Blogtober 9: A Look Back at Boating

 

In August we explored a small area of the maze of inlets, islands, and channels of the coast of British Columbia. One memorable place was Village Island where the Mamalilikulla First Nation lived for many years. An abandoned village remains, named Mimkwamlis which means, village with rocks and island out front, a perfect description of the setting. 

The small bay where we anchored our boat, pictured above, was serene and beautiful. On a tree on the small islet to the left, two Bald Eagles watched us anchor and row the dinghy to shore. 

We had earlier contacted the First Nation and were given permission to go ashore. The village site is used by the people for education, tourism, and traditional ceremonies. While walking along the wide grassy trail, we looked out over the water to the rocks and islands close by. I thought the water looked positively tropical. However, it was very cold. 

In 1920 an English nurse, Kathleen O'Brien, arrived as a missionary on Village Island. At her own expense she built and operated a tuberculosis sanatorium and a school for the local children, seen above. She worked there for 25 years before returning to England. 

A few houses remain, but they are uninhabitable and overgrown with blackberries, vines, and salal. Bears love visiting the abandoned fruit trees in the late summer and autumn. The massive cedar post structure above was one end of a ceremonial building used by the Mamalilikula people. 

Here is another view of the structure from the other side, looking out to sea. The wide shallow beach is rich with clams and other shellfish. 

For many years totem poles stood in the village, but the last one fell several years ago and a new one was raised. 

As we walked down the dock to our dinghy, I stopped to speak with a young man working on his boat and asked him why the village was abandoned. It is such a beautiful sheltered spot. He gave several reasons. One was the shortage of fresh water that had developed in the 1960s. Another was the shallow depth of the ocean surrounding the island which meant that deeper draft fishing vessels could not be harboured there. The people moved to another site with better access. 

We enjoyed our visit to the island, and were grateful for the history learned while we were there. 

Friday Favourites: There and Back Again

"So where did your adventure take you, Bilbo?"

"There and back again."

J. R. R. Tolkien

Our adventure was much shorter than that of Bilbo's and much less eventful, but fun nonetheless. Above is our small boat (25 feet) in the very large and remote landscape of the Broughton Archipelago, a maze of islands and inlets between northern Vancouver Island and the mainland. It was very much like camping, but on the water, and we felt very very small. It's a rugged and weighty landscape, made even weightier when the fog rolled in and rain fell. 

Fog draped the mornings in ethereal mist for the first few days, mist that burned to sunshine by midday. Then the water sparkled and the colours shone. 

This coast is sparsely inhabited. Fewer people live here than once did around 100 years ago. Both First Nations communities and settlers have moved to larger centres, although the First Nations continue to hunt and fish on their traditional territories. 

There is little evidence remaining of the settlements where people eked out a living by fishing or farming. The stone wall above was built on the site of a former Catholic mission by a farmer/storekeeper who ringed his property with local stones. Artifacts such as glass bottles and broken fragments of pottery are found on the site. The doorway above was once an archway, now fallen and the stones scattered. 

Potts Lagoon is accessible only at high tide, with small watercraft. We took the dinghy through one day. Fields golden with grass bear witness to the man who cleared the land. Tides are inexorable and have made inroads into the fields, creating channels that twist and turn. 

One day there was a gale warning. Although there is little to no cell coverage, the Canadian Coast Guard provides weather updates via the marine radio on the boat. We hunkered down in Bootleg Cove, a very sheltered spot. Gusts of wind blew over and rain pounded down, but we were dry and cozy. We spent the afternoon indulging in a downloaded movie on Tim's tablet and I made hot chocolate and popcorn. 

Can you figure out the photo above? It's a seal, head and backside sticking up out of the water. He was playing peek-a-boo. 

Typical morning mist. Rocky islets and small islands dot the landscape, requiring close attention to the nautical charts. It was like being in a dream. 

After the fog left, the water looked almost tropical. Access to the land is difficult - there are few trails to walk as the forest is so dense. 

We were lucky to see three bear sightings. The first was a bear swimming across a narrow channel just in front of us. He paddled hard and paid little attention to us. 

Thousands of birds live here: Rhinocerus Auklets, related to Puffins with similar beaks, Gulls of all sorts, Eagles, Cormorants, Osprey. 

Sometimes, the islands look as if they were castle walls, impenetrable, rising straight out of the water, and making access difficult or impossible. 

We watched another two bears forage along the shore at low tide. They looked at us briefly, then returned to the business of filling their stomachs for soon-approaching winter. 

