by Brian Harvey
By the time Vera’s water pump began to weep and accumulate an unsettling crust of verdigris and salt crystals, I had already been a boat owner long enough to know where to go for help. I pulled the pump off the engine, took it apart in my basement, put all the cruddy corroded bits in a plastic bag, and drove out to Willi Fahning’s shop. The plastic bag told Willi instantly what kind of boater I was: a cheap one.
“You got a crack here or two.” Willi bent one of the impeller vanes back. He was right, the rubber was split. I’d missed that.
“Hard as hell to get it out,” I said, fishing for information. “I read you could get a special tool, a what-do-you-call-it, a puller?”
“Forget about that,” said Willi. “Two screwdrivers, like this.” He stuck imaginary blades into the impeller’s body and made vigorous prying motions, like a duck taking off. “When you put the new one in, put some of this on the shaft.” He handed me a free tube of KY lubricant. “Or you can spit on it.”
“That’s it?”
“Mit one of these gaskets, that’s it.” He handed me a circle of punched paper in a plastic sleeve. “If you don’t have one, maybe you just cut one out of a shopping bag. Shaft is okay?” He wiggled the pump shaft.
“It has seals, right?” I said. “I could put in new ones, maybe?”
Willi frowned under his toque. It was winter outside. I was the only person in the shop, which was papered in photographs and articles about its owner: Willi twenty years ago, riding one of his own handmade racing bicycles in a South American race; Willi ten years before that, beside a freighter propeller four times his height. There were testimonials from competitive cyclists and faded photographs of Argentina. Tomorrow, Willi would leave for a month in Patagonia.
“New ones? What for? You don’t got leaks with the old ones. New ones gonna cost you.”
I followed Willi into his work area. Piano music came from a portable stereo perched above the solvent bath, below pictures of friendly looking naked women. I recognized middle-period Beethoven.
“Impeller’s forty-five dollars,” Willi said, handing me another baggie. “You’re lucky, this one’s still marked with the old price.”
I managed to cram the new impeller in after coating it with the lubricant, then bolted the pump back together and repainted it shiny white for good measure. In all, sixty dollars, a little of my time, a lot of freely given advice, and a chance to meet somebody interesting.
This leads to the second lesson about boating: everything you do is for the first time. The third lesson follows: there are no teachers. Or, more accurately, there are no courses where you can learn more than the rudiments of things that can be covered in a classroom: navigation, safety, weather patterns. But when you head into a well-marked channel for the very first time, that “north cardinal” buoy, so easy to distinguish from the east, west, and south cardinal buoys because of the arrangement of black spheres and triangles on top, now just looks like another chess piece. You have no idea what to do. Rocks materialize and grow inexorably as you scramble for handbooks, rack your brain, argue.
***
Our first summer of actual sailing in Vera was an excruciating cram course on fluid mechanics involving current, wind, and lateral resistance. These things are the basis of sailing: you try to use resistance and airflow to your advantage and try to cancel them when you can’t.
Each lesson began and ended with the dreaded docking. The first complication was the current, which had to be checked religiously, before untying anything, by dropping to your knees and peering at the seaweed streaming away from the underside of the dock like underwater windsocks. If they pointed north, that’s the way the boat would take off, the moment you untied. Whatever you did.
The second problem was wind. Sailboats under power at low speed react more to the wind than to the helm; the bow thinks it’s a sail. The third problem was reverse gear because the turning of the propeller drags the stern sideways. Boat shape matters profoundly: a narrow fin keel makes for a sailboat that can spin on a dime, while a full keel produces a stately, stable craft that needs a Queen Elizabeth’s worth of turning room. Vera was one of those. Docking Vera, that first year, was like trying to back a semi-trailer into a parking spot — on a slope, on ice, and with a crowd watching. It literally scared the pee out of me. The nerves would creep up on me two miles from home, with physiological consequences.
“Take her for a second?” Hatsumi would be on the foredeck, staying out of my way, when I asked her this.
