When the crew of the fishing schooner Annie Healy left their home port of Fox Harbour, Placentia Bay, on Wednesday, August 17, 1927, no one could have imagined what fate held in store for them. Times were hard in Newfoundland that year. On shore, wives of the crew were often worked to exhaustion, even more so while their men were at sea. Most had lost parents, siblings, or children to tuberculosis. Each family had at least one tragic story. But when a hurricane struck Placentia Bay on August 25 of that year, a tragedy unlike any they had lived through would unite these people in ways untold. Now, eighty-six years later, the full story of the ill-fated vessel and her crew is told for the first time. The closeness of the crew and their families, and how they worked together to ensure their little community survived, is relived through the memories of children of the crew, stories passed down from their mothers, and reports from the last men to see the schooner afloat.

Darrell Duke is an author, singer, songwriter, performer, and photographer from Freshwater, Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. He lives in Clarenville with his wife, Lori, and daughters, Emma and Jessie. Thursday’s Storm is Darrell’s third book. His second book, When We Worked Hard: Tickle Cove, Newfoundland, has been in the Newfoundland and Labrador school system since 2008. Darrell is currently completing his next album, which contains his song, “The Annie Healy,” and he is also writing his fourth book, a novel set primarily in Ireland in 1778 depicting his fourth great-grandfather’s plight and subsequent journey to Newfoundland.

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