Ben Collings-Mackay says he is aware of how he will spend the $45,000 he acquired for the distinguished Frank H. Sobey scholarship.
Collings-Mackay, a fourth-year enterprise scholar at St. Francis Xavier College in Antigonish, N.S., and a fourth-generation lobster fisherman, is one in all eight recipients this 12 months of the scholarship for Atlantic Canadian enterprise college students. He has a enterprise targeted on making a life-jacket for business fishermen that’s much less cumbersome than conventional ones.
The life-jacket would inflate robotically when somebody hits the water and would have a GPS function that sends out pings to close by boats and emergency companies detailing the overboard individual’s location, mentioned Collings-Mackay. A strobe mild on the jacket would additionally assist make it simpler to find the individual.
Collings-Mackay mentioned his firm, CM Marine Security Gear, is working with a regulation agency and hopes to file patent purposes inside the subsequent few weeks.
He mentioned the corporate has been working with an engineering agency to develop a prototype of the life-jacket and goals to get it constructed this summer time. The gadget can be examined in preparation for approval by regulatory companies corresponding to Transport Canada and the USA Coast Guard.
“Engineers and legal professionals aren’t low cost,” mentioned Collings-Mackay, a 22-year-old from Montague, P.E.I. “And it will be nice to have the ability to maintain pushing this mission additional down the street and get it one step nearer to saving anyone’s life. That is what this award means.”
For Collings-Mackay, security on the water is private.
1958 tragedy
In June 1958, his great-grandfather and a colleague had simply offered their catch for the day. Once they had been going again to shore in a light-weight plywood dinghy — in accordance with the June 6, 1958, Charlottetown Guardian — the boat capsized, throwing the pair right into a swift outgoing tide. Collings-Mackay’s great-grandfather managed to seize on to a mooring rope that was operating between a buoy and a ship anchored ashore, and pulled himself to security. His colleague, Ernest Brown, was swept away with the tide and died.
And on Collings-Mackay’s first day of fishing, which got here after his first 12 months of college, he acquired a reminder of the risks on the water.
When a ship pulled up beside the one Collings-Mackay was on, he observed a person who was soaking moist and a bit wobbly. When the person had been out at sea, he was knocked overboard however managed to outlive.
Collings-Mackay requested himself why the individual wasn’t sporting a life-jacket. However he quickly had a distinct perspective about life-jackets when he was out working.
“You understand why individuals do not put on them and the way they’re simply utterly insufficient for the job,” he mentioned, noting they’re cumbersome, get caught on issues and get in the best way of finishing up one’s duties.
As effectively, Collings-Mackay mentioned, there is a stigma round life-jackets.
“Fishing is a really generational, conventional trade,” he mentioned. “Folks fish with their fathers and their grandfathers and so they by no means put on them, so why would they? And I believe there’s additionally a little bit of a peer strain there as effectively to slot in possibly, as foolish as it could sound.”
Fishing deaths
From 1999 to 2021, the average number of deaths per year on Canadian commercial fishing vessels was about 12. In almost half of the situations, an absence of non-public flotation gadgets was the cause.
Mary Oxner is one in all Collings-Mackay’s accounting professors. She mentioned the scope of what he is engaged on is much extra advanced than companies many different college students arrange.
“That is an costly factor to carry to market,” she mentioned. “It requires in depth testing, it requires a patent, it requires authorized seek the advice of, it requires technical and engineering assist … it is a advanced factor to do whenever you’re a younger 20-something-year-old to attempt to pull all of these helps and assets.”
Collings-Mackay’s entrepreneurial aspirations are a far cry from his unique life plans. Rising up, he all the time figured he’d be part of the navy. (He does serve within the Nova Scotia Highlanders reserve unit.) He mentioned his mother and father inspired him to concentrate on getting an schooling.
‘It is actually giving me a objective’
Faculty did not all the time come straightforward to Collings-Mackay, who struggled and needed to be tutored in math in secondary college, which is shocking given he majors in accounting as we speak.
“If I did not come to high school, I might have by no means executed this mission,” he mentioned. “And I believe it is actually giving me a objective, one thing that I can obtain and attempt in direction of.”
That motivation is available in half from the individuals who have invested in his firm, but in addition the security of family members.
“Each time I pitch, I say it is no higher motivation than having all of your family and friends on the market fishing daily with no life-jacket on,” he mentioned. “It is a tragedy ready to occur.”
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