Ch 25: Sailing holiday

     I had five weeks of vacation coming up, enough time to do some long distance sailing.  Should we go North to Alaska, West to Queen Charlotte Islands or South to Vancouver? There were many things to consider. Is a 26-foot sailboat big and safe for two small kids and a wife that is only a good weather sailor? How are we going to keep the kids busy on rainy days cooped up in the V-berth? How far could we sail in five weeks?

      Finally we settled on sailing south through the Inside Passage of the BC coast, with the city of Victoria on Vancouver Island as the approximate destination, some 1 200 kilometers away. A few passages like Milbank Sound, Seymour Narrows or the Queen Charlotte Strait had awesome reputations for a weekend sailor like me. Hopefully it wouldn’t be our first and last long distance sailing trip.                                           

      Fortunately we were not going alone. Dave and Joyce Poole were going in the same direction in their power boat. They would travel much faster so we decided to meet couple of times along the way. Dave was a newcomer to Kemano. He used to work for Yukon Hydro in Whitehorse and he became a celebrity of sorts shortly after arriving to Kemano. On his first fishing trip he made coffee “Yukon style” that could be brewed in subzero temperatures, bragging about its potency due to secret ingredients. He was quite shocked when after tasting it his buddies spat it out and started to swear. It turned out that Dave, forgetting that he was not on the Yukon River, had dipped the coffee pot into the chuck. Filled with sea water, even his secret ingredients of rum and vodka didn’t mask the salty taste.

     We left Kemano together, with Dave trolling for salmon, but he soon lost patience with our slow progress and went ahead.

Iron Chink

Some 150 years ago the Inside Passage was a beehive of activity with fishing boats, passenger ferries, supply steamers, and tug boats pulling barges and log booms, plying these waters. There were more than seventy canneries and saw mills operating in the sheltered bays. Canning was very labour-intensive business and thousands of Chinese workers were living in shacks at the canneries, providing cheap labour. Then in 1902 Elgin Smith from London, Ontario invented an “Iron Chink”. It was a strange looking machine that could gut, cut and process over 2500 salmon in an hour, ten times faster than manual labourers. Canning became an assembly line process and most small canneries closed down.

Butedale, one of the few canneries that stayed in business until recently, was our first destination. From a distance we saw a strange picture of a ghost town. The deserted cannery was falling apart, with caved in  roofs,  collapsed walls and broken windows, but strangely, outside and inside, many lights were still burning, revealing the decay. Stranding on the fuel dock was strange couple. The man was tall, well built, wearing a cowboy hat, and a biglonghorn buckle in his belt. The woman was a slim, pretty blond. They were speaking with a strong Texas drawl and the first impression was that they dropped in from the popular TV soap opera "Dallas". They recently bought Butedale and had big plans for it. Some buildings would be refurbished and converted into a fishing lodge, mosty for clients from Texas flying in. I asked them about burning lights.

Butedale in days of glory..... 

.....and days of decay 

“We have a small power station that used to supply electricity for the cannery.  Water from the lake above Butedale runs the generator. No sense turning off the lights, the power is free” explained the Texan.  

                                                 Touring the old cannery was an eerie experience, walking around holes in the floor, passing by ancient, abandoned equipment, banging doors, broken windows and ten years old calendars hanging on the walls. 

     The next day we sailed through Finlayson Channel, past Ohio Rock where the steamer SS Ohio carrying 300 passengers to Alaska’s goldfields hit an uncharted reef in 1909. The captain managed to steer the sinking ship to a nearby bay before it sank and the newly-charted reef got its name.  Further on we saw a large chimney sticking out from a forest. It was the only sign of what was left from a large pulp mill in Swanson Bay established in 1902.  

      It was almost dark when we tied up at Namu’s dockside. It used to be another cannery, now closed, but Namu got a new life as a marina and depot for supplying commercial fishermen  with provisions, fuel and ice. We had run out food, so the next morning we went to the storehouse to buy groceries. But it was closed, what are we going to eat?    "Go to the mess hall, you can get breakfast there” told us one fisherman. The mess hall served food cafeteria style. “Sorry we are closed, the cashier’s gone home.” said the cook cleaning the kitchen. “Could you at least give us some cereal for the kids? We ran out of food and the store is closed. The kids are hungry” I begged the cook, trying to look desperate.  He looked at Mark and Michael; “Pop the bread into the toaster, the breakfast is on the house” he said and started to crack eggs.

