Episode 8. The Capsizing of the Cap Rouge II with Derek Rogers

Canadian Forces veteran and friend of the show Derek Rogers joins host  Dan Latremouille  for the harrowing story of a mission to rescue and recover crew onboard the capsized family fishing vessel Cap Rouge II near the mouth of the Fraser River.

Hosted by Dan Latremouille

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Transcript

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The time is August 13th, 2002. The place is the entrance to the Fraser River in British Columbia, Canada. The situation is as follows. The fishing vessel Cap Rouge II is in severe distress. It has capsized. And although rescue vessels are on the scene, there are personnel missing. The Joint Rescue Coordination Center calls upon the search and rescue crews at Comox B.C. to deploy specialty rescue divers to the overturned vessel where people are believed to still be trapped inside. This is Legacy; Survival Stories.... you're going down, you're going down. Legacy; Survival Stories. Welcome to Legacy Survival Stories. My name is Dan Latimremouille, and I'll be your host. We've got another great show for you today. We're bringing you a returning guest, a longtime Canadian Forces veteran having retired in 2010. He worked with the Air Force. He worked with search and rescue as a search technician and as our team lead. He's currently a project manager for Total Response Solutions, which is a veteran owned and operated helicopter rescue training and emergency response company. It's fantastic to welcome back, Derek Rogers. Thank you very much for having me. It's really a real pleasure to be back. It's fantastic to have you. I mean that and in every way that I can, because you've got more stories than most people would ever have in a lifetime. And you've got some real gems. And I can't wait to hear what you've got for us today. Well, I like having the opportunity to kind of pass some of this information on a lot of it's kind of a historical knowledge within the search and rescue community, but it's good to kind of get it out there for people that may not have heard of it or may not know some of the stuff. Just it's a good education for people out there. Yeah, exactly right. Exactly right. That's why we got in this game, was to hopefully pass along some firsthand knowledge from people like yourselves and people that have been in tough spots and and hear what it was really like. If somebody else if I can tell you somebody else the way I can save somebody else, the bumps and bruises, I'm more than happy to do that. Fantastic. So let's set the tone then a quick recap for the folks back home. If you missed Derek's earlier episode, which is episode one, Derek was search and rescue with the Canadian Forces for a number of years. And if I'm correct here, Derek, this story takes us back to those days with as a as a star or as a search team lead. Yeah, well, actually, I wasn't a search team leader, Tom. I was still a team member. This is out on the west coast of Canada. When I was posted, Komack Subsea was four, four, two squadrons out there. OK, so on the West Coast, where the search and rescue bases are, and I'm not talking about every little Coast Guard location, but where the search and rescue aircraft are taking off from the Air Force aircraft. This is Cormac's is there are other bases out there. The primary base is CFB Comox. That's also the primary training center. And that's also where the Canadian Forces School of Search and Rescue is located, all at a Comox, the one base they have there. They're basically able to cover most of the West Coast and well into the interior. So that's the only primary subbase on the West Coast. However, the Navy has a secondary Sahih role out of their base in Sydney and Esquimaux. OK. OK, fantastic. So if you're so if you're launching aircraft from Cormac's B.C., I'm assuming you're going all the way up until it touches Alaska and probably a little bit. Yeah, we actually have some overlap with our with the Coast Guard guys up out of Sitka and stuff. We have a bit of overlap. So it just provides really good coverage for the West Coast. OK, well, that's good. I I'm one of those people that I was a long time before I ever made it out to B.C. and I had a chip on my shoulder about getting out there because everyone talks about how amazing BC is. And, you know, as an East Coast guy, I didn't want to I didn't want to hear that and want to hear that nonsense about how great the West Coast was. And then I and then I got to B.C. and I thought it was awesome. It was a great place to work. And in search rescue, it offers a lot of challenges. You have the ocean, but you're also deal with the mountains. And the similar what you just said, the West Coast draws a lot of people out there and they want to go out there for the environment and the beauty and the scenery. And a lot of them get lost. So it's a busy place to work. Believe it or not, the term that goes to the gross grind, the trail just outside of Vancouver, people have a very much a false sense of security. They can see the lights of Vancouver. So they're thinking, well, I'm safe, I can see town. And they still get lost. Really? Yeah. It keeps on our sort of search and rescue. That's one of the primary civilian search and rescue agencies out there or volunteer search and rescue agencies. Keeps them very busy because, you know, you leave Vancouver, you drive 20 minutes in any direction and you're in the mountains and you're in the wilderness. So, yeah, people get lost and they're just not prepared. They don't know any better. I know people are people. And you know what? I can actually see that I or I should say I can see that I could relate to that. Like you can see the lights of the city over there. I mean, you know, there's my bearing. There's my direction. How lost could I possibly be? Yeah. That you get on the other side of the mountain. You can't see, you know, I guess what. Or even in some areas, just get in the trees. You know, you have 200 foot high trees. You're not going to see nothing once you're up in there. Yeah. Yeah, I bet. So, OK, let's let's set the tone for this story then. So you're working as a team member out of comics, BESHI? Yes. Yes. I was doing some of my primary training, still doing my team member. I was I was a SMARTech, but I was still a team member level. I hadn't been fully qualified as a team leader yet. I was only a couple of years in the trade. We were still flying on the Labrador helicopter. OK, that was the old twin blade in the States. They