by William Raney

Central Coast, British Columbia

6:15 AM:

I roll over. Speck of light. Time to get going. Today’s the day we cross Queen Charlotte Sound. I flip on the diesel heater and ease myself out of bed. They say you don’t need so much sleep when you are old, but if I’m so old, how come I’m having so much fun?

My wife Nancy and I are both retired. We are “live-aboards” on a boat we bought on a whim four years ago. We had no idea how to drive a boat at the time, so we hired a delivery skipper to take me up to Point Roberts, Washington, on the Canadian border, while Nancy drove the car up. We spent two years running around the San Juan Islands and the Canadian Gulf Islands, learning how to make a boat go wherever you want it to go. Two years later we took it back down the coast to San Francisco Bay, where we suffered some medical reverses before heading back up the coast to Canada again. One good friend told us we were “wandering about aimlessly like little children.” Another termed our lifestyle “sheer folly.” This had a nice ring to it and we named our boat Sheer Folly. She is a 1969 forty-two foot Monk trawler.

We are anchored in Allison Harbour, a fjord-like indentation on the British Columbia mainland across from the northern tip of Vancouver Island. This is one of many such beautiful harbors along the British Columbia Coast. It is our jumping-off spot for crossing the open-ocean waters of Queen Charlotte Sound to get to the once-again-protected waters on the other side. We are in the process of working our way northward up the “inside passage,” to Glacier Bay in Alaska. We have been cruising in the lee of Vancouver Island for the last two weeks now. Today we hope to leave it behind. So there is adventure in the air this morning. And fog!

6:25 AM:

I start up the generator. Twenty-five kilowatts is a lot of electricity. Our generator is way oversized because it is also our “get home” engine. Should our main engine failit never hasthis generator can push us along at about four knots (less than 5 MPH). Our batteries are partially depleted because the refrigerator has been running on them since yesterday afternoon when we dropped anchor here. Each morning I like to make fresh water with a reverse-osmosis desalinator, even though we carry two-hundred ninety gallons on board. I like to keep the tank topped off so we don’t have to conserve on showers, dishwashing, boat washing, and all those other luxuries we rich Americans love to waste water on. In the process of making water, the generator will also give our storage batteries a charge, before the main engine’s alternator takes over once we get moving. Toys for boys. There are a lot of them on this biggest toy of all: our beloved boat. Most important now is the electric coffee pot. If the noise of the generator doesn’t get Nancy out of the sack, the smell of coffee will.

6:30 AM:

Bud wants out. Cold and wet on deck.

6:31 AM:

Bud the Cat wants in.

6:50 AM:

Ablutions accomplished, I’m sitting on the couch drinking coffee and studying charts. Bud is asleep again, Nancy is stirring. I can tell she’s had a rough night of it. She probably lost her purse. Or maybe she couldn’t remember where she parked her car. Or didn’t study for her big exam. She never does. Always the same old story.

7:00 AM:

I pull up the floorboards and grease the shaft. There’s some water in the bilge. Got to tighten that packing gland one of these days. Down I go into the engine room: engine oil OK, transmission fluid OK, alternator belts tight. I clean up that pesky little oil drip running down beneath the bypass filter.

7:13 AM:

I turn on VHF Weather Channel 2: Canada Weather Radio says “Winds, Queen Charlotte Straight, 20 to 30 knots out of the Northwest.” I check the anemometer for the wind-speed reading at the top of our mast: 1 knot. It’s a go! Time to start the engine.

7:15 AM:

I turn on the electronic navigation equipment: depth sounder, autopilot, GPS, navigation computer. Whoops, forgot to turn off the mast light! (We don’t like people running into us in the dark.)

7:20 AM:

Back in the salon, I am talking to Nancy:

“There are a lot of little rock islands off the entrance to the harbor and we are going to have to thread our way between them, carefully. I’m going to have my eyes full this morning watching the radar, the depth sounder and the navigation computer, and I won’t have much time to peer into the fog. Until we get out a mile or so, I would like you to keep a sharp eye out straight ahead and off to each side. There will probably be other boats nearby, either leaving or entering the harbor, so I’ll go slowly. In fifteen or twenty minutes we should be clear of the rocks, but until then it’s going to be a bit tense. We need to be careful!”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” salutes my First Matemocking me.

