COSULICH, Captain John
DOB: August 24, 1944
DOP: September 13, 2026
John was never particularly interested in living life according to somebody else’s script. He was adventurous, entrepreneurial, stubborn, endlessly resourceful and, at times, spectacularly impatient with rules, procedure, or the suggestion that something couldn’t be done.
That started early. A car at 15, floatplanes at 18, tugboat captain’s papers at 23. He started working when most people start high school and went back to high school when most people start working.
John had an instinct to act. He liked figuring things out as he went, confident there would be a solution. Sometimes there was. Sometimes there very much wasn’t. Either way, it usually made for a good story.
And John could tell a story.
A simple question could send him through three decades, several side plots and an assortment of characters before returning—sometimes—to where he started. His stories were funny, frequently irreverent and occasionally unbelievable, told with unmistakable detail, language and conviction. He could bring people and places from long ago back to life and make you feel as though you had been there.
He worked hard and built a great deal over his lifetime. Business was deeply embedded in how John saw the world: problems were there to be solved, deals could be made, things could be built, and circumstances could usually be improved by doing something rather than waiting. But the things that animated him were broader than business. He loved boats and the coast, projects, machinery, people with stories of their own, and places where he could put his hands on something and make it better.
Gambier Island became one of those places. It brought together many of the things John loved: the water, boats, projects that were never quite finished, people coming and going, and an endless supply of things that could be fixed, changed or improved. Like many places John touched, it carries a great deal of him in it.
He could be difficult. He could also be enormously generous. He was fiercely independent and resisted being told what to do, even when accepting help would have made life considerably easier. He had strong opinions, a sharp sense of humour and very little interest in pretending to agree when he did not. Those who knew him well knew both the rough edges and the warmth underneath them.
On September 11, 2026, John gathered family and friends for his first helicopter trip to Gambier—something he’d always wanted to do. His children had brought a tree to plant with him, to put down roots there as he had. But time was short, and John had priorities: a photograph with the helicopters, every single piece of machinery on the property—and the rest of us, if there was room. People he loved, in a place he loved, with all his equipment accounted for.
John passed two days later, at the age of 82, surrounded by loved ones.
At his request, there will be no service.
Trying to reduce 82 years of John to a few paragraphs feels inadequate. Different people knew different sides of him, and some of the best stories may be ones his family has never heard.
We would like to collect them.
If John was part of your life — for a few months or for fifty years — we would love to hear the story you remember. The funny ones, the strange ones, the meaningful ones, the ones that capture him exactly as he was. We would also be grateful for photographs from any period of his life.
Please send stories and photos to tugboatJohn@Cosulichgroup.com.
We hope that, taken together, they will preserve more than we can capture here: the full, complicated, funny and remarkable life of Captain John Quick Cosulich, as remembered by the people who shared pieces of it with him.
