It was still windy in Mark Bay the next morning, but the wind now came from the southeast. When I poked my head through the companionway, everything had changed, as though a completely new fleet had snuck into the anchorage in the dead of night. The James Island Belle and its banshee windmill hung way off in the other direction; now we threatened to tangle anchors with a forty-foot powerboat I had hardly noticed the day before. A wind shift had rearranged everything. Southeasters were a mixed blessing: going north, as we were, they came from behind and made for easy sailing, but they could also be storm winds, accompanied by several days of blustery, rainy weather.
But we weren’t going to get to the Nahwitti Bar by sitting in Mark Bay and fretting about a southeaster. I listened to the weather forecast while Hatsumi made breakfast.
“Looks like a couple days of this,” I said, scribbling down the long-range prognosis.
“Uh-huh.”
“Twenty-five knots late this afternoon.”
“Charley needs to be fed.”
“And Whiskey Golf is active today.”
That got her attention.
“Today?”
Whiskey Golf (Area WG, on the chart) is a modified parallelogram dropped over a ten-by-fifteen mile stretch of the Strait of Georgia, like a haphazardly surveyed building lot in the middle of an uninhabited forest. It’s one of two military exercise areas off Vancouver Island — the other one, Whiskey Hotel, on the west coast not far from Victoria, was almost two months away. By some arcane political arrangement I couldn’t even begin to fathom, both were shared with the United States. Whiskey Golf, the bigger of the two, is used by the U.S. Navy for testing torpedoes, which could be fired from submarines, airplanes, or boats, and whose movements were tracked by an underwater cat’s cradle of sensors. When Whiskey Golf was active, you had to go around it.
And that wasn’t always easy, especially in a sailboat. I imagine the joint committee who decided the boundary of Whiskey Golf where it runs close to the shore, defining what the Canadian Department of National Defence calls the “transit area.” Uniformed men circle a chart table, pondering the route Vera will have to take. Ash drops from cigarettes glued between thin lips, and the harsh overhead glare bounces off crewcut scalps. Finally, a retired U.S. admiral leans forward, brushing cookie crumbs off the coffee-stained chart. He taps the chain of nasty reefs that follows the Vancouver Island shoreline for five miles north of Nanoose Bay, where the naval base is.
“How about right here, gentlemen?” He inks a wavering line, following the prickly shore. “Send ’em past those big ol’ rocks, turn ’em up here, past those, whaddaya call them, Ballenas Islands. Let’s leave those boaters, what, a thousand yards of sea room? Hell, that’s ten football fields! Whadda y’all think?”
“Sounds good to us,” say the Canadians, in unison.
And it is, on a fine day, but today might be ugly.
“Shikata ga nai,” said Hatsumi. It can’t be helped.
The wind rounded in after us as soon as we cleared Departure Bay. We got the jib out with a minimum of clattering and cursing and settled into the long downwind run.
“Not so bad,” I said. “We’ll be at Lasqueti Island in four hours.”
But I was wrong. We made good time along the western edge of Whiskey Golf under jib alone, passing the surveillance dishes and domes that encrust Winchelsea Island by noon. But the southeaster behaved as advertised, building under darkening skies until, by the time we were nearing the final turn at Ballenas Island, where my resentment toward all that military hardware whirring and clicking deep inside Whiskey Golf builds to a peak, the incessant roll and lurch of a downwind passage was turning Charley green.
“I’m taking him below,” said Hatsumi. “He’s scared, look.”
“Don’t do it.” Charley did look miserable, wedged in a corner, his ears laid back. “You’ll get sick. Really.” Vera slewed violently, Charley scrabbled at the seat, and Hatsumi scooped him up and disappeared with him down the companionway. I brought Vera around ninety degrees just as Lasqueti and Texada Islands, the landmarks that mattered, began to dissolve behind curtains of rain. The change in course brought the wind onto our beam, and it felt twice as strong as it did when it was behind us. We started to roll, a slovenly wallow that put one rail in the water and then the other. I heard a bang from below, followed by a moan: a cabin locker had burst open, dumping shoes and bottles over the two forms curled up on the floor.
