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It was the fall of 1944 and the Canadian navy corvette HMCS Arrowhead had just finished escorting a convoy into Goose Bay, Labrador when its skipper, Lester Hickey, ordered the vessel to stop outside the Inuit community of Rigolet.

The skipper tossed an explosive over the side and when a school of stunned cod rose to the surface, he scooped them up, cut off their heads and threw the prime fillets and the rest of the fish back into the sea. All he wanted was the critical ingredient for his signature cod head soup.

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“The soup went down pretty good,” said Glenn Martin, 90, a former Arrowhead crew member now living in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.

Fast forward to 1954 and Mr. Martin is a young machinist in Prince Albert getting a routine chest x-ray from a Czechoslovakian-born doctor.

The men began chit-chatting about the war and, upon learning that Mr. Martin was aboard the Arrowhead, the doctor said, “Remember the time you went fishing off of Rigolet?”