“Didn’t you just go?”
“It’s the coffee, okay? It goes right through me. Just keep the cardinal buoy to port.” And down below I would go, to crouch again over the toilet.
“What kind of cardinal buoy?”
Hatsumi came occasionally unglued at the disorder so common on deck. The raising and lowering of sails became a flashpoint. When a sail needs to come down, I want it down; for my wife, the collapse of the mainsail in chaotic folds was very un-Japanese. Flaking the main, something I thought people only did in books, became an obsession for her, two hundred fifty square feet of heavy Dacron wrenched and patted into neat, accordion folds on the boom. It took a long time.
“My shoulder hurts,” she might say after one of these flake-a-thons.
“Then don’t flake the main.”
“Why don’t you flake the main?”
“Because I can’t do it nearly as well as you.”
Tantrums were common, on both sides. My face, Hatsumi informed me, was perpetually “difficult.” Vera felt as big as a ferry. A routine sailing manoeuvre like “going about,” where you shift the wind from one side of the boat to the other in order to make forward progress against it, felt as though we were sailing in glue. The sails snapped sullenly. I lost a thumbnail in a winch. Even when things were going well, they went badly. Once, going full tilt into a fresh breeze, water foaming at the lee rail and everything singing — finally! — I misremembered the rules of the road, shaking my fist at an onrushing sailboat until I realized why they weren’t going to turn. They had the right of way. We were an embarrassment.
***
With a start like this, what happened to us in Baynes Channel our first year was inevitable. Baynes is a notorious constriction at the south end of Haro Strait where currents can reach eight knots. This may not sound like much, but it is the equivalent of the entire body of water moving at a brisk walk. Vera’s top speed under power is six knots, so we would go backward. The combination of wind against tide creates waves and whorls that snatch at your keel and make the wheel jump in your hands. Even on a relatively calm day, Baynes Channel sounds like a river.
“We’ll go out through Baynes,” I said. “It’ll be a good experience.”
“I trust you,” said Hatsumi.
It was a warm, early summer evening, with just enough breeze for getting to know Vera better. We squirted easily through Baynes Channel with the current behind us, and Haro Strait broadened to include the distant cliffs of Sidney Island and the closer, greener shapes of the American Gulf Islands. We coasted back and forth, getting the feel of the boat in the warm evening breeze while Hatsumi went below and boiled water for coffee. Then we dropped the sails and starting the engine to make it home through the remaining turbulence.
“See that little bay?” I pointed to an indentation in the Vancouver Island shore. “Right there, me and my brother and my dad, that’s where we ended up.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I guess I never told you. It was forty years ago. Don’t worry, Vera’s a lot more boat.”
Then the engine stopped. Vera coasted a few lengths, then began to drift backward. Instead of the drone of the engine, I now heard seabirds and the rushing of a tidal river.
“I know we have fuel,” I said. Hatsumi looked stricken. “There’s still some wind. We’ll sail back.” We got Hatsumi’s impeccably flaked mains
ail back up, unrolled the jib, and caught the remaining breeze, nosing Vera as close into the wind as I could, trying to make headway upstream. Finally, the little bay was visible again. But the wind was just a cat’s paw now, toying with us. To one of the lucky homeowners on shore, we must have made a pretty picture as we ghosted along, the kind of image that causes people to go out and buy boats.
“Take her,” I said. “I’m going down to look in the tank.”
“I wouldn’t bother if I were you,” said a voice. I looked back up the companionway; Hatsumi had a death grip on the wheel and was staring fixedly ahead.
“Did you say something?” I asked.
“What?” She kept staring, as though she could will the wind to come.
“Never mind. I must be hearing things. I’m opening up the tank.”
It was the only thing I could do. I didn’t know my engine at all, but I could at least look in the tank, a stinking wedge-shaped aluminum coffin beneath the cabin floorboards. Even down below, on my hands and knees, I could tell Vera wasn’t moving on her own anymore.
