A day on the water off British Columbia ended in one of the worst fishing tragedies the province has seen in years, with six people presumed drowned after a charter boat went down in the Strait of Georgia.
The vessel, carrying 10 people, sank around midday on Sunday off Richmond, north of Tsawwassen. A passing sailing boat spotted people in the water and issued a mayday, triggering a large multi-agency search. Four people were pulled out alive; six, four men and two women, were not found.
By Monday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said the operation had shifted from rescue to recovery.
"This now looks more like a recovery than a search just because the timeline," said Stephen Adam of the Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue. He said the boat "sank relatively fast and we don't know what happened to it."
The survivors were a 33-year-old man and a 28-year-old woman, both listed in critical condition, and a 26-year-old man and a 33-year-old woman who were treated and discharged. The search drew in the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Air Force, the Canadian Coast Guard, marine search and rescue crews and even BC Ferries before it was suspended at 9:45 p.m. on Sunday.
Major Gregory Clarke of the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre described an exhaustive effort. "From our end of things, it's a tragic event. We are confident that we covered the area very thoroughly," he said. "We don't take it lightly, but basically, through all of the avenues, we exhausted all possibilities."
One detail has sharpened the heartbreak: none of the 10 people aboard was wearing a life jacket. Clarke noted that flotation can be the difference between life and death in cold coastal water, saying people "can survive five to 10 hours if they are wearing a flotation device." Without one, survival time in the strait drops sharply.
That single fact has reframed the disaster as a safety warning as much as a tragedy. Coastal water off British Columbia stays cold through summer, and immersion without flotation can incapacitate a swimmer within minutes, long before rescuers can reach a scene spread across open water.
The RCMP said the work is not finished. "The RCMP Underwater Recovery Team has been engaged and will attend the area in the coming days," the force said, adding that divers and sonar will be used to locate the sunken vessel on the seabed.
The cause of the sinking has not been determined and remains under investigation.
For a coastline where charter fishing is a summer fixture, the sinking is a grim reminder of how quickly a calm day can turn. As the recovery team prepares to go down after the boat, families of the six missing wait for answers that may take days to surface.
