No alarm and a leisurely start to the morning. Extremely mild conditions at low tide through the islets and passageways of the McMullin Group, and lots of Undersea Gardens–type stuff to peer at. My hip felt a lot better after its rest day.
I bet this bright little fella has some good ideas
In a calm channel we met with a raft of otters, who were kind of — but not very very — concerned about our presence. They would poke their heads up and scout us out and bide their time til one of them decided we were too close, then they'd all splash and paddle away in a big group for a few dozen yards, then hang out for a while and do it all again.
A solo outlier swam within a few feet of Jonathon before he realized this big red thing was about to attack him and took off.
Currents in Sans Peur passage were strong enough that we'd have preferred them with us instead of against, but no big deal. We headed out into dead calm seas to the Prince Group, where I was hoping to find the supposed campsite on Robert Island to take some photos and do a site condition report for the BC Marine Trails website. We rounded Robert Island completely, and even did some land-based scouting and bushwhacking, but didn't turn up any evidence of anything usable. The Prince Group has some nice rock formations and some pictographs. The stench of something large and dead was on the air.
Over lunch we'd discussed our options for the night. Jon was much in favour of staying at Soulsby again rather than taking our chances with an inferior site up the channel, and I was easy to convince. We traded kayaks for the afternoon so I could check whether my discomfort was potentially due to a poor fit with my Mariner II. Jon's Mariner XL definitely fit me better. It was a little less responsive, but paradoxcally easier to steer, harder to edge but I could edge it more confidently. It feels more like sitting "in" a boat rather than wearing one around your hips. The II is a performance boat that demands a lot of its captain, and I'm not quite athletic enough to get the best out of it. I'm definitely going to look at getting something more along the lines of the XL*.
We rode the currents through the tiny channels north of Dodwell Island, including one that would only be passable at very high tide.
Back at Soulsby Camp it was an idyllic evening, with cloud hats on the mountains that had been obscured by weather on our previous visit.
Jon found a large crab on the upland trail, dropped by a bird or mink maybe. It was still alive — barely — so we returned it to the water... but the poor fellow didn't make it. We found a west-facing lookout where we watched the sun set on the most placid scene, with a quarter moon in the sky and a couple of sea lions snorting around off the rocks. We finished the last of the beer, the last of the sherry, the last of the scotch... and the last of the summer.
Cultus Sound to Soulsby Camp, Sept 13, 2018: 21km
*I've since bought a Mariner Max, the newer version of the
XL. As of this writing, the Mariner II is for sale — contact me for
details.
September 14: It was a long night, full of restless city dreams, all social anxieties and nothing of nature in them. We had a leisurely breakfast and listened to the wolves greeting the morning on Hunter Island. Sea lions were playing in the channels, and we saw grebes and scoters enjoying this dull, calm, beautiful morning.
It was beautiful paddling up Hunter Channel. We saw a whale blow in the far distance, near the entrance to Campbell Lagoon. A yellow boat came by carrying a young family from Vancouver. They asked us if we'd seen any whales or otters, and we did our best to direct them. The guy took a great photo of the two of us, but I can't seem to find it anywhere.
German Point was staring us in the face seemingly FOREVER as we clawed our way up the channel.We caught a bit of sideways weather coming out of Lena Channel, which was both expected and annoying, but it turned into a nice tailwind that gave us a push from behind all the way to McLoughlin Bay, where we were greeted by a young eagle making quite a ruckus. We initially landed to the north of the terminal, then scouted on foot to find the actual landing spot, which is basically right under the ferry ramp. The worker at the terminal said "I didn't think we had any kayakers left out there!" and I responded that we were just doing some tidying up and making sure all the lights were off.