The sunny days ended after the gale passed and each day the rain fell, in drizzles and in sheets. We ventured into Simoom Sound where Captain George Vancouver anchored his ships, the Discovery and Chatham in 1792 and spent a week surveying the coastline. There is a small isthmus that he walked across, and I would have loved to do the same, but the weather precluded that.

One evening around 8:30 we were reading and heard a series of distinctive deep exhales. Dropping our books we ventured out and sat on the deck to watch a pod of orca whales swim into our anchorage and slowly circle out again. The light was fading resulting in poor quality photos. Magical. 

Despite the rain that caused us to return home earlier than planned, we had a wonderful time. I think that Simoom Sound, even drenched in rain, is one of the most beautiful places I've been. A thousand shades of green that shifted colour throughout the day. When the rain stopped the water looked as though it were a piece of charmeuse silk I could pick up and slip through my fingers, smooth and soft. 

Since our return a few days ago, I've been doing laundry, taking care of the garden, and visiting with family. It's always good to be home. Like Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, I'll close with 

"If ever you are passing my way," said Bilbo, "don't wait to knock. Tea is at four; but any of you are welcome any time." 

J. R. R. Tolkien 

Remembering Summer

We had our first skiff of snow last night. The grandchildren are excited for more in the forecast, as am I. We'll see. Very often these weather warnings are greatly exaggerated. It is dark and chilly out there, with a wind that nips at ears and nose, although nothing like the effects in the middle of the continent. 

We had our local families over for lunch after church to celebrate a little boy turning 5 soon. The girls made tissue paper parachutes and jumped off of things so the parachutes would puff up. Very creative. 

After they left I sat by the fire doing some hand stitching on my quilt and my mind cast back to last summer's boating adventures. And so I thought I'd tell you of one of the most interesting people we met on our travels in the rather remote Broughton Island Archipelago. 

Tim and Bill Proctor sitting in front of the museum Bill created.

Billy Proctor is a legend in these islands, and along the coast. Bill was born in 1934 so he's the same age as my father. Bill lived his entire life on the coast and has worked as a hand-logger, a fisherman, a boat repairman, and more. He tells the story of how he hated school and ran straight away into the woods when his mother ordered correspondence materials for him. He returned home later that day, but his repugnance towards school was so strong that his mother packaged up the materials and sent them back. You can read more of his early life in an article published in our local paper. He loves the land and the sea. 

We were tied up to the dock at Echo Bay Marina where we enjoyed hot showers, a small grocery store, filling our fresh water tanks, and a fish and chip dinner. Echo Bay was once a thriving coastal community with a school building, fishermen and their families, and loggers. As time passed, the area has become less populated and there are only poignant reminders of the lives once lived there. Empty cabins and beached derelict boats hint at the tales. A trail from Echo Bay leads to the place where Bill and his wife built a home. There is an enclosed garden where a bush of yellow flowers blooms profusely and I wonder if it was Bill's wife who planted them. 

On one of his rare visits to larger centres, Billy visited a museum. He is a collector, a beachcomber, and realized that he had more stuff than the museum. He returned home and built a museum to house the many artifacts he's found over the years. 
He also built a hand-logger's cabin, seen above. This cabin was typical of loggers' cabins in years past, built from one large cedar tree in about a week. Just one room, with a wood stove, a bed, and a place for snowshoes, rain gear, and other tools. Tea was a staple, strong and bracing, steeped in teapot, not bags dunked into mugs.  

The stuff Billy collected ranges from old trading beads, seen above, to logging equipment, flint stones from pre-literate times, newspapers, school effects, and more. It's an eclectic collection that strongly reflects the remote coastal life. 

I loved the blue bottles on the windowsill, and throughout the rest of our trip I kept my eyes open for trading beads and blue bottles, but alas, I found none.

Back at Echo Bay, tiny flowers, yellow and white, dot the field where children once played in the school yard. How pretty they are. Can you imagine children sitting in the sunshine making daisy chains? I can. Thinking of them, and thinking of that time last summer has warmed me.

Linking to Mosaic Monday, hosted by Angie of Letting Go of the Bay Leaf. 

Coastal Inhabitants Then and Now.

The Broughton Archipelago is a maze of channels, islands, islets, narrow twisting passages and very few people. However, it is not completely uninhabited. During the first three-quarters of the 20th century, First Nations villages and European settlements were found in much greater numbers than currently. Most of the European settlements were on floats, not on cleared land, and I'll write about them in another post. For today, I thought I'd tell you about some of the First Nations peoples who have lived here for thousands of years.

