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Boaters rescued from capsized vessels

Volunteers from the Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue unit in North Vancouver saved two men from the fast-flowing rapids in the Second Narrows Monday night, after their boats crashed into the CN Rail bridge and capsized.
boat

Volunteers from the Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue unit in North Vancouver saved two men from the fast-flowing rapids in the Second Narrows Monday night, after their boats crashed into the CN Rail bridge and capsized.

The incident happened around 7 p.m., just as volunteers were about to head out onto the water for a biweekly training exercise.

“A concerned citizen … ran down the dock and basically burst in the doors saying ‘Hey, I can hear someone screaming for help on the water,’” said senior coxswain Shawn Burchett.

The men were using a small marina skiff to tow a larger broken-down bow rider through the Second Narrows when the fast current overwhelmed the small boat, sending it into the piling at the base of the rail bridge. One of the men scrambled onto the piling as the bow rider started to list. The other man was thrown into the water as the skiff capsized.

Folks aboard a nearby pleasure craft plucked that man from the water. Rescue crews collected him and the man stranded on the bridge footing. “I think it’s fair to say they were both very grateful,” Burchett said. “There were a whole bunch of very lucky factors that allowed us to respond very quickly.”

Neither of the men were wearing their personal floatation device, Burchett noted,

The Second Narrows can be a treacherous place, especially when the tide is moving in or out. “It is wicked,” he said. “You can have four, five, six-foot-tall standing waves when the current is moving. And when the current is swirling around the bridge pilings, it does interesting things. You have back eddies. It can be a very dangerous place to be … In this particular case, a small boat in a fast current was not necessarily a good choice.”