by Pat Ardley
Richard and Sheila arrived while I was still warming up in the bath. They tied the barge full of gravel to our house float and headed home. We all had more than enough adventure for one day, and the minute I was out of the bath I headed straight to bed. But a cold had crept into my bones.
We stoked the fires all night and through the next day to keep the house cozy but I was still wracked with a cough and stuffed head. Around dinner time the next day, the living room fireplace started roaring. We had a chimney fire. George sat up with it till midnight to make sure it had burned itself out. Now I was growing paranoid about a chimney fire in the kitchen stove, so we stopped piling wood into it. It’s hard to keep a warm kitchen with a cool fire, so a little dancing was in order to help heat the house. I cranked up Buddy Holly on the radio and danced about while George cleaned the chimneys. He cleaned both chimneys and designated me to clean up the spilled soot. He climbed ladders and I swept floors.
God’s Pocket
When we travelled to Vancouver by boat, it was usually late fall or winter. Never the best weather to be travelling in. Every trip that we took had elements of danger. The weather might be all right when we started out, but winter weather on the coast can change in a matter of minutes. We would sometimes suddenly be surrounded by heavy winds, dense fog, snow that piled up on the windshield, or even freezing spray from the waves building up on the windows, making it impossible to see as the windshield wipers became virtually useless. There were times that I steered the boat while George squeezed himself out the window to scrape away the ice so we could see well enough to avoid logs and other debris. If I didn’t actually have to do something to help keep us moving forward, I would sit on the floor of the boat and do my deep-breathing to keep myself from panicking, which would not do either of us any good.
It was November of 1980 when we made a trip to Vancouver to do some shopping and to allow me to fly to Edmonton to visit my sisters before we started our next big building project for the Fisheries. We travelled down the coast, with Zak in the boat with us, without too much trouble. We were travelling in Sportspage. We had sold the boat that we bought specifically for the summer Fisheries charter because it had too many windows all around, making it too delicate for George’s purposes. When we arrived in Vancouver, we tied up at the docks under the Burrard Street Bridge. I used the pay phone in the parking lot to call the airport and made a reservation to fly to Edmonton in two hours. I grabbed my suitcase and left George and Zak standing on the dock and then ran back to the pay phone to call for a cab.
George rented a car and drove around doing a few business things, like going to the bank and stopping to see our friend and travel agent, Nigel. He helped us with our bookings for years, before we were eventually able to put in a proper satellite telephone. George parked the car every time he passed a grassy spot and took the dog for a walk so he wouldn’t be too antsy to sit in the car while George was busy. At one stop, George had been in the bank for about fifteen minutes, and when he came back out, the inside of the car had been ripped and torn apart. Zak had gone into a frenzy, tearing the upholstery from the seats, then the gearshift handle, and finished with the panels on the doors. The inside of the car was unrecognizable. It was very uncomfortable to sit in the car to drive, so, very reluctantly, George took it back to the dealership. They didn’t believe him when he tried to convince them that it was a wolverine that attacked the car in Manning Park in the BC interior. He had only had the car for a couple of hours, which was nowhere near the time that it would have taken him to drive there and back. But three hundred dollars later, he was given another car and went straight to a kennel to drop Zak off.
I had a lovely time visiting my sisters. We shopped and drank coffee, went out for lunches and dinners, had our nails done, and we talked non-stop the entire time. When I heard about the car, I decided that I should be able to spend three hundred dollars too and found a lovely red trench coat that reminded me of the rental car’s interior upholstery. I came back to Vancouver a week later ready to get down to the serious business of shopping in preparation for another winter in the inlet. George and I shopped together for the dry goods at the Woodward’s Food Floor and picked up books and craft supplies, and George ordered building materials. Most of the supplies would be boxed up and taken out to the freight boat and would arrive at the lodge after we did. We had several goodbye parties with family and friends and then loaded up the boat and headed back up the coast.