“Got it,” I yelled up, pulling the hatch off and peering down at what I already knew I would find: a lake of fresh diesel fuel, the level unchanged from when we had filled it a week ago.
“What should I do?” said Hatsumi. I dropped the screwdriver and emerged to see a tug bearing down on us. A log boom the size of a football field stretched astern. The tug operator leaned on his horn, an outraged blatt that rolled over us and must have brought the homeowners upright in their chairs on shore. The log boom swept by twenty feet from us, most of the logs rough-cuts, with untrimmed branches grabbing crazily at the sky as though the trees were trying to right themselves and escape. An eagle perched on one. It looked disgusted.
And so the sun set as we drifted toward the shipping lanes and the state of Washington. After an hour, my pride faltered, and I reached for the cellphone. In the logbook I’d started, there was a short list of numbers, one of them a boat owner named Stuart, who kept his forty-footer across from us. In the few weeks we’d owned Vera, Stuart had become a friend, popping up with invaluable advice (“You will always need an extremely long-handled screwdriver”) and commiserating over the flaws all boats have.
“We’re in the middle of Baynes Channel,” I said.
“I’m in the middle of dinner,” Stuart said.
“There’s no wind and our engine is out and we’re heading toward San Juan Island.”
“It’ll take me an hour to get there.” We turned the running lights on and sailed aimlessly back and forth along a wall of moving water that repelled Vera like some malignant, charged curtain. Finally, Hatsumi spotted Stuart’s boat, and I joined three docklines, praying that I’d remembered the special knot correctly, and soon we were under way behind him, sails down and with a reassuring view of Stuart’s transom and the forceful jet of cooling water spurting out of it.
“You know,” I said to Hatsumi, “I could have sworn I heard my father when I was down there taking the tank apart.”
“Your father’s dead.”
“I know that. But does it mean we can’t communicate?”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing special. Basically that I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Two Faces of an Island
Quite apart from the “offshore trial run” argument for going around Vancouver Island, there was also the desire to find a little more space to yourself. On the eastern, and much more popular, side, especially its southern portion, you were constantly cheek by jowl with everybody else who could afford a boat.
To get an idea of the historic expansion of pleasure boating around Vancouver Island, imagine taking a nautical chart of the coastline between Seattle and Alaska and dipping it in the sea. The first place to submerge is the U.S. Gulf Islands, clogged with yachts by the 1980s. The Canadian Gulf islands, which were relatively empty when I was cruising as a child, filled up soon after so that by the early 1990s — lower the chart a little — boaters were passing straight through the arbutus-fringed coves and lichen-spattered rocks of the southern Gulf Islands and flooding up the Strait of Georgia. They were headed for Desolation Sound, a paradise of sheltered anchorages roughly bounded by the city of Parksville and the Sunshine Coast to the south and the gauntlet of rapids north of Quadra Island to the north. Desolation Sound, once you got past the slightly worrying transit of Georgia Strait, meant short trips between anchorages, oysters so thick you could sit in your dinghy and chip them off the rocks, and alpine peaks that seemed to shoot straight up from the ocean. And warm water: you can swim every day in Desolation Sound.
Of course, Desolation Sound filled up too. Lower the chart a bit more, and the water level rises into the Broughton Archipelago. Yes, navigation is trickier up there; yes, the temperature drops, but by the mid-’90s, everybody had GPS and on-board heaters and computer programs that told them how to get past the rapids. So, on they came. The worst obstacle was getting through Johnstone Strait, fifty miles of frequent wind-tunnel mayhem between the top of Quadra Island and the town of Port McNeill, but boaters figured out how to dart around the back alleys for most of it. The Broughtons haven’t filled up yet, but they’re starting to.
