My heart goes out to the family and friends of Daniel MacAlpine and Nicolas West, the two men who recently perished while kayaking in local waters.
The pair was using a two-person kayak to paddle the 6.5-kilometre distance from D’Arcy Island to Island View Beach in Central Saanich on April 20 and were never seen alive again.
Their kayak was soon found washed up on a nearby island, and the men’s bodies were also located floating in the ocean shortly after that.
In my prime (which seems longer ago all the time), I used to be an intrepid kayaker and grew familiar with that area during my many trips to islands all around Vancouver Island.
I can certainly see why people like kayaking around the Gulf Islands with their beautiful, pristine beaches and multitude of wildlife and I’ve come across more kayakers around these islands than any other place where I’ve spent time in my kayak over the years.
Some guide books refer to the crossing from D’Arcy Island to Island View Beach as an easy paddle, but that really depends on the weather and water conditions at any given time.
From my experience, I know that those conditions can change pretty quickly, and while it may be calm when you start a trip, it sometimes doesn’t take long for the wind and waves to come up and leave you in a dangerous and precarious position far from shore.
I’m not sure what the paddling conditions were on the day that MacAlpine and West went on their fateful kayak trip, and I don’t know what their level of experience with kayaks was, but something obviously happened that saw them dumped into the cold water with no way to get back in their boat.
There was a time when I never feared coming out of my kayak very much because there was usually land or an island within a couple of kilometres and, with a life jacket on, I figured that if worse came to worse, I could simply swim to the nearest land and wait to be rescued.
I learned the hard way back in the early spring of 2005 while kayaking with a colleague to Vargas Island, an approximately three-hour paddle from Tofino on Vancouver Island’s west coast, that other factors can come into play that can easily leave your life in peril.
While the weather was calm when we left Tofino, the wind and waves increased dramatically about half way through the voyage and, despite our best efforts, our kayaks became swamped with seawater and it didn’t take much for the waves to finally knock us into the roaring sea.
We were quickly separated in the waves and there was no way to even attempt getting back into the kayak, which I was hanging off of. In those conditions, I figured the best strategy was to begin kicking my feet and trying to get to the nearest point of land, which was about a kilometre away.
I kicked and I kicked, but every time I looked up to get my bearings, the land I was trying to reach was getting further away and I realized I was caught in a current that was taking me directly out to sea, despite my best efforts.
I was exhausted by this time, and my torso was black and blue from the pounding I was taking from the waves smashing the kayak into me.
I remember thinking that I needed to rest for a few minutes and closed my eyes just before I heard a boat approaching at a high rate of speed and voice yelling out to me from a bullhorn.
It was a tourist boat heading back to Tofino and I started yelling back that there was another guy in the water in the vicinity, but was told he was already rescued and on board.
I thought I had come through the ordeal quite well but when they hauled me on board, I collapsed, began flopping around like a fish out of water and started to black out.
Then a coast guard vessel pulled alongside and two paramedics jumped on board and immediately ordered the captain of the tourist boat to head to Tofino as fast as he could where an ambulance was waiting for me on the pier to rush me to the hospital.
I spent several hours in there while wrapped in heating pads as the medical personnel stabilized me.
It was a humbling experience and I learned some valuable lessons from it.
It’s sad that MacAlpine and West weren’t as lucky as I was that day.
I really wish a passing boat had spotted them before it was too late.