call it a night. It's a twin bladed it looks like a Chinook type thing. And it's it's a it's a size down from the Chinook Chinook. To be large is be a medium type thing. Right. So. They're great. They're great airframes. We upgraded to the cormorant aircraft, each one on ones, a few years later. But this was still on the lab, and I was basically into work on a Tuesday morning. And it was a work day for me, which here you go in, you do your maintenance, you do this and that . And all of a sudden, basically it turned into from a workday to a mission. We got a call from Ops and Geraci that we had a basically a vessel overturned vessel, and they required a dove team. So this is a very obscure call for us. Yeah. That very often that's that's that's that's sort of weird. That's highly specific. So it's an overturned vessel. It's already overturned. Yes. And they're and they're needing a dove team specifically. Yeah, they wanted a Dove team. Now, of course, we were kind of confused by this because the Coast Guard. You know, that's kind of their that's their primary kind of role as Marine and these types of missions. But they called us. They needed assistance. So we assumed, OK, well, we'll get everything ready and we'll start heading south. We were anticipating it, not actually hopping. We're saying, OK, they're going to call for extra assistance, which you do. You want some redundancy in case something goes wrong. And we thought we'd be like the secondary asset. Right. Yeah. So if I can Segway here for a second. And from the previous discussion we had, the search techs, the search groups that the team leads and the team members, you guys would have you have your high angle training, you'd have your your your paramedic in training. You probably have a certain amount of sea survival, mountain survival, you know, climbing, rappelling. Does to scuba diving fit into all that? Yeah, actually, it's it's a fairly big portion, of course. And the surgery defers to the experts. We actually go to the fleet dove dove unit. We actually learn through the Navy how to be basic divers. And then we do more advanced trade specific dove programs. It used to be called overturned vessel training. And the whole idea was it wouldn't necessarily just be vessels. But if a plane flips over in the water or a vessel flips over or whatever else, it might be something a car on the wall you have to have as opposed to kind of safely go in and extract survivors. Now, our role is just survivors. So that's why we thought, you know, if the Navy's call on the Coast Guard calls coming up, by the time we get down there, there's not really any survivability left or right. So we're thinking, oh, this probably won't happen, but let's get all hands on deck and head down. We're one of the few organizations that dove. We'll dove in a two man team. At what time? What type of teams do most organizations? Well, generally, you're going to have a dove supervisor. You're going to have a standby diver, and you're going to have a paradise was in the water. Oh, I see. You're almost talking like full commercial, sort of pretty much the commercial standards. Yeah, you'll go to that. But because we only work in two person teams, generally, we have soapies design. Two guys can do it now as it happens, as it happens to this day. There's more people available in the shop. And I was actually kind of a spare man at the wedding that day. I wasn't just on a workday, so I got commandeered to be on the Dove team. My team leader was Mike Boettcher. He was going to be the the primary. And then we actually jumped on the lab and the library had Wayne Chism. He was the team leader and Paul Morcom was a team member. So he he's got a four man team heading down. So we had a full team heading out and we grabbed all the dove gear we can get our hands on, load it up to load it up to a helicopter. And we started heading south. So dry suits, tanks, mask, goggles, fins, weights. And at this time, too, we were just starting to get into the full communication systems are using like an ag mask, bailout bottles. And we had had some training, ironically, by the Canadian Coast Guard on doing these types of dives. OK, so let's focus on that point just for a second here. You saw some of the training you're seeing, not the bulk of it, but some of the training you were seeing, some of the specialty training, specifically with overturned vessels. They had had a dove team on the West Coast for a number of years, because out there, you baby. And the Coast Guard. Yes, the Coast Guard because you do get vehicles that go in the water and stuff like that. And the big thing is Vancouver Airport is right on the cusp of the Fraser River, the mouth of the Fraser River. So whole idea was there as they wanted to have a way to mitigate in the event of a water ditching or a water landing. They wanted to have like dove capability, dove teams, rescue. They actually have a hovercraft assigned specifically to the airport area, or they did at that time, specifically for this reason, if an aircraft was there, because most most aircraft incidents happen on takeoff and landing within within eyesight of an airport, really. So this was one of their mitigating factors, was putting a specialty team right at the airport. OK, so then back to back to the core story here then. So here's you. You've been kind of scrambled, grabbed as an available person with suitable skills. Hey, Derek, come on. Join us out here on the chopper. You grab all the gear you can. You're going to a site where you've been called for an overturned vessel, which is sort of weird because it's an overturned vessel that you're being called to when you know that there's already a Coast Guard team that's around. It was kind of strange like we were we you know, we were just told they need another team. So we thought again, we thought it was just a redundancy, kind of like when we got called out on a mission. They'll try and mobilize other assets in the event that that first asset, you know, had. An engine problem or, you know, something goes wrong, you get as much resources as you can mobilize everything, you know. It's like a fire, you know, send all the fire trucks. If you don't need them, they go home. You can always turn them around. