Cowichan Search and Rescue, after successfully getting an injured 73-year-old female hiker off Maple Mountain onto the beach, got a big floating surprise late Monday afternoon.
The whole gang, the injured woman, her husband, and the SAR team, where whisked to Maple Bay in a Canadian Coast Guard hovercraft.
According to search manager, Shaunene Nicholls, the rescue went remarkably smoothly.
“We got a call-out yesterday afternoon (Monday, April 23) at 2.20 that there was a 73-year-old female that had fallen and hurt herself on Maple Mountain. We were tasked out by BC Ambulance Service to locate her and render first aid assistance and bring her out. It took two and a half to three hours to mobilize and get out to her.
“She was on what’s called the Yellow Trail, which is the one that follows the shoreline. There’s the Yellow and the Blue, and the Yellow is the more difficult trail, and then there’s the Pink trail, which is straight up and down. We’re glad she wasn’t on that one.”
Once they’d found her, there was going to be the big job of getting the injured woman back safely and in some kind of comfort.
“Because she had been out there for the time she was, and her injuries were significant enough, I knew how long it was going to take for them to stretcher her back out. A team moving in has just packs on their backs but stretchering a subject back out would take a lot longer. She had fallen and hit her head; she had a neck injury as well.
“So to make it easier on the subject I contacted my resources and they were able to deploy,” Nicholls said. She thought when she called they might send a local fire rescue boat to help out, but instead they got an unexpected assist from the Coast Guard, who sent in a hovercraft all the way from Richmond. Because of the style of the boat, it was able to come right up on shore. “They came right beside the beach, a beautiful little cove, so our rope rescue team roped her down to the cove [to come back by boat],” Nicholls said.
Nicholls was at command central and she couldn’t see the hovercraft herself so when she asked if it could also carry her team, she had no idea why the captain chuckled, and said, “we have plenty of room for them.”
“It was huge,” Nicholls said Tuesay. “It was great to get my team out that way so they didn’t have to hike back in the dark. It all went very well.”
A ride in the big boat was a thrill for the search and rescue team, too.
“We had some of our members in training with the team but it was the first time for all the team members to be on a hovercraft,” Nicholls said.
“Those resources are there if they are needed. This lady was 73 and she had been out there and was cold and hurt. We try to make it as quick as possible,” she said.
Nicholls said she didn’t know if the hiker was local or not.
“We had 28 members out in all, a good turnout for a work day. Especially when it comes to carrying a stretcher over all those dips and dives in the terrain, it definitely takes a lot of manpower to ease the subject. A lot of times they have to set up rope systems for the subject in the stretcher. We were able to rope her down to the beach. That’s why we do all that practising.”