A trans-Atlantic search for two missing boaters with connections to Salt Spring Island has concluded after a man and woman were found dead in a boat that washed ashore on Nova Scotia’s Sable Island on Wednesday, about 300 kilometres southeast of Halifax.
Halifax RCMP spokesperson Allison Gerrard told the Times Colonist that there was no additional information available on Saturday and that Nova Scotia’s medical examiner service continues to work on identifying the bodies.
Police said that a three-metre-long inflatable boat was found washed ashore on Sable Island with two deceased people on board by Parks Canada on Wednesday.
Police believe that the boat is a lifeboat from a larger vessel named Theros and that the bodies are of a 60-year-old woman and a 70-year-old man from B.C. who were reported missing at sea on June 18.
Photos and video posted on the Facebook page Theros Sailing Adventure on June 11 show the vessel leaving the Dartmouth Yacht Club. The page appears to have been run by Brett Clibbery and Sarah Packwood.
A Guardian article from 2020 says that Packwood, a humanitarian aid worker, and Clibbery, a retired engineer, met in a chance encounter at Trafalgar Square while Clibbery was in London to donate his kidney.
After sharing a bus ride together, the two fell in love.
The two married onboard Theros and moved to Salt Spring in 2018 after a sailing trip around North America and the Caribbean, the article said.
They had previously planned for a sailing trip across the Atlantic in June 2019, but that was curtailed by severe storms, the Guardian reported.
In a video posted on June 11, Clibbery provides an update on the couple’s voyage from aboard the boat.
“Well, we’re away from the Nova Scotia coast now. We’re 16 nautical miles from where we started, which is probably 12 miles inshore,” he said. “And we’re doing five and a half knots average. So we’re not doing bad.
“If the winds stay the same as it is right now, we’re basically southeast, which would get us to the Azores. So we’ll see. We’re sailing away.”
Lt.-Cmdr. Len Hickey, spokesperson for Halifax’s Joint Rescue Coordination Centre, said the Canadian Coast Guard has provided transport to a RCMP forensics team to Sable Island to help confirm the identity of the deceased.
“Based on descriptions, they were pretty confident that it was the two from the sailing vessel,” he said.
A 70-year-old male Canadian citizen and 60-year-old female British national was reported missing to the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre on June 18 after they left Halifax Harbour for the mid-Atlantic Azores Islands of Portugal.
Hickey said the call was made by a person who was concerned that they had not heard from the couple since June 13, though there were no known signs of distress at the time.
Search efforts began on July 2 after the two did not appear at the Azores as planned.
A C-130 Hercules aircraft from CFB Greenwood traced the boat’s intended route from Halifax to the Azores and back but found no trace of the two missing boaters, he said.
A PAL Airlines aircraft was also engaged for a search off the coast of Nova Scotia in areas of “highest probability,” he said.
The rescue centre at the Azores conducted their own aerial search, as well as the United States Coast Guard on July 8, he said.
Halifax’s Joint Rescue Coordination Centre stopped its search and rescue efforts after the bodies were discovered on July 10.
Hickey said the waters where the two may have travelled through on June 13 and 14 — when contact was first lost — were experiencing heavy fog and mist.
That reduced visibility to just 200-feet in sea conditions of 15-knot winds and two-metre tall waves, he said.
It’s not unknown for the remains of deceased boaters to drift up on Sable Island, he said.
The inflatable boat was found on the southern side of Sable Island.
The island, known for its population of wild horses and often shrouded by mists and fog, is nicknamed “the Graveyard of the Atlantic” and has seen more than 350 recorded shipwrecks off its shores.
RCMP and Parks Canada are both investigating as to why the inflatable boat ended up on Sable Island, Hickey said.
The ship Theros has yet to be found.
On Saturday, a man who identified himself as Clibbery’s son, James Clibbery, wrote on the couple’s sailing page on Facebook that the family had no immediate updates and asked for privacy “as we navigate this dev[a]stating time in our life.”
“To those who have reached out with my family in their thoughts and prayers, [t]hank you.”
— With The Canadian Press