What’s north of the Broughton Archipelago? If you stick to what locals call “the mainland,” meaning the coasts of northern B.C. and Alaska, there are plenty of fjords and fishing communities, and all you have to do to explore literally thousands of miles of coastline is to pick a good moment to cross the one unprotected section of Queen Charlotte Strait. You can even opt for Haida Gwaii (the former Queen Charlotte Islands) if the mainland doesn’t appeal, as long as you stick to the relatively protected eastern side. You need a bigger boat to go north, but plenty of people have big boats now. Slowly, the northern coast will fill up too. You might as well let that sodden chart float away; what used to be the haunts of commercial fishermen, Indigenous peoples, and hardy settler families are now the summer homes of fifty-footers from as far south as Portland, Oregon.
But what about the rest of Vancouver Island? In the case of a long, thin island like Vancouver, why concentrate on one side? The reason is the same as for the Haida Gwaii: the east side is protected, while the west shore takes the full pounding of the open Pacific. So while the west side of Vancouver Island is well known as a place of extraordinary natural beauty — a lot of it is national or provincial parkland, and parts of Clayoquot Sound comprise a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve — most people will admire those sandy beaches, those jagged black reefs, that pounding surf, and the frequent enveloping mists from somewhere safe. They’ll be on land.
Because once you step off land, you’re entering a place where bad things converge: oceanic waves from Pacific storms a thousand miles away, high local winds (or quixotic calms, which can be almost as bad), impenetrable fogs, and many, many rocks. The rocks are very different from the ones on the east coast, not only in their shape (they tend to be pinnacles) but most horribly in their number and placement. There are an awful lot of them, and some are more than a mile offshore. When I first saw the paper chart for Kyuquot Sound, about a third of the way down the western coast, the “open” waters off the coast were speckled with tiny black crosses.
There isn’t much protection. You hide where the natives and the early settlers hid, built their villages and trading centres, lost their sons and fathers to the storms and shoals. The towns that have survived are small and tough and widely spaced. If you need a dozen eggs or shelter from a building westerly, you’d better plan ahead.
For all these reasons, the west coast of Vancouver Island will always be a challenge. People with a taste for adventure, plenty of time, a good boat, and a low tolerance for crowded anchorages do circumnavigate the island, and the numbers have been rising steadily ever since satellite-based navigation systems have taken the edge off some of the white-knuckle passages through reefs and around headlands. But when you hear a
bout someone having gone around the island, it’s still a “wow” moment, and few boats head out alone.
A lot of boaters see circumnavigating Vancouver Island as a test, especially people who, like us, were dreaming about sailing their boats offshore to somewhere warm, like Mexico or Tahiti. There are (of course!) two schools of thought here.
“Once you’ve gone around the island,” a speaker at the Bluewater Cruising Association once lectured us, “you’re ready.” But when I mentioned circumnavigation to Allan, the broker from whom we bought Vera, he didn’t even look up from the cat’s cradle of docking lines he was trying to sort out. Dock space at his small brokerage was limited, so Allan often had two or three sailboats mysteriously tethered, like flies caught in a spider’s web, where there was really only room for one.
“Why would anyone want to do that?” He tugged on a line and a thirty-five footer two boats away turned slightly.
“They say it’s a good tune-up for going offshore,” I said.
“It’s nothing like going offshore. Going offshore is pointing your boat west, sailing a hundred miles out, and turning left. Long ocean swells, hit the trades, keep going until you reach the Marquesas.”
“And the west coast of Vancouver Island is . . . what?”
“Fog. Wind. A rockpile.”
“Did you ever do it?”
Like many other long-distance sailors, Allan seemed to have fallen into boat-selling after washing up in Victoria. He looked up from his knots.
“What would I want to do that for?” he said. “But if you’re set on it, watch out for the Nahwitti Bar.”
“Sure,” I said. There it was again. I was starting to worry about this place. “What exactly should I watch out for?”
“Don’t cross it at the wrong time, when the current’s running. Don’t go if the wind’s blowing the dog off the chain. And once you head into it, remember, there’s no turning back.”