“Gotta get the main up,” I called down. “We’re going sideways.” By then it was clear that whatever could go wrong, would. The main halyard got away from me just enough to snag around one of the steps that run up the mast. I managed to get twenty feet of sail up before it refused to move further in either direction. I secured what I could, and Vera began to move forward again, but by now the rain had arrived in earnest. The coast of Lasqueti Island, which I knew had only one opening where we could find shelter, became a grey blur. My glasses misted over.
“Where are we?” When I peered below, all I could see of Hatsumi was the soles of her shoes, poking through the bathroom door. Small bottles of Japanese cosmetics rolled past her. As I watched, the rest of my wife emerged. She was clutching Charley, still in his orange life jacket, and her face was white.
“Sorry to bother you, but I really need a position. I can’t see the opening to Bull Channel.”
“Can’t look at the computer,” she croaked. “Get sick.”
This was the first year we had used electronic charts. We had them on a laptop and were still getting used to the seductive belief that you knew exactly where you were. But the laptop was jammed somewhere secure now, so we were back to the old system of paper charts. I took a quick look at the radar, which confirmed that the shore of Lasqueti was only a half mile away, before my own gorge rose.
“Well, use the old GPS then, just get me a fix, a lat-long. Come on, I can’t leave the wheel.”
More heaving.
“We’re on a fucking lee shore!” I reminded myself that alarm in my voice would only increase hers. “Honey.”
The lee shore is, or should be, very high on the sailor’s list of to-avoids. A lee shore is a shore you’re being blown onto; a lee shore you couldn’t even see, I was finding out, was extra frightening. In a westerly wind, the entire west coast of Vancouver Island is the ultimate lee shore. That’s why it’s called the Graveyard of the Pacific. And that’s where we were going.
“I’m trying,” I heard faintly from below, and she was, on her knees and clawing at the chart table where the elderly GPS was fixed. Finally, a shaking hand fluttered a hastily folded chart at me; I grabbed it, found Hatsumi’s weakly pencilled dot-and-circle that represented our position.
“Holy shit.”
I spun the wheel. If we hadn’t been socked in, I would be seeing breaking waves on the island’s distinctive black cliffs. Any closer, I might soon be hearing them. I started the engine and put the bow back into the waves, on a course that should take us clear of the rocks even as we went sideways. We settled in for more uncomfortable slogging. It was pouring now. It took another hour, and several more nauseating fixes, before I finally saw the entrance to Bull Passage. It really was framed in surf.
“Just a little longer,” I said to Hatsumi, who had finally rejoined me in the cockpit. She was still white as the sail I couldn’t get down. We went wide around the corner, then hard over into Bull Passage. The rolling ceased, the engine stopped gulping, and, by bringing the main in tight, I was finally able to wrestle it down. Even the rain stopped. Just like that, the coast proved, once again, that your punishment can end abruptly, leaving you wondering what just happened. I shut down the engine, let the jib out again, and went below to put on some cobweb-blowing music. The life-affirming, C major blast of the opening of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto poured out of the cabin, bounced off the straining jib, and ascended to the heavens.
“Hah!” I said. “Whiskey Golf, but still. We made it. I hope the guys cleared a space for us at the dock.” Vera surged ahead, steam rose from the drying decks, and Beethoven caromed off the cliffs on either side.
***
“The guys” were Gordon and Bruce Jones — the Jones Boys — brothers who had operated a shellfish hatchery and farm in Skerry Bay on Lasqueti Island for thirty-five years. Both were stocky, eccentric, generous, and ferociously strong. Although I had known them for twenty years, I still found them impossible to categorize, and I won’t attempt it here. For the four years we’d been cruising these waters, we’d shown up at the farm in Vera, and every year, it became harder to untie and continue on our way. Bruce Jones’s explanation for this was always delivered with widespread arms that took in the cluttered docks, the mussel rafts, a boat they’d salvaged off a rock, Bruce’s house perched on the cliff above with its hot tub that had been empty for twenty years — and the explanation was always the same.