7:25 AM:

All systems are go. It’s time to get out of here. I go outside on the bow to operate the windlass that pulls up the anchor. You can’t see anything in this fog. It will probably lift, it usually does. I stomp on the foot-switch and 150 feet of chain starts rattling up over the bow roller. Our Delta anchor weighs some forty pounds, plus the weight of the chain. Parts of the chain, and the anchor too, are encrusted in mud. Now I’ve got mud all over the deck. No problem! I whip out my little handy-dandy saltwater wash-down sprayer.

7:35 AM:

Back in the warm pilothouse, I ease the Detroit Diesel into gear. We start to move. Creeping along in the fog now, it’s spouse Nancy vs. the 48 mile Furuno radar. Both of them are nice to have on board, but it’s thanks to the radar I can see the harbor entrance a half-mile ahead. The shores on each side of us are showing up on the radar screen as parallel green slabs of light about an eighth-mile off to both port and to starboard. These slabs converge towards the harbor entrance, until there is only a narrow, dark green slit separating the two sides. Beyond this bottleneck are irregular blobs of light-green scattered about on the screen: those cursed, little rock islands we saw when we were coming in yesterday afternoon. We will have to thread our way carefully between them once we are out of the harbor. I can now see them all on our laptop’s satellite-based GPS navigation program. There we are too on the screen, in our cute little generic, green boat. I have drawn a course on our electronic chartone that should take us in-between all those rocksand so long as I keep the boat on that line, the Good Lord will protect us or so I’ve been told. But I still don’t get it with all those shipwrecks. Sometimes stuff just seems to happen.

Nancy is staring dutifully into the fog. “Probably looking for her car,” I note in the logbook. My own eyes are glued to the radar. My Second Mate, Bud, is asleep as per usual. The depth sounder reads 10 feet of water beneath our keel. Sheer Folly draws 5½. That leaves 4½ feet, not an especially inspiring thought when you know there are rocks lurking about waiting to rip your bottom out.

The water is smooth and glassy. The radar is picking up all the seagulls, ducks and the driftwood. I de-tune its sensitivity to diminish all this clutter. I check the radar again, then our course and heading on the laptop. I put the boat on autopilot and make a quick trip down into the engine room to make sure everything there is OK. I write “EROK” in the logbook (Engine Room OK). I check all the gauges on the console and make a second entry: “GOK” (Gauges OK). “EROK GOK” I tell myself proudly. All is right with my world!

7:50 AM:

We’ve made it through the rock islands guarding the entrance to Allison Harbor from the turbulence of Queen Charlotte Straight. All is clear on the radar, but it’s still pea soup. Two and a half miles ahead at about twenty-five degrees off to starboard there are a couple of blips on the radar, which I am pretty sure are the two commercial fish boats I heard talking to each other earlier on Channel 16. Probably gill-netters, I figure, they don’t seem to be moving much. I make a course correction to port. I give gill-netters a very wide birth. You don’t want nets in your prop. Some guys carry a wet suit for this kind of unhappy event, but I guess I’m more like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. I choose to make myself “dependent on the kindness of strangers.” This is not a good philosophy for a man who fancies himself the skipper of a seagoing vessel.

8:15 AM:

We are flying along at 8½ knots SOG (speed over ground), according to our GPS. Our depth sounder’s log reads 7 knots speed through the water, which means we must be getting a rip-roaring 1½-knot kick from the tide. 8½ knots is about 9 miles per hour, which is jet propulsion for a full displacement 42′ trawler! Without a hull that will allow you to get up onto plane just a little, 9 miles per hour SOG is as good as it gets. There are major advantages to going slow, you see: you are a pleasure boat and by definition you must enjoy the ride. Sooner or later this will make you very happy someday when you reflect upon the fact that you didn’t sink that time you ran into that log.

“Hey Nancy, keep an eye out for logs! I want to go topsides and get Bud off the flybridge. It’s going to be windy today and I don’t want him rockin’ n’ a-rollin’ all by himself up in the cold.” Leaving the warmth of the pilothouse, I find Bud all huddled-up underneath some loose canvas. Poor little guy, he turned out to be a gal and I’ve never been able to keep him straight since. “Whether you want to our not, Bud,” I tell her firmly, “you’re coming below because I don’t want you getting seasick and throwing up all over the boat.” “EEYOWELL, EEYOWELL, EEYOWELL,” Bud howls at me! “EROK GOK, EROK GOK, EROK GOK,” I howl back. We understand each other, Mr. Budweiser and I, but it’s hard to find decent crew. They don’t follow orders, they talk back to you, they can’t even keep track of their purse.

