Hi Steve, how are you doing?
Very well, thank you.
Now, Linda was telling me that you're in the Coast Guard, and I don't really know much, I guess, about that. How did you get into that, and what do you guys do?
Maybe I should tell you a little bit about who I am with.
Sure.
There are basically two divisions of the Coast Guard. There is the regular Coast Guard that we've known forever, with the big ships with the white stripe down the middle. As time has gone on and budgets have changed so has the role of the Coast Guard and there's been a new development now which is called the Coast Guard Auxiliary. And that.I'm the base commander of an Auxiliary unit in Gibsons. I run a Coast Guard Auxiliary unit. And our job is primarily search and rescue. That's virtually all we do, is search and rescue. People on boats that have gone missing or....?
Boats that have gone missing, people that have gone missing. Typically. we've done three people that have jumped off a ferry in the last half year. We have spent the last week keeping a fifty foot boat afloat to avoid an oil spill and avoid it sinking in a waterway, a heavily used waterway.
A commercial laneway I guess?
Commercial lane, yeah. We've pulled two wind-surfers out of the water that have got too far out and have become exhausted and.in the last week. We do a lot of towing where people can't read a fuel gauge. And.
Probably much more that we probably think. More than you think.
That's a big part of, it seems to be a big part of our normal weekend. Would this be, for instance, Sewell's boat rental, like boat rentals and that? I imagine that the boat owners are probably a little more savvy.
With the boat. with Sewell's our biggest callout on the Sewell stuff is 'where am I'. And they'll go alongside a boat and say 'we need help' and so we'll come out and direct them home. Yeah, so regular Coast Guard is more into enforcement of the fisheries habitat and enforcement thereof.
What about, I know in the States, the Coast Guard does a lot of narcotics work, I think?
Yeah.
Does that happen much?
We don't do, either Coast Guard branch, we don't do. we don't carry guns, we don't do any enforcement, but we transport because there's no other reasonable way to do it. We transport RCMP. RCMP do all the enforcement on the coast.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
Auxiliary.
We're quite different than the American Coast Guard who have machine guns on the bows of their boats. We don't do that, except when we do movies with our boats. Yes.
And they put them on for a week. So we transport RCMP, yeah.
Are there certain Coast Guard boats that would always have an RCMP on board?
No, they would call us.
Or do they have their own boats?
RCMP have their three big catamarans that they run on the West Coast, and they're used obviously for RCMP enforcement. When they need boats outside of the three vessels, which is not, with the amount of coastline we have, three vessels is not a lot of boats, so when they need additional boats they use the Coast Guard Auxiliary, primarily.
Do right now. I remember a few years ago the stories of the boats coming over loaded with, I guess, alleged illegal immigrants.
That's right. Were you.... was your unit involved in that? Your division?
Yeah.
My particular division wasn't, but a unit further up north was. And everything that would float in that community was used to get the immigrants off the boat and transport them into Victoria, where they were, I think it was Victoria, where they were kept in a barracks. If I'm wrong it was Jericho. I think there were actually two incidents, but our units were used to get the people off the boats and get them into safe quarters. Yeah, yeah.
So you guys don't do enforcement, but do you find illegal fisherman, and do you call that in? There's another branch which we haven't discussed, which is Fisheries, and they carry guns. And they come alongside in their own boats and check you for a fishing license, and if you don't have one they can write tickets and impound your boat. Our. the Auxiliary role, again, which is my responsibility, is safety, water safety, and the enforcement that we do, we do come alongside, but we come with by out of friendliness. Do you carry enough life jackets? Are they right for the people on board? If your boat were to go down in a minute, what would you, what resources would you have to look after yourself? Do you carry a portable radio that's waterproof on your person? Do you have flares? I mean that sort of thing. And our whole approach is that of recommendation, and we also have a division of professionals that go out and you have to ask for it and we will come on and do a free courtesy examination, where we go through the whole boat.
So, like a boat owner maybe doesn't know a lot about what he's doing? Yeah.
Many boaters, as long as you approach them without a gun, are quite happy to have us tell them what they should have. Nobody wants their family to die, so where this. a big piece of that work comes from the yacht clubs who are very aware of this, so at the beginning of every year, the yacht clubs will have, on the long May weekend, for instance, they'll have a huge gathering at one of their out stations. And we'll send a dozen of our inspectors in. And they volunteer, they invite us, and we spend the day there, and we go through all their boats and show them where they're great and where they're…Yeah, you seem to be very well equipped in technology. Good for you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, our main roles again, search and rescue and water safety. Boating safety. Boating safety is a big. it's a division that we're trying to grow from the Auxiliary side. I got you. And I see those yacht races, I guess, they're not yacht races, I guess they'd be sailboat races. Sailboat races, yes.
Is there ever lots of trouble with those, or....?
They look after themselves, primarily depending on... Female Voice: They're quite impressive _______, look at that.... That is so cool. Thank you.
Female Voice: You're welcome. Thank you dear. So my dinner's coming. If we're asked to we will patrol those races but essentially we go on the busy, busy weekends when you see all the sails everywhere, we go on patrol and we stand by looking for, I mean awaiting, awaiting calls. Those boats usually have radios on them. But for the most part they have their own power boats that come out with them and they have their own closed channel and they talk to each other and if there's a problem they'll try to deal with it themselves. If they're hurt or they go in the water, then it's our turn. And we can bring in the hovercraft. We have a huge hovercraft that we use for evacuations. That's another part of our work, is we evacuate DOA's and people that are hurt on the islands and in areas where they're not accessible to the normal ambulance system, so we come and get them. Yeah.
One quick question before I let you get started on your dinner. Do you think most boaters are fully equipped? When you give a seminar to somebody or go to someone's boat, are those boats. I would assume that they wouldn't be for some reason. Most people are probably quite well intentioned, but, you know, it's not uncommon to see a $50,000 boat but they won't spend the money on, you know, $3,000 worth of equipment that'll keep the family alive. When I do talks, one of the statistics that I'm using currently, is that 80% of the people that were dead in the water that we recovered, not saved, but recovered, 80% of them, that incident would have been a story to tell their kids had they been carrying a waterproof radio. Everybody thinks the life jacket is the beginning and the end of it.
That's.... I don't go out on the water a lot but I wouldn't even think about a radio. A life jacket we say. I said one day to the press and they quoted me, which was a little insensitive to the bereaved family, a life jacket after an hour simply makes the bodies easier for us to find. You can't survive in this water. On a hot summer day you might survive two hours, but.
You're just talking about temperature-wise? Yeah.
Yeah.
So if we don't know you're in trouble, we can't help you. If we do know you're in trouble, I can guarantee you we will save your life. Well, okay. I'll let you get at your meal there. Thanks Steve.
My pleasure.
Thanks very much.
