.......It took us probably twenty minutes to get our act together, and it wasn't much of an act. Once we did get back in, we were pointed straight into the waves. Every wave went up over me. I had this incredible bruise from the back of the cockpit, from each wave wrenching me back. Some of the time I couldn't even get my breath.
.......I was able to get my spray skirt on tight, but he couldn't ever get his on. That was a pretty critical thing. I think we might have been able to recover if he'd have gotten his spray skirt on, because I had a bilge pump and we had an extra paddle—we'd lost both of our other paddles when we went over. But by the time we got into the boat, his hands wouldn't work. The other thing was that our life jackets kept coming unzipped—both of them. I remember trying to get it zipped up to a certain point, and using my teeth because my hands didn't work, and every time I looked down, it was just kind of floating around me. Johnson:...We were going farther and farther out into the Johnstone Strait, and there again were hitting these standing waves which are several feet high, and they're breaking over Deb and coming up on me and going into where I'm sitting. The kayak had bulkheads, but the front one blew out.
.......So we were going along and trying to be encouraging to each other but not doing a very good job of it. We were both real scared. We'd managed to salvage the spare paddle, but in trying to pass the paddle back and forth, she had an end of the blade and was handing it back to me when a gust of wind caught it, and it was ten feet out. It could just as well have been miles.
.......We tried paddling with our hands, but the damn thing was so heavy by now that we weren't really doing anything except keeping ourselves warm a little bit. We could see a house, and I'm thinking, "I'm going to die out here within sight of a house." A sense of impending doom was definitely on me. I was starting to think about my funeral. I just didn't see how we were going to get out of it. I was getting real weak by this time. Deb was in better shape but not able to do anything without me.
LeClair: The wind caught the first flare, and it didn't really go up into the air. I think it was Kevin's. I had a flare, and it was like having a candy bar when everyone's starving, holding onto it and going, 'I can't let this go. I have to wait for just the right moment.' I don't really know why we didn't shoot it off sooner. Probably because we were fighting so hard just to keep going. Everything was a struggle. Then, at some point—we were well out into Johnstone Strait by then—we shot off the second one.
Johnson: It seemed like it wasn't too long after that we saw a boat, which was the Gikumi.
Dan Mooney: I was working as a faller and it was very windy—we'd been blown out for the day. It was around nine or ten in the morning. I was living at Telegraph Cove at the time and had come down from Kokish, which is right up the road. At that time, you could, if you lived there, drive your car right down the boardwalk. I thought I'd just drive down and have a look at the waves—I had nothing else planned for the day. I parked facing the water, got out of my car and was just noticing how big the waves were. It was blowing at a steady forty knots at least. There was pretty big surf out there.
.......I was looking out at the horizon across Johnstone Strait. It would be almost due north as you're looking out of the cove. About three to five miles out, I saw a big, arcing flare. It was quite brilliant, not that hard to see. You could see it drifting in the wind. It went across the horizon in a fairly wide arc. It stayed visible for somewhere between thirty seconds and a minute. Just the one. When you see a flare under those conditions...I thought, "I wonder if someone's in trouble out there."
I turned around and from where I was standing I could see Bill standing in the sitting room on his balcony. I knew he couldn't hear me, so I mouthed the words, "Did you see that?" He kinda gave me a blank look.Bill Mackay: Dan kind of motioned up to me, and I went, "Yeah, that's right—it's coffee time, Dan." So he comes up—bolting up the stairs—and he says, "Did you see that out there?" And I said, "Yeah, right, Dan, it's real windy out there. Sit down and have a coffee." But he said, "No, no, did you see that? I saw a flare, I'm sure I saw a flare." We said, "Who the heck would be out there? Forget it." He was insistent. He just couldn't sit still. And he kept staring—see if he could see it again.
.......He was saying, "Please, do something," so I phoned the Coast Guard. At the time it was in Alert Bay, and I explained to them that a friend of ours thinks he's seen a flare out near Cormorant Island. Somewhere in there—the Stubbs Island area.
.......The Coast Guard person immediately said, "Well, did you see it?"
......."No, I never saw it."
......."Did anyone else observe it?"
......."No, just Dan."
......."How reliable is he?"
.......I said, "Well, Dan's cool. He's a pretty bright guy."
.......So they said, "Okay, we'll phone rescue centre."
.......They phoned [B.C.'s Rescue Coordination Centre]. Rescue centre phones us back and says, "How reliable is he?" The whole thing, the same thing. And I say, "Well, Dan's straight, he's not a wacko." And they said, "It's at your discretion, if you want to go, but we're out of it. Just let us know what you do."
.......So we sat back down and continued our coffee and Dan just kept hopping. He just kept saying, "We gotta go," so I phoned rescue centre back and said, "Look this guy's pretty sure he saw something." About forty minutes had elapsed by this point.
.......We went down and fired up the Gikumi, and we've got a thirty-foot skiff as well. We towed the skiff. What we normally do when we set something like this up is, the bigger boat will go and handle the rougher water, and the smaller vessel will do in amongst the islands, going in and checking with people, see if they've seen anything—just generally doing the shore search stuff.
.......So away we went. And boy, it was rough. We were taking a beating. The wind's picking up and we're up to about 60, 65 knots when you get out there—really blowing—and a big ebb tide: the ocean's flying out of here heading for Japan, about 7 knots. Dan's really on point; we're all on point, but sort of yawning at the same time, like, "Why are we here? This is really absurd."
.......As we're cruising down the backside of Pearse Island, I see what appears to be a flour bag, a yellow flour bag. And I think, "That's pretty dumb, people throwing their garbage out." So I jumped in the skiff to check that out. I recognized that it was kayak stuff. I undid the Velcro and it's got women's stuff in it and a little camera. And it's all dry as a bone. Well, my heart stopped. I just knew there was something serious going on. And we weren't that far off the mark.
.......I went back to the Gikumi right away to tell Jim. I threw the bag at them, and Dan just started rejoicing. He couldn't believe it: there was really something going on. They went through the rest of the bag to see if there was any name or anything on it—anything identifiable. And there was nothing.
Mooney: When we found that, it really confirmed that someone was in trouble out there. That was when we really started to peel our eyes. Up until that point, we were thinking maybe it was a false alarm. We didn't have anything concrete to prove that there was anybody in trouble.
.......Then, when Jim radioed Coast Guard that we'd found the bag, the skipper on the Alert Bay ferry run interjected in the transmission and said something to the effect that, "Yah, I saw a couple of kayakers going over about two days ago, and they haven't come back on the ferry yet."
Jim Borrowman: Bill went off to the southeast corner of the Pearse Islands and started searching in that area. The reason he went in the skiff up there is that there are small, tight little channels, and it's really difficult to get a big boat in there. And that's where the fifty-knot winds were smashing against; it was quite a rough area right in there. I just couldn't get in very close because of the reefs.
.......So we carried on west down the side of the Pearse Islands. We went right down the full length of them. We went into a channel inside the Pearse Islands and did a circuit in there, but there was nothing, so we came back out and were going to go a parallel route east back up Cormorant Channel. We got up not very far and Dan says, "I think I saw something."