Warm again in the pilothouse, we are now three miles off the mainland and seven miles off Vancouver Island. I can see its northern tip on the radar. Soon we shall be leaving it behind. Cape Caution, here we come!

10:00 AM:

Vancouver Island behind us now, we are no longer in its lee. We can feel the rhythmic power of the open-ocean swell. “What’s going on up there,” Nancy yells from the galley. “Don’t you have the stabilizers on? Bud’s getting seasick again and it’s your turn to clean up his mess!”

Ernest Shackelton didn’t have no stinking stabilizers, I want to tell my beloved. “Yes, dear, I just turned them on.” The roll quickly subsides, but we still have the pitch: that up-and-down rocking movement of the boat as the bow busts through each successive wave. These stabilizers are really cool! They are hydraulically driven fins protruding down into the water from each side of the hull, like ailerons hanging off the trailing edges of the wings on a jetliner. They are hooked to a gyroscope in the engine room that senses the beginning of each roll and then sends a message to the fins to dig into the water more deeply in order to counteract that roll. Stabilizers are great for swells on your beam. They ought to be sold in bars.

We are now headed directly into the wind. Our anemometer reads 26 knots of apparent wind over the boat. Subtracting out the GPS’ now-reduced 7-knot forward speed-over-ground, that means we are now heading into about 19 knots of true wind over the ocean. Our depth sounder’s log also reads 7 knots through the water, so we have lost all of that 1½-knot kick from the tide that we had earlier. The wind is kicking up three to four foot waves, which periodically coincide with the five foot swells rolling in off the Pacificall of which means we regularly have a sum total of nine feet of water suddenly trying to squeeze itself under our keel. We go up. We come down. Often with a big slam. We are thankful for our stout boat. Sheer Folly keeps us safe. Like a mother. That’s why boats are named after women.

11:00 AM:

“Sweet Betsy from the Mary J, Sweet Betsy from the Mary J,” I hear on the VHF radio. No answer. “Sweet Betsy from Mary J, Sweet Betsy from Mary J. Over.”

“Mary J, this is Northern Dawn,” a voice replies. “We are northbound and we passed Sweet Betsy coming on slow almost an hour ago. Reply six eight.”

“Northern Dawn, Northern Dawn, this is the Mary J on channel six eight. You copy?

“Yeah, got you, Mary J. I’m pretty sure that’s you up ahead on the radar. We are coming up behind you at ten knots and plan to pass you off to starboard in about fifteen minutes. I thought I would just let you know that we passed the Sweet Betsy about nine miles back. Over.”

“Roger, Northern Dawn, glad to hear that. I’ve been having a little trouble out here with my port engine coughing and sputtering. I’ve been making the crossing with Sweet Betsy, but we lost her somewhere in the fog. It’s good to know she’s still behind us. Over.”

“Do you need assistance, Sweet Betsy?”

“No thank you Northern Dawn, I think I am OK. Pretty soon the wind should be easing and we can run on one engine if necessary.”

“Roger, Mary J, and good luck to you. This is Northern Dawn clear.”

Boaters like to stick together and I like to get in on the act. I pick up the microphone:

“Mary J from Sheer Folly.”

“Come back, Sheer Folly, this is Mary J.”

“I’ve been listening in and I just want you to know there’s another boat out here too. We are northbound and will be rounding Cape Caution in about an hour. If your problem gets worse, don’t hesitate to give us a call.”

“Thank you, Sheer Folly, we won’t hesitate to take you up on that, but we should be OK. We are approaching Cape Caution now. Once we are on the other side, things should get easier.”

“Roger, Mary J, we’ll be looking for you on the radar. This is Sheer Folly going back to Channel 16 and standing by.”

It’s fun to talk on the radio. It’s unprofessional to admit it.

