“There were Americans everywhere.”
This was the nightmare the Canadian Coast Guard’s Peter Garapick faced on an otherwise pleasant Sunday afternoon, when 1,500 of these showed up on Ontario’s shores:
The annual Port Huron Float Down, a time-honored tradition spanning 39 drunken years of drifting lazily along the St. Clair River, took a turn for the very ridiculous as 30 mph gusts blew their inflatable rafts into Canadian waters.
“The people who take part in this are not mariners,” Garapick told CBC. Or thinkers, apparently. “They don’t look at the wind, the weather and the waves. We knew from the get-go, the winds were going to cause a problem. There’s no question they were involuntarily coming to Canada.”
Involuntarily, and illegally: Some in the wayward party tried to swim back to America, with little luck. The coast guard rounded up the soggy trespassers and escorted them back to the States.
Hundreds of individuals being shipped back by bus with police escorts. #sps pic.twitter.com/wE62MmCu77
— Sarnia Police (@SarniaPolice) August 21, 2016
On their country-crossing walk of shame, some Canadian passers-by donated the shirts off their backs. America, we have a lot to learn from our neighbors to the North.
