It’s difficult to imagine a more relentless environment for a maritime rescue: hurricane-force winds gusting to 100 knots, temperatures plunging to a nail-numbing minus 20°F, heavy swirling snow, 12-foot seas and constant freezing spray. A January darkness so complete that even powerful searchlights barely cut through it.
Summoned by an EPIRB signal from a disabled fishing vessel, the 75-foot Canadian Coast Guard cutter Point Henry steamed down Grenville Channel in northern British Columbia, steadily icing over as she pushed into the storm. Navigation fell to radar, chartplotter and compass while the crew fought to keep the ship on course.
“Zero visibility,” recalls Les Palmer, the first officer aboard Point Henry that night. “It was a blinding snowstorm. It wasn’t a good scene.” Ice even formed on the inside of the pilothouse windows, adding to the challenge of locating the distressed boat on a dark, storm-lashed coastline.
Palmer knew the risks both for those in danger and for the rescuers. An experienced outdoorsman and search-and-rescue specialist, he grew up working with his father in marine towing, logging and commercial fishing. “I grew up in the bush,” he says—knowledge that proved critical that night.
As the cutter made way south from Prince Rupert toward the distress coordinates, a northbound freighter reported seeing a small flickering light on a rocky beach on Pitt Island. That sighting likely saved the fishermen’s lives by narrowing the search in the storm-struck darkness.
When Point Henry reached the area reported by the freighter, the ship moved to within about 300 feet of the beach and trained powerful spotlights on the shore. Snow and night swallowed the beams. The crew fired rocket flares to illuminate the coastline, but heavy squalls obscured everything. Then, in a brief break between squalls, someone on shore flashed a tiny strobe—visible for a moment through the weather—and the rescue team finally had a fix on the victims.
Finding the men was only the beginning. The beach where they huddled was hit by an 8 to 12-foot surf with winds blowing directly onto the shore. Attempting a direct landing there would have been nearly suicidal. Using local knowledge, Palmer knew of a narrow pass about half a mile south of the site that offered enough of a lee to launch an inflatable craft. He volunteered to be put ashore and make the overland approach to the fishermen.
At 43 and in strong condition, Palmer suited up in a Mustang survival suit, fleece long johns, insulated gloves and boots, and two balaclavas. He was dropped off and began the half-mile trek across a frozen, otherworldly shoreline. The distance took an hour because conditions forced slow, cautious travel and frequent detours.
The beach and immediate shoreline were coated with freezing, blowing spray that glazed everything in ice and severely limited visibility. To escape the worst of the spray and wind, Palmer tried to move through the coastal bush about 50 feet inland. There the snow measured up to three feet deep. Tree limbs, battered by the storm, began to break and fall. At times he had to crawl; the wind literally knocked him off his feet more than once.
Exhaustion and exposure set in. Sweat soaked his insulating layers and then began to freeze. “I closed my eyes, and my freaking eyes froze shut,” he remembers, a mix of physical pain and the sudden fear that can strip away focus. He forced himself on, crawling behind a fallen “sweeper” log for a moment’s shelter before continuing.
Eventually Palmer reached the fishermen. Their boat, the Larissa, had iced up earlier in the day and been knocked on her beam ends by a powerful katabatic burst. The men had made it to shore and huddled in a torn, partially inflated life raft, anchored down with logs. One of them spotted the flares; another used a strobe to signal the rescuers during a brief lull in the squalls.
Palmer’s luck and timing mattered: from the cutter a waterproof medical bag had been fastened to a lighted life ring and tossed toward shore. Under extreme conditions, Palmer retrieved that bag and used the survival suit and heat packs it contained to treat a hypothermic, semiconscious captain. Without those supplies the man likely would not have survived.
The rescue occurred nearly seven years before this account was written, but the courage displayed by Palmer and his shipmates—and the tenacity of the fishermen—remains timeless. For his actions that night, Les Palmer was awarded Canada’s Cross of Valour, one of the country’s highest civilian honors and only rarely bestowed since its introduction in 1972. Palmer is modest about the recognition: “It’s not just me,” he says. “It’s the whole crew.”
The fishing captain later gave his daughter the name “Palmer” as a middle name, a gesture that moved the rescuer deeply. “It’s a good feeling,” Palmer says, “knowing that that fellow continues on and started a family.”
“I kept at the tiller all night and by morning I was subhuman, just a wet lump of humanity longing for nothing but warmth and oblivion.”
– Charles Violet
This article originally appeared in the January 2011 issue.