I am asked this question often; “Geez!  Livin’ out there and all……..no stores, like…………nuthin’ goin’ on………ya know……no cable………….no restaurants……like, do you and Sally get really bored or sump’n?  Like………waddya do, man?”

Today’s answer:  It was around two-ish.  We had guests for lunch and had just finished eating when we heard the drone of heavy engines overhead.  R and F operate one of the very best charter/adventure tour operations on the coast and R had also been a helicopter pilot in his previous vocation.  They both were familiar with the sound.

“Search and Rescue plane.  Must be something goin’ on.”

We turned on the VHF radio and overheard the coastguard talking to a boat assisting another that was taking on water too rapidly for comfort.

“This is Comox radio (Coastguard).  Please provide your exact locations.  Do you need assistance?”

“Yes.  We need assistance.  Vessel taking water.  We are the ‘Sportfish’ and will take the vessel Lady B to the nearest dock.  Our location is..(they read out their GPS coordinates)…….We really could use a pump!”

“Pump arriving by way of coastguard fastboat and another vessel in the vicinity.  Estimated arrival time both vessels approximately one hour.”

We were only about 20 minutes away.  But I had just put my boat up on the beach for servicing.  I called the Sportfish and asked if they required quicker service.  They answered ‘yes‘.  Then I called my neighbour J.

“Hey!  Feel like being a hero?  Some guy is sinking and he needs one of our pumps but we’ll also need to use your boat.  Mine is on the hard.”

“Let’s go!”

We loaded his boat in a couple of minutes and then we headed north to where the VHF conversation we overheard had described the scene.  They had described a pretty narrow area.  Should be easy to find even though the afternoon light was limited.

As we were getting closer to the area it was not at all clear where they might be.  We could see no lights.  We didn’t see a boat under tow.  We didn’t see ‘Sportfish’.

“You have gone too far!  Stop!  Go left”. 

Go left?!  Who’s talking?  Whoever was saying that could see us.  Weird.  But I recognized the voice over the VHF.  It was R, a neighbour who lived about half a mile from our current location.  I guessed that she had seen the activity, listened in on the radio call and was watching from her window.  When she saw us come up on the scene, she opted to ‘get involved’ and help direct us.  It seemed odd, but she sent us up a channel that we had not considered and began to search in a place completely different from what the coastguard had described.

The sinking boat was heavy aluminum, dark grey in colour.  The name of the vessel was printed in large black letters on the half-submerged stern.  The fellows on board were urchin divers and were clad in black wetsuits.  No lights were on and the area was in shadow.  And it was raining.  Against the grey rocky shore they were all but invisible and literally dropping further out of sight as they sank slowly deeper.

We saw them when we were about 100 feet away.  We never would have found them without the ‘stop‘ and ‘go left’ directions.

We pulled alongside.  I slung the pump over to one of the crew and then followed that with the pick-up hose while J nestled his boat alongside.  Then we attached the outflow hose and began to pump.  The water was already about three inches over the engine.  The entire engine compartment was swamped.  A lot of expensive machinery was slowly being ruined by the sea.

One guy had been in the compartment with a ten gallon pail bailing for all he was worth.  He was not winning the battle when we showed up.  But the little Honda pump worked well and the water level very slowly began to drop.  Took about twenty minutes for the engine to break the surface.  And that was just about ten percent of the water in the boat.

By then the Coastguard fast response boat showed up and another pump was put to work.  After an hour the aft section was relatively dry and the hole that had been opened where the outboard leg had been damaged was evident and trying its best to fill up what we had just pumped out.

We had to get the stern higher or the boat would continue to flood.

Urchin divers pick urchins.  No surprise.  And they put the urchins they collect in large net bags.  Each bag holds about 300 or so urchins and weighs about 100 pounds.  And each bag looks like a giant urchin with thousands of spines sticking out.  There were already about fifteen bags on the dock and we threw out the remaining ten or so to lighten the load and get the hole above water.

‘Course after throwing out the bags we just stood there looking at the hole and wondering why our efforts hadn’t worked until it dawned us to get out of the boat ourselves!  Duh!

The Coastguard provided the crew with some emergency ‘stuffing’ specially carried for a breach in a hull.  It resembles thick cotton batten.  The crew stuffed it in the hole and, though it continued to leak, the flow was pretty much under control.  It was time to go.

We gave our names, phone number and address and left them to it just as two more Coastguard vessels came on the scene.

A couple of hours later one of the Coastguard boats returned J’s pump to his dock.  The holed vessel was under tow back to Campbell River.  We listened on the VHF as they made their way in the dark and against the current.  The guy who does ‘haul-out’ at the local shipyard had already been called.  They’d likely have the boat ‘on the hard’ before midnight.

All in a day’s work for the Coastguard, I guess and not an infrequent occurrence to a commercial fisherman.  It can get a bit dicey out here at times.  Especially in December.  But luck was with them.  They stayed afloat.  Saved the vessel and got to go home the same day.  They even kept their catch.

As for us?  Well it was just nice to get a break from all that boredom, ya know?