Six people are missing and presumed drowned after a charter fishing boat capsized off the coast of British Columbia on Sunday, setting off an intense search and rescue operation in the waters off the province. The case has remained something of a mystery, with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police investigating how the vessel came to overturn and what happened to those who were aboard.
New details have sharpened the scale of the tragedy. According to CBC News, the vessel that went down was a charter boat called the Top Ocean, which had 10 people on board at the time, none of them wearing life jackets. Four people were pulled from the water, but one of them later died in hospital, while six others remain missing and are presumed drowned.
The toll could have been even higher were it not for the quick actions of strangers nearby. Authorities and witnesses credited a couple aboard a passing sailboat with playing a decisive role in saving lives in the moments after the boat went down, reaching people who might otherwise never have been found.
The couple, identified as Brian Angus and Dorothy Stauffer, were navigating the waters off British Columbia when they made a life-saving discovery. They came upon several people in distress floating on their backs in the open water, with no debris and no boat in sight, an eerie scene that signalled something had gone badly wrong nearby.
Acting quickly, the couple called for help and worked to pull people from the water, ultimately helping to rescue three of those who survived. Their account of spotting the swimmers and raising the alarm became central to understanding how the four survivors made it out of the water alive while six others did not.
Search and rescue crews mounted an extensive operation in response, scouring the area in the hope of finding more survivors. As the hours passed, however, hope of recovering anyone else alive faded, and the six who could not be found were presumed to have drowned in the cold coastal waters.
The RCMP has taken the lead in investigating the capsizing, working to establish exactly how and why the charter fishing boat overturned. For the families of those lost, the questions remain painful and unresolved, even as the survivors and their rescuers are left to reckon with how close the tragedy came to claiming even more lives.
In the days since, attention has turned to the company behind the trip and whether the vessel should have been carrying paying passengers at all. According to CBC News, Transport Canada has now detained a second vessel, described as the sister vessel of the Top Ocean and operated by the same company, issuing an order that says the boat is being held over safety deficiencies. The order states that the vessel was actually a pleasure craft being operated as a commercial passenger vessel, and that it was not registered or marked properly.
Investigators are also scrutinising how the trip itself was run. The RCMP is now looking into whether it was the boat itself or the operation of the boat that caused it to sink, and questions have been raised about whether the person at the helm was even properly licensed to be a fishing boat captain. The six people still missing were all in their 20s and 30s, from Toronto, Washington and British Columbia.
There has been some progress in the underwater search, even as the human toll remains unresolved. The sunken vessel was located about 150 metres below the surface, though crews did not find any of the missing people on the surrounding seabed. The three survivors who had been in hospital, a 33-year-old woman from Toronto, a 33-year-old man from Washington and a 26-year-old man from Richmond, B.C., have since been released, and police have taken statements from them as the investigation continues.