Buoy problems plague Rainy Lake

There are missing buoys on Rainy Lake and that poses a safety concern, the coast guard has warned.
“Our marine patrol has been out and they have made contact with the coast guard and notified them of the missing buoys,” Fort Frances OPP S/Sgt. Hugh Dennis said yesterday.
Craig Coughlin, the navigable waters protection officer for the coast guard, admitted missing buoys could be a safety issue. “If there are [buoys] missing, that is a safety factor, yes,” he said.
Meanwhile, local boaters are fuming.
“All it takes is one [missing marker] to cause a serious accident or wreck your boat,” said Bob Hamilton, who operates a 25-foot sailboat and a power boat on Rainy Lake.
“This could be a life and death situation,” he stressed.
Members of the Rainy Lake Yacht Club also have filed complaints with the OPP and coast guard.
“I just went through American Narrows and there are supposed three green markers on the south side of French’s Island . . . marking rocks and there are only two and the other one is against the shore,” club commodore Brett Bartlett charged.
Barry “Woody” Woods owns a guide service on the U.S. side of Rainy Lake. A buoy that washed up on shore with the call number EE13 is now sitting in his pub in Ranier.
He knows the lake well, and said the markers have been “out of kilter for many years.”
“There has always been some buoys missing [but] it’s gotten steadily worse the last 10 or [about] seven years,” Woods noted.
Scott Hamilton, owner of Jackfish Hammy’s Guide Service here, has registered complaints every year with the coast guard but has seen little response.
“Early this year, [the markers] were a real mess,” he said. “There were four that I knew of that were missing.
“But since then, they have been replaced, slowly but surely,” said Hamilton, who also is worried about the increased boat traffic the annual Fort Frances Canadian Bass Championship will bring in next month.
“Maybe it’s too much of a job for one person,” he offered.
The coast guard takes bids on contracts for the maintenance of aid markers on Rainy Lake every three years. The current contract belongs to local resident John Ossachuk.
This is Ossachuk’s second contract. In 1995, he undercut former contractor Jim Gladu’s $14,000 a year bid by more than $5,000 annually. But when the contract comes up for bid again next March, Ossachuk said he “absolutely” would not bid on it.
In the meantime, Ossachuk insisted he’s doing all he can to make the lake safer.
“I’m busting my a– trying to keep this lake open,” he argued. “I go out every day. I work every day at it and for an individual to sit around and ridicule me and call me names that’s their prerogative.
“If they are looking for somebody to shoot at, just shoot me and be done with it. It’s a hell of job, it’s a lot of work,” he claimed.
Ossachuk said the contract stipulates he must patrol the lake for missing buoys once a month. That involves checking the 26 light towers and inspecting–and possibly replacing–the 157 buoys.
“I’m one man,” Ossachuk said. “I take care of a whole lake. If I have a bad winter and I lose half the buoys in the lake, it’s just a matter of putting them back one at a time.”
Gladu, who had the contract for 12 years before Ossachuk, said he sometimes did the job alone but usually took along someone for safety reasons.
Meanwhile, the coast guard is replacing all the old fibreglas and plastic buoys on Rainy Lake with new “Ottawa River” style plastic versions. Many of the fibreglas versions break during the winter and sink beneath the surface.
The project, which will cost $50,000, is part of a coast guard strategy to standardize aid markers across Canada. They hope to have all 157 buoys on Rainy Lake replaced by the end of the summer.
“They are trying to standardize across Canada so that everyone’s going to these plastic ‘Ottawa River’ type [buoys] and upgrading all the lights on the lake as well,” said Coughlin.
But until the project is finished, police are urging boaters to use caution.
Woods has never had any problems on the lake but offered some advice to those who have never used a boat on Rainy Lake.
“You got to read those maps. It’s easy to hit rocks out there,” he warned.