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So we're on our way down. And it was kind of hard because we kind of we kind of like we were kind of late to our own party. So we show up. We realize there's a vessel overturned. There's a lot of support vessels around. There's even a Bshe ferry providing a way block, kind of like stopped breaking the wind, breaking the waves Xactly. So, I mean, this was this was not a this wasn't a small event. So we thought we'd show up and they'd be like, yeah, we're done. And they're like, no, we need you now down here. And at this point, we're still trying to figure out what the hole. So you're flying in you're in your Labrador helicopter. You can see all these boats. Yeah, we did. We did a circuit around and see what was going on and establish communications with the guys on the ground, make sure everything was good to go in there like, no, we need a dove team now. And it's like with a sense of urgency there. Yeah. And what we found out later, it's again, there's some politics involved here. It's really unfortunate. But these things happen. What it was is that the Dove team was not allowed to go into the overturned vessel. OK, so hang on. When you say the dove or the Coast Guard dove. The Coast Guard. Who are they on site? Yeah, they're on site. They're all good to go. In fact, the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard team did most of the initial work on this mission. They did a lot of the heavy work on this, like they had shown up. They had managed to recover one crew member. They managed to recover the captain of the vessel. They managed to secure make sure, you know, basically do a recce of the vessel, secured the hatches, cleared some of the lines. They did all the heavy lifting. But they're mandated change changed. Now, you got to remember, in Canadian and Canada, the Coast Guard is a civilian agency. Right. So they fall under a lot of the occupational health and safety standards, somebody to interpret those standards in such a way that these guys were not allowed to go into the vessel when it was overturned. So some sort of, I don't know, underwater confined space classification kind of thing. That's kind of what it was, is that they said, OK, because of the level of risk, we aren't going to send people we aren't going to send Coast Guard personnel into an overturned vessel. Huh. Now, where the military works like we do have rules and regulations and we're very safe. We're not a liability driven organization. I mean I mean, we don't we can't do it that way. No, you can't send guys in Bosnia or Afghanistan, so. Well, what's the chance of them being killed? You know, the military is a little less liability driven or these civilian agencies are always Lucerna about tax liability is a huge driving factor. So we went down and surprisingly enough, some of the guys that were there were the guys that initially taught us how to do overturned vessel procedures . So I'm trying to I'm trying to get this picture on my mind. Right. You guys have been called on what? On the books. You are subbase and you're responding to a star call. So that part is normal. The fact that it's an overturned vessel is a little unusual. But there you show up, you got all your dove gear, as you say. You figure you're just going to be kind of back and clean up and just you. Yeah, we should be a backup, right? We be there's a secondary resource right now. You've arrived and there's a clear sense of urgency that they need you down here like right now to do a dove. If they want us as a primary, they want us to. And on top of all that, the Dove team from the Coast Guard, who some of whom had specifically trained you guys on how to do this, is there and not allowed to do it. Yeah, because of there because of the rules within their organization. You looked you looked at some of the boys that were there, and you could just tell the level of frustration. Unfortunately, it was just. Yeah, it was it it it's one of those situations where, you know, the search and rescue is a difficult job, but you shouldn't have to deal with bureaucracy. And unfortunately, these guys were put in that situation. And, you know, I but at the time, it was like, you know, we're just going to do this. This is all secondary time. It's OK. What he needs to do, we're doing it. You know, it's one of those things. It's not, you know, typical kind of military guy. You know, what you want me to do. It's going to get done. I'll ask questions later. So that was the way we kind of approached it. So. All right. So we understand the political situation that's on the go here now. And you know what you're here to do. So that was all you discovered later. So now paint the picture for us. You've done your you've done your recchi by air. You've landed somewhere close by and somebody grabbed you on onshore and run you out there. Well, what we do is basically we decide to do is that, OK, we kind of assessed it as the team. We had two very experienced team leaders and we had two somewhat experienced team members. So we decided that myself and Mike would be the Dove team and Wayne Chism, who was the other team leader, he would kind of act as our dove supervisor. Slash liaison. Yeah. So what we did was we loaded all the gear into the rescue baskets and we hoisted all the gear down to the hovercraft and the hovercraft taxus over to one of the Coast Guard vessels. So you literally hoist it down to the. Yeah. Okay. We didn't go straight to the water. We went to that because we weren't exactly sure what all the. We want to actually physically talk to somebody. And get the layout so wild. While Mike and I was prepping our dove gear for an overturned vessel penetration to go underwater. Wayne went and did a debrief from the Coast Guard guys and did a debrief from one of the casualties that had him on the couch, one of the survivors, to try to get an idea of what was going on, what the layout was, what the layout of the vessel was. So Wayne was able to come over and draw us a map of the boat where he thought people might be. So we kind of had an idea what we were going into. So you're almost drawing sort of a floor plan, almost literally. In fact, Mike was kind of a brilliant idea as he took a grease marker, a grease pencil, and we have red dry suits. And he actually drew the boat on his arm. And I did the same thing. And then we were able to kind of x off what areas we had been into because with a black grease mark, that's actually that is genius. That's very, very clever thing to do. Very simple. But it worked really well. And, you know, it's just one of those things because we carry the grease marker to mark the hull, to mark the hull so that, you know, if the vessels are sinking or missing or so. And so as you actually I was going to get to that. So you're when you're when you're prepping for this sort of thing, you are putting markings on the hull so you can see if the and the Coast Guard had already done this for us, like they had done everything, all the preliminary. They even lost like the primary entry point, even like the doors for us and everything else. So we go down. What we were taught to do is you have lashings, so you have a bunch of lashings, kind of like waistcoat ideas. You know, you have an elastic or something around your arm and you have like little pieces of rope in there so you can lash out or schutze or lash doors open so they don't close on you once you go in. And then you also have some glowsticks kind of mirch rooms that you've been in. Breadcrumbs, really? