Update
The family of Rod Anderson stepped forward today, thankful that a carved memorial bearing his name had been found.
Anderson died unexpectedly on July 18, 2002, while skippering a 68-foot boat to Alaska for some American clients. He left the boat for a run near Greenway Sound and upon returning to the dock, he collapsed and died.
The sudden loss of the 51-year-old boat broker devastated his family and those friends who knew him through his passions of diving, boating, flying and running.
Read more in Thursday's Times Colonist
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Original story
A Sidney couple wants to return a carved memorial bearing the name of Rod Anderson to his family.
The large carving depicts a man in a sou’wester hat, pea coat and gum boots.
The carving was found by Mike McGregor in 2011 while he, his son and his son’s girlfriend were in a boat off Pender Island.
“I looked down and thought ‘That’s not a log’ — it was like a little totem pole,” McGregor said Tuesday.
They circled around and picked it up and brought it home. An initial search for Anderson’s family went nowhere.
“We searched the Internet — Canada 411 and all the obituaries — and couldn’t find anything,” he said.
So the carving became an interesting conversation piece in the McGregors’ backyard. Then, a few days ago, Mike’s wife, Lori, looked at the carving and realized she’d seen it before somewhere else.
So she went looking at family photos archived on the computer.
“She’s looking at old pictures and she found a picture she took at least two years before we found this thing, and it was a monument on a little island off Sidney,” McGregor said.
The couple took a close look at the photograph of the memorial on Arbutus Island. Lori had taken it in 2008 — three years before Mike picked the carving from the water off Pender.
A fresh search for the Anderson family has run into dead ends. “I searched everything out in Sidney,” McGregor said.
He wrote to the Times Colonist for help searching out the Anderson family.
An Internet search by the Times Colonist turned up an obituary for Rodney Anderson of North Saanich who died in 2002.
“Whether he was running, boating, flying, scuba diving or taking a peaceful walk, he was full of life and love,” said the obituary, published on July 24, 2002.
It’s not clear if this is the Rod Anderson who was commemorated by the monument — attempts to reach the family listed in the obituary were unsuccessful.
If you can help, please contact the Times Colonist at 250-380-5337 or localnews @timescolonist.com.
