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Fogs, Storms, and Tossing Billows

Were the frequent experiences of one of Cape Cod’s deep-sea skippers. Captain Manuel Enos was one of the Cape’s able mariners or deep-sea sailormen, a group that has vanished into history.

Always a Cape Codder, he went to sea as young as twelve years. Thereafter, for many a year, his home was on the bounding wave, with only the skin of his ship between him and the water. He went with his vessels to fish off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, the Western Banks, and Sable Island. An apt and natural sailor, he quickly acquired essential seamanship and at the age of twenty-three years he became the skipper of the deep-sea schooner Gertie S. Winsor. How proud he must have felt to take her out, as her master, on his first such trip.

His many vivid experiences and an inherent capacity for it, made Captain Enos a fascinating sea-story teller. He often told, with undying sorrow, of the loss of his first love, the Gertie S. Winsor. She was the victim of a dense fog on Peaked Hill Bar, off North Truro â€” that graveyard of scores of fine vessels and their men. Captain Enos and his crew were taken ashore from her by the Coast Guard’s using the breeches buoy. The loss of his vessel in 1895 was all the more hard to bear since she had just weathered two violent storms on the way home, only to meet her doom “at the Cape End’s back door.”

On another occasion, while skipper of the Annie Perry, he was nearing Boston Light, when his vessel was rammed by a beam trawler and went down. All aboard were saved.

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