In my last column I wrote about meeting a cyclist on the trail who, when I said, ‘Good Morning’, immediately stopped his bike and asked, ‘Andrew?’ We hadn’t seen each other since 2014, yet he remembered me from POCOMAR, the Port Colborne Marine Auxiliary Rescue Unit based in Sugarloaf Marina.
I guess it was the voice and my accent. Since emigrating to this lovely country to live among all your lovely Canadians I have lost count of the times I’ve had to correct some of you. Our language is English, and I am English, so how is it I have the 'accent'?😊 It is you, dear friends, not I, who have the accents, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that— I think they’re rather cute.
But I digress.
Only two or three days later I visited the stables where my long-time crazy Rottweiler lived to say hi to the daughter of the house, and the lady who runs the riding school. She was actually with a class when I arrived but as she went into the arena a lady came out and passed us. This was a bit uncanny as all she said was ‘Andrew?’ (Do I really have an accent?)
Turned out she was the wife of another POCOMAR member and someone else who I had last seen around 2014.
Coincidence?
But certainly enough to turn my mind back to an early period of my Canadian life when I discovered POCOMAR and began one of the most rewarding periods of my life as a professional mariner.
I should first admit that my interest was not ‘to give back to society’, no selfless volunteer, I. It was solely to get back on the water, on a couple of pretty impressive SAR vessels, to do what I have always loved best, boat handling, with the added thrill of just maybe occasionally having to operate in some fairly scary weather conditions.
All very well until I quickly began to appreciate the incredible dedication of the volunteers who made up POCOMAR.
I went to a pre-sea training school at 16, then into the British Merchant Navy, a number of years in marine pilotage, a period with a foreign Royal Navy, and in my later ‘beach bum’ years, managing a dive shop and teaching and taking folks scuba diving.
I have nowhere to hide when claiming to be a professional mariner, no excuses for screwing up whatever might happen out on the water, whatever those activities they might entail.
Yet in POCOMAR I met a whole new group of very ordinary folk who had jobs, had families, most with some limited experience of boats and boating. They chose to volunteer to go out on Lake Erie when called (in my personal opinion one of the most unpredictable and scary stretches of water I have encountered anywhere) and literally put their lives on the line to save those in peril on the seas.
POCOMAR is, in Ontario, a unique SAR Unit, part of the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary. Whilst the Welland Canal has frequent Canadian Coast Guard vessels transiting the canal, there is no permanent Coast Guard base close to Port Colborne. This makes POCOMAR the only volunteer SAR Unit tasked to cover a huge area of Lake Erie from the Niagara River in the north to Port Dover in the south. And they do it incredibly well.
The training manuals and course are all based on Canadian Coast Guard standards and have to be met by all volunteers to maintain their status. I was overwhelmingly impressed by the dedication and professionalism shown by almost all those I was fortunate to volunteer with.
One AGM, when a next year’s Committee was being elected, I was shocked to see my name proposed as XO. I hadn’t submitted it, and no one had asked me. Despite my objections, I was elected and maybe began to understand that being a ‘volunteer’ was a bit different than anything I’d ever experienced before.
I never regretted a moment of it and after two years had no qualms about being elevated to Unit Commander, and then two years later handing over to a younger POCOMAR as it seemed the right thing to do.
I have never lost my total respect for all the POCOMAR volunteers I was fortunate to serve with, in my eyes they were as professional in what they did, as anything I believed about my own professional mariner status.
So when you next pass Sugarloaf Marina, think about those young men and women, still responding to CCG callouts and still saving lives. They are truly unsung heroes who rarely, if ever, get the recognition they all deserve.
The coincidence of those two recent ‘Andrew?’ questions brought back so many great personal memories for me. Maybe enough for a column about what we all did out there on Lake Erie...
