The love story behind the lost Bluenose II sailor
CBC
The stranger made a stir that summer of 1966 in Yarmouth, N.S.
Strong and handsome, blond hair and blue eyes, he seemed like something dropped out of a movie.
With his Quebecois accent, the well-dressed, clean-shaven young sailor turned a few heads.
Cora Doucette, then 19, noticed him. She didn't know his name at first, so she called him Cute Guy.
"I forgot — or I chose to forget — my mother's words about fishermen," she said.
"Mum was concerned about us falling in love with a fisherman. Because she knew of friends who had lost loved ones like that. I never thought it would happen. I didn't think my sisters or me would fall in love with a fisherman."
His name was Neil Robitaille.
Doucette did indeed fall in love, and the two spoke of marriage in a succession of love letters. But that hoped-for wedding never happened.
Robitaille took a gig crewing the Bluenose II, and on Jan. 6, 1969, it sailed out of the Halifax harbour bound for Bermuda. Two days later, a storm caught the ship, and towering waves washed two sailors overboard.
One, Craig Harding, made it back to the Bluenose.
The other — Neil Robitaille — didn't.
Doucette woke up that morning to the news that her beloved was missing at sea.
"It was awful. I kept praying, I kept hoping that they would find his body," she said.
They never did.
This story is a collaboration between the Investigative Journalism Foundation and CBC Saskatchewan.
More than 300 patients without housing have gone from Edmonton emergency rooms directly into transitional accommodation since the launch of a unique program in March 2023.
B.C. Ferries says it is replacing its principle model of community feedback, the ferry advisory committee (FAC), which has been the main way the ferry corporation has kept in touch with ferry-reliant communities for over three decades.
The inquest for six inmates at the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre heard Tuesday that five of the men died overnight, one of several commonalities noted in testimony by a corrections consultant.
"Our bodies lie, but still we roam" is written on a wooden cross paying tribute to Paul Gilbert and Donna Whyte — the Windsor couple who were fatally hit by a vehicle on Walker Road last week.
In three years, the number of people who are homeless in Waterloo region has doubled a new report says.
P.E.I.'s minister of fisheries says the Maritime oyster industry has sustained another blow after evidence of a new disease was recently found in oysters from Spence Cove, about five kilometres west of the Confederation Bridge in New Brunswick.
WARNING: This story contains distressing details.
Canadian political leaders can't control the fact that Donald Trump will be the next president of the United States. Neither can they stop him from threatening to take illogical steps that could hurt American businesses and consumers almost as much as they would hurt Canadians.
A First Nation in southern Alberta is suing the federal government for $1 billion, the latest in a series of lawsuits which argue that annual payments promised in treaties should have been adjusted for inflation.
The oilpatch is reacting to Donald Trump's threats to impose a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian goods with a mix of concern and skepticism.