The Stuff AC Employees Are Made Of

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All of us on this site have read some pretty interesting stories here over the years, but this one......in my book is one of the finest. What determination to survive.

Courtesy of the Delta Optimist.

Sailor tells a tale of survival

by Maureen Gulyas

One minute Dave Zaharik was basking in the afterglow of two days of glorious sailing around the Gulf Islands.

It was early Saturday evening.

Zaharik was out on the boat's deck doing nothing more mundane than shaking out his bed linen. The seas were calm, the Esperance I was on autopilot, 10.2 nautical miles from its berth at the Point Roberts Marina.

In an instant, the 45-year-old Boundary Bay man lost his footing. He twisted and turned, as if in slow motion, struggling to regain his balance.

The safety line gave way and Zaharik felt his body succumb to gravity. He fell backwards into the cool waters of Active Pass.

Now he was in the fight of his life - and this wasn't going to be anything like a Kyokushinka karate match, a form of full contact martial arts he'd been studying for 30 years.

This was to save his life, a battle, if won, that would spare his family from a world of sorrows for years to come.

He watched helplessly as his 36-foot Beneteau-built vessel motored toward Point Roberts. Gasping for breath after the shock of the cold water - the temperature was 16 degrees celsius - he screamed: "No!"

A few hours before, Zaharik, a Boeing 767 Air Canada pilot, sailed to Sidney, where he docked the boat and invited a couple of friends over for dinner.

They sat down to a meal of taco soup, a Mexican creation with spicy strips of chicken his wife Scarlet had made for him to take on his trip.

At 5:30 p.m., Zaharik called home to let his wife know he was on his way back. Scarlet, out for dinner to celebrate her parents' 50th wedding anniversary, was supposed to pick him up at the marina around 9:30 p.m.

At Active Pass, Zaharik set his GPS chart plotter for Point Roberts. With the autopilot set at 6 knots, the seas flat, Zaharik expected to be back in two hours.

"I started clearing up the boat," Zaharik remembers.

While he folded his bed linen on deck, his left knee pressed against the life line.

"The clasp released because the pin hadn't gone through properly."

That's when he fell into the water - without a life jacket.

He swam four to six lengths toward his boat. It was futile. He kicked off his rubber boots, took off his polar fleece and reached into his pocket for his cell phone. It was dead. He spun back around and watched the boat, travelling on course without him.

"I looked at Point Roberts and thought, forget it, too far. I looked at Mayne Island and thought, I wasn't going to make it there. I took a deep breath and thought, this is Sept. 6, 2003, I'm 45-years-old and I'm going to die tonight."

Zaharik rolled onto his back and looked skyward.

"Lord, I could use some divine intervention. It would really be appreciated," he remembers saying to himself.

He struggled to control his emotions. Zaharik thought if he was going to die, he wasn't going without a fight.

"I thought of that line from the Nike commercials. I said to myself, 'Just Do It.'"

He started swimming toward Mayne Island. He still had his pants on, but they weighed him down. His stomach, full of taco soup, was in a knot.

"I realized I wasn't going to make it to Mayne Island with my pants on. That's when I remembered my lifeguard training."

He took off his cotton pants and tied a knot at one end of the leg. Holding the pants, he waved them in the air and as he brought them down to the water, an air pocket formed. He squeezed the waist together and placed the homemade life jacket under his drooping chin.

A lifeguard in his teens, he had performed that technique a thousand times, he says.

Zaharik did this every 10 minutes as he swam to Mayne Island. Every muscle in his body ached. Hypothermia had set in and two hours into the ordeal, he started to slip in and out of consciousness.

"I didn't stop kicking or stroking for three hours. At times I thought of the absolute futility of it. But I kept saying, 'Just Do It.'"

Thoughts of his wife Scarlet, 47, his daughter Rachel, 19, and his 16-year-old son Alex crept inside his head.

"I thought of them on Sunday morning getting the news. I thought I had three good reasons to stay alive."

His limbs thought something else. He could no longer feel his legs or arms. He started to lose consciousness again.

Then he heard a great big splash next to him. He didn't know if it was the great squid from Jules Verne's novel, but whatever it was, it woke him up. Then he heard the waves lapping against the shoreline and he knew he was close.

He imagined himself landing on a soft beach like Tom Hanks' character in Castaway. But Zaharik ended up at the wrong end of a 25-foot cliff, one of many around Mayne Island.

It was daunting, to say the least. But the Gods were on Zaharik's side that night.

He reached up and found a place for his hand. Pulling himself upwards, his foot found a safe grip.

"I felt like Spiderman."

Zaharik managed to reach the top, sat down for a second and quickly got up. He crawled across a meadow toward a house that had its lights on. Breathing with the force of a grizzly bear, Zaharik made his way through the darkness, right smack into a nine-foot wire fence.

He backtracked around the fence and finally up to the house. But no one was home.

Down the road, he did find someone home. He reached the front door just as the owner happened to be walking down the hall.

"What happened to you?" Zaharik remembers the surprised homeowner asking.

His boat made it back in one piece. It came through the reef at Lily Point and was finally grounded in Boundary Bay, not too far from Zaharik's Centennial Parkway home.

Rachel Zaharik was home on Saturday night. Around 9 p.m., there was a knock on the door. She opened it to find two Delta police officers.

"Do you know where your dad is," they asked.

"Out sailing," Rachel replied.

"I'm afraid your dad's boat has shown up in Boundary Bay, but he's not onboard," they told her.

They said the coast guard would be conducting a grid search.

"I knew that wasn't good," Rachel says.

But she remained calm. She's a lifeguard, too.

Rachel called her mom, who got on the phone with police, who told her the news.

"I went back to the table and told my mom and dad and we all started crying."

Ten minutes later, the coast guard called Scarlet: "We found your husband and he's alive."

The hovercraft transported him to the Sea Island station in Richmond, where he was treated at Richmond Hospital for shock and hypothermia.

"All those things he learned came back to him," Scarlet says. "He's a very determined person."