Brian Angus and Dorothy Stauffer set out from Vancouver’s Coal Harbour on Sunday morning to embark on their annual months-long sailing trip aboard their 33-foot yacht Malaika.
But within hours they were undertaking a harrowing rescue of survivors from a fishing charter boat that sank in the Strait of Georgia, leaving six missing and presumed drowned.
The toll might have been higher except for the efforts of the married couple, who have been sailing together for more than 30 years.
“I look over to my right and literally five feet off the side of my boat, there’s a person in the water, and then I look and there’s two more. So I screamed to Dorothy,” Angus said in an interview from Pender Island, where the Malaika was docked on Tuesday.
Angus, a former Air Canada pilot, had been on the lookout for logs and debris, while Stauffer, a service director with the airline, was below deck consoling their pet cat in the choppy seas. Stauffer emerged and spotted two more people in the water as Angus called in a mayday around noon.
He said none of the survivors were wearing life-jackets, and they clutched their phones above water as the rescue unfolded.
“It was all they could do, to raise their arm and wave at me with their iPhones. They wouldn’t let go of their iPhones,” Angus said. “There was no panic at all, they just said, ‘Please, please help.’”
“It felt like an eternity,” Stauffer said.
Angus said he faced a tough choice.
“There were three people together, about 10 or 15 feet apart. And the other two were probably 100, 200 yards away. Well, I had to make the decision that we could only save three. We could only get to three immediately.”
The Malaika was towing a small inflatable dinghy and Angus wheeled the yacht around in circles, while Stauffer shouted instructions for the survivors to try to grab the inflatable.
There was a language barrier with those in the water and Stauffer said the two men and a woman didn’t seem to understand her instructions.
Eventually the woman managed to clamber into the dinghy, while the two men grabbed hold of its handles.
But Angus and Stauffer lost sight of the other two people in the water.
Angus said it took about 18 minutes before the three were secured, and a coast guard hovercraft soon arrived to retrieve them. RCMP said a fourth person was also rescued in the incident, with two people taken to hospital in critical condition and two later discharged.
The Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Victoria said Monday that the four survivors were hypothermic after spending less than an hour in the water.
Vernon Wang, a licensed sightseeing boat operator in English Bay, Vancouver, said he knew the captain of the boat that sank and that he had died in the tragedy. Wang said the captain was in his early 20s and the news of the sinking had left the charter boat industry in shock.
Wang said he planned to visit the captain’s mother on Tuesday to see if the family needed any help.
Richmond RCMP would not confirm the identity of the captain, but a spokesman said “our focus right now is on recovery and supporting these families.”
Wang said it was important for charter clients to choose trustworthy and licensed boating companies and to inspect the boat before going fishing.
An RCMP underwater recovery team has been tasked with finding the sunken vessel, which police believe sank “in very deep waters,” between 150 to 180 metres in depth.
“The investigation remains ongoing to determine the cause of the sinking and to confirm the identities of the six missing individuals,” Richmond RCMP said on Monday.
The Transportation Safety Board also said it deployed a team to investigate the sinking on Tuesday.
Angus and Stauffer said their airline emergency training kicked in during the rescue.
Stauffer said they were told by other rescuers and sailors that saving three people was the best they could do given the conditions on the seas that day.
“We couldn’t have done anything more. It’s just the way it was worded to us. There is nothing more we could have done,” she said.
Angus said lessons for others about boating safety were more important than any accolades for their rescue efforts.
“I don’t want to be called a hero again,” Angus said. “I want people to remember about going out in a boat and not wearing a life-jacket.”
