For the sailor, the western side of Vancouver Island has four major navigational challenges: Cape Scott (behind us now, thank God), Brooks Peninsula (coming up), Estevan Point (south of Nootka Sound), and finally the seventy-two-mile stretch between Barkley Sound and Victoria. The first two are the worst, and the fear factor recedes as you go south. Estevan Point is a smaller bump than Brooks, and the long day back to Victoria is a worry only because all of the anchorages on the way are in bays where you wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep.
The Brooks Peninsula and Estevan Point are classic headlands, and they do the usual unpleasant headland things to sea conditions. Brooks was especially notorious for making mariners miserable, and even the most cursory glance at a chart tells you why. While most of the west coast of Vancouver Island is perforated by long inlets (the one we were sheltering in now, for example, cuts almost all the way across the island), Brooks protrudes ten miles into the Pacific, an almost perfectly rectangular shelf defended by cliffs. It’s a geological afterthought, accessible only by boat and helicopter. To me, it looked like a particularly ugly mole, the kind of thing you have to watch out for when you’re shaving.
The Brooks Peninsula messes everything up, catching and bending the Pacific swell, getting in the way of currents. The air mass following the contour of Vancouver Island has to play catch-up around the Brooks Peninsula, which means that the weather forecasts for the area often end with the caveat, “except Brooks Peninsula.” Going around Cape Cook and Solander Island, the outermost corners of the peninsula, the wind speed frequently doubles. The day I’m writing this, in late November, there’s a storm warning out, which is bad enough (thirty-four to forty-seven knots) that nobody in their right mind would leave port. But the caveat for Brooks Peninsula is “hurricane force warning” — an unimaginable sixty-five knots.
That day, the forecast was for fifteen knots, rising to twenty-five at Cape Cook. We decided to try it. We left Winter Harbour in mid-morning, hours after the sport fishermen but taking the same route many of them would follow into Brooks Bay. If Vancouver Island was your side, and the peninsula a cocked arm, Brooks Bay was an armpit, and in a northwester, it became a trap. We had such a wind, and we dithered as we got closer, heading far enough offshore to avoid the five o’clock shadow of rocks that guarded the coast but not committing to Cape Cook either. Vera seemed to appreciate the chance to sail, and we lurched south under the big genoa jib, struggling to get used to the swell that had begun to lift us as soon as we left Quatsino Sound. It was sunny and clear, and Brooks Peninsula was visible almost immediately, a green panhandle with a mane of brilliant white low cloud.
That cloud rang a bell.
“Take the wheel?”
I clambered below and dug out a weather manual for Vancouver Island. “A ‘cap’ on the Brooks Peninsula,” the book cautioned, “usually means a gale is coming.” Vera rolled south, settling into the first decent sailing wind we’d had since before the gale that blew us into Loughborough Inlet. For a while longer, I could still see the distinctive cone of Solander Island guarding the tip of the peninsula before the island, then the rest of the whole promontory, began to slip behind the clouds. Now Vera was really flying. The sea whitened. We wound the genoa into a half-reef, Hatsumi wrestling with the wheel while I threw my weight into the winch handle and tried not to somersault over it when the boat rolled.
Then the peninsula disappeared.
“Those guys who gave us the salmon the other night,” I said. “They said there was a spectacular anchorage this side of the peninsula. Want to have a look? Try Brooks again tomorrow?”
We both wanted to. By the time we made it to Solander Island, it would be a full gale, probably with zero visibility. So we altered course, heading for the armpit of Klaskish Inlet while trying to keep from being driven into the cliffs. By turning east, we were putting ourselves on a lee shore, a situation that always makes me touchy. “Don’t you get it?” I would snap to Hatsumi in our first year of sailing. “We’re going sideways. It’s a goddamn lee shore.”
I didn’t have to snap at her now; we were too busy threading the rocks, and she now knew as much as I did about lee shores. Two orcas cruised past as we closed in on Klaskish Inlet, and a momentary white flash dead ahead looked like a third.