We packed just the light stuff in the kayak hatches (so we didn't stress our hulls) and loaded the rest of it onto the luggage carts. It was a long, dull wait in the little terminal as we re-entered modern life, picking up the emails and texts from the past few weeks, charging batteries, and seeing other humans. No question: running water and flush toilets were very welcome, and the showers that awaited us in Port Hardy were keenly anticipated (and no doubt considered very overdue by our fellow passengers). As the ferry barrelled down Fitz Hugh Sound, it was weird thinking we were passing on the other side of everything we'd just experienced (just over a mountainous island), whizzing past at 30kt instead of 3, with luxury seating and hot meals served.
For large chunks of the voyage I stood out on the deck just to feel the air on my face, good and cold and real.
Soulsby Camp to McLoughlin Bay, Sept 14, 2018: 17 km
As nice as the Serpent site was, and as much as we'd have loved to spend the day exploring in the Hakai area, discretion is the better part of catching the Last Ferry of the Summer, so we packed up and headed north to make sure we would be on the right side of Superstition Point tonight.
We had calm conditions, no wind and little swell, as we crossed Kildidt Sound into the Kittyhawk Group. The water in Brydon Channel was like glass. The photo below is actually flipped vertically so the reflection on the water is at the top of the image.
We stopped for a quick snack at an islet that we'll call Shazam Islet on account of its cartoon lightning-bolt shape:
This whole area is pretty much ideal for leisure kayaking. There are a million little islands and protected routes, and lots of subsea life (including a vast patch of anemones looking like nothing but a field of Aloo Gobi). I began to feel a twinge in my hip that felt like a muscle tear — a war-wound from yesterday's battle that became more and more persistent as we paddled.
Even in calm conditions, Superstition Point is a bit of a bear. Clapotis and confused seas, and larger waves than the surrounding areas, no matter where you turn. Fortunately, it's a pretty short traverse, and we fought through it just fine. My hip cried out at every stroke as we cruised into the big yellow sand beach at Cultus Sound. I'd hoped we might end our day at the north end of Hunter Island and maybe spend Thursday doing a loop through Gunboat Passage, but I needed to give it a rest or I'd have trouble getting to the ferry. After lunch and coffee, Jon set off to do some exploring up the sound while I set up the tent in a beautiful glade and pottered around doing not much of anything at all.
Besides the strategic location, it's easy to see why Cultus Sound is a popular site. It's got a lot of amenities, a lot of room for groups, a big sand beach, and it's well protected.
It was the buggiest of our camps on this trip, home to little midges, but they weren't too bad, and we didn't have any bugs to speak of anywhere else so the comparison isn't really fair.
Jon paddled up to Kinsman Inlet, where he found some entertainment riding back and forth on the little rapid there. He says the rapids were friendly and fun and easy to paddle against the flow around high tide, with the current still in the direction of tidal flow.
He also found some good clear water from a stream there. Triquet water for comparison:
We spent a quiet evening watching the waves splashing on the rocks out in the sound and the tide gently lapping at the beach while we discussed our mistakes of yesterday. The biggest error we made was that both of us had our charts folded so that Superstition Point was near the fold, so we couldn't get a good visual sense of the layout of the area. We were also definitely not prepared for the charnel house of energy that was concentrated in the Superstition Point/Swordfish Bay area.
Serpent Group to Cultus Sound, Sept 12, 2018: 16 km (does not include Jon's side-trip to Kinsman Inlet)
This was the weirdest, coolest day. A peak experience, but one I'm at a loss to explain properly.
After heavy rain all night we woke to light drizzle and no wind. We saw a boat running south down Hunter Channel, which we took to be a good sign. If the locals were emerging, then so would we!
An 8:00 launch, a quick crossing of the channel, and finally, near the end of our trip, we were in Hakai Luxvbalis park. Paddling through the McNaughton Group was beautiful, the water like glass and the currents initially with us, then building against us as the current caught up with the changing of the tide.
Jon suggested poking our noses out through the channel that runs east-west through the big island to see what conditions were like on the outside.
There was very little current in that channel near low tide. It was calm and pretty and very passable by kayak.