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So you're going to basically have a trail of bread crumbs. You can go in on. And of course, we we always do this stuff on a buddy line, which is kind of like your tender line right now. We weren't doing this with surface supplied air. We do a tank. So we have to kind of monitor our tanks, monitor our, you know, our oxygen, our air consumption, those types of things. Right. So while Wayne was getting all the information and briefing us and Mike and I were getting ready, and then it was, you know, basically the Coast Guard guys told us everything we need to know, basically to get up to the vessel. And we knew we were looking for a couple people. I'm sorry. We're looking for. I think it was so three people inside the vessel that we suspected. Three or four, actually. And as soon as we went down on the water, we kind of got set up. And the way it works is I would sit at the door for the first. I basically I sat at the door for the first dove and Mike did the initial penetrations, and I kind of basically bodyline him as he check rooms. And then we kind of switched it up. So we kind of went. One guy would go in and one guy would sit at the door as the safety. So the person at the door, they also on air or they you their underwater swellable, 14 feet underwater. When you look at the deck now, the thing is, this was a family run fishing vessel, right. It was like, you know, your typical, you know, West Coast trawler seiner type thing, you know, just a small fishing boat or at a family run fishing operation. When you say small ballpark, I think 40 feet. I think it was I think it was a 64. Well, out here, they call them 64. 11. Yeah, it was yeah, it was a 65 foot. So, I mean, when you say small, it's not a ship. No, no, it's not a rowboat, but it's not a large like it would be a probably equivalent to an in inshore fishery boat, OK. Versus very far offshore. Right. But, you know, these family run vessels, they are a business, but they're also almost like a camper, for lack of a better term. Like I mean, it's almost like an RV. And imagine taking a family camper or a family camper trailer that's all loaded up for, you know, a couple of weekends up at the camp. Now, flip it upside down and sink it underwater. I couldn't believe the debris. And the other big limiting factor is the diesel fuel, all the surface. So all the fuel that came out of the boat's fuel tank, as soon as we start getting close to it, we had to kind of like lock down and go on air or go on, you know, go on compressed air because, you know, the fumes were so bad on the surface of the water and all the way that any of your skin that was exposed, you know, you got that, you know, it's almost like a burn that you get a chemical burn, that you get off the fuel. Right. So it was it was challenging to at least and again, like, you know, where he came to the surface, you can just take your mask off because you're just you know, your skin was all back then. So you almost had to leave a little extra or just. And this was something you had to factor in when you're doing, because you don't want to be coming up on your last breath type thing or we never try to do that. We always try to have a reserve or diving. But, you know, if you're pushing things. Yeah. And it was pretty bad. It was pretty bad. So we basically set up and we started doing these dives into the vessel to try and find the survivors. So you said there was three or four missing still? Yeah, there are still people missing now. One of the problems we had here was, again, we got there in the vessel. It's already been overturned for a while. So there was any kind of atei. How long had it been? Yeah, I think we took a boat. I'm going to say it took us about 35 or 40 minutes by the time we were called to be on scene. Getting ready to go in the water and presumably it had already been captured, I mean, they called you, they already said it was capsized. So it must have been some time before that as well. So we were probably looking over an hour before we got on scene. So in all reality, we were saying, OK, what's the level of survivability? It's probably not much. Is it worth doing a high risk dove? But once we got down there, we realized there's a large air pocket on top. I was going to say, but there not be some air pocket trapped. So we thought, OK, there's viability here. People could be alive. And once Mike, Mike didn't really get into details because he didn't want us. Mike and Wayne didn't get in too many details. We later found out that there were children onboard and they were worried that, you know, don't tell the new guy. You know, they basically limited our information, said, OK, you're looking for casualties. They didn't get into who's what's, where's or what. We kind of found this. So probably doing you a favor at the time. It was actually pretty smart because, you know, when people assume you think kids. Yeah. You start making it's kind of the same concept they have in the aviation community or in other search and rescue assets where you kind of keep the pilots sterile from the mission details because you don't want that part. You call it sterile cockpit. You don't want that guy making decisions based on emotion versus decisions based on the reality. And they're human beings like they're going to I'm trying to picture myself. Something tells me they're a kid in there. I'm going to kill myself. Try to get that kid over there. Yeah, absolutely. Virtually. You know, that's that's what we do. Right. But, yeah, we went in and we found out basically the situation was that we had on to there's still four casualties left. Turned out one of the casualties was the captain's wife has two kids and some dark and a deckhand. So. So where's the captain at this point? Now, the captain was one of the survivors. So he was on the Coast Guard boat with us while we were