Ben Collings-Mackay says he knows how he will spend the $ 45,000 he received for the prestigious Frank H. Sobey scholarship.
Collings-Mackay, a fourth year business student at St. Francis Xavier in Antigonish, NS, and a fourth-generation lobster fisherman, is one of the eight beneficiaries this year of the Scholarship for Canadian Business Students of the Atlantic. It has a business focused on creating a life shirt for commercial fishermen that is less cumbersome than traditional ones.
The life vest would be automatically inflate when someone hits the water and would have a GPS feature that sends pings to nearby boats and emergency services that detail the location of the person by the board, said Collings-Mackay. A strobe light in the jacket would also help facilitate the location of the person.
Collings-Mackay said his company, CM Marine Safety Equipment, is working with a law firm and hopes to submit patent requests in the coming weeks.
He said that the company has been working with an engineering firm to develop a prototype of the life shirt and aims to build this summer. The device will be tested in preparation for the approval of regulatory agencies such as Transport Canada and the United States Coast Guard.
“The engineers and lawyers are not cheap,” said Collings-Mackay, a 22-year-old boy from Montague, PEI “and it will be great to continue pushing this project later and closer to one step more to save someone’s life. This is what this award means.”
For Collings-Mackay, safety in water is personal.
Tragedy of 1958
In June 1958, his great grandfather and a colleague had just sold his capture for the day. When they returned to the shore on a light plywood boat, according to Guardian Charlottetown of June 6, 1958, the boat overturned, throwing the couple into a rapid outgoing tide. Collings-Mackay great-grandfather managed to take a mooring rope that was running between a buoy and a boat anchored on the ground, and got safe. His colleague, Ernest Brown, was swept with the tide and died.
And on the first day of Collings-Mackay fishing, which occurred after his first year of university, he received a reminder of the dangers in the water.
When a boat stopped next to Collings-Mackay, he noticed that a man who was soaked and a little wobbly. When the man had been in the sea, he was beaten by Borda but managed to survive.
Collings-Mackay wondered why the person did not carry a life shirt. But soon he had a different perspective on life jackets when he was working.
“You realize why people do not use them and how they are completely inappropriate for work,” he said, pointing out that they are bulky, they are trapped in things and get in the way to carry out one’s tasks.
In addition, said Collings-Mackay, there is a stigma around the jackets of life.
“Fishing is a very generational traditional industry,” he said. “People fish with their parents and grandparents and never use them, so why would they do it? And I think there is also a little companion pressure to fit perhaps, as dumb as it may seem.”
Fishing deaths
From 1999 to 2021, the average number of deaths per year in Canadian commercial fishing ships was approximately 12. In almost half of the cases, the reason was the lack of personal flotation devices.
Mary Oxner is one of Collings-Mackay accounting teachers. She said that the scope of what is working is much more complex than the companies that many other students establish.
“This is something expensive to bring to the market,” he said. “It requires extensive evidence, it requires a patent, it requires a legal consultation, it requires technical and engineering support … It is something complex when you have a 20 -year -old to try to get all those support and resources.”
The business aspirations of Collings-Mackay are far from their original life plans. Growing up, he always thought he would join the army. (It serves in the Highlanders Reserve Unit of Nueva Scotia). He said his parents encouraged him to concentrate on obtaining an education.
‘I really are giving me a purpose’
The school was not always easy for Collings-Mackay, who fought and had to be trained in mathematics in high school, which is surprising since the specialties in accounting today.
“If I didn’t come to school, I would never have done this project,” he said. “And I think it’s really giving me a purpose, something I can achieve and fight.”
This motivation comes in part from the people who have invested in their company, but also the safety of loved ones.
“Every time I have, I say that it is not a greater motivation to have all your friends and family fishing every day without a life shirt,” he said. “It’s a tragedy that expects to happen.”
