Richard Gaines, the award-winning 40-year New England journalist who spent more than a decade as staff writer with the Gloucester Daily Times and carved out a national niche with his local coverage of the commercial fishing industry, was found dead Sunday afternoon in the swimming pool outside his home in his beloved Bay View section of the city.

Gaines, who was 69, was found by his wife Nancy — also a longtime writer and editor and a Times correspondent — at around 2 p.m. yesterday when she returned to the couple's Quarry Street home from Boston.

Nancy Gaines said she was initially surprised that Richard did not pick her up at the Gloucester commuter rail station as they had planned. She then made her way home, and found him already dead in the pool.

"We had plans to try to clean the pool," she said Sunday evening. "And I'm guessing he either got up very early — as he often did — and was working on the pool, or was examining it. It looked as it he may have had a heart attack."

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