getting ready. And that was who we were interviewing to. OK, and this is where you got the layout of the boat or they got the layout of the boat, which they then passed on to you, the deckhands and the cops, and had been thrown when the vessel rolled over. Now, kind of leading up to this incident, apparently what they were doing as the boat was transiting their rate at a place called Sandhills. It's right near the mouth of the Fraser River. And there's an area where you go from saltwater, kind of like a brine to freshwater. So you get that brackish. Yeah, it's kind of abrupt. And I guess what happened was the vessel basically all they're taxiing here. They did have a net out. And I guess it was that change in buoyancy that caused them to roll. I'd like the details are still there's a full Transport Canada investigation going to have to look into that. But it could because there is on larger vessels, you have to actually make an allowance for that. And I guess and I don't know if that had happened and you have to change your bill or your you know, how much water you have in the bilge, that you have to make some adjustments for different buoyancy. For the folks at home, loosely speaking, stuff floats better in saltwater than it does in freshwater in very, very general terms. Now, the percentages are small. So if you take a canoe on the ocean, it's canoeing on the lake. You wouldn't notice a difference. But on a larger vessel with a massive load where if you lose five or 10 percent of your buoyancy, that might make a difference. And so we'll have to well, undetermined right now for the purposes of this, whether that was the contributing factor, but certainly could have been. It did appear that I was probably something that they were, you know, towing a load and, you know, switching water. So a variety of factors. But two people got thrown off. It happened so quickly that no one else had time to get into the vessel. So basically, probably people that were kind of near the deck or an open window kind of got chucked. Yeah. And if they were below deck, they didn't. Oh, boy. And we found out later that like when the Coast Guard did or initial recchi, they were actually able to recover one body that was kind of not in the vessel, but kind of in the exterior rigging. So then we knew we still had three more people to look for at the time. Right. So there's you making your divers go in and out, taking turns. Yeah. So we you know, again, one guy would sit at the door. He's still under water, Bill, 14 feet of XEmacs depth on these dives. You're not really going that deep. You're trying to get down toward the entrance. Was he, by the way, any idea what the actual water depth, if the vessel had if it broke loose and sunk or something like that? Well, you know, I'm not sure it's fairly deep. They're all Putsy. There's a full sized Bshe ferry right beside us. So they must have at least a 20 or 30 foot draft rafts. So it's probably, you know, steep enough for them. Yeah, it's deep, deep enough for that thing to go right to the bottom. So I guess that's one sort of where the vessels at the surface, you're only diving down 14 feet. Immig extends your extend your. Yeah. We weren't worried about dove time. Put it down. We're still monitoring it, but we weren't that worried about dove time. Like you'd be there all day and not worry about. Were you guys swapping out tanks or something like what we did. We we. Because there's some adrenaline involved. You're everybody's an air pig when you're underwater in an upside down boat. All right. So we were eating up the air and again, we didn't want to go past that third like a third of a tank. Safety factor, especially when you're doing that because you don't know if you're going get hung up. So we did we did stop at one point and swap out tanks. We went through two hundred pounders and then we had Bailleau bottles as well, just in case. But yeah, we burn through a tank each. Then did a second dove on the second tank. OK. And again, we were just really monitoring that safety factor so that we weren't. And we base it on whoever the biggest like I was the biggest bear hug. I was the new guy. So we based on my tank, so we'd say, OK, of all, you're the lowest common denominator. Exactly. Exactly. So if if if you don't mind, what's it like inside there? Like visibility's got to be the visibility now. It was a nice day outside. The visibility wasn't bad. Look, we had good sunlight, good sunlight penetration. But like I said, it's like you said, it was certainly getting into. Well, you know, the you know, when you're doing a dove the first 10, 15 feet, you've got good visibility and then it starts getting darker. So we still had to kind of that residual light coming from the surface. But inside the vessel, we didn't have that. It was a little darker. Now, in the main cabin, we had fairly good visibility because the sunlight, you know, that light was kind of penetrating a bit. And we did have flashlights. We're using, you know, underwater lights and stuff. But the problem we were having was that, first of all, the oil in the film. So when you came up to check out an airspace, basically it was like looking through a layer of oil like your windshield when you're going through a car wash, just can't see you because you have all the debris. And the other thing is these vessels. I try to kind of describe it as a camper. Like, I mean, there's boxes of cereal and there's food and there's like people live on these vessels that are live aboard fishing vessels. So everything that would be in your cottage is now floating. And the worst thing in the world was sleeping bags and bedding there in the water. And you're trying to like push up through a sheet in the water. So what you end up doing is you take your gloves off, so you're got some tactile sense that was fairly cold, but not cold enough to you couldn't do it. And you're trying to feel for things. And now the other problem we had is I grabbed on what I thought for sure was a person. I thought, OK, that feels like an arm. It was a fish. So it must have been leather from the floor just swimming around or from there it was dead. It was. So it must have been either something they had caught or what. And I'm like, OK, that's not a person. But you're trying to just kind of feel around the see if you can find anybody in this mess. You know what I mean? Like it was just a yes. It was pretty it was pretty intense trying to sift through the stuff, trying to find people crazy. Yeah, I'm trying to. And folks at home like try and imagine yourself, you