My name is Nelson Barnes and I’m from Cottlesville, Newfoundland. I’ve been working for McKeil since 2001; on the Great Lakes and in the Arctic. I am a deckhand on the boat and sometimes the cook too.

My most powerful memory of water was when I was about 4 years old my grandfather took me out on an old fishing boat and took me around, he had some fishing nets he had to haul and came back in. That was a big thing. Water is important because my living is from water, I work to make a living on the water. And we all drink water.

We were on the water and found an iceberg, and a polar bear tried to get on our boat and all kinds of fun stuff. We first started feeding it. Got some bologna for him, got him some bagels, fattened him right up. Then he started to get playful, playing around with us, just rolling on the ice. Then he went a couple hundred yards away from the tug. We were stuck in the ice and we wouldn’t go nowhere. So he decided to get abroad the barge, we had a barge in tow, but he couldn’t get up because it was too high. So went about a couple hundred feet away from the tug, and he stayed there all day. Come suppertime we had chicken and my oh my when he smelled the chicken, could see him coming. So we fed him chicken and then he went on his merry way.