Queen of the North remembrances begin

With a rather sad occassion about to be commemorated on Thursday, the remembrances of the events of March 22, 2006 have begun to find their place in the news machine. We'll try over the next day to provide a link to those items that come across the Podunkian internet connection.

An archive of those remembrances of a night that not many on the North Coast will forget any time soon.

Steve Metly of Canadian Press has put together a look back at the events of that night off of Gil Island, it first appeared on the CTV News website.

Fatal B.C. ferry sinking still 'night to remember'
Steve Mertl, Canadian Press
Updated: Tue. Mar. 20 2007 1:44 PM ET

PRINCE RUPERT, B.C. — You can still see the marks where she struck, the kind of scrapes a sleepy driver's car leaves after caroming off a highway divider.

The Queen of the North was doing almost 19 knots -- close to 35 kilometres an hour -- when the 8,800-tonne ferry slammed into the steep, unyielding shore of Gil Island after midnight a year ago March 22.

The collision ripped a gash from stem to stern that sent her to the bottom of Wright Sound in just over an hour, leaving passengers and crew bobbing in lifeboats and rafts in choppy, rain-swept seas.

A battery of investigations is trying to discover why the ship, which travelled the ruggedly beautiful B.C. North Coast's Inside Passage since 1980, missed a routine course change exiting Grenville Channel.

A pair of steel crosses now overlook the wreck site, the presumed resting place of two passengers who apparently never made it off the ship.

On Saturday, relatives of Gerald Foisy and his companion Shirley Rosette of Prince George, B.C., gather to dedicate the memorial and join in a commemoration with the nearby Gitga'at First Nation village of Hartley Bay, whose residents sped to the rescue that night.

Crew members quietly held their own reunion in Prince Rupert, the Queen's home port, earlier this month.

The initial jubilation that all 101 passengers and crew had made it off the ship evaporated it became clear two never got to Hartley Bay or to the coast guard vessel Sir Wilfrid Laurier that arrived within two hours.

Rosette and Foisy are likely entombed on the Queen but the couple remain officially listed as missing until the RCMP finish their investigation.

"We can't do anything until we get that death certificate," says Glenn McDonald of Penticton, B.C., Foisy's grandfather and co-executor of his will, who has also launched a lawsuit on behalf of Foisy's two teenage children, one of several legal actions triggered by the sinking.

"They really want to find out just what happened to their dad."

The anniversary comes as the Queen's replacement gets ready to enter service. B.C. Ferries recently dedicated the Northern Adventure.

Despite often lurid speculation, the cause is still officially a mystery. It sparked an RCMP criminal probe soon to be the hands of Crown prosecutors, a B.C. Ferries' internal review likely ready this month and the federal Transportation Safety Board's definitive analysis that's three to six months away.

The coast guard is promising a recommendation soon on how to deal with tonnes of remaining diesel fuel and other pollutants.

Like almost everyone connected with the Queen's final journey, B.C. Ferries president David Hahn says his thoughts are of Rosette and Foisy.

"This'll probably come out wrong but I could care less about the ship," he says. "It's the people that lost their lives that is the most difficult thing to deal with."

The investigations could fill in some of the missing pieces of what survivor Graham Clarke wryly calls his "night to remember," a reference to the well-known account of the Titanic's sinking.
Few that night were in a better position than Clarke to understand what was happening.

The head of Vancouver-based Pacific Marine Group was aboard as a guest of B.C. Ferries. His small ferry company was offering to take over the 17-hour run between Prince Rupert and Port Hardy, on northern Vancouver Island.

Clarke had explored every part of the ship, including the bridge, and spoken to many of its crew. He was dozing in bed when he heard and felt the ship's first contact with Gil Island at around 12:20 a.m.

"I thought we'd broken a propeller shaft," he recalls. "But when the second impact occurred a second or two later, it was long, protracted and the ship was rolling considerably like she was being lifted bodily."

Clarke vividly remembers the noise, a long, metallic grinding "like something was giving way to an immovable object," followed by a long silence, then an alarm. And darkness.
As Clarke groped for his clothes he realized the sound of tearing that had passed beneath him was clearly below the waterline.

"As far as I was concerned the ship was no longer on a rock. It was going down," he says. "I was going to get dressed warmly because I thought that this was going to be a long night."

In Hartley Bay, where the 150-odd residents routinely monitor marine radio traffic in case of emergencies, matriarch Belle Eaton was first to hear the ferry's distress call and alert her neighbours.

Nicole Robinson, in charge of the village nursing station, got an instant message on her computer at home.

Edward Robinson spoke briefly to the ferry by radio and offered assistance, then heard her mayday call to the coast guard. He quickly summoned his neighbours.

"Not even two minutes after I made the call I was down on the float and everybody was already on boats," he remembers.

Ernie Westgarth set up a reception area for survivors at the village cultural centre. Eaton was one of the first to arrive and help, making sandwiches and coffee.

