Forest Service launch: B.C. Forester

It was World War II, a stormy night on the B.C. Coast. Lew King, then skipper of the Forest Service launch B.C. Forester, was headed southeast from Alert Bay, on northern Vancouver Island, to Kelsey Bay, near Campbell River.

"The Navy had this gunboat you were supposed to report to before you got anywhere near. This night...it was storming something awful out there, and I couldn’t make any contact. It was getting dusk, blowing, raining," he told writer Michael Coney.

As it turned out, the gunboat "was laying around the back of the island in shelter. I was supposed to lay out on the other side, but we were rolling terribly, so I kept going. The (next) thing I knew, was a big geyser of water splashing up just a little ways off the bow. Those trigger-happy guys were firing on me!"

Lew and his ship survived that friendly fire—which never actually hit the B.C. Forester—and he continued to sail the ship off and on through the rest of the 1940s.

He often spoke warmly of the Forest Service staff and kept in touch with some of the surveyors, timber cruisers, and rangers he had worked with. Bill Young and Ralph Schmidt were a couple of favourites. He had taken them out for one of their first summers in the woods.

The story of the B.C. Forester and other Forest Service marine craft, and the people who worked with and on them, are detailed in Forest Ranger, Ahoy! by Michael Coney. That book, published in 1983, is "dedicated to the unsung heroes of the British Columbia Forest Service."

Forest Service boats plied the province’s coastal waters, lakes and rivers since the very early 1900s. When the B.C. government created its Forest Branch in 1911, three government boats were already patrolling the coast, looking to prevent illicit export of logs, checking hand-loggers’ licences and enforcing the Timbermark Act.

The era largely ended in 1987 when the forests ministry dismantled most of it’s marine operations. Today, the service operates just two large vessels, the North Coast Ranger out of Prince Rupert and the Forest Patrol out of Bella Coola, along with a fleet of smaller craft.

Lew also travelled the world with Canada’s Merchant Navy. And at age 89, he was still taking his great-grandchildren boating on the waters off Sidney, B.C. By this time, he was legally blind, but with his long experience on the water, he was still able to navigate safely.

Llewellyn Leslie King, my grandfather, died July 29, 2000. Rest in Peace, Grandpa.