“You’re off course,” said Hatsumi. That white flash was Hughes Rock, more than two miles off the coast. I began to wonder whether I liked navigating out here. The entrance was clotted with islets, and although our new GPS told us exactly where we were, I clung to an atavistic need to see for myself, using a much-folded paper chart to match up the landmarks with the lurching landscape. The navigation light I was searching for on shore turned out to be a spindly thing on a pole, more like a garden light than the white-painted concrete tower I’d been looking for, but once we’d passed it, the wind was blocked, and we motored cautiously toward what one of the guidebooks called “the best-kept secret on the west coast” — Klaskish Basin.
It was like going up a river. The entrance to the basin was almost invisible until you were practically in it, but the cedar-lined channel was deep. When it opened up, we were alone in what might as well have been a lake. We anchored across from the only conceivable landing for Charley, a trickle of stream with just enough of a clearing that I could run the kayak next to a rock, let him off, and float around until he’d done his thing or gotten eaten by a bear. The broad estuary of the Klaskish River, moss-green and open beneath an old clear-cut, was too far away to reach by rowboat. We were enclosed by forested hills shot with the silvered trunks of fire-killed trees, like a greying beard. And we were very alone.
We sat in the warm sun while Charley snapped at horse flies. A big jet crawled overhead, a sparkling point of silver trailing twin contrails. Where was it headed? Tokyo? Hong Kong? I thumbed through Captain Walbran’s book. Klaskish Inlet had been named seventy years before the Brooks Peninsula; back then, the inlet was known as Port Brooks (to the English) and Puerto de Brucks (to the Spaniards Galiano and Valdes). On the matter of what the Indigenous peoples called this lonely spot, or what use they had made of it, Walbran was silent.
I swatted flies and thought about these long-ago explorers and how they stumbled into this place — on August 5, said Walbran, so the weather would have been similar to today’s. Had they too been taking shelter? I imagined their ship anchored uneasily outside while her boats felt their way along the riverlike seam, then the hours of careful soundings before the larger vessel cautiously followed. They must have towed her in.
We tried to round Brooks the next morning, despite a gale warning and an ominous report of thirty-five knots at Solander Island by 4 a.m.
“It’s always thirty-five at Solander Island,” I said peevishly. We’d gotten up early, made coffee, secured the lockers. Outflow winds barrelling through the mountains at the head of the inlet had rocked Vera all night. “What the hell, let’s try it. We can always turn around.”
Outside Klaskish Inlet, the wind was already rising at 6 a.m., and by the time we’d sailed an hour, clawing slowly toward the peninsula that was invisible under a grey, depressing sky, Vera’s decks were awash, and it would clearly be another two hours before we could even think of making a wide, cautious turn around Cape Cook. It was a simple enough problem: we had to backtrack, almost into the wind, to get enough sea room to avoid being crowded onto the uncaring face of the Brooks Peninsula. With the wind rising as the day went on, the safety margin would just keep shrinking.
“So much for that,” I said, turning Vera up through the eye of the wind and all the way around onto a broad reach. She galloped back to Puerto de Brucks like a dog racing for home, but our spirits sank as we dropped the anchor and shut down the engine. It was as silent as the grave. And still only eight in the morning.
“Breakfast?” I said brightly. But Hatsumi looked defeated.
“We’ll try again tomorrow,” I said. I didn’t tell her that something else was worrying me. When I’d started the engine, the first push of the button had produced nothing but a faint click. One thing at a time, I decided, although a failing starter circuit was the last thing we needed out here. Sails were nice things to have, but an engine could keep you off the rocks.
“No people,” said Hatsumi in a small voice. She handed me a fried egg. “Drives me crazy.”
“No kidding. Not exactly Kugayama, is it?” From Kugayama to Klaskish Basin: there was a dislocation. But I couldn’t find any way to make it better for her.