We visited New Vancouver, also known as Tsatsisnukwomi, which means "Eel grass along the shore." The village is currently occupied by members of the Glendale family, whose grandfather wanted his family to live traditionally, and to not lose the old ways. There are 8 homes, a variety of outbuildings, a dock, and a Big House, seen in the bottom right photo above. A young woman gave us a tour of the village, and told us her family's story. We were permitted to enter the Big House where ceremonies occur such as potlatches occur. The sweet fragrance of cedar filled the building. Regalia and special carvings are kept there and she explained each one's significance.
   

On Village Island, within sight of Tsatsisnukwomi, is the empty village of 'Mamkwamlis, also known as Mamalilikulla. Here one can see the tangles of blackberries and salal bushes encroaching upon the old buildings. Along the foreshore, remnants of the stilts that once supported houses weaken with each rise and fall of the tide. 

M. Wylie Blanchet, author of The Curve of Time, was a widow who explored this area in the 1930s with her 5 children and a dog. If you can find a copy of her book, you're in for a fascinating read. There's another book called Following the Curve of Time in which Cathy Converse retraces Blanchet's travels. It's also excellent. 

We spent another pleasant morning exploring the Burdwood Group, a cluster of small islands and rocky islets between Raleigh and Hornet Passages. It's a popular place for kayakers with a number of white shell beaches where First Nations peoples once harvested clams. The white beaches are composed of millions of fragments of clamshells. 

The top right hand photo shows a culturally modified tree. A strip of bark is taken from the cedar tree for traditional basketry and other handicrafts. The trees continue to survive. There's a rough trail across the island that gave us a bit of exercise. 

We saw five bears during our trip - always at low tide on rocky beaches. The bears turned over great rocks with a toss of their front legs looking for sea creatures trapped underneath. Fascinating to watch from the safety of the boat. I wrote about an encounter with a mother bear and her cub while hiking a few years ago, and I had no wish to relive the experience. We did very little hiking on this trip. 

I'll leave you with a photo of wildflowers - fireweed and tansy ragwort, bright spots of colour against the unending green forest.

Linking with Mosaic Monday, hosted by Maggie of Normandy Life.  

Sermons in Stones

Got your life jacket (aka personal flotation device, or PFD)? One of the best parts of a boating vacation is time to read. Long hours bobbing gently on the water, lost in another world, with periodic times of looking up to admire the scenery. 

I don't like to take library books on the boat for fear of loss, so I collect possible reading material for quite some time, from used book stores, friends, or the occasional new book. Here are some of the books I took along on this trip:

Britt Marie was Here (Fredrik Backman)
The Little Paris Bookshop (Nina George)
A Royal Pain (Rhys Bowen)
Totem Poles and Tea (Hugina Harold)
Mrs. Roosevelt's Confidante (Susan Elia MacNeal)
The Death of Mrs. Westaway (Ruth Ware)
If You Want to Write (Brenda Ueland)
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper (Phaedra Patrick)
I'll See You in Paris (Michelle Gable)

and a few more. Lighthearted, easy reading, for the most part. On vacation, I read about a book per day. Oh, how I anticipated the reading I would do on this vacation. I read 4 novels in the first 5 days. It was delightful. 

And then this happened....

I had been working in my sketch book, without my glasses, and decided I needed them. So I went to get them, and then tucked them into the front of my shirt to take a good look over the side of the boat (all sorts of interesting things float by), and quick as a wink, and almost as silently, my glasses slipped from my shirt into the water. We watched them disappear in about 2 seconds. 

Reader, I was sickened. A huge pit formed in my stomach. My expensive progressive lenses were now being worn by a fish. Or a crab. Or something else that simply would not appreciate them.

"It's not the end of the world," I told myself. At least I can still appreciate the scenery, sketch a little, and take photos. Tim felt almost as bad as I did and he expressed it well when he said, "For you, reading is like breathing." 

There was still another week of boating planned. What on earth would I do? 

I did a lot of thinking. And a lot of looking at the scenery. 

The Duke's words in Shakespeare's As You Like It came to me as I pondered life 

"And this our life, exempt from public haunt, 
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
Sermons in stones, and good in everything." 

The "sermons in stones" phrase was particularly meaningful as we chugged alongside immense stone cliffs rising like walls from the ocean floor. Such powerful forces created and continue to alter these formations, forces created by the Creator God. 

That pointy bit above looks as though it were ready to fall off and plunge downward. Sights of earlier landslides, 50, 100, 1000 years ago were everywhere.  The landscape is continually changing. I'm relieved it didn't fall while we were there. 

 Life clings to these rocks, finding hold in the smallest crevice. The continuous lap of waves, and the endless rising and falling tides shape the landscape, carving out deep fissures and smooth pools. 