We had a very heavy load of groceries, plants, diving equipment, tools and hardware, plus the dog. The trip was comfortable but slow. We got as far as Powell River when the engine suddenly seemed to fade, then picked up again, faded, and then was okay. George decided to head into the dock at Pender Harbour instead of trying to get as far as Lund before dark, so we turned around and tied up there. It was Sunday of the Remembrance Day weekend and our Merc dealer and mechanic just happened to be staying at his cabin in Pender Harbour, so he came down to look at our motor the next morning. It turned out to be a major problem and would need to be worked on in a proper shop. He had his own boat trailer there so that evening we headed back to Vancouver. While waiting for and riding on the Langdale to Horseshoe Bay ferry, George and the mechanic tore the engine apart so that very first thing in the morning, it could be taken in to be rebuilt. They worked on it on Tuesday and Wednesday and we were able to leave Vancouver a second time, very early on Thursday morning.
We travelled faster this time thanks to the much-improved engine. We refuelled at Kelsey Bay on northern Vancouver Island, and then continued on to Sointula on Malcolm Island, where we tied up to the dock. We were going to visit our lighthouse friends Ray and Ruth Salo, who had moved to Sointula from Addenbroke Island. I folded my big black winter coat onto the floor of the boat to make a bed for Zak and told him to stay there. He always stayed when we asked him to. He would curl up in a tight little eighty-five-pound ball and sleep until we called him. George and I zipped up the back cover of the boat and walked up the road toward Ray and Ruth’s house. We had tea and a happy visit with our friends, and walked back in the dark to the boat. When we got there, Zak wasn’t on board. We ran in all directions at once, calling and calling him. We went up to the road where we had just walked and headed back toward the houses. I felt sick. Zak had never gone on his own adventure before.
We knocked on doors and asked people in the pub. No one knew anything. We headed back to the docks and passed a small, creepy-looking shed-like building. George looked inside and came out looking ashen. There was a huge blood spatter in the corner but no dog. We had a terrible sleep, and then got an early start the next morning. We headed out again just in case we had assumed wrong. Our suspicions were confirmed when we talked to a woman in the store who said she had heard that some kids had been driving along the road and hit a dog. He was badly injured, she said, so they shot him and dumped him. I felt like such a traitor. I hadn’t looked after our dear friend and now he was dead. I decided that I would never have kids if this was how much it hurt to lose a dog. I wouldn’t be able to stand the pain if my children were hurt. And it was a long time before I could think about having another dog. We couldn’t get away from Sointula fast enough.
We headed to Port Hardy where we picked up fresh produce, fuelled the boat and stayed overnight so we could get a very early start Saturday morning. It’s always best to leave at first light, as the wind wouldn’t have had a chance to build yet. We could cross Queen Charlotte Sound in about three hours if the water was right, but there had been a storm blowing for the last couple of days and there would be a large swell. We left the relative safety of Goletas Channel and Christie Pass and only made it as far as Pine Island before we turned back because of the heavy slop. We listened to the forecast, which wasn’t good, and the sky looked most foreboding. Once again, we headed back to Port Hardy to fill our fuel tanks.
Sunday morning we attempted the trip again. George had the idea that we would wait out at the
entrance to the sound and tuck in behind the BC Ferry that was leaving Hardy Bay and heading up to Prince Rupert. When we got out to the entrance to Christie Pass, which is about twelve miles from Port Hardy, we could see that the sound was pretty wild. We would not attempt to cross with such a gale blowing. Instead of going back to Port Hardy, we decided to pull into a little bay on Hurst Island, off the east side of Vancouver Island, called God’s Pocket, where there were two can buoys anchored for boats to tie to. We tied onto the outside buoy and settled in for the night.
