A yacht owner has been ticketed and several people have been treated in hospital after crashing into the CN rail bridge at the Second Narrows.
Vancouver Police Department and Coquitlam RCMP's marine patrol units as well as the Canadian Coast Guard all responded just after 1:30 p.m. Saturday afternoon when a distress call went out over the radio. According to Coquitlam RCMP, who are investigating the case, the 58-foot Meridian yacht was headed east through the second narrows when it went off course and plowed into the south concrete piling.
The collision was hard enough to knock all 15 passengers on board off their feet, with four of them requiring treatment at Lions Gate Hospital, according to Cpl. Jamie Chung, Coquitlam RCMP spokesperson. One of the passengers suffered a broken arm in the fall.
According to Port Metro Vancouver, the movable rail bridge has since been inspected and is back in operation.
The captain and owner of the boat has been ticketed under the Canada Shipping Act, Chung said. He was away from the helm and relying on his autopilot at the time of the crash, according to Grant Drummond, a boating consultant and dealer who was on the Cates Park dock and spoke to the passengers when the Coast Guard and VPD brought the injured in.
"I talked to the wife. She was pretty beside herself, obviously. No one wants to be in a situation like that," Drummond said. "For us as advocates and members of the marine industry, it's a sad thing to see."
Rather than being at the controls, the owner was allegedly on the deck with his guests, most of them girls in their teens who were celebrating a birthday party, Drummond said. By the time he made it to the wheel, it was too late.
The extreme currents that flow through the Second Narrows are strong enough to pull even large yachts off course if they are simply relying on autopilot, Drummond said.
"When the tide is ripping hard - and it was a huge tide that day - what happens is you get hugely turbulent waters. You get big whirlpools and it's a very hazardous, small little stretch of water as the water gets funneled though that bottleneck," he said. "It's a miracle, just a miracle, that no one was killed and no one went overboard because that front end is just totally mangled."
Those same currents would prove even more treacherous for someone in the water, he added.
"If one of those girls had gone overboard, you probably wouldn't have seen her again. She'd be gone. That current can suck a giant tree under and spit it out 50 feet down stream or up stream," he said.
The boat was named Hakuna Matata - a phrase meaning "No worries" as referenced in Disney's The Lion King.
It would have been worth about $700,000, but Drummond suspects it is now a write-off.
