Report Of Couple’s Death Premature

It was a labor of love and sorrow, the obituary Dennis Patterson wrote summing up the lives of his sister and her husband - tragically cut short as the couple pursued their passion for flying.

So it was laughter, not tears, that came when Patterson learned he could personally deliver his prose to the not-so-late couple after all.

Brian and Sheila Johnson were found bruised and shaken - but very much alive Friday - three days after their plane crashed into a remote lake, leaving everyone assuming the two were dead.

Everyone except for the couple’s 8-year-old son, Lewis.

“I thought they did a nose dive in their landing,” the boy said. “I thought they jumped and swam to shore.”

That optimism proved right.

The Johnsons were on a one-hour sightseeing flight over the northwest coast of Vancouver Island on Tuesday when their amphibious float-plane crashed into Gaultheria Lake.

Brian Johnson, a pilot of only four years, had made a bad landing and the plane flipped. He and his wife escaped from the sinking aircraft and swam about a quarter-mile to shore.

But when search and rescue officials arrived at the site, they found an oil slick, debris and the couple’s identification. They assumed the Johnsons had sunk to a watery grave.

The couple was nowhere in sight because they had decided to follow a creek down to the ocean, where earlier they had seen kayakers who they hoped to ask for help.

They weren’t spotted until Friday when a helicopter flew by carrying a coroner to the crash site to prepare a report on their deaths.

The coroner said, “I’m glad I don’t have to write this report,” Brian “Bugsy” Johnson, 48, recalled during an impromptu news conference at their home. His wife Sheila, 41, skipped the session in favor of a hot shower.

Johnson said they set up a crude oceanside encampment, existing on a “West Coast cuisine” of mussels, wild berries and creek water.

Wearing only light, summer clothes, they lit fires, drew a huge SOS on the beach and waved a tarp to try to attract attention.

They never gave up hope, but not seeing any searchers was unnerving.

“It was really the fact we couldn’t contact anyone. That was the worst part. There were two days of awful silence,” Johnson said. “We didn’t have any injuries and we knew someone would come.”

The horror, he said, was wondering “what everyone was thinking.”

Mourning turned to celebration when friends and relatives learned the couple had been rescued Friday. A steady stream of joyous family members and friends arrived at the couple’s home to welcome them back to life.