know, locked in a a large ish closet with essentially little to no light other than your flashlight. You're underwater and you're you know, and everything that was in the closet is still there. So you're feeling through stuff, trying to determine what's what. Boy, that would be difficult and nerve wracking. Well, it's we after the mission, you know, you always have that kind of like, you know, de-brief, mental debriefing, all the. So what what phobia didn't we address on this mission? You know what I mean? Like other than heights? Well, I guess we hoisted so, you know, we kind of kind of rolled it all into one situation. Fear, water, fear confined spaces, the guys. But Mike, Mike and Wayne, who kind of ran the mission, they did a phenomenal job and like just so much experience. I was a young guy at the time. And, you know, even little things like, you know, about sterilizing the conversation, you know, things that's really smart, you know, and you're thinking, wow. So, you know, I took a lot away from the mission. Unfortunately, Mike did most of the heavy lifting on this one. He managed to recover a couple of different balls. When you say heavy lifting, he has to be the one that he was on that actually he found the bodies. And, you know, he was he was a better diver. And I was I have no shame in saying no. He was he was a really good sundeck and I was in a learning phase. All right. So it was it was kind of drinking from a firehose on my end. And I joke around with all the guys. I said on that mission, my job was don't screw up and don't drown. That was don't make don't make it worse. Yeah, don't make it worse. Don't screw up and don't drown. So that was kind of my primary objective in the whole mission. Right. That's all of us going through my head was just do everything according to the book and do it as safely as possible. Right? Wow. Yeah. So you've done your two dives. Mike found did you how many did you get out of the at of the wreck? Now, the Coast Guard managed to find one of the. So we had two guys, two to Persell. I got thrown off the boat. The Coast Guard managed to recover a guy and they they both survived. Yeah. The two that got thrown. Sabbar OK, I'm. Well, they did. But I mean, unfortunately, the rest, you know, basically that poor captain lost his family. Yeah. You know, it's just it's just one of these hurt after the fact. You're like, I'm glad I didn't know this. Yeah. Before I went in you. Because there's no way there's no way that would affect what you were doing. You know, if it didn't, you'd have to start questioning. You're a robot. Yes. You're Terminator. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And one day they'll build robots for that, too. But we're not there yet. Well, yeah. Well, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it's not hers, because, you know, the robots can make that decision. You know, who do I save? Right. It's like one of those Asmus laws or whatever it is. You know, who do you save? Who don't you save time? Yeah, exactly right. So so now the did you end up getting so there was four missing, I think you said still the Coast Guard pick up somebody else in the rigging on the outside. Yeah. And then that would mean three stonily. Mike Mike managed to find one of the deckhands and we recovered him. He was the first guy that we found. And then we found the the wife, one of the. Female crew members, the wife of the captain, and then unfortunately found the son, the young boy. And that's when it kind of came home like, oh, geez, what are we doing? So the only we knew the other two had not had succumbed. You could tell it was fairly obvious. How are we did, you know, still did a full recovery? We attempted, you know, attempted to put a mask on and do the things you put the old to do. Unfortunately, you know, for the first two, we pretty much knew that these people, you know, you could just tell visually that, OK, there's a fairly long gone. They've they've expired. The sun, however, we decided to do a full medevac on. You know, there's that resiliency of youth with children, cold water. And a lot of kids have been recovered, cold water, drowning, you know, significant amount of time after cold water, drowning. And in all reality, we don't know when he drowned. He might have drowned two minutes ago. No. So we're like we're treating this one like all out now. Paul Moquin and stayed on the aircraft. So Paul did all the medical. Are they flying the whole time? They were there doing circus first. They had enough fuel and time. So as soon as the Sun Susar recovered the young boy, it was like, OK, full on medevac. We just treated him like it was like, you know, let's get this kid going. So we got him into a stretcher, hoist him straight up to the aircraft. And they just they just Paul was doing CPR on the aircraft and he just booked it to the dock to the Vancouver General Hospital. They were there in minutes type thing. Right. So we attempted that. Just basically said based on, you know, the you know, the child, what they're referring to, by the way, for folks at home, if you anybody can go look at, you know, Red Cross statistics or St John Ambulance or something like that, and and the the freakish almost rate of of survivability for four kids is just so much higher. Not not not to say the bad things don't happen. They certainly do. But but, you know, if if a if a 10 year old gets splashed into some ice cold water, their odds are a lot better than that. They seem to have this resilience to hypothermia. It's almost like they go into some type of like, you know, some something. We've lost evolutionary. It's just like they hibernate, you know, and they manage to stick and go for a very long time in these conditions. There's been cases where, if I'm not mistaken, kids have been almost four hours. They've been in cold water. Yeah, there's there's a couple of stories out west and people getting locked out of their house and stuff like that. Some crazy long story. So we were we were trying to hedge the bet on this one. Now, unfortunately, we decided to call the mission after the young boy. We didn't. You have it was are still somebody. We still had one missing. And we found out later it was the daughter, the young daughter. Now, unfortunately, she wasn't recovered until the vessel was. They did a proper salvage job on the vessel, actually, like floated it, pulled it out. She was it ended up she was in a sleeping bag in a corner of a room. You know, it just wasn't yeah. It wasn't something we'd be able to recover easily because again, I