By GREGG DRINNAN
Daily News Sports Editor
Darryl Sydor has his boat back.
The 2002 Tige ski boat disappeared from the buoy in front of Sydor’s Shuswap Lake summer home earlier this month. It was found a week later on the other side of the lake.
The boat was stolen while Sydor, a former Kamloops Blazers defenceman who now is one of the WHL team’s co-owners, stopped off to visit ex-teammate Tyson Nash en route to Edmonton.
“I got a call the next day,” Sydor said Monday night. “My neighbour called me and my boat was gone. It was on my buoy.
“My two neighbours went all the way down to the mouth of the river at Chase and then all the way up to the narrows and they couldn’t see it.”
By the time a week had come and gone, Sydor, who now plays for the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins, said he had all but given up hope.
“After a week goes by, you don’t hear about it . . . I thought it was gone,” Sydor said. “But they found it a week later.”
It was found on a buoy on the other side of the lake from Sydor’s property. The boat had a dealer’s sticker on it from Captain’s Village Marina at Scotch Creek.
“A guy called Dean Acton over at Captain’s and said they had a boat. He went and got it,” Sydor said. “Nothing was stolen. They ripped out the ignition. They tried to steal the satellite radio and that was it. It could have been a lot worse.”
Asked if he thought the thieves were able to start the boat, for which Sydor paid $76,000, he offered: “I don’t believe so. They ripped one battery case out — I don’t know what they were trying to do, if they were trying to hotwire it, or what.
“They may have just drifted across the lake.”
Sydor said a “couple of Sea-Doos and a houseboat” that were stolen around the same time also have been recovered.
“We’ve never had anything like this in our little strata development,” Sydor said of the recent thefts. “I haven’t heard about people’s boats being stolen or even vandalized.”
gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca
