Outside the window of a red brick building, adjacent to St. John’s harbour, sits a colourful assortment of large, metal objects.
Some of these objects are painted bright primary colours and others are encrusted in rust and barnacles. They are aids to navigation best known as buoys and no matter if you pronounce it “BOO-ee”, “bwoy” or “BOY” these brightly coloured pieces of metal are crucial to mariners.
Dan Pike, superintendent of maritime and civil infrastructure (MCI) with Canadian Coast Guard Atlantic, defines a buoy as “a floating aid to navigation that’s anchored in an area where information is required to be provided to a mariner.”
From Nain, Labrador, down to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia and in “every cove in every nook and cranny, even offshore, there are aids to navigation,” says Pike.
His job involves keeping track of all 6,550 of them — floating and land-based aids throughout Atlantic Canada, 200 communication towers, radar and differential GPS towers, as well as dozens of buildings and other properties owned by the Coast Guard.
In the waters off Newfoundland and Labrador alone, there are 850 floating buoys in service. MCI has staff located in St. John’s and Stephenville in N.L., Charlottetown, P.E.I., Saint John, N.B., and Yarmouth and Dartmouth, N.S.
Floating buoys have assisted mariners since the 13th century. Early buoys were mainly hollow wooden caskets bound with iron bands and moored with a chain and a large stone.
In 1888, the first electrically-lit buoy was tested. It was a simple spar shape, tall and thin and floated upright in the water with a lantern housed on top. It was powered by a cable running under the water and connected to a generator on shore.
Almost 100 years later in 1983, Canada adopted the buoyage system, or aids to navigation, which is used internationally. This system includes port hand buoys, starboard hand buoys, cardinal buoys and special buoys.
Some special buoys have all the bells and whistles and carry those names. The bell and whistle buoys are both nine-feet, six-inches in diameter but have different shapes.
“The whistle buoy has a much bigger and deeper hull and a hollow leg and a shaft that hangs off the bottom,” says Pike, “and when it moves up and down with wave action, a column of air is sucked down and then driven back out through that shaft which blows it out an opening and creates the sound of a low frequency whistle.”
“Mariners have told me if they get lost in the fog and the radar is not working for whatever reason, they need to try to figure out where they are, they listen out for the sounds of these buoys.”
The bell buoy is shallower in the hull with a short shaft on the bottom. It’s designed in such a way that as it rocks in the water, four hammer-like pendulums swing and make contact with the bell design and you hear “clang, clang, clang.”
“These are most valuable to local fisherman,” says Pike, “because they know where they are and what they’re hearing when they hear it.”
Large vessels today are decked out with modern navigational systems, like electronic chart displays and information systems, so they may not need the buoys as much as a smaller vessel might. That doesn’t mean captains of big ships don’t appreciate the valuable job they do.
Captain Windross Banton of the CCG Terry Fox icebreaker knows their worth. “Buoys are no different than road signs. Even for me — I’ve been around this coast countless number of times,” says Banton, “but some of the areas we have to take our ships into, it’s such a stress relief to be able to look out and know that that a buoy is there. And whether it’s lighted or not, at least there is a navigational mark to assist you from staying away from that particular danger. Their value is priceless.”
Boys oh buoys, they’ve come a long way from even 40 years ago when, “they used to use kerosene lamps on the buoys so the vessels that would service them would go out and fill the kerosene tanks and actually light them with a flame. That was followed by the use of acetylene,” Pike says. “Imagine having to service something with a flame on it.”
Then there were battery-powered buoys and the next big technological change came with solar panels. Their skull-sized, self-contained lights keep the batteries charged. “If they’re not fooled around with by Mother Nature or too much ice or even collisions with ships,” says Pike, “they can last five to seven years.”
Historically buoys were made of rolled steel that was riveted, while nowadays buoys are welded steel. If you walk around and look at the oversized steel buoys, you will see a round raised bit of metal and the date the buoy was manufactured.
There is a buoy floating around the Atlantic region dated 1903 and several from the 1940s and 50s. They don’t show their age. Buoys are regularly refurbished and maintained by the Canadian Coast Guard and in some cases by contractors.
But while steel buoys are sturdy, sometimes they leave home. Pike explains about the early freeze that happened two winters ago in Labrador.
“We have ice conditions that match anything in the world. You have a buoy that’s suspended in the water by a mooring down to an anchor. So if that’s left in along the coast of Labrador in the wintertime, because we can’t get to it, it could be fine or it could be dragged off by the ice pulling the anchor out into deeper water. The anchor is heavier than the buoyancy of the buoy that is only meant to hold it. So if that went down into deeper waters, then it would sink the buoy. Or it could break the mooring and go adrift.”
“Several times a year we’ll get emails or letters from somebody in France or Ireland or Scotland saying there’s a buoy on their coast and it’s got these markings on it,” says Pike, “we’ll find out that it came from Notre Dame Bay two years ago or came up off Cartwright last year. So they are totally lost to us.” It’s so hard when your buoy leaves home.
“People are very passionate about the services that Coast Guard provide like search and rescue and icebreaking and that kind of thing but I don’t think the general public spends much time thinking about what we do. They are saved by a buoy every time they go out.”
Imagine a road without stop signs or yields. Now imagine the wide expanse of ocean with no buoys.
“The people in my department want to do a good job and even though it’s not high profile in-your-face saving lives,” says Pike, “they know that what they do prevents the loss of life, protects property and the environment, and they believe that there’s a value to it.”
While his department is doing all it can to keep the buoys afloat, there is something the public can do to help as well. “If you know that a buoy is in the wrong place or it’s not indicating the right information, please let us know at the very first possible time. We have to depend on the people that use them if they notice them not operating properly or they’re missing.”
The number to call to report a buoy out of position or missing is 1-800-563-9089.
