From Klemtu to Hakai: 14 days kayaking on the central coast, Sept 1-15, 2018

September 1: I'm lying in bed, staring through the dark to where the ceiling should be, listening to the trucks gear down on the highway, and to Jon's snores from the couch on the other side of the room. We're in a snug little cabin just outside of Port Hardy, about to embark on a 2-week kayaking trip from Klemtu to Hakai and back to Bella Bella. I'm seriously considering staying in bed for the entire two weeks, sort of a "let's not and say we did" vibe. This is because I'm scared shitless. In an hour or so we have to get up and board the ferry. Its dark and foggy and I'm irrationally convinced we're going to die.

It was photos of Wolf Beach that brought us to this. The tropical-looking expanses of sand and blue sky, untrammeled by flip-flops and inaccessible except by boat, called to us. Since BC Ferries no longer offers a kayak wet-launch and we need to disembark at the regular stops like the civilized people, it's also become one of the more difficult-to-access locations in the area. "Two nights there, please," Jon said when I sent him a photo. And so our plans were put in motion.

We'd spent August 30 at my sister's place in Surrey test-packing our boats, trying to make all the booze and chocolate fit in little nooks and crannies. The next morning was a frantic stuffing of the car hatch and running around with worried looks on our faces. I fired up the InReach satellite communicator... and couldn't get it to pair with my phone. Fuckitty fuck! Last year it had worked like a dream, my old iPhone 4 paired up with a first-generation InReach to allow messages to be sent back and forth to home and keep our wives' worries to a dull roar. I had been so proud of how I'd cobbled together these two old technologies to enable communication from the remote parts of the earth and now it wasn't going to work! Screw it, let's go, we have a ferry to catch. A final desperate reboot and reinstall of the software got the thing working — crap, note to self, next year test it BEFORE we have to leave...

After the usual slog through the blasted Nimpkish Valley (I really hate driving through the Nimpkish Valley; it's got bad juju), we arrived in Port Hardy just before dark. The place looked like a ghost town, just a little outpost on the edge of nowhere. We took a recon drive down to the ferry terminal, and booked ourselves a cabin on the highway not too far from the ferry road. Supper was an order of business: our two options appeared to be A&W or a place called Sporty Bar and Grill. I guess we were going to be sporty! The pizza was surprisingly excellent. The waitress asked us if we were catching the ferry tomorrow: yes, yes we were. "Up pretty late, then, aren't you?" Ooooops.

Sleep happened, theoretically. I don't remember getting much of it, and 5AM rolled around with a dread inevitability. This is by far the biggest and most remote trip I've ever been on. Jon, on the other hand, is a veteran of wilderness adventure, having hiked across Baffin Island among other journeys. I tried to take heart from his confidence... but then again, one of the things he'd told me while I was fretting in the lead-up to this was "the fact we could perish is central to the point of it all," so there was little comfort there; I was partnered with a nihilist.

Paddling the S.S.Sleepytime

At 5:45, after a last shower and a good hard fret on my part, we arrived at the ferry terminal and were directed to a place where we could load the boats onto a wheeled rack — something we were not expecting at all. We'd bought wheels for the yaks to cart them on and off the ferry. The wheels had become a source of contention because of the room they took up. There was no good way to store them without jettisoning either food or booze, neither of which was very appealing. But here was all modern convenience! Misunderstanding the instructions, we lashed the kayaks to the rack and then started stuffing all our gear into them willy-nilly. Every few minutes a BC Ferries employee would come over and ask if we were nearly done, because there was another kayak they needed to load up. "Yep, almost done," we said as we jammed just one more bag into the cockpit, again and again.

Finally one of the Ferries people came over and explained to us, in the voice of someone telling a child why they shouldn't dip their lollipop into the mud puddle, that what we should have done was loaded the empty boats onto the rack and then put our gear on a different cart designed for luggage. "That way you won't stress your hull."

For those contemplating logistics, the photo above was taken from the long-term parking lot. The luggage carts are parked under the blue tent to the right. You can put all your drybags on them and they get locked up til you reach your destination. But because we are ninnies, we'd missed the window to load our stuff onto it. So our hulls, like us, were stressed — and we would be carting luggage onto the ferry besides.

I had kept all the liquid — both the inflammable fuel and the two weeks' worth of life-giving beer and bourbon — in a carry-on bag. It was as heavy as lead and clinked incriminatingly as I waddled it toward the terminal. Jon, with his little backpack, skipped ahead of me, whistling a jaunty tune, to the ticket office. Foot passengers are ticketed well inside the gates, and to validate your pre-purchased ticket you require 75 pieces of government-issued photo ID, your immunization records, a "facilitation fee" of $100 in unmarked, non-sequential bills, and a signed affidavit from the Queen that you are a Subject of the British Empire in good standing*.

It's required that you arrive at the terminal two hours before a sailing — more than you need for an international flight — but it all makes sense when witnessing the colossal inefficiency and confusion of the boarding process. All the foot passengers stood in a huddle outside the ticket office while the cars loaded in, seemingly at random. We spied a young woman grooving away under her earbuds like a loony person. She looked like someone who would end up on a Disasters In The Wilderness documentary — a naïf on a crash course with fate — someone to give a wide berth to. Eventually they let us walk on, and I waddled and clinked my way up the ramp, trying — and failing — to look like someone who was not carrying a ridiculous amount of booze in his bag. I shuffled and clanked my way to a seat, and the ferry got moving, somehow, nearly on time after all. We were on our way to Klemtu.

*For those actually making the trip, all that's required is photo ID, a requirement that some of the other passengers were apparently having difficulty meeting.