A physician and her infant daughter from Vancouver, and a couple from California are among the six people killed in a float-plane crash off Saturna Island on Sunday afternoon.

Two people survived the crash -- the male pilot and a female passenger -- and are in stable condition in Victoria General Hospital.

RCMP have identified the victims as Kerry Margaret Morrissey, 41, and her daughter, Sarah Grace Morrissey, six months, both of Vancouver; Richard Bruce Haskitt, 49, and Cindy Schafer, 44, both of Huntington Beach, Calif.; Catherine White-Holman, 55, of Vancouver; and Thomas Gordon Glenn, 60, of White Rock.

The identities of the survivors are not being released at this time.

The bodies of the victims were found inside the de Havilland Beaver aircraft shortly before 1 a.m. yesterday by coast-guard divers after an exhaustive nine-hour search, said Troy Haddock, maritime co-ordinator for the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Victoria. The plane, operated by Seair Seaplanes, was 11 metres below the surface of Lyall Harbour.

The crash has sent shockwaves across the small, southern Gulf Island, where only about 350 people live year-round.

"I feel sorry so many people died outside my door," said James White, who was the first on the scene of the crash, and managed to pull the two survivors to safety.

Yesterday, he put his efforts down to luck. "It was lucky that I heard it. I was lucky I saw it before it sank. It was lucky I had a boat in the water. It was lucky my boat didn't sink."

Saturna Island resident Robert Montgomery, a former firefighter, said community members, especially those who tried in vain to rescue the other six passengers on the plane, hurt "in the heart."

"We're a very small, close-knit community. We'll meet in our homes and cafés and the community store and the church and we'll keep talking about it," Montgomery said. "I think we'll take care of each other by trying to talk about it."

Two of the six victims were well-known on the island. Haskitt, a district manager with Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, and Schafer, a photographer, lived in California, but purchased a cottage on Saturna about six years ago.

"They selected Saturna because of its unique characteristics," said Haskitt's father, Dick, in a phone interview from his home in Redmond, Wash. "It was the opposite of their life in southern California; it was un-commercialized. That's the place to which they would retreat whenever they would have a long weekend."

The couple had a small ownership share with a group of people in the Lighthouse Pub on Saturna. The were married about 15 years ago, and had no children.

While Haskitt grew up in California, Schafer was from Ontario. They both loved to travel, Haskitt's father said.

"They enjoyed going to places people wouldn't go ordinarily," Dick Haskitt said. "They enjoyed the small towns, the villages and getting away from the crowds ... talking to the local people and trying to absorb as much of the real culture of the place as possible."

The Haskitts, who have one other son, are devastated at their loss.

"Just to be confronted with something like this that we've never contemplated -- it's so shocking," Dick Haskitt said. "We're having a great deal of difficulty even accepting it."

Meanwhile, doctors and nurses at a clinic in Vancouver were struggling with their loss, too. Morrissey, who also was known by her maiden name, Telford, had recently returned to work from maternity leave at the South Community Birth Program in Vancouver, a program aimed at improving birth outcomes in the underserved Indo-Canadian community. Morrissey was working part time with a team of doctors and midwives. She had also spent several months-long stints working at a tiny hospital in the Peruvian jungle, near the village of Santa Clotilde.

"The whole team is devastated," said Linda Allen from the Vancouver clinic yesterday afternoon. "We loved her to death and the baby, her husband and her little girl, too."

Morrissey's older daughter and husband were not among the victims.

Investigators from the RCMP, Transportation Safety Board and the Coroners Service are all trying to determine what went wrong Sunday just after 4 p.m. when the plane, which was en route from Lyall Harbour on Saturna Island to Vancouver, nosedived into the frigid waters right after takeoff. It was on a regularly scheduled flight, and had already picked up passengers on Mayne and Pender Islands.

With no black box on the small plane, the pilot's insights will be critical to investigators. The pilot gave a brief statement to police at the hospital, according to Bill Yearwood, regional manager of aviation of the Transportation Safety Board.

Yesterday, officials secured the area around the crash site, and divers assessed the plane wreckage. The Transportation Safety Board hopes to hoist the plane from the water today; it will be then transported to the Lower Mainland or Sidney to be examined.

ceharnett@tc.canwest.com