When we exited the channel into the sound between the McNaughton Group and the Simonds Group, we were met by huge waves rolling in from the south. They were easily 3 meters, but friendly and low-period, and for whatever reason we felt like we could take what they were throwing at us. Jon asked if I wanted to go back to the protected channels, and — you know what? I really didn't. Once free of the clapotis in the McNaughton island bay, the big rollers became quite pleasant to paddle on. I was going very slow, as I was feeling very tippy in my boat and was trying to figure out how to paddle in these conditions. I became easy with untucking my thighs from the braces and articulating my legs for strong drive, the way I would to make miles on calm water, but I had a really tough time putting the whole stroke together. It was much less rhythmic and more opportunistic as I had to catch water on whichever side it was currently available as the waves rolled by under me. We stayed well off the coast, outside the foam line, thus avoiding rebound waves and feeling the unadulterated strength of the ocean coming at us from way out in the wild enormous Pacific. I wished — for the first time ever — that I had a GoPro, because there was no pausing to operate a camera. The waves got bigger and bigger as we crawled like tiny ants across the vast surface of the water, south and out of the protection of any islands. Jonathon would disappear, then as I crested a wave I would see him a couple hundred meters away, clawing his way up the face of the next wave. I reckon the waves were easily 6 or 7 meters high, and I marvelled at the volume of water that must be contained in each one.
When we eventually arrived at Superstition Point we tucked in behind some islets for a breather and a snack and to decide whether to go to Cultus Sound or push south. It was only about 4 km from where we'd exited the channel, but it had taken well over an hour to get here. Jon thought the worst of the water would be in the mouth of the sound and that the point wouldn't be too bad if we stayed beyond the foam line. We had plenty of gas in the tank and it wasn't yet noon, so we decided to head for Spider Island and refill our water there, then proceed to the Serpent Group.
Nosing out toward Superstition Point we were proved wrong: the water around the point was a total gong show, a reeking mess of clapotis, wind waves, and steep-sided swell. If the previous leg was a challenge, this was a battle. The whole shoreline was a mess of spray and foam, impossible energy meeting immovable rock, and every bay was a disastrous soup. We fought the chaos and looked for a passable opening into Spider Channel. All the openings were clustered with rocks and reefs. The waves would crash against one shore, rebound toward the other shore, and meet another rebounding wave in a mess of white water. We were pushed further and further offshore to get free of the energy being thrown back at us from the land while we scouted openings and fought to stay upright as the waves hit us from all sides. A couple of guys on Sea-Doos roared up from the south (where on earth were they coming from?). They looked sick and terrified; I'm sure we did too. We were in an endless present moment, reading the water and reacting, simultaneously somehow in fast-forward and pause mode. Time seemed to disappear. At last Jon pointed at a line he thought we should take and I responded in the negative. Apparently what I actually said was, "IT'S A FUCKING BLOODBATH!" We found another, wider, blood-free entrance and took it. It felt so good being in the protection of the reefs and islands in more manageable water. In the bay on the northeast of Spider we found a beautiful sandy beach with some kind of infrastructure on it: A big A-frame of logs and miscellaneous featurettes.
Dry land never felt so good.
Zombie snax
Once we caught our breath a bit, recapped the adventure, and had a bite to eat, we started to poke around the place. There was a little run-down hobbit cabin in the woods, which I recognized. It was Randell Washburne's old cabin from the 70s! But wait, that cabin was certainly not on Spider Island. I couldn't remember for sure, but I thought it was on Triquet. Which was clearly impossible, because we'd only been paddling we guessed about 45 minutes from Superstition Point to Bloodfrei Passage.
I pulled out the InReach and fired up the phone to get a GPS location. Sure enough, it showed we were on Triquet! We'd gone more than twice as far as we'd thought, and somehow had entirely missed Spider Island, which is kind of a big island to just overlook. Some kind of Bermuda Triangle/Tales of the Uncanny shit was clearly going on here.
