Maritime mystery
Villagers speculate about shipwrecked sailor and dog after boat washes up on isolated, rocky point
A tiny Cape Breton fishing village is abuzz with a maritime mystery.
A storm-tossed boat washed up on the rocky coast of Gabarus last week and several residents spotted the shipwrecked sailor, accompanied by his dog, walking up the highway. Marie Jaarsma said the man was headed in the direction of Fourchu when he passed her home in Gabarus Lake early Thursday afternoon.
“I just saw this guy with a backpack — I don’t see many people walking by — and I noticed he had a dog with him with a red jacket on it,” Jaarsma told the Cape Breton Post while making crafts at the Mildred (Grant) Gray Community Hall on Tuesday.
The 11metre sailboat Liberty sits stranded off an isolated point of land in the 10,000-acre Gabarus Wilderness Area south of village.
Local resident Tim Menk was at the site Tuesday looking over the vessel, which is pitched inward toward the shore and appears to be severely damaged. A life preserver is perched in one of the small spruce trees that line the cliffside about 30 metres away. Farther up the coastal trail, a board with various electronic equipment and a few vinyl boat fenders are propped against a tree trunk
Menk said there is centurieslong history of shipwrecks off Gabarus, and the area where the sailboat is beached is particularly dangerous, calling it a “forbidding coast and a dangerous shore.”
“Wherever you come in here, if you’re unlucky enough to run aground, you’re going to hit rocks and stove in the hull of your boat,” he said, adding that it appears the boat’s operator didn’t have enough time to secure the sailboat before he abandoned it.
“He had to jump for his life, and I imagine it was higher tide and bigger waves in the storm, so my read is he’s lucky he got to shore because it’s a short distance but you can be swallowed by waves and, if you’re not a great swimmer, towed out.”
Mark MacGillivray and his fiancee Monique Ford also went to check out the wreck.
MacGillivray, a Gabarus resident who fishes out of Main-aDieu, wondered why the sailor didn’t ask anyone in the village for help.
“It’s funny he wouldn’t at least knock on someone’s door and ask for a glass of water,” he said.
“The people I’ve been talking to are just asking questions and curious, more or less, as to what took place.”
While the identity of the sailor couldn’t be confirmed Tuesday, it appears to be the same sailboat that was eventually towed into Sydney harbour by a Canadian Coast Guard cutter on Sept. 24.
At that time, Marine Atlantic’s MV Highlanders ferry was first to reach the boat, about 20 nautical miles north of Sydney in the Cabot Strait. However, the man who sent the distress call opted to wait onboard with his dog, even though his vessel had a hole in the hull and its engine wasn’t
working.
A CBC Cape Breton reporter spoke to the man the following day, and identified him as Andrew Bunn, a nurse from Chicago who was sailing the world on his sailboat Liberty with his bull mastiff-boxer mix Atticus.
Bunn told the public broadcaster he planned to replace the sail then “limp back to the U.S. east coast to effect some serious repair.”
Cape Breton Regional Police spokeswoman Desiree Vassallo said their officers checked on the
boat Saturday as part of an investigation by Canada Border Services Agency. She said authorities know the identity of the owner and police are no longer involved.
“There’s nothing criminal there that we’re investigating in terms of anything suspicious or a missing person,” she said.
The Canada Border Services Agency returned an email sent to them by the Post, but a spokesperson said they couldn’t provide a response until Wednesday.