Couple in sailboat ‘saved lives yesterday,’ search leader says

Clarke told me the fact that lives were saved is largely because of the couple — Brian Angus and Dorothy Stauffer — aboard a sailboat who came across the survivors and called in a mayday.

I spoke with the couple last night. Angus is a former commodore with the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club and a retired Air Canada captain, and Stauffer is a service director with the airline. 

They said they were on their way from Vancouver to Saturna Island when they saw five people in the water and their training took over. 

They began circling the survivors, using a dinghy they were towing as a life raft.

“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,” Angus told me. 

“The question you have in any incident as a pilot with Air Canada or a boater is: could we have done anything different? And we don’t believe we could have.”

The couple said there was no wreckage or debris at the scene, and none of the survivors had life preservers on. Angus and Stauffer stayed at the scene until they were able to transfer the survivors to a Canadian Coast Guard hovercraft.

Clarke told me it was obvious the duo knew what they were doing.

“They knew exactly who to call, exactly how to circle in,” he said. “We’re very grateful for their response, and I’m not surprised to hear that they had some experience based on how they handled things … they saved lives yesterday.”