Before we could parse the mystery, a skiff came putt-putting in to the beach. It was loaded with two kayaks and three German dudes. Two of them had been kayaking down here when the storm hit, and they'd been stuck on Triquet, a bay or 2 over, for the past few days, til their friend could bring the skiff out to get them. It turns out, they were the ones responsible for all the infrastructure at Islet 48! The skiff's pilot was the SIMON of the sign — he lived in Bella Bella and was married to a local woman. He gave us his number in case we needed to hire him for a lift sometime, although he couldn't guarantee he'd always be available to check messages. We bid them auf wiedersehen and filled up our water before launching toward the Serpent Group.
Triquet looked like a really neat island; I wish we'd had the chance to explore it more. Next year!
It was a short but intense paddle to the Serpent Group — there was lots of confused water and we were tired. But we made it, approaching from the northeast as per instructions. When we saw sand on the bottom, I knew we were close. Jon, unschooled in the lore, made the expected exclamations that there's no way these rocky crags could host a campsite, and then...
Serpent Group is an amazing spot, just an absolutely magical hideaway. The upland tent site itself isn't ideal — a bit sloped if you don't like camping on sand — but you can't beat the location. Featurettes galore, including majestic promontories for viewing the ocean, a rock wall that reflects the heat of the sun and dries your tent like billy-o, and a deep tidal pool where full-sized crabs and fishes live.
Modern art?
Check out the local churn:
We were absolutely bushed after our huge day, and we spent a couple hours just exploring and relaxing.
Here, at last, through time-warp and wave action, we'd found the transcendence that we'd been missing. Our bodies were battered and our minds exhausted, but our spirits were soaring. We spent a beautiful evening looking out into Hakai Pass with a well-deserved mug of excellent sherry.
Almost the weirdest thing about today? The InReach stopped recording our locationpretty much at the exact point when we decided to take the channel to the outside of McNaughton, didn't even record the ping where we checked our location on Triquet, and didn't start working normally until we left Serpent Group the next morning. So we will never know where we were between the hours of 9:30 and 1:30 on September 11, 2018, how far we were off shore, how fast we were going, how we missed seeing a gigantic island, or how we landed on ancient Triquet. As Rod Sterling might have narrated, They were looking for transcendence, and they found it ... in the Twilight Zone.
When we woke at 6:30 it was still rough and rainy out in Joassa Channel. We decided to get ready to head out anyway, but wait until there was a sign of conditions improving. By 9:15 there was blue sky to the south, and we launched by 9:30. Some headwinds but generally friendly seas to Raymond Passage, where Queens Sound threw some rough water at us through Codfish Passage. This was enough to make us think it was going to be easier travelling over the north side of Piddington Island and sneaking around through the back channels as much as we could.We saw some porpoises just outside Hochstader Basin. It's a measure of how beaten we were that we found great amusement in the idea of a non-extreme version of the Tsunami Rangers, but instead of seeking extreme waves and rock gardens, they would instead seek out the flattest, calmest water — a kind of kayaking version of the ASMR laundry-folding videos. They'd be called the Lagoon Squad. Their motto? "Chasin' the basins."
Crossing Peter Bay we got a big wet squall, and then intermittent sunsqualls. The channels north of Piddington are very pretty, very pleasant kayaking. Caught a great group of pictographs here.
We had intermittent wind and rain but generally friendly seas all the way to Safe Passage (ha!) where we got hit with crosswaves and a fair bit of current.We had lunch at high-high tide just after noon in a little notch bay on Campbell Island. We agreed that if these conditions prevailed, we should push for Cultus Sound.
