Cape Dorset boater recounts harrowing Canada Day accident

A group ofCapeDorsetboaters are lucky to be alive, followinga Canada Day accident that destroyed their boat and left them stranded on ice outside theNunavutcommunity.

Last week,JamesieAlariaqleft CapeDorsetin his 24-foot wooden boat with his 11-year-old son and a friend.

"We were out collecting duck eggs and catching some ducks,"recalled Alariaq.

They had been on the water for about 9 hours and were having some tea when, suddenly, Alariaq says they felt a piece of ice strike the boat.

"[The water]was open one minute and then the ice came in from behind us and crushed us,"he said. "It happened in a matter of seconds."

Alariaq's son looked to the side of the boat and saw a holeabout "one-foot wide."

"We were driving around in circles trying to bail out the water and trying to get back to my son because he was on a piece of ice and we were sinking real bad."

As the water gushed through the hole, Alariaq says he knew it was only minutes away from sinking.

"We were barely keeping the boat up. There was so much water coming in through the big hole," he said. "We had no choice but to park the boat on a different piece of ice."

The harrowing experience didn't end there.

When Alariaq looked toward the floe his son was stranded on, it was already about nine metres away.

"My parental instincts came over,"he said.

'We needed a rescue'

Alariaq threw on a survival suit and grabbed another for his son, as well as a seal hook. He tethered himself to the wrecked boat and swam to his son.

By the time he got there, says Alariaq, the floe had already drifted about another 20 metres.

Together, the father and son swam back to where the destroyed boat sat on the ice.There, he says hepulled out his GPS andsatellite phoneand called his wife, who was at their Cape Dorset home 24 kilometres to the west.

"I said we had an accident and told her that we needed a rescue."

It was another two and a half hours before Alariaq's father-in-law and two brothers-in-law arrived to take them back to town.

"We had to leave [the boat] on the ice out there,"he said.

"We were able to load everything in one canoe including our motor and gear and people and make it back to town."