“We just have to learn to wait,” I said lamely. It was true, though. Getting around Brooks Peninsula — like getting around Cape Scott or through Johnstone Strait — was a fight, a lopsided one. The only way you could expect to win was to look for your enemy’s weakness. In our case, that meant waiting for a break in the weather. So we listened, on and off throughout the day, to the Coast Guard broadcasts on the VHF radio, infuriatingly faint in our closed-in little world.
VHF weather reports follow a script, of which the actual forecast is only a part, and not always the part you’re desperate to hear. Often, the real-time report from a lighthouse or a weather buoy is what you base your decision on; in this case, the Solander Island light was what mattered. So we sat glued to the crackling radio as Vera swung slowly at anchor and the signal built and faded, waiting out the reports for all the places that didn’t matter, grinding slowly through the list of “local and lighthouse reports” until finally — finally! — here it was:
“Solander Island. Winds northwest whistle pop grrr whooshhh . . .”
The silver jet crawled across the blue dome of our prison. Same time as yesterday, probably the same destination and the same plane.
“Come on, Charley,” I said, heaving myself up. I released him on weed-covered rocks and floated in the shallows while he snooped around. It was warm again. Flies buzzed and the cedars released their summer smell. Again, the idea that we were anchored in an alpine lake was hard to shake. But the moment didn’t last long. By lunchtime, the fog began to settle into the basin, sifting down over our little bowl until only the lower branches of the trees were visible. Vera ceased swinging and the place became unearthly still and silent.
“Ahhhh-choo!”
It was more a roar than a sneeze, and there weren’t many people who sneezed like that. It was strangely muffled too, and I had to look hard in the direction of the sound until I could spot him. He was standing in the clearing where I’d taken Charley to pee, holding the red-and-white checked jacket around himself like a blanket.
“We could talk to him,” said Hatsumi.
“You can see him?”
“Of course I can see him.”
“It’s lonely here,” called my father. That’s what he’d said, every day, near the end. “What are you doing in this terrible place?”
“I don’t want to talk to him,” I said.
“Then turn on the shortwave radio,” Hatsumi said. “Maybe we can talk to someone that way. It’s about time you tried.”
She was right about that.
“I’m trying to get us out of here,” I called. “You had a shortwave radio, didn’t you? When you were a kid? Well, watch this.”
***
Shortwave (or “high frequency” or just “ham”) radio wasn’t found on a lot of cruising boats, but Vera had come equipped with one of these dial-encrusted monsters. I’d spun those dials a few times when we first got the boat, randomly intercepting excited whisperings in Mandarin, Colombian pop music, the plummy tones of the BBC, and a lot of pops, tweets, whistles, and dishwasher noises. But I didn’t understand the first thing about how it worked, and listening was pointless if you couldn’t transmit. To do that, with our particular radio at least, you needed a ham licence.
But determining, unequivocally, that I needed a licence, and finding out how to get one took months. There just wasn’t a simple answer. So-called amateur radio (the proper name for ham) might be capable of life-saving, globe-spanning feats of communication, but its practitioners were thwarted by simple English. Finally, I went for the bargain-basement option: buy a study guide from the Radio Amateurs of Canada and pay $25 for a locally accredited ham to administer the 100-question multiple choice exam.
The study guide was an inch thick, not counting appendices on elementary math. How could an inch be boiled down to 100 questions, of which I had to get 80 percent correct to receive my licence? In desperation I turned to the Internet, where I was delighted to find the entire bank of 973 possible questions. After three days cramming, there were still 500 questions I kept flunking. There was only one way to get through this hell: forget understanding everything, just memorize the answers, all 973 of them.
Which I did. Two infuriating weeks later, I tossed my cheat sheets in the recycle box and went to see my examiner, Barry Mann. He met me at the door to his apartment wearing a red T-shirt over jeans and slippers. I wondered if he was a typical ham — the receding hair, clipped beard, and pallor certainly fit with the image I had of people hunched over knobs and dials in a darkened room. I followed Barry into his tiny kitchen, where the exam was laid out on a breakfast table next to a coffee mug jammed full of pencils with plump, virginal eraser-ends. Maybe he anticipated a lot of indecision on my part, or an unusually heavy hand. A Mozart string quartet murmured from a small stereo on a shelf next to a framed sepia portrait of a naked youth, knees drawn up pensively at the edge of a lake. Barry fiddled with an espresso machine.
