More needs to be done to mark Lund’s underwater water lines, but what that might be is not exactly clear, says a member of the community’s water-improvement district.
Lund Water Improvement District board member Harry Robertson said an incident at the end of August when an out-of-town boat hooked its anchor on the Sevilla Island water line in Finn Cove is not that common, but it is cause for concern.
“It happens infrequently,” said Robertson. “Few people will go in there to anchor because it’s too congested. These poor people picked the wrong spot to put their anchor down.”
In a letter to Powell River Regional District, Powell River Chamber of Commerce and the Lund Hotel, Pender Harbour resident Karen Dyck wrote that she and her husband Jeff had “one of the worst days cruising BC waters ever, all because they decided to stop in at Lund.”
When the Dycks pulled in to the gas dock at the Lund Hotel the seas were still rough and the couple had difficulty getting their 40-foot boat tied up.
After their fill up was complete and they were leaving the harbour, they realized one of their boat fenders had come loose and was in the water.
According to Karen, efforts to recover the fender were hampered by a large wake created by harbour traffic from a Lund water taxi, so the couple took their boat out of the harbour in search of calmer waters.
Northwest of the harbour they found Finn Cove and what they thought would be a good place to drop anchor and plan a fender retrieval mission.
Karen said they found out that they dropped their anchor on nearby Sevilla Island’s underwater water line when a man on shore began “screeching” at them, she said.
Hours later and $120 to hire a diver to unhook their anchor from the line, Karen and Jeff carried on toward home.
The water line was not on their electronic charts, nor were there any signs posted to notify any boaters that the line was in the water, she said.
According to Robertson, while locals know the water line is there, people from out of town would not.
While the water line is legal, Robertson said it is not on the Fisheries and Oceans Canada charts and he does not think it is on the electronic ones either.
There used to be signage on the shore where the line goes across, but boaters did not pay attention to it when it was there, so it was taken down and there could be potential difficulty having signs re-posted on private property, he said.
Robertson added that he will bring the issue up at the next water district meeting held at the end of September.
“Now our problem is if we put in a couple of buoys on a rope with signs, that will impede navigation and then we get called up on that,” said Robertson. “We’re kind of between the devil and the deep blue sea.”
