On Sunday, 28 June, a chartered fishing boat went down in the Strait of Georgia, off British Columbia. Ten people were aboard. Four were pulled from the water alive; six are presumed drowned. The sinking almost went unnoticed: the boat sent no distress call, and the alarm was raised only because a passing sailboat happened to see people in the water.
The vessel had left Steveston, a fishing neighbourhood in Richmond, and was near Roberts Bank, roughly ten nautical miles southwest of Vancouver International Airport, when it began taking on water and sank. Its name has not been released. The charter operator has not been named either.
No distress call from the boat
The Canadian Coast Guard radio station listens around the clock. On Sunday it heard nothing from the boat — no mayday, no distress signal of any kind. The first anyone knew of the sinking was late morning, around 11.45 a.m., when the crew of a sailboat crossing the strait spotted survivors floating in the water and called it in.
The people they found were on their backs, trying to stay afloat, and none of them were wearing lifejackets. The sailboat's crew — a couple, Brian Angus and Dorothy Stauffer, sailing from Vancouver toward Saturna Island — put their dinghy in the water and pulled out as many people as they could before official help arrived. A Coast Guard hovercraft reached the scene soon after and took over.
Major Greg Clarke of the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre credited them plainly: "If it wasn't for them, frankly I think this would have been more tragic."
What the rescue exposed
Two things about the rescue keep drawing comment from the people who ran it. The first is that no distress signal ever came from the boat, in one of the busiest commercial corridors on the coast, with ferry lanes and shipping traffic all around. A vessel can go down in minutes; without an EPIRB or a personal locator beacon transmitting on its own, a crew in the water has no way to be found except by luck. Here the luck was a sailboat on the same stretch of water at the same hour.
The second is the lifejackets, or rather the lack of them. Responders came back to it again and again. People in cold coastal water without flotation have very little time, and the gap between the four who were recovered and the six who were not may turn partly on that.
The search and the recovery
The response was large. Alongside the Coast Guard, it drew in the RCMP, Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue volunteers out of Richmond, the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre, Canadian Armed Forces aircraft and helicopters, and ferry operators including BC Ferries. The search ran through the day and was suspended around 9.45 p.m. on Sunday, when the effort turned from rescue to recovery.
Of the four survivors, two have since been discharged from hospital and two remain in critical condition. The six who are missing — four men and two women, according to the RCMP — are presumed to have drowned.
The cause is not yet known, and officials have not speculated. The RCMP's Underwater Recovery Team is to locate the sunken boat using sonar, with a remotely operated vehicle dive to follow if conditions allow. Until the wreck is found and examined, the cause stays open.
Photo: Steveston Harbour, Richmond, BC — the boat's departure point. Jeff Hitchcock / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