mean, imagine filling your closet full of water and sinking and sinking it and then trying to find something you feel it, feel around. It was literally the visibility was so bad with the oil and the debris that it was a tactile search. You're basically just searching with your hands, trying to find something in and debris. Right. So unfortunately, we didn't find her until after the vessel was recovered. It was it was an it was an interesting mission. And like in hindsight, there's a lot of things, you know, unfortunately, the bureaucracy and stuff got involved. But, you know, we were able to bring some closure for the families and we were able to, you know, at least put an effort in to try and do this. Right. Well, but what what more could you do that you did? I don't see how well and you know, the what I find to be the real tragedy of the mission outside the loss of life. I mean, the families were devastated by this, but also the rescue. And I'm referring to the Coast Guard rescue divers. They took a hit man, those guys. It was how it was a moral injury to those guys, man. That's I'm trying to imagine to do their job would be to help. And to this day, I just feel so bad for them. And again, none of this I didn't none of this was even in my mind till after the fact. And, you know, it took me it took me a while to even kind of acknowledge this part of it, you know, that these guys are really hurting because, you know, you just don't have that maturity sometimes, you know, have that experience. But as you get a little more advanced in the training, you do more of this stuff. You realize that, you know, telling those guys not to do their job. And that's that's, you know, well, especially when like what's the purpose of being like? Why do you exist as a Coast Guard rescue? Why does the Coast Guard have a rescue team if not to do the specific job? Yeah, it was a bad movie plot. You know, it was just, oh, my God, you know, and you think to yourself, well, I would have just done it anyway. But it's not like that in the real world. You know, people are saying, you go in there, you know, you will be either forced because you remember you, you got to get a line on you. They want to pull you back in. They're going to pull you back and. Yeah, and and you're not going to go in there without a buddy line or when on a safety line. Right. So and the hero of a movie often does go in anyway, you know, dove in with your with your with your with your Baywatch outfit on. But as you say, it's it's not like that in the real. No, it's not. But, you know, again, the one part that Israel these guys are hurting at a bad goal. Yeah, but I could see that. So if you so takeaways for for for Derik, then you said that you learned. A lot from the team leads on there. As you I like your phrase, they're sort of sterilized conversation a little bit. Keep it keep it on like the dove side of it. You know, we just did our drills and we did our drills as best we could in an adverse environment. So we did what we were trained to do by the guys that we were helping. So that was good. And we had a ton of support from all the Coast Guard guys that were there. Like I mean, I never touched my tank or move my tank or swapped, you know, they just because everybody knew what was going on. Right. So there was a lot of interagency support and mutual support, which is fantastic. Which is awesome. So like the operations side, I learned a lot, but I think I learned more on the how to human side, the human factor side, really. You know, when I was things like sterilizing a conversation, trying to like, you know, you know, check the empathy type thing, you got to go more with, you know, straight folks, unfortunately. Yeah, you got to triage the situation. It's somewhat robotic, but it's the only way to do it safely. Well, as you say and we said it three times already today, if if if you knew there was kids, it would have absolutely skewed what you were doing and possibly to to your detriment or maybe crewman detriment or. Well, and again. And now in hindsight as well, I think the guy like the Coast Guard guys knew there was kids because they had talked to the captain. They had they had been down there for a while communicating. So I think that just added to that insult that much more of that. Yeah, there's kids in there in order to go help them. You know, so it was you know, unfortunately, unfortunately, we weren't able to rescue anyone. We were able to bring closure and we were able to act the way we were supposed to do our job, which was great. Unfortunately, our guys didn't get that benefit. They were robbed of that. So they didn't even have that that bit of at least we could go in and say we did the most we could do under the like. You know, you lost the game, but you played your guts out. Well, they didn't even get to play the game. Yeah. You can look yourself in the mirror and said, well, I did. They did the best I could do under those conditions. Unfortunately, these guys didn't get that opportunity and they were there so much earlier. So I guess as a takeaway, you know, even in the tech trade, they've often said, OK, we don't need to do this type of training because it doesn't happen that often. Now, even within our organization, I got two or three guys that work with our company that have done this life. So it kind of contradicts that. But, you know, when people are doing bureaucracy can get in the way. When your companies and your companies like, do we need to do this over to invest training? How often do they actually use this little piece of training here? But even if it only gets use once a year, that's once a year. You got it. And again, anybody flying over water or working on the water has to anticipate or have something in place for what happens with this vessel overturns like or what happens if this thing sinks? Well, how are you going to get out of here? It's interesting. Like, I'm surprised that there's not more. It's not like, for example, in the aviation community, in helicopters, they've actually have they've been designed into the aircraft features that are to help people egress and stuff like that, push up windows, emergency windows, stuff like that. You don't see that very often in the fishing community or the voting community. And it makes you wonder, you know, should they have these types of integrations that consider these types of safety factors like how you get out of a boat when it turns over, you know, like, you know, you're not going to have your bearings. It's not like on a helicopter where you're seatbelt