7 minute read
Ryan Binder
Ryan Binder
BETTER SERVICE THAN FEDEX. Coast Guard Ryan Binder onboard the Terry Fox after successfully delivering two hydrography survey boats, the Whisky Jack and True North, with the crew of the Sir Wilfrid Laurier. The Terry Fox set up the transportation of the boats from the North back to their base in Victoria.
THE WORLD IS YOUR OYSTER
I've lived in Inuvik my whole life. 24-hour sunlight in the summertime, and the darkness in the wintertime—I wouldn't have it any other way. It's a great place to grow up and live, with a lot of great people and a wonderful community.
My interest in being on water started when I was young. Every summer, we would make our way to our camp at the coast and we would travel to other communities around the delta. In 2007, when I was working with the Fisheries Joint Management Committee (FJMC), we got to do different placements like bird-monitoring out on the Taglu Site within the Kendall Island Bird Sanctuary. I’ve also been on a few different vessels as a marine mammal observer for Kavik Axis such as the Western Patriot and the Viking Vision as well as a couple others.
One of the most memorable placements was working on a Coast Guard icebreaker—the Amundsen. FJMC flew me down to Quebec City where I stayed on the ship. We travelled out through the St. Lawrence seaway up the east coast to a few different fjords for scientific research. It was just amazing to travel through those inlets. There were walls around you that reach pretty high, and it was the first time I'd ever been in those environments. It was just amazing, the stuff I got to see—even the zooplankton, phytoplankton there. We had nets onboard the Amundsen (tucker net, monster net), and would pull up some of the biomass before sorting through them. I got to learn their Latin names! I had scientists beside me, showing me exactly what to do, what they were and what they would be doing with it. We stopped in Sanikiluaq, around the middle of Hudson Bay. There, I acted as a tour guide for people of the community that came onboard the vessel. The voyage ended in Churchill, Manitoba and after that began my interests in joining the Canadian Coast Guard.
I was a stay-at-home dad just over a year ago. My youngest—he was going off to kindergarten. So, there I was at home, thinking: 'Geez, I really gotta do something.' I’d seen a program being offered on Facebook with the Marine Training Centre out of Hay River. It said, 'Start your new Marine Career!' And they were offering the first part of the Bridge Watch Rating program in partnership with Aurora College in Inuvik. I figured this was my chance to really do something I’m good at.
A lot of my family members have been to sea—we're out on the boats all the time and go out to a whale camp every year. My parents (Richard and Olive Binder), my uncles, and my Daduk Alec Gordon influenced me in terms of going to sea. I want to say that it just runs in the family. So, I thought, since I have a little bit of a history in going to sea—let's give it a shot!
And after being a stay-at-home dad for a while, I thought this might be just what I was looking for! I enjoy going to sea. I've been to it before and I know what to expect, so I took the opportunity. They had the first part of Bridge Watch Rating training in Inuvik, so I didn’t have to leave my kids yet. There were a bunch of us students who were interested in a life at sea. For the second part, they flew us out to Hay River, where we finished off the rest of the eight weeks of the program. That was just to get us familiarized with what to expect in the marine industry. After that, they took us to Stevenville, Newfoundland for our STCW (Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers) and Marine Firefighting training, then to Iqaluit with the NFMTC (Nunavut Fisheries and Marine Training Consortium) to train on their new simulators, like emergency lifeboat simulations, and FRC (Fast Rescue Crafts). They were beautiful, brand new machines that can give you an idea of what can really happen at sea, and what to do in a dire situation.
MTC reached out to a few places for employment saying that we had some young up-and-coming Aboriginal students with all the necessary training, who would love to experience a life at sea. One of them was the Coast Guard. So, they flew somebody up to Inuvik to meet with a few of us students. After passing a standard test, we did our interview and a few of us got call-backs—some to work on the Eckaloo, and the Dumit. I myself got to work on an ice-breaker out of the west coast, the Sir Wilfred Laurier.
Onboard the Laurier, I'm a quartermaster, or a deckhand. As a quartermaster, my duties are to steer the vessel as a helmsman and be a lookout on the bridge when visibility is low. I also to do my rounds every hour around the ship when it's late at night or early in the morning. I have to use all of my senses (like sight, hearing, touch, and sight) to see if there are any dangers onboard, like a fire, flood, loose cargo or anything that can cause damage to the vessel. We're constantly walking around the ship—climbing the stairs, going through hatches, checking every level from the lower hold to the monkey’s island. It gets pretty tough through repetition, but it's mandatory, and you never know what you might find that just might save the day.
On our work cycle, we work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for about five weeks at a time. It is never a dull moment and there is always something to do, like ship maintenance through chipping, grinding, painting, greasing, and splicing. We even have a wood shop on board for woodworking! If something on board is broken, we fix it. If we don’t know how, someone can teach us—it’s on-the-job training and we are always learning new things. We also do emergency drills to become more efficient for Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS). As a deckhand, we do buoy tending, maintain land markers for navigational purposes, and run helicopter operations in which we resupply lighthouses and other aids to navigation. These are also used for scientific operations, search and rescue, and many other things.
During the Arctic Expedition a few months ago, we got to go to Cambridge Bay, Kugluktuk, Taloyoak, and a few other places. We assisted in the Polar Bike Project in Cambridge Bay. I'd never been there before, but I found out I had some family there, and I got to meet some family I'd never seen! We helped the Polar Bike Project bring over 100 bikes to the north. A lot of the kids in the community got to have their own bikes, where it's a tough place to ship bikes. Just meeting family I'd never met before and being in all these new places I've gotten to see was memorable.
I would love to get into more community outreach with youth in the future of my career. I would love to give back what they taught me and spark some other youngster's interest in living life at sea, because once you've figured out it's for you—it's got you! I'd love for my kids to come see the vessel that I work on, too. It's just amazing and I am sure they would have a great time exploring on there. It's a big boat with lots of interesting equipment. My kids do come out to the whale camp every year, just like I did when I was a kid. I loved it—and I'm happy they love it as well. They really get excited about the freedom of it all.
My advice for youth is: ‘the world is your oyster.’ If I can express it another way, I would. There are so many opportunities given to our people, and I would just say: jump on any one of them. You never know what might spark your interest in anything. And that's what did it for me—working for the Coast Guard. A lot of doors are being opened, and the possibilities are endless. In the future, I can expect to see a lot more Indigenous people pursuing a career with the coast guard, or just getting out there!
Try to find something that you're passionate about, and take any new opportunities—just traveling, seeing new things will broaden your horizons. The Coast Guard is one way to go to do that. They'll take you places. You're constantly learning every day on the job. For me, I found something that I was passionate about and I chased it. It was like a dream to me, and just being there is very fulfilling.