“It’s the Lasqueti Triangle!”
“We’ll stay a few more days this time,” I said.
Skerry means rocky in Gaelic, and the Jones Boys’ shellfish operation filled half of Skerry Bay with a jumble of outbuildings and floating structures that reminded me of the floathouse communities I’d visited in Thailand. “Whatever worked” seemed to be the principle here, and whatever didn’t work was stored somewhere on the theory that, someday, it could be made to. I say floating structures because sometimes it was hard to tell what you were stepping on: it might well be a dock, but it could also be a barge that, through disuse, had turned into a sort of dock, or a workshop so full of spare parts you couldn’t actually work in it. Lines of demarcation were indistinct, so watching your step was important. Most of the floating space that wasn’t actually being used to process shellfish or raise their feed was simply another place to store whatever drifted in from where we’d just been. I wasn’t in the least surprised when, one year, I found the fuselage of a small yellow airplane tucked in behind a shed. The wings, I noticed later, were leaning against the side of Bruce’s house. They didn’t seem out of place.
We slid past the black turtle-humps of Rabbit and Bull islands, turned left into Bull Harbour, and motored down into Skerry Bay. Through the binoculars, the farm looked as cluttered as ever. A few sailboats were anchored outside the bay, and I wondered what their owners made of the scene inside, the sudden, high-speed comings and goings of workboats, the dogs barking, the diesel generator in its shaking shed on the point, grinding away until ten o’clock at night. In addition to caretaking the nearby provincial park on Jedediah Island and running a full-time shellfish hatchery, Gordon and Bruce were the local responders for the Canadian Coast Guard, so people anchored off the farm had to be prepared for the sudden middle of the night throat-clearing of the Pac 1’s twin diesels, the firefly pinpoints of the Jones Boys’ headlamps as they jumped aboard, the dazzling eye of the searchlight, and the unapologetic wake of the big workboat churning through a sleeping anchorage.
We managed to avoid the two horrifying rocks in Skerry Bay (Bruce: “Why should we mark them? They’re so obvious!”) and nosed in between a work launch and what looked like an aluminum party boat, twenty-five feet long, with a cabin and wide decks for lounging around on a lake and drinking. This one seemed to have sat on the bottom for a year or so; there would be another Jones story there, I knew. The dogs reached us first, and Charley was off before we had even tied up, racing up the dock with Fergie, a rangy and limping part-coyote somebody had dragged out of a ditch near Calgary. The last I saw of Charley was his orange life jacket disappearing up the ramp. Next was the barrel-shaped Simba, a crumbling, waist-high senior citizen with a grey muzzle, friendly, exhausted eyes, and a lump the size of a grapefruit hanging from his abdomen. Last year, there’d been one of those lumps on his shoulder. Maybe it had migrated. Simba let out some face-saving foghorn sounds, then began the painful process of subsiding on the dock while Bruce brought up the rear.
“What took you so long?” he said. “Look, we even cleared a special space for you.”
“It was nasty,” I said. The southeaster had followed us into Skerry Bay, but the sun was out now. Vera sparkled with salt. Tied up snugly to the dock, with the cliffs breaking much of the wind, it seemed like a nice day again.
“You’re a sailboat. You love wind!”
Bruce and Gordon had pulled so many sailboats off the rocks that their opinion of recreational sailors was somewhere down around kayakers, which they called “speed bumps.” I didn’t take any of it seriously; I knew they had grown up cruising Desolation Sound in their parents’ sailboat, and there were two bright red Jones-made fibreglass kayaks on the roof of the shed next to me. I joined Bruce on a wooden park bench (where had that come from?) while Simba completed the operation of lying down at our feet, keeling over like a collapsing tripod. As if to confirm Bruce’s low opinion, a sailboat puttered down one side of Skerry Bay and up the other, miraculously missing both rocks.
