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PAGE 17

hat,

COUNTRY singer Marty Gillan ...under

the spotlight.

SA hin sea

NEWS photo Terry Potais

A PACIFIC RIM Bus Corporation president Brent Hendricks catches a ride on one of two 47-passenger Prevost Le Mirage XL wide-body coaches his company recently bought in Montreai. ‘ne big buses were driven across the country and delivered to 2 bus tour company on Vancouver Island.

A LONG and bitter battle between the British Columbia Lifeboat Society (BCLS) and the North Shore Lifeboat Society (NSLS) over the ownership of a 20-foot Boston Whaler lifeboat has been settled out of court with the vessel

returning to the NSLS.

While neither side of the dispute is willing to divulge specific details of the settlement, the boat was delivered to the NSLS Sept. 30 and will be officially re-launched at Fisherman’s Cove Saturday.

“The boat will be based on the North Shore,’ said NSLS presi-

PS Ea re Sage Deni eee nee

Reporter

dent Tully Waisman. ‘*We're hap- py to have it back.”’

The $30,000 boat — partly funded with a $15,000 provincial

lottery grant secured by West Van- couver-Howe Sound MLA John Reynolds, and a $5,000 grant from the North Vancouver Kiwanis Club — had been operating from a base at Fisherman’s Cove, west of Point Atkinson,

The vessel was seized earlier this year by a bailiff and impounded for non-payment of storage fees. The boat was then retrieved from the bailiff by the Pender Island- based BCLS, which claimed ownership.

The NSLS had the boat when it

the BCLS operate

broke away from organization to autonomously.

The ensuing wrangling resulted in an estimated $70,000 investiga- tion into the affairs of | oth life- boat societies by the provincial Fi- nancial Institutions Department of Investigations. In its findings, the report concluded the boat be returned to West Vancouver.

In the report, a lengthy and often critical accounting of the operation of BCLS as headed by the organization’s president Horst

Klein, investigator Aflan Clark also recommended the lifeboat society's privileges, pursuant to the Society Act, be suspended pending a vote by the membership, as listed in 1986, on a motion to wind up the society.

But in a letter sent to Klein, Fi- nance Minister Mel Couvelier con- cluded it was inapropriate for him to intervene in the internal opera- tions of the BCLS.

The NSLS initiated court action

See Lifeboat Page 3