But we weren’t trapped in a rising gale, we were comfortably anchored in Clam Bay, where it had turned into a lovely evening. The cannon-balling teenagers had worn themselves out, and I heard a new, more welcome sound, the rhythmic chanting of the coxswain in an eight-person canoe.
The long cedar dugout emerged out of the setting sun behind The Cut, making straight for us across the darkening water. I shaded my eyes; there were eight paddlers, and the man urging them on from the raised stern seat wore a traditional woven cedar hat. Hatsumi and Charley joined me, and we all watched the canoe sweep past a boat’s length away, paddles glinting in the fierce late-afternoon sun. Charley growled softly, way back in his throat, like a distant Harley-Davidson. Incongruously, all the First Nations paddlers wore bright yellow life jackets, and I wondered, is that what it’s come to? Do they have to carry flares and plastic emergency whistles too? On a trip like the one we were starting out on, there would be a strong Indigenous presence, and the absurdity I sensed at seeing those paddlers cutting a hard and fast line through the anchored yachts would be repeated time and again over the next two months. From masters of their own land to families blown to dust by nearly a century of residential schools, and now to paddlers in Transport Canada–approved life jackets — whose idea of progress was this?
It was high tide when we left the next morning, so there was only a sliver of pebble beach for Charley to defecate on, crouched like a sumo wrestler beneath overhanging cedars. We left in time to catch the eleven o’clock slack current at Dodd Narrows, raising the sails once we were past the shoals and tacking into a freshening northwest wind. We fell into the routine of upwind sailing: maintain a course roughly forty-five degrees off your intended destination until you run out of sea room; spin the boat ninety degrees by steering through the eye of the wind; sail the new leg of the zigzag until you run out of sea room; repeat. It can get boring.
“I had a weird dream last night,” said Hatsumi after an hour or so of this. “A dead person on the floor of the cabin.”
“Man or woman?”
“Man. I had to step around him.”
“Were you frightened?”
“No. But when I woke up this morning, I thought somebody will die.”
We turned Vera again. Convulsing sails, whiplashing ropes, immovable winch handles.
“Well, somebody did die, you know,” I said. “Maybe it was just him.”
“Maybe.”
I said what I generally say. “Let me know if it happens again.”
Even with the wind on the nose, we made decent progress, and by ten we were only a half mile south of the narrows. We dropped the sails and started the engine.
“You’re always too early,” said Hatsumi, as I put Vera in a holding pattern of slow circles. To the south, boats began to appear behind us. On every one of them, the same conversation was probably happening.
“I’m too early? I thought there were two of us making these decisions.”
“Let’s just go.”
“An hour before slack? Come on, we only make six knots, the current’ll still be running at, what, four?”
“You worry too much.”
In the end, we went through thirty minutes early, merging into a parade of hell-bent pleasure boats like a squabbling family entering an on-ramp. Dodd Narrows seems to bring out the worst in boaters, some of whom will churn past you in their rush to be through it, even though, at its narrowest, there’s barely room for two vessels. The waning current spat us into Northumberland Channel, a five-mile industrialized stretch that leads to the port city of Nanaimo. Northumberland Channel is a wind funnel, gathering the prevailing northwesterly and stuffing it into the hourglass that ends at Dodd Narrows. We abandoned the idea of sailing, hunkered down, and pounded into it under power, an hour and a half of substantial seas on the nose, sheeting the windows, coursing down the decks.
It seemed to take forever to crawl past the log booms and the red-and-white barges of wood chips tethered along Gabriola Island. I kept the binoculars on the huge ferry docked at Duke Point and breathed a sigh of relief when it separated from the land and, accelerating smoothly, plowed across our bows and into the Strait of Georgia. One more obstacle avoided.
And a good thing, because Charley was letting us know what he thought of his first taste of rough weather. He cowered on a cockpit seat, shivering rhythmically, as though some fiend were zapping him with electricity. Hatsumi wrapped him in blankets and winced along with him as Vera punched through the whitecaps.
“Should I take him down below?” she said.
“Don’t even think about it. You’ll both get sick.” As dogs, I might have added. “Tough it out, we’re almost there.” She and Charley stayed in the cockpit that time; two days later we would find out what happened when they didn’t.