The next day, the wind had picked up yet more, and now it was even too rough to get back to Port Hardy. With all our expensive radio equipment on board, we couldn’t get a marine weather forecast. But we could get Vancouver and Port Hardy radio stations on our portable AM radio. From Port Hardy we heard that the gale warning was being upgraded to a storm warning with winds of fifty to sixty-five knots plus higher gusts. This was not good news. We untied from the outside buoy, and I carefully nosed the boat in to the shore so George could climb off the bow to refill our water bottles from a freshwater stream. Then we tied on to the inside buoy and ran a stern line to the outside buoy to stop our boat from swinging too much.
The wind seemed to blow harder after it got dark. Then it blew harder and harder again. Around 11 PM, a large halibut boat came in to the bay and tied to the outside buoy. I felt a little better knowing that we weren’t alone, but it also meant that their heavy boat was putting a lot of pressure on our stern line. We were being tight-lined every time a gust hit. Because our lines were so tight, we didn’t simply rock with the waves, rather, the night was full of sudden and violent jerks with every gust of wind. We didn’t get much sleep Monday night in God’s Pocket.
On Tuesday, the wind picked up considerably, so George put some extra ropes on the boat to the stern can buoy. Everywhere you looked the water was a white seething mass. The winds did not build up large waves in God’s Pocket because it’s a small bay, but there was a huge swell coming in from the sound and from Goletas Channel. That night it seemed to blow even more until we thought it couldn’t blow any harder, and then it would blast us with an even worse gust. We were in a closed boat, but I could feel the gusts reaching through and blowing in my face.
The whole time we were in God’s Pocket, I was grateful that we could run a heater and had a two-burner stove to cook on. I had a nice warm down jacket and a big bag of books, so at the beginning of the storm I nestled into a corner and surrounded myself with reading material. As the storm got worse and worse, I spent a lot of time wrapped in a sleeping bag and the action of the boat kept me from reading. George made our coffee and all the meals because I had trouble looking down when I was in a boat. We had now been stuck in our little boat for three days and it was feeling very cramped.
On Wednesday, the wind was driving walls of rain and ocean water at us. The wind had not dropped; it had only increased, but the forecast from Port Hardy radio called for the winds to drop to around gale force that night. Thirty to forty-seven knots would normally scare the wits out of me, but now we heaved a sigh of relief. A little too soon, though.
The wind howled all day, and when it became dark it was still blowing. We noticed that the boat was starting to swing much more than it should have been. The stern line had broken. George collected our last good length of rope and climbed out the hatch onto the front of the boat while I ran the engine all the way to half throttle to take slack off our existing ropes to allow George to tie on to the front can buoy. He looped the rope several times. We would just have to swing wildly the rest of the night.
If what was left of our lines broke during the night, our only recourse would be to run the boat on to the shore and hope to be able to scramble on to the rocks and not get pulled into the surging swell and waves, then—perish the thought—wait out the storm huddled on land while our boat broke up on the rocks. In the meantime, the wind and waves kept pounding us, and I felt that it was never going to end.
Around 10 PM the wind finally started to die down slightly, and we were thankfully able to get a little sleep. Thursday morning seemed to have very little wind, but there was another gale warning so we decided to scoot back to Port Hardy if there wasn’t too much swell in Goletas Channel. We untied all our ropes and went back to the halibut boat. It was the first time we could talk to the crew, and they said they were also heading back to Port Hardy so if it was too rough, we could tuck in behind them. It wasn’t too bad, and in thirty minutes we were back in Port Hardy, mercifully tied to the dock. We had trouble negotiating the stable dock and staying on our feet after having been thrown around for so long on the boat. It was like being seasick, but we were on land. I leaned on every lamppost we passed in order to keep from throwing up.
We immediately checked into a hotel for a nice hot bath and a good long sleep. Later in the afternoon, while picking up some new fresh produce to replace our first batch, we ran into a friend. When we told him that we had just spent the last few days stuck in God’s Pocket, he exclaimed “So you’re the ones. Wow! Did you know that it was blowing ninety miles an hour and gusting at Scarlett Point?!” Scarlett Point was the light station about a mile and a half from God’s Pocket. George was often referred to as Hurricane Ardley after that.
