John Francis, Bruce Peninsula Press
(with notes from Tara Lobb)
Tara Lobb describes what she and her husband saw from their cottage in Johnston Harbour:
“My husband went down to the water with his coffee and our dog for their morning stroll at our waterfront. It was Thursday June 25th at 7:30 in the morning when he was startled to see the large red channel marker 300-400 metres directly out from our waterfront.
“The buoy was not moving and had settled into about 15ft of water … he assumed a broken chain was dragging on the rocky bottom and holding it stationary.”
The Lobbs then had a back-and-forth phone conversation with the Coast Guard that day, after which:
“Later that evening around 9pm a red/orange CG zodiac with twin outboard engines approached our bay from the northwest. It had 3 or 4 crew on board and spent about 10 minutes circling around and investigating the buoy before it left on a southerly heading. On Sunday morning June 28th around 7:30 my husband saw a much larger Canada Coast Guard vessel approaching from the north west towards our bay. … the ship slowly made its way to within a kilometre or so of our shore. It slowed to a stop and deployed a smaller barge type vessel via the aft-mounted crane. … the barge proceeded to the buoy … and proceeded to tie the buoy to the side of the barge … to drag it back to the larger ship, which took about 25 minutes.”
Tara Lobb explains that when the crane hoisted the buoy out of the water, it had 20 or so feet of thick chain hanging from it, which had probably served as a sort of anchor, once it reached shallow water.
The large vessel the Lobbs saw was the Coast Guard’s buoy tender, CCGS Samuel Risley, which had been doing routine buoy maintenance on Lake Superior when it received the call.
The buoy proved to be American, although it did not have an identification plate so no further details were available at press time.