The above photo is of Lacy Falls, now mostly dry. Fresh water in the Broughtons is tannic, or deeply stained by decaying vegetation in the forests. In turn, the water stains the stone. 

Some of these rocky islets resembled huge sleeping beasts, prone on the sea floor, their backs curving above the water level, with a heavy growth of barnacles below the high tide line. Doesn't the above photo remind you of vertebrae?

I didn't arrive at any exciting breakthrough in my thinking, and I actually got so desperate to read by the end that I did manage, in small bits, to read another novel. I chose the largest and clearest font and had very strained eyes by the end of it, but it was worth it. I can't imagine not being able to read, and I'm so, so thankful for my eyesight. 

As soon as we arrived where there was cell coverage, I called my eye clinic and made an appointment. The new glasses should be here next week. So it's been a week of not much reading at home, too. I do have a pair of very old lenses that help somewhat, but reading and computer work isn't very comfortable. 

Lesson learned - get a strap for my glasses on the boat.  

If you're still here I thought you might like to see my little galley. The shelf next to the water faucet folds down to create more space in the cabin. There's a sink, a two-burner propane stove, and a small oven. A few cupboards. On the other side of the doorway (the frame is just visible) is a chest freezer/fridge. For long trips we use it as a freezer, for meat, bread and making ice, and have a well-insulated cooler for a fridge. We change the ice daily and were able to keep milk fresh the entire time we were out.

We eat well. One day Tim caught a small halibut and cleaned it on shore while a mink watched him from behind a rock. The scraps were left for the mink and we enjoyed a delicious dinner of fresh halibut in Alfredo sauce (from a jar), sauteed zucchini, and cauliflower mash. We also have a small barbecue and cook much of our meat there. 

In the late afternoon, when the sun streams down, we might go for a little exploration in the dinghy and come back to a cold drink. I brought along a pot of fresh herbs - mint, basil, and parsley. A little mint, muddled with lime, with a bit of simple syrup, topped off with chilled club soda made a refreshing drink. 

I brought along a bag of frozen, raw, chocolate chip cookies and baked them one morning when we were waiting for the tide to change to enter a lagoon. What a treat to have with hot chocolate. 

Here's one last photo of rocks - with a bear! He was heading off into the trees after foraging on the rocky shore. 

Reading - is it like breathing for you, too?

To the Wilderness and Home Again

Ready for an adventure? Tim and I arrived home last night after two weeks in the Broughton Archipelago. You've probably never heard of it, a cluster of islands situated between northern Vancouver Island and the mainland in the Canadian province of British Columbia. It's remote, sparsely populated by humans, and it's wild and beautiful. 

We towed our 25 foot boat to Port McNeill and launched it one evening. Our first night was spent in the marina, and in the morning we set off to explore. Low clouds hung from the mountains, and even rose from the sea, as seen above. Anticipation mixed with mystery. 

As we chugged past Cormorant Island into Blackfish Sound, I noticed lots of small, almost tailless birds flying low and swift over the surface of the water. Hauling out my trusty bird identification book, we determined they were Rhinoceros Auklets. Although they live in the waters further south near our home, I've never noticed them before. Here, they were everywhere. 

They are chunky looking birds, related to puffins. They breed in the temperate North Pacific and spend a lot of daylight hours on the water, fishing for food which they take back to their nests in the evening. The auklets frequently stood up in the water and flapped their wings. They get the rhinoceros name for that little white horn above the beak. 

Just as we were leaving Blackfish Sound for Village Channel, Tim saw a whale blow. We slowed the boat down to idle and watched over the next few moments as the Humpback Whale surfaced and blew 4 or 5 times, then, with a show of his tail, dove deep and disappeared. 

We spent the first night anchored off of Crease Island in a quiet little bay. When Tim took sailing lessons, his instructor referred to the many rocks and islets that dot our waters as "chunky bits". There were lots of chunky bits in the Broughtons. 

We wound our way through kelp beds and around chunky bits before dropping anchor for the night. Then, it started raining. A good time to haul out books and make tea. Just perfect. 

The skies cleared early evening and as we sat eating our dinner, enjoying the utter peace, two bald eagles came screaming overhead, fighting over a fish which one carried and then dropped in the water. 

One eagle flew up to perch in a tree, looking very unconcerned and nonchalant about the whole affair, while the other skimmed across the water and made a few grabs with his talons. 

In the end, I think he got the fish, or another one, and flew off to enjoy it on his own. The other eagle sat for a long time in the tree, perhaps looking for another fish to grab.

We slept like babies that night, lulled by the gentle movement of the boat, the fresh air, and the knowledge that there was nothing we needed to do in the foreseeable future.