A classified advertisement, run under the "Volunteers" classification: "SOOKE Search and Rescue is looking for new members. Training courses begin in Feb. Call if you have an interest in or would like to learn about the outdoors, have any local knowledge of the Sooke Hills or West Coast to Port Renfrew. Also looking for computer and communications people to help in base camp. Pls call 642-7473"
Written from the article text only. Where the scan is hard to read, the summary was taken from the page image rather than the OCR.
Three consecutive daily insertions of the same recruitment notice, 27-29 January 2000. Their value to the archive is not their content but their existence: they are direct evidence that Sooke Search and Rescue was recruiting publicly under that name in January 2000, three years before the CRD established the Juan de Fuca service by bylaw. The crop cut on 2026-07-30 made the whole advertisement legible for the first time. The earlier summary quoted only its opening sentence, because that was all the page-level OCR could read. The rest of the wording above is transcribed from the new clipping. The same advertisement ran on 27, 28 and 29 January 2000, word for word.
The clipping
The article as printed. Clipping cut on 2026-07-30 after reading the page. Shows the whole classified advertisement. The print on this page is faint: the default OCR pass returned only 10 words, but a single-block pass returned the full advertisement and 4 of 5 distinctive terms. The crop was confirmed by eye rather than by word count..
Read the original online
No external link. No stable public link is recorded for this article. It was read from a page scan obtained through a library database. The full page scan is below.
Classified page. This is a single short notice on a full page of classified advertising; everything else on the page is unrelated. These are the three lowest-scoring Times Colonist pages in the collection (OCR 0.49-0.53) because classified type is small and dense, and the notice itself could not be isolated in the fresh OCR of this page. The wording quoted in the summary is taken from TABLE_OF_CONTENTS.md, which describes all three files as "SOOKE Search and Rescue is looking for new members" notices, NOT from a verified read of the scan. Confidence is 'probable' for that reason. Verifying the notice text and recording its full wording, contact details and any meeting place would need a magnified read of the page image.
Record id 2000-01-29-times-colonist-p47-sooke-sar-recruitment. Original file in the project archive: 06_pre_formation/2000-01-29_times_colonist_p47_sooke_sar_recruitment.pdf.
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29 January 2000A classified advertisement, run under the "Volunteers" classification: "SOOKE Search and Rescue is looking for