11:45 AM:

I look up at the radar and there’s Cape Caution glowing greenly off the starboard bow. It’s getting rough. Suddenly there’s a crash! The refrigerator door has come open and Nancy is doing pirouettes in the salon, trying to catch hold of one of the handholds to forestall her imminent fall. An open box of milk has slid out onto the carpet and is making a huge, white stain. My aluminum cans of beer have come out of their six-pack and are rolling back and forth across the carpet to the rhythm of the ocean swell, bumping into each other, into the chair legs, and into what’s left of the beleaguered milk carton. With each pass the mess gets bigger, until: “thar she blows,” I yell as one of the cans lets go, spraying beer all over the place. “What’s going on? What’s going on!” Nancy demands! I drop the RPMs of the engine and the boat slows down. The pitching ceases. There is a sea of nasty, square little whitecaps all around us. “Everything is fine,” I tell her. “OK, fine!” she replies. “Fine! Fine! Fine! So you clean up this fine, fine mess you got us into!” My first mate gets so excited! She’ll never make much of a skipper. She knows I ought to have slowed down in such a confused sea as this, but she doesn’t seem to appreciate the fact that we are now in the middle of a big tide ripwhich I am not responsible for, by the wayor that the autopilot lost its lockwhich I am in no way responsible for eitherand that it is obviously not my fault that we started bouncing all over the ocean. Women!

So now I’m the janitor too. I stuff most of the food back into the refrigerator and go rescue my beers, if not in that order. Then I plunge on into the unknown with my pissed-off wife and cat. “The rest of this mess is just going to have to wait until things gets smoother,” I tell my crew. At least Bud is licking up the milk! Nancy is still in a huff, however. I tear off a three-foot-long strip of duct tape and use it to tape the refrigerator door to the wall in an attempt to bring some final finality to my unfortunate misfortune. Maybe I should stick duct tape over her mouth, it occurs to me. All is well with my world once again. We are rounding Cape Caution!

Capes are interesting things and rounding them is exciting, both in terms of the psychology and of the physics involved. Capes have a certain cachet in nautical history. They are but simple extensions of land sticking out in the oceanas land likes to do in its eternal battle with the sea. Capes are protrusions, ridges falling off gradually in height, lowering and narrowing until they disappear beneath the surface of the ocean. Out of sight, out of mind, they remain, doing complicated things to the water above. Water is a stress medium in which wave action is excited by the wind, thereby creating pulsing tensions in the liquid below. When waves start to encounter shoaling in the waters off the end of a cape, this interposition of the earth interrupts the regular, mathematical play-out of the forces in the liquid. When waves move into shallower waters, their shapes and periods must change, and the result is that they start having steeper vertical faces on one side. This is good for surfers, bad for boaters. When you run into these mathematical disturbances, depending on the interplay between depth, wind and tide, it can get very nasty off the ends of capes, as many a mariner’s story attests. You can usually avoid this potential problem by crossing such submerged “bars” further out where the water is deeper. But sometimes you are in a hurry and you just don’t want to add-on that extra mile or two, or three. So you damn the torpedoes and let your wife and cat take the consequences. They are not amused.

Rounding capes gives you a sense of well being because they are so prominent on maps and charts. Capes are milestones. They are your accomplishment. I have been preparing for my battle with Cape Caution for two years now, gazing at my charts, vicariously, many a time. Now all I have to show for it is a filthy carpet and an angry wife and cat.

The seas have eased and the fog is beginning to thin. It’s getting brighter. Two miles ahead I see two blips on the radar. I watch them for ten minutes and decide they are two boats going in the same direction as we are. Gradually we close on them. We’ve been all by ourselves for several hours now, and I’m a little bored. I want to take a look at these two blips to see who else is out on this ocean. With radar and autopilot, I try setting Sheer Folly on a collision course with the blips. Don’t worry, we should have a visual on our target from a quarter-mile away. In half an hour I see a transom emerging from the fog. It says Sweet Betsy. In a few minutes I see Mary J painted on a second boat’s transom. We pass them slowly. The guy waves to us. He seems to be alone. Guts! We wave back. In a few minutes he will see Sheer Folly written on our transom and will know we are the boat he was talking to a while back. The Mary J is a surprisingly small boat, no more than twenty to twenty-four feet long, and with two outboard motors hanging off its stern. It’s skipper has reconnected with his “buddy boat.” They are doing fine. I give them two quick toots on the horn. “Bye bye.”