At Dodwell Island, though, the water was tempestuous. Lots of currents and the kind of crazy waves you would expect with high wind against the tide — steep-sided whitecaps going at least 3 different directions. No thanks, we'll pass. The little crossing to Latta Island was a raging deathtrap. Discretion being the better part of staying alive, we abandoned the idea of crossing into Hakai Luxvbalis park today and instead struck out for Island 145 aka Soulsby Camp. This was a tough enough leg! East of Dodwell we felt very exposed as we hightailed it for the north side of 145 and the wind and waves battered us: You shall not pass! Turning the corner the headwind coming up Hunter Channel was absolutely brutal, but we knew our destination was only minutes away.
"The most perfect clamshell beach on the west coast" (although we might make a case against Kimantas on this point in favour of Klaoitsis), Soulsby Camp was a welcome refuge. It's a cute site and advantageously situated, but in itself it wouldn't be a must-stay destination. There's a general lack of featurettes from which to hang gear or upon which to sit. There are a couple of gloomy areas semi-sheltered by fallen logs, which make a handy kitchen and reading nook in the rain. The tent sites are only OK: the flat one is too small, the large one is too sloped, and others are either lumpy or concave. We bemoaned the lack of an accessible rocky promontory upon which to eat and enjoy a sunset view. And the place was absolutely infested — with chickadees*. But Soulsby Camp does have a lot going for it. If it were situated anywhere but the Central Coast, it would likely be considered the best in its area — it's just that compared with Dallas, McMullin, or Islet 48 it paled a bit.
The kitchen grotto
Quinoot to Soulsby, Sept 9, 2018: 25 km
September 10: Another stormy, tempestuous night. Wind and rain in spades. Our sweet tarp skills kept us dry, but the wind was still raging by 6:00, so back to sleep again. Stormy nights and mornings make for very short paddling days.
I see seas of grey
Caps of white
'Cause a sou'wester blew
All through the night
And I think to myself
"What the fuck have I done?"
I spent some time this morning watching a mink beachcombing. He'd swim out to the rock in front of the beach, then back with something in his mouth. Also spent some time watching a little woodland bird — a wren, maybe? — pecking at the seaweed on the edge of the rising tide. Funny how everything adapts to its environment.
Hunter Channel was largely whitecapped all day, and the area where Hunter Channel meets Queens Sound was a horrorshow of confused seas and whitecaps. Intermittent rain all morning, and winds driving low, black clouds up the channel. We were dispirited enough that we'd probably have just made for Bella Bella, except that the forecast looked better. Gale warnings were in effect all day, then winds 5-15kt tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday, and light on Friday. Seas were supposed to subside from 3m tonight to 1m by noon on Tuesday. We still had a chance to catch a bit of Hakai, if we got a little lucky.
Mid-morning brought a brief bout of milder weather, including a couple minutes of sunshine. This brief period of sun gave us the hubris that we might dry some things. Then, with the wet clothes hung and all our gear spread out on the beach, a steady solid rain socked in.
I spent a couple hours reading in the "solo shelter", a perfectly dry nook under a fallen cedar, with a springy branch seat. Jon hit the tent for a nap. We had lunch and a cup of blessed coffee near high tide, watching a squabbling flock of seagulls diving for herring (?).
We were going a little squirrely waiting around for the weather to turn.
I realized we hadn't seen a boat or a plane or any other person since Seaforth Channel — this was day six as the last people on earth. This trip was a very different feel than the others we've been on. No defined weather pattern from day to day, including some really rancid early-morning weather, makes for tough decisions on launching times — or, more often, a go/no-go decision. I missed the transcendent feeling of following and achieving a defined route, also. If there had been any campsites between here and Cultus Sound, we would probably have taken our chances during the afternoon to try our luck paddling south into the wind, but we didn't fancy getting out there and finding we had to go all the way in terrible conditions. As it turns out, the evening brightened right up and the wind died down. Cultus Sound is closer than I imagined it was (about 2 hours' paddle in good conditions) and we could easily have made it. Ah, hindsight.
Where's me pot o' gold?
Tomorrow beckons: looking south into the McNaughton Group