“He better not try anchoring down there,” said Bruce. “The end of the bay is planted in geoducks.” Geoducks (pronounced gooeyducks) were enormous clams, I knew that much. But despite many visits, I still understood little of what was going on here. What I saw above sea level made a kind of sense, but so much of it was underwater. The mussels hanging from their rafts, the vast, bubbling, sunken swimming pools of green stuff tethered below Gordon’s “apartment” at the top of the hill, the circular cages farther out in the bay that might once have belonged in a salmon farm, that might contain something alive and needing feeding, or that might just be gathering weed. And now geoduck clams. I rowed out to them later and found myself gliding over a small city of geoduck-houses, each one a length of white PVC pipe jammed into the sand.
Bruce stretched his legs in the sun while we caught up, though he jumped up briefly to give Hatsumi a hug. He wore shorts and a frayed sailor’s hat that had long ago lost its shape.
“You can just leave her here, you know,” he said, holding on. Hatsumi put her head on his shoulder. Within fifty feet of where they stood were plastic barrels, rusted chain, a coil of frayed and faded ship’s hawser, and a salvaged yellow weather buoy with what looked like a perfectly good strobe light fixed to the top. The dock was so untidy you needed a map, or the feet of a dancer, to negotiate it. Yet here was my clutter-abhorring Japanese wife, clutching the proprietor.
“Hey, don’t I get one of those?” Gordon appeared, dressed in filthy jeans, a plaid shirt, and an Innovative Aquaculture baseball cap, incongruously bearing a pitcher of lemonade and a stack of disposable plastic glasses. Where Bruce is voluble (his conversation has been called “the Bruce-wind”), Gordon is self-deprecating and ironic. Bruce’s humour is broad; Gordon’s draws blood. Their banter is unrelenting. Apart from the separate skiing holidays they take when the hatchery slows down in the winter, the brothers are inseparable. They both got long hugs.
“We have mussels to set,” said Gordon, draining his glass.
“I know, I know,” said Bruce.
Gordon and Bruce went off to prepare the mussel rope for planting, a baffling procedure that involved pulling what looked like an endless roll of narrow cotton pantyhose over a length of thin plastic pipe as it spat out a slurry of mussel larvae, then attaching the string to hundreds of feet of hairy plastic rope.
“It’s therapy,” said Bruce, slicking the cotton sock off the plastic tube like a jaded Casanova. While they worked, I passed an hour making a detailed inventory of the back-from-the-deep party boat tied up next to Vera. The whole place reeked of mould. I wondered how long it would sit here before Gordon and Bruce towed it around the corner to join the seaplane and the rest of the abandoned reclamation projects.
When I emerged, they were attaching the seeded mussel rope, now coiled in the bottom of a workboat like an enormous chain of sausage links, to the underside of a floating raft made of thirty-foot lengths of black plastic sewer tube. Gordon straddled two of these barely floating logs, reeling in the sausage Bruce fed to him and suspending it from hooks so that it fell in gentle underwater loops, beneath a trapped scum of twigs, crab moults, and weed. In a few months, the whole thing would be dragged up again, foot by slippery foot, the sock rotted away and the baby mussels firmly attached. Back it would go for stripping and sorting by a mechanical grader, and then the brothers would go through the whole pantyhose-therapy business again before retrieving the mussel-garlands a final time, tearing the finished shellfish off the plastic rope before grading, power-washing, bagging, and shipping them. If anyone wondered why moules marinière cost more than steak, here was a tiny part of the answer.
Aided by their long-time business partner Cathy (a.k.a. the Algae Queen), Gordon and Bruce had been growing oysters, clams, and mussels for decades. In a barnacle-like warren attached to the cliffs above the docks, Cathy maintained thirty-foot fibreglass tanks for coddling the baby molluscs until they were ready to set and an entire room of ten-foot-high circular algae tanks that would feed the larvae. Each translucent silo looked like a core taken out of the ocean. Tethered just off the point, more algae multiplied in swimming-pool-sized vinyl tanks held up by a ring of floats. The Joneses even processed algae into a vile green toothpaste, packaged it, and marketed it to other growers. There really wasn’t anything they couldn’t do.