The Laurier was anchored for the night in Bernard Harbour about 27 kilometres south of Hartley Bay.

It would take 90 minutes to up anchor and steam at top speed to the wreck site so the crew launched its fast-rescue boat, an inflatable Zodiac capable of 40 knots, to race ahead.
Aboard the Queen, dazed passengers mustered on deck.

"There was one lady who was complaining that this was a fine time to have a lifeboat drill," says Clarke. "She was dressed in a nightgown, in her bare feet."

The ship's list made it hard to launch her lifeboats and rafts, says Clarke. He had a heart-stopping moment as his raft fell about three metres when its launch mechanism malfunctioned.
Ed Robinson and his fellow rescuers raced their small boats through a violent squall and arrived in time to see the ship, lit by her emergency lights, settling in the water.

The captain, still trying to account for everyone, asked Robinson to circle the sinking vessel and look for anyone still aboard.

"So I went around the ship and I flashed in every window. I went around slow and didn't see anything."

Robinson watched as the Queen took her final plunge at around 1:40 a.m.

As her bow lifted towards the sky, Clarke heard the sounds of cars, heavy trucks and machinery tearing loose and tumbling towards the stern.

"It was making a terrible din, amplified over the water and under the water," he says.
Windows blew out and air rushed through the hole in her bow.

"As she went down, the stern hit the rock face at the edge of the island and you could see her dance vertically sideways as she hit," says Clarke.

Mindful of naval tradition, Clarke says he led the survivors in a cheer for the Queen.
"She was a beautiful ship. I felt she was the handsomest ship in the fleet."

The crew of the arriving Laurier was met with an unnerving sight -- hundreds of floating lifejackets that had fallen out of deck containers as the ship sank. In the dark their untied straps looked like limp arms.

"We couldn't just go steaming through all that," says chief officer Steve Kennedy, the ship's second-in-command. "You don't know if there's people in any of them. We had to basically stop the ship."

With no idea how many people had been aboard -- the Queen could carry more than 500 passengers -- the Laurier's searchlights probed the mass of lifejackets as she crept through the debris.

"It was likely the most eerie feeling I've ever had. I'll never forget it."
The Laurier would take about 50 passengers and crew aboard, including Clarke, while the rest were taken to Hartley Bay.

As she waited for an unknown number of casualties, Nicole Robinson worried she might be in over her head.

The village's visiting nurses had left the previous day and Robinson would have to rely on her first aid training. She also knew her uncle and cousins from nearby Klemtu were travelling on the Queen.

"I just broke down and cried because I didn't know what I was going to do," she remembers.
Robinson would end up treating several people for minor injuries, getting advice over the phone throughout the night. Several people were later taken by helicopter to Prince Rupert.

Westgarth initially took things in stride, joking with men on the dock as they waited to receive survivors. That changed when the first boatload arrived.

"They just had these shocked looks on their faces, like is this really happening?" he says, remembering especially a bewildered barefoot little boy. "That's when it dawned on us how serious this was."

Survivors were counted at the reception centre but Westgarth says there were problems as the coast guard repeatedly questioned the tallies, which came up short.

The uncertainty was deepened by a false rumour that two passengers -- assumed to be Foisy and Rosette -- had hitched a ride on a fishing boat headed to Prince Rupert.

The rescuers trolled Wright Sound all day, picking up lifejackets, food trays and other debris in a spreading diesel slick whose fumes nauseated them and turned their boats black.

The survivors at Hartley Bay, after being taken into homes to eat and clean up, joined the others on the Laurier to return to Prince Rupert almost 24 hours after they departed there in the Queen.

The ferry now lies beneath 425 metres of water. Video shows her sitting upright looking largely undamaged -- her wound hidden by a deep bed of silt -- as if waiting to load passengers and cars for her next trip.

An almost benign sight, except for the realization the Queen is regularly burping up diesel from her 225,000-litre fuel tanks, and perhaps some of the 23,000 litres of lubricant she also carried.
Hartley Bay residents are frustrated that B.C. Ferries and government agencies have not kept their promise to address the potential environmental disaster quickly. Hahn says costs will be borne by the company's insurance.

B.C. Ferries has shown its gratitude to Hartley Bay by funding improvements to its dock and buying new playground equipment for the children, but rejected suggestions to name the Queen's replacement Spirit of Hartley Bay.

The village has been showered with accolades, including a Governor General's commendation. Westgarth says the incident has done a lot for residents' self-confidence.

"There was two lives lost there but I'm pretty proud about how Hartley Bay came together without questioning,' he says. "The guys that went on the boats, they put themselves in jeopardy."

Gitga'at Chief Bob Hill proposes a more tangible reward than renaming a ship: Build on coastal First Nations' seagoing skills with training and better equipment to bolster the emergency-response capabilities on these remote shores.