Officials recount night of Lake Manitoba rescue

A police officer and a military member who were involved in the rescue of three stranded fishers on Lake Manitoba earlier this month detailed the night as a collaboration that involved some help from the missing fishers.

RCAF member Capt. Zach Hotte was on the rescue plane, a CC-130H Hercules, on the morning of Jan. 10, flying 1,000 feet over Lake Manitoba when a flashing light caught the attention of his spotter. He said the light was cast by the stranded fishers who were signalling for help.

“The search and rescue technician who was sitting in the left window was able to spot them right away,” Hotte said in a recent interview with the Sun. “The second we got close, we had a light shining directly at the plane.”

Hotte said the fishers’ action of shining a blinking light at the plane made a real difference. The rescue team was dealing with reduced visibility due to snowfall, as well as darkness inherent to the overnight search.

“We are extremely thankful, as the guys trying to look for you, when we have co-operative survivors out there,” he said of the flashing light.

“Once that happened, I got really busy with communications. And our guys started going to work making sure that if something bad happened, we were ready to, you know, get out there right away.”

They were readying to airdrop trained search and rescue technicians in case of an emergency.

The Hercules crew from the 435 Transport and Rescue Squadron flew over the target to get location data and passed the location co-ordinates onto RCMP, he said. They then circled over the area and waited for a confirmation that they had found the people they were looking for, when they saw the response on the ground.

“We saw the three headlights from the three snowmobiles of the RCMP guys going directly towards (the fishers),” Hotte said. “The second we found something, they were right on their sleds and headed there to help us confirm those were the people we’re looking for.”

On the ground, RCMP Cpl. Ron Poetker was one of the riders behind the headlights. Poetker told the Sun that the conditions were roughly -10 C, with visibility that worsened as the morning went on.

“It was blowing when we were going out. It wasn’t drifting too bad. But by the time we had turned around with them … I was riding strictly by GPS, because I couldn’t see where we were going,” he said.

When the RCMP arrived on scene, the stranded fishers activated the headlights in their enclosed Bombardier vehicle to draw attention, Poetker said. The police located them and found them to be out of gas and without any firewood to stay warm overnight, he said, and he described it as a relief to find them.

“They were cold, they were scared. They were thankful,” he said. “The brothers, and I think it’s their mom, were hugging.”

The RCMP then gave confirmation to the Hercules crew in the air that the sighting was the missing fishers, loaded them onto the back of the snowmobiles and drove them back to the shoreline, Poetker said. The fishers abandoned their Bombardier vehicle for the night.

The family said they had stopped to clean their fish within eyesight of the shoreline, however the weather conditions worsened and they lost sight of the shoreline and mistakenly rode deeper into Lake Manitoba.

The fishers were found five kilometres from the shoreline. They had been too far from their last known location to be seen by an RCMP drone that was deployed the day before, and hadn’t been found after several hours of snowmobile searches.

Following the sighting from the sky, Hotte said the mission was a success thanks to collaboration. The Hercules team knew from the start they would have support from RCMP and planned their rescue centre around it, he said. They had clearance to airdrop search and rescue technicians onto Lake Manitoba that night because they knew RCMP would be nearby to assist and extract members if needed, he said. They had missed their airdropped radio and couldn’t communicate with the fishers on the ground.

“I want to give huge kudos to the RCMP officers that were working that night,” Hotte said. “They helped us out tremendously.”

Manitoba RCMP media relations officer Paul Manaigre said search and rescue operations on the lake are more likely to involve partnership between RCAF and RCMP because it involves a massive area to cover.

» cmcdowell@brandonsun.com