    

    Queen Charlotte Strait lies between the north end of Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia. It faces the Pacific Ocean and is known for vicious, sudden storms with big waves and rolling fog. More than a little worried, I listened in the evening for the marine weather forecast. It called for moderate winds so we left early in the morning. The land soon disappeared beyond the horizon and I sailed by the compass, plotting our position on the chart. Large swells rolled in from the Pacific and I was greatly relieved when the Pine Island beacon finally appeared on the horizon, confirming our position. The next day we sailed to Port Hardy, a town on the North end of Vancouver Island. Arriving from Kemano, it felt like coming to a big city. There was a shopping plaza with a supermarket, a recreation centre, library, Laundromat, and a hamburger joint. Hamburgers  never tasted so good.

                                                                                                                         

2710 tons of Nitramex blasted away  673 000 tons of rock

        The most difficult part of our trip was behind us but we had other challenges ahead in the Georgia Strait: various narrows with fast- flowing currents that could be navigated only at slack tide.

Captain George Vancouver described Seymour Narrows as “One of the vilest stretches of water in the world.” It used to be a very dangerous place with a raging tidal current caused by a large underwater mountain called Ripple Rock that at low tide lay only nine feet under the surface. It was a serious shipping hazard, sinking 119 vessels and drowning hundreds of people.  Various methods were tried to blast the obstacle away but all failed. 
       Eventually a long tunnel was excavated under the Narrows into the Ripple Rock. It was then packed with explosives and in what was the biggest non-nuclear explosion in the world, the rock was blasted apart in 1958.  I was approaching the narrows with apprehension, The Sailing Direction, a sailor’s Bible, strongly recommend passing through narrows at slack tide. I had to calculate our arrival time from the tide tables. If we were late, we would have to wait six hours for the tide to change. But our timing was perfect, we arrived at the narrows just as the current started to reverse direction and the sailboat shot through. Once I got the hang of the timing, going through narrows was                                                                                                                     a piece of cake.

   

      
     Couple of days later we arrived at Powel River where we were supposed to meet Dave. He was not there but I was not surprised. Our rendezvous date was only approximate, plus or minus three or four days, and we missed even that deadline. Next day we sailed for Victoria, arriving safe and sound at the Small Craft Harbour, twenty days and 589 nautical miles from Kemano. We spent a couple of days exploring the beautiful downtown, just a stone’s throw away from the harbour, wondering how we would adjust our lives back to the small, remote Kemano.

     

The return trip should be easy; we would be retracing our steps and a few days later were back in Powel River. The kids were playing on the dock and the Coast Guard broadcast was squawking from a nearby boat when suddenly I heard words “…sailboat Sagittarius overdue….missing…” that was the name of our boat! I waited for the rebroadcast. It said that the sailboat Sagittarius was overdue, requesting mariners to look out for it and asking anybody with news of the missing boat to immediately contact the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard contact told me “You were reported five days overdue by another boater so we put you in our Alert Notices to mariners. If you are OK, we will take you off that list.”

Half an hour later there was a knock on the cabin. “You are reported missing! Call the Coast Guard immediately!” yelled an excited boater.  It took the Coast Guard another week before they changed the tape and for that whole week, every time we stopped in a marina somebody would come to tell us the Coast Guard was looking for us.

    The Queen Charlotte Strait was calm when we motor-sailed through. The Autohelm was steering the boat, my wife was sleeping and I was reading a book inside the cabin. Occasionally I would stick my head out to check the course and glance at the kids that were playing in the cockpit. Suddenly there was a piercing shriek from the cockpit. MAN/KID OVERBOARD?? I shot out of the cabin. Both boys were in the cockpit, Michael holding the lifeline looking back screaming. “Daddy, daddy, I lost my boat, go back!” His boat was an egg carton tied to a fishing line and he would spend days towing it. By now it was just a white spot way behind our sailboat. It would take me few minutes to drop the mainsail, disconnect the Autohelm and turn the boat around. It dawned on me then that we were rather careless leaving the boys alone on the deck, trusting their life jackets. If one fell overboard, rescuing them would take some time even in calm weather.

     The last day before arriving to Kemano we stopped at the Bishop Bay Hot Spring. We were relaxing in a large, waist-deep pool full of hot water. Michael was puttering around in his life jacket. Was it safe? He couldn’t swim so he was a good candidate to check its safety. “Come here Michael, I want to try something.” I asked him innocently, then picked him up and threw him back into the water, face down. I was shocked, he was floating in the water, face down, thrashing and chocking, unable to turn onto his back. He was wearing a Coast Guard-approved life jacket that he wore all the time on deck! We put complete faith in its safety, letting the kids to move around the deck without being tied to life lines.

    

      We adjusted very quickly to life back in Kemano, the trip to Victoria being just good memories. A few weeks’ later Alcan’s management made a big announcement about the Kemano II project. A new dam will be constructed; the waters of two lakes were being diverted, a 12 km long tunnel was going to be excavated and a 650 MW power station would be built in Kemano. The Alcan directors in Montreal didn’t realize that by making this announcement they stepped into a hornets nest.....