Finally, we rounded Protection Island and followed the channel markers into the relative calm of Mark Bay, on Newcastle Island. Everybody stops in Mark Bay; it’s across the harbour from the best provisioning city on the coast and minutes from the extraordinary marine park at Saysutshun, the Indigenous name for Newcastle Island. It’s usually jammed with boats of every size and description, from derelict local liveaboards to gleaming sixty-footers. And the skill level of the boaters in Mark Bay is similarly all over the chart. Part of the evening entertainment is watching boats back slowly through the anchorage, husbands at the wheel and wives standing forlornly on the foredeck, towing a too-shallow anchor along the bottom and wondering why it won’t dig in.
We found a spot at the head of the bay, near the public wharf, and launched Charley into the dinghy. He was vibrating with anticipation, and he urinated ecstatically as soon as his feet touched the dock. We hurried along the wharves and up the trembling ramp to Newcastle Island. Charley broke free, grabbed a four-foot branch better suited to an Afghan, and began to cut delirious circles in the grassy meadow that looks east across Georgia Strait to Vancouver. He even ignored the goose droppings that speckled the grass like thousands of thick green worms. If ever there were such a thing as pure joy, here it was doing rings around me.
The history of Newcastle Island, however, was more complicated. Joy there must have been, but hard work and sorrow were here too. Newcastle sat upon a fortune in coal (the name given it by British colonists was no accident), and you had only to walk ten minutes from where Charley was now savaging his stick, and scuff the trail with your shoe, to uncover the black grit of Nanaimo’s past. A trail ran all the way around the island, and at one point, fenced-off concrete platforms, moss-covered and crumbling at the edges, marked the walled-off openings to the ventilation shafts that kept the miners alive.
Beginning with the ubiquitous Hudson’s Bay Company and continuing at the hands of a succession of coal barons, companies pulled coal out of a half-dozen mines around Nanaimo into the 1950s. In coal’s heyday, shafts criss-crossed beneath the city, even across the harbour to Protection Island. Today, home buyers in some parts of the city are still advised to check with city hall before plunking down their money.
There were quarries here too, where the unique sandstone of the island was sawn out in disks by huge rotating cookie cutters that now sat rusting in the pit beside a monolithic jumble of rejects. The discs became millstones for grinding wood in pulp mills. Other chunks of Newcastle sandstone were shipped as far afield as San Francisco as building material.
Beyond the quarries, along the narrow passage that separates Newcastle Island from the City of Nanaimo, the Japanese families who were so much a part of the commercial fishing industry in B.C. before the Second World War built salteries for the salmon and herring that they shipped back to Japan and the Far East. By the 1920s, Nanaimo, which had been known as “Coal Town,” had forty-three Japanese salteries and was now known as “Herring Town.” The Japanese lost it all, along with their boats and everything else they owned, when the xenophobic wartime government banished them to internment camps.
Of the Indigenous people who were there first, there are few artifacts beyond the mounds of shells in Midden Bay, a seasonal encampment for harvesting the herring that used to mass near Protection Island. They got their first taste of the white man’s progress by digging coal shoulder to shoulder with Chinese miners, for half the wage of the whites. Now the Snuneymuxw First Nation manages the park, which is part of their traditional territory, offering cultural tours and interpretation on Saysutshun. Every evening we watched their aluminum scow depart for Nanaimo, piled high with the white man’s garbage.
Nanaimo is a good place to contemplate human nature; like every place we stopped in the two months it took to go around Vancouver Island, the sense of past lives was overwhelming. You never had to look far — there was usually an abandoned log skid or a drunken length of cedar fence to remind you that families had been here. Sometimes you even brought up the evidence on your anchor. The bottoms of many bays were criss-crossed with old tackle, and remote beaches were often littered with what, at first sight, looked like sizeable brown turds. They turned out to be fragments of two-inch cable so rusted you could shatter them against a rock.
The hot wind blew all night, carrying snatches of music from a wedding being celebrated in the nineteenth-century pavilion on the island. Hatsumi steamed the two barely legal crabs I had managed to entice into our trap, and we ate them in the cockpit while Vera swung uneasily on her chain. I wondered if we’d make it through the night without bumping into our next-door neighbour, the James Island Belle, an ancient liveaboard with a dinghy whose sails hung, algae-slimed, in the water. A young guy and a mutt came and left in a decrepit runabout, and the whistle of his windmill generator rose and fell in the gusts fanning across Mark Bay. A dirty rope at the bow led to something on the bottom; I hoped it was an anchor.