it in, where you're putting your landmarks, you know where you are. You know that boat floods. You know, now, again, they don't flood in an instant. It's probably not as fast as something like a helicopter. But in this case, it probably was, you know, probably very similar timeline's to a helicopter ditching, you know. Oh, man. That's a that's a that's a tough story. And I imagine you got to carrying a little baggage with that one. And as you say, I'm sure the rescue from the Coast Guard team would be as well. I'd say there definitely. Yeah, I can pretty much guarantee that was a factor, if I'm not mistaken. But again, we went in and we did what we could do. Again, on the technical side of it, after this mission, we went back and said, OK, here's what worked, here's what didn't work. And that was actually a lot of those things, like for the equipment that we had, some of the communications that we had, we actually went back and we actually improved it so much. And so on that note, and just and just out of curiosity, so I'm not an expert diver. I would rank myself somewhere between novice and amateur. And but knowing what I know about the rescue organizations and the process and what you'd be dealing with, because I have been in an upside down boat, I'm wondering and from what you described and what my limited knowledge, I can't think of anything that I would any different than what you did. What what would you guys change? And you said you you made some corrections. What thing? Well, this was one of our first just one of our first uses of the full face mask. OK, all right. And a full face mask was actually really good, because when you came out of the water, your face was an expose. You weren't getting near the burns from the fuels and the chemicals in the water. You had good ventilation. But for example, we had communications with this. We have underwater transducers. We do have wireless communications. But like we need to have, you know, some backup comms, stuff like that. And then we've seen some. Inventions later on, they're like, oh, that's a good idea. And we took away from some other parallel communities, like, I don't know where you guys ride dirt bikes or Adobe, but you ever see they have the tearaway tearaway strips you can buy for a visor. So the visor gets mud on it. You tear away the strip and you can see we incorporate you know, we went out and bought a bunch of these strips of tearaway screens for the Agama so that, you know, if the Agga mask are covered in oil, you could pull it off. And now you can see if you're sort of looking at things like that to try to make it a little safer if it happened again. Right. And even things like, you know, the type of line we use, while you didn't want to use a buoyant line in there, maybe want to use like a you know, a non Moyet line, things like that that we ended up revisiting. And it's been an evolution ever since trying to do that stuff. And there probably isn't one right answer either. You just you just try and pick up skills, pick up knowledge. And now this is it's can or you should be called OTV training, overturned vessel training, then you call it, then a switch to confined space rescue diving. And they again, they want to parallel communities and kind of look at some of the soapies for confined space rescue. So some of those recipes migrated into the trick because we went back to look, we got to do this better. You know, like, you know, because we we felt that we we did as best we could. But it would have been better if we had been, you know, a little faster, did our searches a little better, got in. Ideally, if, you know, we had found everybody, extracted everybody, we would have walked away with our head a little higher. So we kind of looked at this as kind of a I wouldn't call it failure, but we looked at as a chance to improve. So we tried to do that after the fact. And like I said, doing things like researching, like confined space rescue, those guys are really good, like, you know, anybody in that world, they're really good at what they do. The firefighters that specialize in that stuff and, you know, industrial teams. Yeah, yeah. They're like mine rescue teams to some of the soapies that they use, like some of the marking of the rooms and stuff like that. There's a lot of these parallel skill sets that we were able to kind of borrow from, you know, and that was one takeaway as we were able to say, you know, you got to keep improving. You need that continuous improvement cycle. You got to have that professional development. And just because you don't have the answer or your group doesn't have it doesn't mean somebody's next door doesn't know it's a big world. Yeah. Lots of people out there trying to do similar things somewhere. Yeah. And again, like, you know, you might not have a stand or even having a but somebody else might. So if you can draw on parallel experience or parallel industries. Yeah. Go for it. You know, that's the best way to go, you know. OK, well, thank you so much for that, Derek. That's an incredible story. Not all the stories have happy endings, but the whole point of of of a session like this is to try and get get some knowledge out there so that other people can learn and maybe pick up some other things. And that's what I love about these these types of long form discussions, because you can, you know, maybe some maybe somebody on a fire rescue team somewhere might hear this thing. Oh, well, I never thought of that. You know, if that information get out there, I think we're doing a good thing. Yeah. A hundred percent agree. Thank you so much for being here again, Derek. It's absolutely enthralling to hear the stories from you. And I hope we get to have you on here again someday. So you guys doing good work. Very much appreciate it, boys. Thanks so much. Be safe out there. OK, ladies, gentlemen. That wraps it up for today. Once again, my name is Daniel after my thanks for listening to this episode of Legacy Survival Stories. We'll see you soon. If you have a story to tell or know of someone who does, please contact us at legacy survival stories. All one word at Gmail dot com. You can also find us at Legacy Survival Stories. Dot Buzz, Sproat dot com. If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe and help us move up the charts with a five star rating. We like comments and reviews, so we'd love to hear from you. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Stitcher, and almost anywhere you can find podcasts that ignite, you go down, you go down. So now for legacy survival stories.