A team of dragon boaters from Pender Harbour assisted in rescuing a boater who flipped his canoe in the ocean about 30 metres from shore in Garden Bay on May 25.
The 10 DragonTini paddlers were taking part in their weekly training paddle that evening at about 8 p.m. when steersman John Farquhar heard a splash behind the dragon boat.
“I didn’t see anything, I just heard a big splash and I turned around and there was this guy in the water hanging onto a canoe, so we turned the dragon boat around,” Farquhar said, noting it took a while to turn the 40-foot boat.
“In doing so we passed a yacht at anchor and there was a guy on the boat and I asked him if he had seen what happened. He had and he got into his little rubber dinghy with a small outboard on the back and he set off towards where the guy was.”
The driver of the dinghy made it to the canoeist, who wasn’t wearing a life jacket, before the dragon boaters arrived, but he was unable to pull the man into the dinghy by himself.
“When we got there he was having difficulty pulling the guy into the boat because it was so small, so we went alongside his rubber boat and leant on it so he could lean over and pull the guy back into his boat,” Farquhar said.
The paddlers gave some bailers to the canoeist and the dinghy operator who managed to right the canoe and get most of the water out of it before towing it to shore.
“He was probably in the water for three or four minutes, if that. He didn’t appear to be suffering from hypothermia or anything,” Farquhar said.
He noted that if the dingy operator hadn’t been in the area, the DragonTini paddlers would have been able to rescue the canoeist themselves as the team trains for man overboard situations.
“It’s not the easiest thing to do, but we definitely could have done it,” Farquhar said.
It was the first time the paddlers had taken part in a real rescue at sea.