“No thanks,” I said. More caffeine would send me into Barry’s bathroom. “And look, I like Mozart, but it’s kind of distracting. Those formulas, you know?” I was itching to spill them. Barry clicked the radio off.
“Take your time.” He padded silently into another room. I heard the mouse-scampering of computer keys. Thirty minutes later, Barry ran my completed pages through a scanner while a shortwave radio mumbled from one corner. There were radios everywhere, perched on brackets or winking from windowsills and all connected to a Christmas tree of antennae. A cluster of handhelds was arranged next to the scanner like some kind of electronic ikebana. I shamelessly snooped in his bookcase while he fussed with the answer-key software.
Barry whistled. “Ninety-eight percent,” he said.
Of that 98 percent, I understood maybe 40. We filled out and faxed some forms, and I became VA7BJH, licensed to transmit. A week or so later, I got a diploma in the mail. I didn’t frame it. But I had written down the frequency for one of the boaters’ networks that operated daily, providing a shortwave meeting place for anybody with the right radio and a licence. Now, marooned in Klaskish Basin, I dug out the information: six o-clock, 3,010 kilohertz.
“Here goes,” I said. While Hatsumi fried onions, I perched next to the radio, fiddled with the tuner, and listened. And there they were! A moderator, a roll call of sorts, and then a string of little narratives, each from a different boat. An ethereal gaggle of boaters had just joined us in Klaskish Basin. Their voices came from all around Vancouver Island, and most of them were clear and strong, totally unlike the feeble whisperings of VHF. With this radio, I knew, we could as easily listen to someone in Fiji, but being connected to these local people, whose reports were edifying, or rueful, or exasperated, was just what both of us needed. Several called from the Gulf Islands, so far behind us now they seemed a distant memory; others were closing in on Alaska.
“Listen,” I said suddenly. “This guy’s in the Bunsby Islands. That’s practically next door!” If the weather showed us its belly, even for a day, the Bunsby group was where we would spend the next night.
“Call them,” said Hatsumi. She was grinning now. “Go on, do it. Let them know we’re here.”
“Well, I . . .”
“You took that course, didn’t you?”
Everyone on the Boaters’ Net sounded ferociously competent, hailing and signing off with their call signs, relaying each other’s messages, even leaving the air, some of them, with the phrase “Seventy-threes, everyone.” What the hell did seventy-threes mean? Before I could look it up in the long list of coded signals, Hatsumi nudged me again. I clutched the microphone, waited for a break, and said, reading from my scribbled notes, “Ah, Victor Alpha Seven, Bravo Juliet Hotel.” Bravo Juliet Hotel was tricky to say, I found.
“I, ah, don’t have you on my list.” The moderator sounded puzzled. But he was speaking to me! To VA7BJH afloat in a fog bowl and surrounded by frying smells. Barry would have been so proud.
“What’s your vessel’s name?”
I spelled it out for him, and my own.
“And your crew, who are you travelling with?”
“My crew? I don’t . . . oh, I get you. My wife, Hatsumi.”
“Ah, you’re going to have to spell that one for me . . .”
And so we became part of the B.C. Boaters’ Net. When I finally signed off, we didn’t feel so alone. I looked up “seventy-threes”; it meant “best regards.”
The whole experience reminded me of the delight my father had taken, as a boy, in constructing his own shortwave radios and listening hungrily for a voice from England or Australia. In the end, he always seemed to end up with CFCN, the “Voice of the Prairie,” but he was as satisfied with that as I was with the B.C. Boaters’ Net. I was so happy I climbed into the cockpit to tell him.
But he wasn’t standing in the clearing anymore. So instead, I spent the evening reading about him.