Quite apart from the “offshore trial run” argument for going around Vancouver Island, there was also the desire to find a little more space to yourself. On the eastern, and much more popular, side, especially its southern portion, you were constantly cheek by jowl with everybody else who could afford a boat.
To get an idea of the historic expansion of pleasure boating around Vancouver Island, imagine taking a nautical chart of the coastline between Seattle and Alaska and dipping it in the sea. The first place to submerge is the U.S. Gulf Islands, clogged with yachts by the 1980s. The Canadian Gulf islands, which were relatively empty when I was cruising as a child, filled up soon after so that by the early 1990s — lower the chart a little — boaters were passing straight through the arbutus-fringed coves and lichen-spattered rocks of the southern Gulf Islands and flooding up the Strait of Georgia. They were headed for Desolation Sound, a paradise of sheltered anchorages roughly bounded by the city of Parksville and the Sunshine Coast to the south and the gauntlet of rapids north of Quadra Island to the north. Desolation Sound, once you got past the slightly worrying transit of Georgia Strait, meant short trips between anchorages, oysters so thick you could sit in your dinghy and chip them off the rocks, and alpine peaks that seemed to shoot straight up from the ocean. And warm water: you can swim every day in Desolation Sound.
Of course, Desolation Sound filled up too. Lower the chart a bit more, and the water level rises into the Broughton Archipelago. Yes, navigation is trickier up there; yes, the temperature drops, but by the mid-’90s, everybody had GPS and on-board heaters and computer programs that told them how to get past the rapids. So, on they came. The worst obstacle was getting through Johnstone Strait, fifty miles of frequent wind-tunnel mayhem between the top of Quadra Island and the town of Port McNeill, but boaters figured out how to dart around the back alleys for most of it. The Broughtons haven’t filled up yet, but they’re starting to.
What’s north of the Broughton Archipelago? If you stick to what locals call “the mainland,” meaning the coasts of northern B.C. and Alaska, there are plenty of fjords and fishing communities, and all you have to do to explore literally thousands of miles of coastline is to pick a good moment to cross the one unprotected section of Queen Charlotte Strait. You can even opt for Haida Gwaii (the former Queen Charlotte Islands) if the mainland doesn’t appeal, as long as you stick to the relatively protected eastern side. You need a bigger boat to go north, but plenty of people have big boats now. Slowly, the northern coast will fill up too. You might as well let that sodden chart float away; what used to be the haunts of commercial fishermen, Indigenous peoples, and hardy settler families are now the summer homes of fifty-footers from as far south as Portland, Oregon.
But what about the rest of Vancouver Island? In the case of a long, thin island like Vancouver, why concentrate on one side? The reason is the same as for the Haida Gwaii: the east side is protected, while the west shore takes the full pounding of the open Pacific. So while the west side of Vancouver Island is well known as a place of extraordinary natural beauty — a lot of it is national or provincial parkland, and parts of Clayoquot Sound comprise a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve — most people will admire those sandy beaches, those jagged black reefs, that pounding surf, and the frequent enveloping mists from somewhere safe. They’ll be on land.
Because once you step off land, you’re entering a place where bad things converge: oceanic waves from Pacific storms a thousand miles away, high local winds (or quixotic calms, which can be almost as bad), impenetrable fogs, and many, many rocks. The rocks are very different from the ones on the east coast, not only in their shape (they tend to be pinnacles) but most horribly in their number and placement. There are an awful lot of them, and some are more than a mile offshore. When I first saw the paper chart for Kyuquot Sound, about a third of the way down the western coast, the “open” waters off the coast were speckled with tiny black crosses.
There isn’t much protection. You hide where the natives and the early settlers hid, built their villages and trading centres, lost their sons and fathers to the storms and shoals. The towns that have survived are small and tough and widely spaced. If you need a dozen eggs or shelter from a building westerly, you’d better plan ahead.
For all these reasons, the west coast of Vancouver Island will always be a challenge. People with a taste for adventure, plenty of time, a good boat, and a low tolerance for crowded anchorages do circumnavigate the island, and the numbers have been rising steadily ever since satellite-based navigation systems have taken the edge off some of the white-knuckle passages through reefs and around headlands. But when you hear about someone having gone around the island, it’s still a “wow” moment, and few boats head out alone.
A lot of boaters see circumnavigating Vancouver Island as a test, especially people who, like us, were dreaming about sailing their boats offshore to somewhere warm, like Mexico or Tahiti. There are (of course!) two schools of thought here.
“Once you’ve gone around the island,” a speaker at the Bluewater Cruising Association once lectured us, “you’re ready.” But when I mentioned circumnavigation to Allan, the broker from whom we bought Vera, he didn’t even look up from the cat’s cradle of docking lines he was trying to sort out. Dock space at his small brokerage was limited, so Allan often had two or three sailboats mysteriously tethered, like flies caught in a spider’s web, where there was really only room for one.
“Why would anyone want to do that?” He tugged on a line and a thirty-five footer two boats away turned slightly.
“They say it’s a good tune-up for going offshore,” I said.
“It’s nothing like going offshore. Going offshore is pointing your boat west, sailing a hundred miles out, and turning left. Long ocean swells, hit the trades, keep going until you reach the Marquesas.”
“And the west coast of Vancouver Island is . . . what?”
“Fog. Wind. A rockpile.”
“Did you ever do it?”
Like many other long-distance sailors, Allan seemed to have fallen into boat-selling after washing up in Victoria. He looked up from his knots.
“What would I want to do that for?” he said. “But if you’re set on it, watch out for the Nahwitti Bar.”
“Sure,” I said. There it was again. I was starting to worry about this place. “What exactly should I watch out for?”
“Don’t cross it at the wrong time, when the current’s running. Don’t go if the wind’s blowing the dog off the chain. And once you head into it, remember, there’s no turning back.”