Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue leapt into action on Sunday as reports came in of a fishing charter vessel in trouble off the coast of Vancouver.
The alarm was raised by Dorothy Stauffer and Brian Angus, who were sailing in the area and spotted people in the water. She alerted authorities, and the couple mounted a rescue operation, but were puzzled by the people in the water’s behavior.
Stauffer has emergency training from working as a flight attendant and told CBC News the group appeared weak and hypothermic. She said one had no clothes on from the waist up and that she’d tried to get them to swim to a dinghy, but they seemed (as per The Guardian) “confused” and took as long as 20 minutes to reach the small boat.
“Could we have done anything different?”
The couple says they counted five people in the water when they arrived. They managed to rescue three, the authorities rescued another, but one is said to have slipped below the waves. As Angus said:
“We lost sight of the other two, we decided to just go for the three that were closer together, that’s the decision – a hard one – we had to make. The question you have in any incident as a pilot … or a boater is: could we have done anything different? And we don’t believe we could have.”
The boat was believed to have had 10 people on board at the time of its sinking. Two survivors, a man, 33, and a woman, 28, are listed as being in critical condition. A man, 26, and a woman, 33, have been discharged from the hospital. The other six are missing at sea, presumed to be dead.
What happened to their boat remains a mystery, with Stephen Adam, an operations manager with Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue, describing the incident as “bizarre”. He notes that the boat must have sunk extremely quickly, said there was no distress call, and that he’s been unable to find “any details of the type of vessel it was, why it went out, where it came from”.
The RCMP’s major crimes unit is now exploring whether there was a collision or any other criminal behavior linked to the sinking.
The boat itself is also missing, with an underwater recovery team summoned to locate it and begin the process of returning it to the surface for forensic examination. This is complicated by the deep waters, with authorities saying they plan to deploy divers or a remotely operated underwater drone to search for the wreck, which is believed to be around 10 nautical miles southwest of Vancouver airport.
In other ongoing mysteries at sea, Ocean Infinity is beginning yet another wide-ranging search for the wreckage of flight MH370. The newest search program began in January, but the next phase begins today. And, as a reminder that even after a boat sinks, all hope isn’t lost, one lucky man survived for almost three days trapped at the bottom of the ocean.
Published: Jul 1, 2026 08:13 am