Jap Fishers May Supply 'Subs' Off B.C.

Special to the Seattle Times.

VANCOUVER, B.C., June 24. -- British Columbia's Japanese fishboat problem is cleaned up nicely, but Saturday night's shelling of Estevan Point, west coast of Vancouver Island, has tugboatmen, fishermen and others in marine circles here, wondering if the Little Yellow Men got in their "work" before the boats were rounded up. They could have easily enough.

Here is the question bothering marine experts here.

"Have secret cashes of fuel oil, food and other supplies for marauding submarines been hidden along the Vancouver Island coastline?"

The rugged west coast is a wilderness of ocean and jagged rocks, and heavy wooded shoreline. Nowhere in this world is there a more desolate landscape.

In any one of a thousand hidden, secret bays and inlets up and down the coast fuel and other supplies for submarines could be hidden.

The Japanese fishermen had a free hand on this coast. They came unhindered and unchecked, and went the same way. They could have filled the forests on the west coast of Vancouver Island with fuel oil.

And they had plenty of chance to tell the "right people" about it, too.

Such supplies couldn't be found from the air, or from the sea, but shore parties of men travelling in small launches could nose into those bays and inlets and dig them out.