The next morning, the forecast was for southeast winds of twenty-five or thirty knots, but we figured that we could follow the Queen of Prince Rupert when it left at 10 AM. We didn’t realize how terrible the trip would actually be following the big ferry. George had to fight the throttle the whole time just to stay in the right spot behind the boat. The seas were still so rough that we had to stay within forty feet of the back of the boat or the sea would’ve closed in and we wouldn’t have been able to catch up. The ferry was so big that it wasn’t terribly affected by the thirty-knot wind and was able to travel very fast. We were surfing on the wave right behind the boat and people on the ferry were holding up life rings and taking artistic photos of us through them. George had to concentrate completely for the entire three-and-a-half-hour trip to keep us on that one wave while avoiding kelp and driftwood and whirlpools from their prop wash. We pulled away from the ferry wake when we were just off the entrance to Darby Channel, and bobbed and bounced our way through the slop to the quiet channel.
To say that we were glad to be home is such an understatement. We barely had the strength left to unload the supplies and then tumbled into our cold and damp bed without even lighting a fire. Just before falling asleep, I was able to get George to agree that if we ever travelled to Vancouver in November again, we would definitely fly.
Building the House at Dawsons—Part One
The house we would be building for the new assistant Fisheries officer at Dawsons was on property owned by the government, just past the A-frame and the existing Fisheries officer’s bungalow. At the moment, there was a twenty-four-foot trailer sitting on blocks while the rest of the property was wildly overgrown with salal, small alder, hemlock trees, blackberry, salmonberry and thimbleberry bushes.
Before we started the project, we took my mom and aunt to Hawaii. Both ladies lived in Winnipeg so it was a wonderful change for them from the cold and snow. For me, it was a wonderful change from the life in the inlet, because there we were always working at something. Taking apart, putting together, pulling down, building up. We never sat still. George thought just sitting and reading in the afternoon was a waste of time, which unfortunately is one of my favourite things to do. In Hawaii, you could sit guilt free by the pool or on the beach and read to your heart’s content. George went scuba diving while the rest of us just relaxed.
We came back from our two-week trip in the sun feeling soft and out of shape. We had hoped that a lot of the brush-clearing at the new building site would have been done by the caretaker at our lodge, especially since George had left instructions for him to do the work and told him that he would be paid extra for everything he did. He did nothing. We never did figure out what he
did for the whole two weeks he was at the lodge on his own. Oh well, we saved money—but it put us behind schedule.
Before we could start clearing, the freight boat arrived with our massive load of concrete in sixty-six-pound bags. We had to move the bags off the store float and cover them properly so the contents didn’t harden before we could use it. The bags were very awkward and very heavy. George and I strategically loaded the wheelbarrow with four bags at a time, with more weight toward the front. We made a harness out of rope that I stepped into, then I pulled, like a hitched-up donkey, while George pushed. I was wearing my version of cork boots—golf shoes that George’s dad found for me at a garage sale. We hauled load after load of concrete up the wharf ramp and along three hundred yards of plank walkway to the worksite. It was exhausting work. My vacation-relaxed muscles were screaming long before we were a quarter of the way through the pile. Lucky was watching the whole time. He was eager for us to move the extra weight off his floats as soon as possible.
Because of the size of the hill behind the property, the sun slipped out of view by around three in the afternoon, leaving the bay dark and cold. I didn’t mind having a somewhat short workday when the work was such a physical challenge. When we got home, I had to get the kitchen fire going to start supper, because we would be ravenous and I couldn’t get dinner on the table fast enough.
Several days of moving concrete and we could finally start clearing brush. I worked with a machete chopping the bushes while George used a chainsaw to cut down the small trees. We kept a fire going and burned the branches for days as we cleared the site. The trailer had seemed smallish when it was surrounded by all the growth, but once the hillside was cleared it stood high and towered over us. That was our next job—moving the trailer.
