We escaped Sidney Bay the next morning. The weather forecast was the same as it had been for a week: twenty knots in the morning, rising to a gale in the afternoon. Last year, we would probably have stayed put; this year, with Dave’s example to follow (I still couldn’t admit we were following him), getting up at 5:30 a.m. seemed the obvious solution.
Loughborough Inlet was calm. We turned right at Chancellor Channel and right again at the much narrower Wellbore Channel, closing in on Whirlpool Rapids. I wolfed down the fried eggs and toast passed up from the galley, warming myself against the cold wind.
“I had the dream again,” Hatsumi said, refilling my coffee cup from the comfort in the galley.
“The dead guy?”
“It’s like, the boat isn’t really moving. We’re just floating. The three of us.”
Now she had me worried. “You do realize,” I said, “dreams don’t have to mean something. They can just be dreams.”
“Not mine,” she said.
Two salmon farms slid by, one of them directly beneath an even more chaotic than usual clear-cut, and I couldn’t help wondering, which was the lesser of two evils? Salmon farms were under sustained assault from environmental groups, something I was familiar with as a fisheries biologist, and I kept trying to push away the unfashionable suspicion that the critics had simply changed horses. Funding was easy to get if you wanted to oppose salmon farms, while logging protest seemed to be on hiatus.
The sun came out as we turned right into Wellbore Channel. As though following a hackneyed script, the clouds parted, four mountains revealed themselves alarmingly close on the north side of the channel, and a dolphin cut across our bows. The ebb tide emptying the channel picked us up and hurried us through Whirlpool Rapids. Just as Dave had assured us the night before, Whirlpool’s flow wasn’t especially turbulent, and going through felt like stepping onto the conveyor belt in an airport, with the billboards replaced by hills on vertiginous hills. We sprinted through at eleven knots, an all-time record, nearly twice Vera’s cruising speed. Then another hard right into Forward Harbour, following Dave’s lead to an overnight anchorage in Douglas Bay, a delicious scoop out of the peninsula connecting Forward Harbour with Bessborough Bay (named after the “noble house of Bessborough,” rather a disappointment after all those lord chancellors). It was only ten in the morning. One more early start and we’d be through Johnstone Strait and into the Broughtons. We anchored while three wolves patrolled the pebbled crescent of beach, long-legged and in no hurry.
We spent the rest of the day exploring while the wind built to a gale around the corner in Johnstone Strait. The wisdom of waiting for a weather window was beginning to sink in, although it ran contrary to my nature, and there wasn’t any evidence of high winds where we were (which was, of course, the whole point). After lunch, when the wolves seemed to have moved on, we manhandled the dinghy into the water, persuaded Dave and his wife, Nancy, away from the books they were reading in Sanctum’s cockpit (they seemed to have no problem with the waiting thing), and went ashore.
The incoming tide was filling the beach like a bowl. A notch in the trees opened into a trail flagged with marine detritus: faded net floats, unravelling lengths of hawser, lengths of PVC tube jammed in tree forks. We clambered over roots and under fallen trees. Charley stopped every few feet, riveted by the smells of strange animals. When the trail opened out onto the other side of the peninsula, the wind barrelling down Sunderland Channel hit me in the face. This was the weather from Johnstone Strait; this was what we weren’t seeing in our little bomb-proof haven in Douglas Bay.
Back on the Douglas Bay side, only the tops of trees gave any sign of the gale a mile away. The bowl was now brimming, the beach obliterated, and Vera’s dinghy floating serenely at the end of its long yellow tether. We had to scuttle under cedar branches to get in.
That evening, Hatsumi and I gorged ourselves on Dane Campbell’s crabs, sitting in the cockpit and tossing the remains overboard. We went through three of them, creating a slow-motion fountain of crab shards. Eating crab was one of those activities that always reminded me, “You’re not Japanese, and she is.” I dismantled my crustaceans using bone shears from the first aid kit and dug the sweet meat out with a knife; Hatsumi cracked the claws with her teeth and inhaled, making a whistling sound. We wiped our chins and agreed that tomorrow we would listen to the early forecast and decide whether to leave. I might even pop over to Sanctum for a word.
Next morning: another gale forecast. If we left, we had to make it through the last, unavoidable ten miles of Johnstone Strait. We dithered. I rowed over to Sanctum, feeling weak-willed, and rapped on the cold hull. Dave emerged, sniffed, looked around.
“We’ll likely just poke our noses around the corner, see how it goes.” I rowed quickly back.
“We’re out of here,” I told Hatsumi. It was warm in the cabin but cold outside. Charley peered up beseechingly.
