Unmoored barge has near miss with Vancouver beach

Almost two years to the day since a barge ran aground near Vancouver’s Sunset Beach—where it would remain for another year—there was a close call in the same location.

Just after 12 p.m. Sunday, an empty gravel barge broke loose from its mooring buoy in English Bay and began drifting toward the beach, a spokesperson for the Canadian Coast Guard told CTV News.

A video posted to YouTube shows the barge just metres away from the rocks in front of the inukshuk on the shore of English Bay.

A crew from the Coast Guard’s Kitsilano base on board the CCGS Laredo Sound tied on to the barge in attempt to hold it off from the shore. A second vessel, the Kitsilano 1, pushed on the barge’s stern.

“The two Coast Guard vessels successfully kept the barge off of the beach for about 30 minutes until a commercial tug could arrive and hook onto the barge,” the Coast Guard spokesperson wrote in an email.

Seaspan tug Cates VIII towed the barge away and re-secured it to a different mooring buoy in the Vancouver Harbour, according to authorities.

Thanks to the crews of the three vessels, Vancouverites narrowly missed a repeat of the events of Nov. 15, 2021, when high winds and tides washed a barge ashore between English Bay and Sunset beaches.

Nicknamed “The English Bay Barge” or “Barge on the Beach,” the 1.4-million kg vessel became a sort of tourist attraction while it stayed stranded on the rocks for over a year. The barge was the subject of memes and merchandise, and was the site of at least one marriage proposal.

Loved by some and hated by others, that barge was deconstructed over 15 weeks last year. The city declared it gone-for-good on Nov. 24, 2022.