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It was an expensive B.C. Day long weekend for a group of campers who were fined more than $10,000 for having what police called “a rather large bonfire” on tiny Home Island, off the Sunshine Coast.

Residents from Keats Island spotted the fire early Monday morning and made their way over to Home Island — which is off the southern tip of Keats — to speak with the people responsible.

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“It didn’t go so well,” said Sunshine Coast RCMP Sgt. Mike Hacker. “The people were really belligerent, I guess, in the exchange.”

The incident was reported by an off-duty firefighter and two Mounties responded around 2 a.m. using an RCMP boat from Gibsons. Hacker said the officers had an equally unproductive exchange with the people around the fire.

“Home Island is not a big island — it’s a rather small island — so I would suggest they felt that going over to a small little island like that was going to be fairly self contained, and there wasn’t going to be a problem,” Hacker said.