“He’s going to have to hold it.”
Sunderland Channel was gusty and cold, a working corridor of salmon farms and clear-cuts. Once, I did a double-take: a B.C. ferry, one of the big ones, sat tethered to the shore beneath a clear-cut. So that’s where the old ferries went — housing for loggers. It looked preferable to Aquatraz. The northwest wind was already peering around corners, looking for boats to harass. But Dave had been right, an early morning run would get us to safety, and we left Johnstone Strait for good to turn up Havannah Channel. Behind us, on the Vancouver Island side, Mount Palmerston looked as though it had risen straight out of the ocean. Which, geologically speaking, it had.
We stopped for lunch in Port Harvey, a place that, despite its name, I took a dislike to. The bay itself was clotted with logging equipment, barges, a collection of salvaged salmon cages. The ridge above it all was an old-man stubble of stumps — yet another clear-cut. Someone was trying to make a go of a new marina at the head of the bay, with a floating store, a small restaurant, and invitingly empty docks. If you wanted a corn popper or a fish bonker, maybe some Kraft Dinner or a watermelon, Port Harvey was the place.
Most such places on Vancouver Island, once away from the cities, are laid-back and casual, and the really small ones, like Port Harvey, usually have an owner whose story alone is worth the moorage fee. But this one’s docking instructions seemed strangely anal-retentive for a person with two hundred feet of unused space. Maybe he didn’t like Charley, who leapt ashore to bark at anything that moved, including the horseflies. Whatever the reason, I didn’t want to hear this guy’s story. Ex-fisherman, failed stockbroker, axe murderer, I didn’t care. We followed Dave and Nancy out.
“Let’s try Boogie Bay, around the corner,” Dave said, and that was fine with me. It also told me how to pronounce “Boughey,” the name on the chart. Speaking of names, I couldn’t resist looking up the Harvey who’d had this place named after him. At first, it seemed too good to be true: Captain John Harvey, Walbran informed me, was master of HMS Brunswick in the battle of the “Glorious First of June,” 1794, in which Harvey’s ship grappled with the French frigate Vengeur and sent her to the bottom. Captain Harvey received his death wound during hand-to-hand fighting, dying after being relieved by another ship captained by his brother. What a glorious career — and the same name as my father! Unfortunately, Walbran’s book had several historic Harveys, and this was the wrong one. John Harvey did have a mountain named after him, but Port Harvey, it turned out, commemorated the less remarkable commodore of the British South Pacific Fleet.
We rolled out the big genoa jib and followed Sanctum up Havannah Channel, the rising northeaster catching Vera perfectly on the beam so that she gambolled past all the other landmarks named for the survey ship’s officers: Mist Bluff, Malone Point, Bockett Islets. Boughey was the Havannah’s first lieutenant, but his bay was taking the wind dead-on, so we turned north and found shelter in Burial Cove, from where we would have access to the Broughton Archipelago by any number of passages.
Burial Cove was pleasant enough, but the name cast a pall over the place for me, and the trees sighed all night. Vera dragged her chain to and fro across the bottom, and I came awake repeatedly to the grumble of metal on rock and the moan of wind in the rigging. I wondered when the dead man would step out of Hatsumi’s sleep and silently take his place on the cabin floor.
Sanctum motored past us early the next morning, heading for Malcolm Island, where a daughter worked in the Co-op store in Sointula. The night before, saying goodbye, I realized that, in four days, Dave had told me nothing specific about how to comport myself on this coast — about wind direction and weather forecasts and waiting. But, in his own self-deprecating way, Dave was such a potent mixture of confidence and humility that some of it, if only the faintest smear, had already worn off on me. And that was a good feeling. This coast was so pockmarked, so hazard-riddled, I desperately needed to kick-start my own competence.
“By the way,” I said, as the dinghy drifted away from Sanctum, “yesterday, when we were coming up Chancellor Channel, you stopped for a while. What was all that about?”
“One of those clumps of floating kelp,” Dave laughed. “I ran straight into it. Couldn’t have done it better if I’d actually been aiming for it. Nearly seized the engine.”
I was paranoid about floating kelp myself. And now this paragon of seamanship had hit some. That meant I had the right idea, but sooner or later, I was still going to screw up. Somehow, that made me feel better.
With Sanctum gone, Burial Cove seemed even colder and emptier. It was still early, and neither of us felt like going anywhere. Hatsumi was still in bed; Charley’s ears poked out from under the covers beside her. Sometimes I wondered if I was being displaced.
“I’ll just do a little reading,” I said.