Operation Caribbe

CANADA’S MISSION: CHOKE OFF THE FLOW OF COCAINE AND OTHER DRUGS ACROSS THE EASTERN PACIFIC

- IAN COUTTS

Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” rattles out of speakers in cabins and messes throughout HMCS Yellowknife. It’s 0700 hours. April 20, 2019.

“Don’t forget this fact, you can’t get it back …”

In the galley, Yellowknife’s cooks started preparing breakfast at 0500 hours. Food is a morale booster on a ship, so it’s uniformly good and uniformly plentiful — eggs the way you want them, bacon or sausages, toast. Before too long, throughout the 55.3-metre Canadian maritime coastal defence vessel, there’ll be the clunk of heavy sea boots on metal gangways and a crowd will be gathering at the counter in the flat (as the navy calls corridors) outside the galley.

“She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie, cocaine …”

The music fades away, and two decks up on Yellowknife’s bridge, navy Lt. Anna Childerhose, the ship’s 24-year-old navigator and the officer of the watch, announces the ship’s location and the weather. She caps it off, as she does each morning, with an excruciating joke. (Example: “Did you hear about the shy pebble? It wanted to be a little boulder.”) Then, in a return to naval tradition, the shrill sound of a boatswain’s pipe rings out followed by the words, “Hands to breakfast.”

“COCAINE” ISN’T EXACTLY the song you’d expect to jolt you awake on a naval vessel. But they auction off the choice of wake-up song on Yellowknife as a charity fundraiser, and Clapton’s raucous ditty won this time. That aside, it is an excellent one-word answer to the question of what has drawn Yellowknife more than 3,000 nautical miles south from its home port of Esquimalt, B.C., to the warm waters off Guatemala and around the Galapagos: cocaine. That and a host of other drugs