlines of the Evening Chronicle.
Given the seafaring history of our region, it wasn’t that uncommon to see a vessel in trouble off our shores in the rough North Sea. If we take the stretch of water between Whitby and Berwick, there were around 380 recorded shipwrecks between 1740 and 2000.
It was July 1972 when the fishing boat, Bella, ended up on the rocks 50 yards from the shore at Tynemouth. Our dramatic photograph captures the holed boat lying on its side at St Edward's Bay.
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The Chronicle reported: "Five men took to a life raft when their seine-net boat ran aground off Tynemouth. The Bella, a £15,000 vessel, was badly damaged after being holed on rocks off Sharpness Point. The sea was calm. The 56-year-old owner of the boat, Mr Lawrence Olsen, scrambled ashore with the four crewmen and called the coastguard."
A Tynemouth coastguard told us: "They missed the entrance to the river in the fog." The owner's wife, Clara, meanwhile told our reporter: "The fog just came down. It was like a mill pond when they went out. They had a good day's fishing and were amazed when the fog came down."
The boat's skipper, Mr Sid Clark, 59, of North Shields said: "We were feeling our way through the fog when we struck. We were going at about three knots when we hit a rock in six feet of water. We got into the life raft and came ashore."
For one of the five crew members, we reported, it turned out to be an unfortunate start to his career as a fisherman. "Anthony Abernathy, 22, signed on to the Bella only four days ago, and it was his first job as a seine-net boat fisherman."
Happily, the boat's owner, who we told also owned six similar boats, was quickly at work repairing the vessel which had just had a refit at a Felling boatyard two weeks earlier.
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