From near-death to jail

I have often wondered, in passing, what happens if you wreck and are rescued in a foreign country before clearing customs. Now I know: you get arrested.

This story has already been making the rounds on nautical websites here in the Pacific Northwest, on Three Sheets among others. So far, though, all that has been covered has been the fantastic survival story of Keith Carver, a 56 year old American sailor from Tucson who was shipwrecked on the coast (sort of; we’ll get to that in a minute) of Vancouver Island a week ago and rescued by chance by a passing helicopter ferrying a physician between remote communities on the West Coast. Carver survived the five days since he had come ashore by eating lichen.

How he came to be washed ashore near the northern tip of the island in the first place is as fascinating as his survival thereafter. With a friend, Carver had come to Washington in mid-February to purchase a 40 foot cement sailboat, intent on sailing it down the coast to Mexico. The plan itself gives an indication of the likely outcome to those familiar with weather along the northwest coast in the winter. And indeed, after a few days clear sailing out the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the pair were caught off-shore in a storm they claim blew them well up into Canadian waters. During the course of the storm, Carver’s friend broke his arm, and they put in at Tahsis to get him medical attention. A good samaritan drove the friend to Campbell River for help. Carver, apparently not having had enough, put back out on his own, only to run into another storm system a day later, which seems to have pushed him even further north.

His vessel disintegrating around him, he decided to make for Port Alice, but never got there… 20 kilometres from the village, he abandoned his boat and barely made it ashore, with no communications or survival equipment. He planned to walk in the rest of the way, no great feat across 20 klicks of Arizona desert, perhaps, but near madness to anyone looking at a topographic map of the area and familiar with the dense, swampy forests of the region.

Only good luck and sharp eyes of helicopter pilot Wayne Goodrich saved Carver, who ended up in the hospital at Port McNeill, from which he was released today, and promptly arrested by the RCMP on suspicion of entering the country illegally.

Well, no kidding.

“We have reason to question his admissibility and that’s why we’ve detained him. It’s got nothing to do with him being shipwrecked,” says Corporal Derek Lagan, which is a bit like saying “We arrested the guy for shooting the victim. It’s got nothing to do with him pulling the trigger.”

As I said, I have sometimes wondered idly what might happen if one were forced off-course or wrecked or otherwise found oneself in need of assistance before formally clearing in to the country… speculation encouraged by a particularly annoying evening spent dealing with US Customs merely for being a couple hours late due to mechanical difficulties. I shudder to think what might happen if we had been adrift, or god forbid, put ashore, anywhere other than a designated port of entry during regulation hours.

Despite that experience, however, I suspect that rescued sailors generally receive a more amicable welcome than Carver, and there is probably some contingency for clearing in even if you hadn’t intended to enter but were compelled by emergency or force of nature. I suspect that in this case, the RCMP finds something fishy in Carver’s story or background, because when I first heard it, I thought it was a little fishy, too.

Now, I don’t want to discount the sorts of strange things that the ocean can do or the seemingly odd decisions that any of us might make under stress or in exigent circumstances. But having covered some of the same ground this past summer, a few things seemed odd right off the bat.

Tahsis, for instance, is not someplace that one simply stops off if they happen to find themselves in need of assistance off the coast of Vancouver Island. Tahsis lies at the head of a substantially long fjord; you have to work at getting to Tahsis, and either of the two ways you might get there require passing other settlements or manned Canadian Coast Guard light stations along the way. If you had injured crew, you could get them help hours sooner ducking in at Esperanza (itself a long way from the coast) or the Nootka Light right on the coast.

Carver also managed to get a long way north for someone trying to get to Mexico. We had to work pretty hard last summer to cover that same territory, going the opposite direction. No doubt the wind was behind him, but he still had to have been making pretty good time to go all that distance. And why not run back in to closer ports once it all started? A day’s sail south from Tahsis has you closer to Tofino and other sheltered anchorages in Clayoquot Sound… if you’re getting hammered and pushed off course why wouldn’t you duck in there, or even back to Tahsis, a familiar port, instead of heading for Port Alice? At the very least, you might heave to and at least try not to get blown that much further from where you were headed originally. (Edit 07MAR10: More intrepid investigators than myself have dredged up weather records for the period in question and, in the words of this Seattle PI article, found “…nearly ideal sailing conditions on the day he claimed he was shipwrecked.” Of course, one man’s ideal sailing conditions are another man’s small craft advisory; still, it casts more doubt on the idea that he was blown uncontrollably so far north)

Speaking of which, Port Alice is up a lengthy fjord itself, past another Coast Guard light station, and a much closer village at Winter Harbour. Carver may have been shipwrecked, but contrary to the headlines, it wasn’t exactly “on the coast.” (Edit: I see now in the second article that other sources are saying he was found some 30 klicks from Kyuquot, which is on the coast; it’s unclear how this reconciles with Carver’s statement that he was within 20K of Port Alice)

I don’t wish to be too judgmental, or suggest that anything untoward was happening. All those decisions, individually, can be explained away through desperation, other difficulties left un-detailed in the news articles, inexperience, or excessive stress and fatigue. I’ve made enough terrible decisions myself to not be too quick to condemn those made by others. It’s very different when you are out there in the middle of it, after all.

What I will say is that I can see how all those things taken together might rouse some suspicions in the mind of your average Mounty, however, perhaps sufficient to justify holding Mr. Carver on some readily available immigration charges long enough to dig a little deeper into his and his friend’s journey. At least, I like to think that is the motivation, even as I hope that Carver himself is no more than he appears, an unlucky sailor who ran into a string of difficult circumstances and escaped by the skin of his teeth.

Either way, I am anxious to hear the rest of the story on this episode. I’m sure it will be equally fascinating. And I hope I am not shipwrecked before clearing Customs anytime soon!