“Except, maybe, get a life,” said Gordon later that evening. The dogs had collapsed in malodorous heaps. From the upper “boardroom” lined with books and hung with Bruce’s paintings, where we’d just finished a gargantuan pot of mussels, you could see the sailboats anchored in Bull Harbour and just make out the black cliffs behind them. The VHF Coast Guard channel muttered in the background.
“He sleeps with it under his pillow,” said Gordon. I could believe it: Bruce could be in full rhetorical flow, hands chopping the air, then suddenly halt, alert as a hound catching a scent, and dart for the radio.
I reached down to squash a mosquito on an unprotected ankle. “Any problem if we stay another day?”
“Another day? Why not a week? Better still, just leave your wife—” The VHF burbled. Bruce jumped up and disappeared in mid-sentence. When he reappeared, he was putting on his floater coat.
“Some guy drifting out in Bull Passage. If you want to come, we have to go now.”
This was a Bruce I hadn’t seen before. The bonhomie and bad puns were replaced by a headlamp vanishing down the path. The southeaster was still blowing. Even in Skerry Bay, the dark water was ruffled and uneasy. Out in Bull Passage, a disabled boat would drift quickly, and there was nowhere to go but rocks.
I picked my way after him, back down the treacherous path to the Pac 1, the aluminum landing craft used for transporting supplies, hosting parties, and rescuing feckless mariners. We hurriedly off-loaded an orange sofa, some white plastic lawn chairs, and a barbecue. I cast off the lines and hunkered down on the huge foredeck as the twin diesels erupted under my feet. In the raised wheelhouse aft, I could see the ghostly green faces of Gordon and Bruce, illuminated by the radar screen. Within seconds, the big boat was at top speed, cutting a foaming wake between the anchored sailboats. I imagined the owners clawing their way into their suddenly rocking cockpits and going “What the . . . ?”
There was enough of a moon to pick out the sixty-foot cruiser rolling in the slop from what was now a more serious fifteen knots of wind blowing their baby toward Jedediah Island. A searchlight played briefly over the little knot of anxious-looking people on her foredeck. We came alongside and made fast under the great flaring bow, the two boats jostling while I scrambled around trying to insert fenders between them without losing a finger. The owner shouted down, Bruce shouted up, and we pieced the story together while Gordon slowly backed the joined boats away from the rocks: their anchor windlass had jammed with sixty feet of chain out. Part of it hung in a loop from the bow.
“I keep resetting the circuit breakers!” said the owner. “Is there some way to get this thing up manually?”
“Shouldn’t you know that?” said Bruce under his breath. He was struggling to pull the vinyl cover off a hydraulic crane. This wasn’t life-threatening, simply absurd: Charlie’s Charm couldn’t go very far with an anchor ready to snag anything shallower than sixty feet. Bruce rigged a length of elderly polypropylene line to the dangling chain, pushed the button to withdraw five feet of chain from the waters of Bull Passage, and went back for more. The anchor itself finally emerged, to nervous clapping from above. I felt cautiously superior; we’d never done anything quite this dumb.
We returned sedately through the anchored yachtsmen, who were probably just getting back to sleep. Gordon brought the Pac 1 to the dock with the kind of seamanship that takes a lifetime to acquire, shuttling in and out of gear so that the twin screws fired bursts of blue-green bioluminescence. Beside Vera, the weather buoy that had drifted into Skerry Bay was blinking serenely. Hundreds of miles from where it was supposed to be, it seemed perfectly at home here.
“Maybe we will stay another day,” I said.
We hung around, firmly in the clutches of the Lasqueti Triangle, while the weather improved and the long dock filled up with the next shift of summer visitors. With each boat that came in, we untied Vera and shifted her back, until there was only six inches of water under her keel and I could count the furred-over bottles on the bottom.
But I didn’t spend long chatting with the latest arrivals. Instead, I decided to ease into my father’s story by having a look at those intriguing “other patient” files he’d held onto for so long. Who were they? Why had he kept them? Maybe there was something revealing mixed up in all those carbons and onion skins and yellowing envelopes.