Questions swirl as sunken B.C. ferry's logbooks vanish

Logbooks that could have shed light on what course the Queen of the North took before it struck an island and sank off B.C.'s North Coast in March have gone missing, CBC News has learned.

Capt. Darin Bowland, BC Ferries' chief safety officer at the time of the sinking, said it was "very odd" that the books went missing, especially when there is an individual assigned to retrieve them in the event of a crash.

"The sole responsibility is documents and to get them safely off the vessel," Bowland told CBC News.

Bowland said he was told that someone managed to put all the documents together in a satchelafter the accidentbefore they vanished.

"Well, I think it makes the company suspicious when logbooks disappear," Dave Hahn, president and chief executive officer of BC Ferries,said in an interviewwithCBC News. "There's protocol around there. They're the ship's diary, right?"

Hahn said he still thinks it was an innocent mistake, despite the standard basic protocol that the captain leaves with the logbooks ifa ship goes down.

"I think this one individual was tasked with that, grabbed it," he said. "I'm sure that some other event came up that distracted him for a while. That's the account that I have."

The mysterycomes after BC Ferries asked the RCMP on Wednesday to investigatethe disappearance ofthe October logbook on the Queen of Prince Rupert, which replaced the Queen of the North on its route.

Off course for 14 minutes

Almost eight months after the ship sank, BC Ferries has not given any account of what happened that night that led to the incident, in which two passengers were reportedmissing and later presumed dead.

"These people were qualified enough," Hahn said. "The question is, what went on? And that's the part we don't know."

OnMarch 22, the ferry left Prince Rupert on a routine run down the protected waters of Grenville Channel, emerging at the southern end of the channel into Wright Sound, near Hartley Bay. At that point, the crew was supposed to make a left turn around the east side of Gil Island, then continue south.

But they never made the turn. Instead, the ship kept going dead ahead for 14 minutes before hitting Gil Island full throttle andsinking more than 400 metres to the bottom of Wright Sound.

Ninety-nine passengers and crew managed to escape. Gerald Foisey and Shirley Rosette of 100 Mile Housewere presumed dead, and theirbodies have never been recovered.

GPS turned off

Another mystery surrounding that night is why the ship's global positioning system, which constantly updated its position, was turned off.

At midnight, only Fourth Officer Carl Lilgert and deckhand Karen Bricker were on the bridge. CBC News has learned they didn't know how to dim the brightness on the GPS displayto see better out the window, so they turned it off.

"Why anyone would do that is beyond me," Hahn said. "Their claim was, it was too bright. Well, that's the environment. Everybody else up there works in that environment. Everybody up there understands."

But Hahn dismissed that their actions suggested a lack of training.

"I would argue that it's something else, not lack of training," he said.

The Transportation Safety Board disagreed. In a letter to BC Ferries in May, the board said the crew was not properly trained in the steering system or the navigational gear.

The two crew members have refused to talk about that or anything else since the accident. Their silence andthe logbooks' disappearance have led many to suspect a cover-up.

"A cover-up? I don't know, I can't go there yet," Hahn said. "I think it's unusual, when you do get on the ground, and people stop talking."