A Courtenay skipper accused of threatening to kill his two crew members while high on drugs aboard a fishing boat Sunday night has now been charged.
Karl Darwin Thomas, 49, is charged with assault with a weapon, pointing a firearm, careless use of a firearm and uttering threats.
Police were alerted to the situation just after 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, when a 26-year-old woman called 911 to report the skipper of a fishing vessel was high on drugs and threatening to kill her and another crew member, a 21-year-old man, said Corporal Darren Lagan of Island District RCMP. The woman said the skipper had physically assaulted and threatened them, and they had sought safety on the roof of the 30-foot, gill-net fishing boat. There was a loaded shotgun and multiple knives on board, she said.
As police mobilized officers, the woman called back: The skipper had fired at least one shot and the situation was quickly escalating.
Port Hardy RCMP officers, along with members of the RCMP Island District Emergency Response Team, took to the water. However, with no exact location and dusk beginning to fall, locating the moving vessel proved challenging. That's when the RCMP's Operational Communications Centre in Courtenay stepped in, using cellular telephone pings off the towers in the North Island area to identify the vessel's general location, Cpl. Lagan said. From there, officers used heat-detecting equipment, binoculars and sheer perseverance, eventually spotting the flicker of flashlights coming from the two crew members shortly after 11 p.m.
"We would rather have had it happen quicker, but there simply wasn't the information there to locate them any sooner than we did," Cpl. Lagan said.
Police then followed the vessel, using a marine radio to order the skipper to head to shore. When those repeated attempts failed, the man and the woman jumped from the back of the boat on to the bow of the officers' boat. A short time later, police were able to make contact with the skipper via cell phone and successfully persuaded him to dock at Port Hardy.
Mr. Thomas was held in custody, and appeared in Port Hardy Provincial Court on Tuesday.
The two crew members had been physically assaulted with a knife but were not seriously injured, Cpl. Lagan said.