1:45 PM:

The fog is definitely lifting. We should be able to see Egg Island soon. Shafts of yellow and blue are beginning to splinter the omnipresent grey. I can now see this island on both the radar and electronic chart plotter. It is the landmark marking the approach to the northern side of Queen Charlotte Sound. Our cruising guide tells me Egg Island has a lighthouse staffed by a young couple who are happy to give you the weather. Perhaps I should call them on the radio. “How’s the weather over there?” I could say. But why am I supposed to do this when I will soon be outside their window?

2:20 PM:

The fog has almost completely dissolved. We have sunshine! The

Southern tip of Calvert Island is off our port bow. Calvert Island marks the beginning of Fitz Hugh Sound, the continuation of the inside passage. The waves we have been punching through all day have eased. They no longer have room to build upno “fetch.”

2:45 PM:

Just passed Cape Calvert off to port. Entrance to Rivers Inlet is off to starboard. Rivers Inlet is one of the most productive salmon fishing grounds on the West Coast. We have seen several commercial fish boats in the vicinity. Compass course 355 degrees magnetic. Sun’s out, wind’s down, mountains all around! Feeling good.

3:00 PM:

Penrose Island is off to starboardwe had planned to anchor there in Fury Cove, the most popular anchorage for boats kicking-off across the open water on their way south. Maybe we will stay in Fury Cove on the way back. We can’t bring ourselves to stop there now. Everything is too darn pretty. Outside of an occasional fish boat, and just one cruise ship, we have this pristine wilderness all to ourselves.

4:00 PM:

Our cruising day is almost over. We are approaching Green Island Anchorage. When I meet people on the docks who are cruising in the opposite direction, I frequently ask them about where they have anchored. Green Island has been mentioned more than once in the superlative. Picking my way through a group of small islands, I am no longer in need of the radar. I just follow the course I laid out on the chart this morning. In twenty feet of water, we squeeze through a narrow rock opening and we are in. The bay inside is marvelously protected by a ring of small islands. It is one of the most beautiful anchorages we have ever seen. We cruise the anchorage slowly, checking out all the nooks and crannies, depths and currents. We choose a narrow spot along the south shore opposite a small island with a large white section on it’s top. I call Nancy to the helm, put the engine in reverse, and go out onto the bow to unloose the anchor. The chain rushes out until the anchor comes to rest in 40 feet of water. Nancy continues backing down until we have let out one hundred and eighty feet of chain. I signal her to put the transmission in neutral. Having secured the chain to the boat, I take the helm and continue backing down until we come to a complete stop. Then I run the engine up to 900 RPM to make sure the anchor is well dug in. We don’t move. The anchor has stuck. I turn off the engine. All is quiet. We are here.

5:00 PM:

Being “on the hook” is the best part of boating. Over the course of a long day of cruising, tension builds up because you have been operating in the unknown, and because it is the skipper’s job to always remain alert and on guard. Anchoring brings relaxation from this tension. You have done a good job. You are where you want to be. You are safe. You are rewarded. Sticking your hook in the ground is the mark of the satisfied man. This is what you’ve been looking for.

Green Island Anchorage is exceptionally scenic, secluded and safe. We drink it all in. Tomorrow we will launch the dingy to go exploring the remains of a lost civilization. A few hundred feet away on the top of that little island shining so brightly in the sunset, is a midden. A midden is a very large calcium deposit marking the site of a former aboriginal Indian settlement. The Indians of the British Columbia Coast once lived largely on clams. Over the years, their discarded shells accumulated under foot to be gradually crunched into a clean, white gravel that was more desirable to live on than the original sandy soil. Over time, such villages grew larger, as more and more clamshells were crunched underfoot. Eventually when the inhabitants moved on, perhaps because their supply of clams had run out, their huts remained, only to be quietly reclaimed by nature. But these sitesthese alkaline deposits still glistening so brightly in the sunremain chemically unfriendly to encroaching underbrush. Thus many of these remnants of human habitation remain today on the shores of some of the most desirable bays of the British Columbia Coast, shining testimonials to the people who once knew these beautiful places far more intimately than we ever will. People who lived here and vanished. As we will too. On this very special night, the people of the village and the people of the Sheer Folly are passing through history together like ghosts in the fog.

---

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Elder Travel, First Annual Solas Awards Winners, Great Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.