In the Summer of 2019 we took a cruise in our sailboat out to Barkley Sound on the west coast of Vancouver island.  A friend of mine and one of my sons powered a 20’ boat that I had recently built out to Barkley Sound as well so that we could use it for longer distance day trips during our cruise.

There was an algae bloom going on in Barkley Sound while we were there so fishing was not as good as usual.  My older son and I decided to take a fishing trip out to Swiftsure Bank – a shallow spot in the Pacific Ocean off the Northwest corner of Washington state.  Since it was a bit of an adventurous trip I brought along my ACR ResQLink rescue beacon as well as a handheld VHF.  We had a GPS chart plotter and depth sounder for navigation.  As we approached Swiftsure Bank we were enveloped in a dense fog and  the waves became steeper and more confused in the shoaling waters.

We were going faster than we should have (trying to get in position to drop our lines before slack water) and the combination of a rough set of waves and a lapse in concentration lead to us flipping the boat.

The waters in this part of the world are very cold (12 deg C / 53 deg F in Summer) and Swiftsure Bank is remote so even without the fog we were clearly in trouble.  I dove back under the boat to retrieve the ResQLink and handheld VHF (luckily these were stowed securely enough that they were not lost in the capsize – if they had not been secure I would not be writing this).  I activated the ResQLink and then started to discuss our situation and our options with my son between bouts of serious shivering.  We went ahead an righted the boat but this meant spending more time in the water and the boat was partially swamped and unbailable when upright.

Within 10 minutes of deploying the beacon we heard the sound of an engine in the fog (the visibility was about 200m maximum).  I was amazed that we were being rescued so quickly and I started to get a tow line ready for the trip home.  The noise was from a ~20 foot outboard powered runabout and the were passing within 100m of us or so.  We could see their faces as we waved but they never saw us.  It was just a chance encounter and it was a terrible feeling to see them disappear back into the fog.  That was another lesson – being alert or not being alert when out in a boat can be the difference between life and death for someone.

I continued monitoring VHF  channel 16 and transmitting May Day calls every 10 minutes or so but nobody could hear us.  That said, I could hear some VHF traffic and after an hour or so (hard to judge time) I was relieved to hear the Canadian Coast Guard station at Bamfield about 25 miles away making calls about a beacon signal near Swifture Bank.  There were no responses to their calls that were close enough to provide assistance and no one was within transmitting range of our VHF.  Luckily the Canadian Coast Guard must have sent a boat soon thereafter because within 2 hours or so later we were receiving calls from the rescue boat and they could hear us!   As they approached they had me countdown on the VHF so they could home in on our position.  We were so cold by then that we could barely talk.  It was a huge relief so see them appear out of the fog.  Ten minutes later we were warming up in the cabin with our boat in tow behind us.

I am pretty sure that there would have been a greater than 90% chance that my son and I would have died out there if we had not had the ResQLink beacon with us or had lost it during the accident.