by Brian Harvey
We walked down to the sales dock for the short trip across the harbour to the “travel lift,” a monstrous wheeled gallows which would pluck Jade Myst out of the water so that the marine surveyor could do what he had to do. I had no idea what he had to do.
“Sailing all my life,” I mentioned as we walked down the ramp. It was still raining. Allan hopped into the cockpit and did things to the engine. “I’ll take her,” he said. We were already moving by the time I jumped on. Allan brought the boat smoothly to the dock at the marine yard, working levers and spinning the big stainless steering wheel so that the boat seemed to levitate sideways into the tight space. I really wanted to ask Allan how he did that thing with the engine and the steering wheel, but he was gone already, up the ramp to the yard office, and someone else was holding out a wet hand.
“Bob Whyte,” said a tall, bookish-looking man with a neat grey moustache. He held a clipboard. “Can we get out of the rain?”
“Be my guest,” I said to the surveyor. That moustache was a good sign. Only anal-retentive people wore moustaches like that. If anything was wrong with Jade Myst, Bob would find it. We clambered down slippery wooden steps and looked around. Jade Myst smelled musty, a house from which the family had long departed. Everything was teak; it was like descending into a showroom for Scandinavian furniture. Daunting-looking electronics were recessed neatly into bulkheads.
“Bigger than my last boat,” I said.
Bob Whyte pulled out a pocket flashlight, clamped it in his teeth, and dropped to his knees. He yanked out a trapdoor. “Might as well start in the bilge,” he said and stuck his head in like an ostrich. I looked at his thin buttocks and the soles of his oxfords for a while and then went back out into the cockpit and started pulling things out of the lockers: half-empty engine oil containers, a dampish pair of blue coveralls, stained life jackets, and assorted lengths of hose. I rejoined Bob and found a wobbling bead of water hanging to the underside of the plexiglass hatch in the cabin roof.
“Got a leak here,” I said.
Bob’s checklist had begun to accumulate ticks. He snorted. “You’re lucky. Usually, those ones are right over your berth.” He didn’t make a tick.
After that, I kept my mouth shut while Bob methodically sounded the rest of the boat, inching along the deck like a man checking for mines, tapping the fibreglass with a rubber mallet and cocking his head to listen for the telltale sound of delaminated layers. Allan rematerialized, untied the boat, and eased her between the two canvas slings that dangled from the travel lift like enormous rubber bands. One went under the bow, the other was tugged beneath the stern, then a cautious revving of the travel lift’s diesel and Jade Myst exited the water vertically to hang, dripping, in the frame of the huge machine. There was much more of her underwater than I had imagined.
Bob went over all of her considerable underbelly with his little hammer. I took out a credit card and began chipping at the barnacles on her propeller until Allan nudged me aside to screw a shiny new zinc anode onto the shaft. Bob peered around the curve of the hull, still tapping. “Don’t forget to paint it,” he said.
Did one paint zincs?
“You bet,” I said.
“I was kidding,” he said.
It started to hail. I ducked beneath the curve of the hull and stood next to the propeller as the concrete slowly whitened to outline the shape of our new boat.
Bob gave Jade Myst a clean bill of health, but there were more hoops to jump through. The next was the sea trial, when the prospective owners get to try the boat out on the water, just to be sure. Ours was no more than a slow loop around the bay in a dead calm, during which I was mostly concerned with hiding how much of sailing I’d forgotten. That was farcical, I thought, not knowing that the real sea trial would come four years later.
***
Boat names are important. I was sure Jade Myst should be renamed Ima Kara, an expression I first heard when I was hiking up a mountain in the Japan Alps, before Hatsumi, before boating. It was cold. I was labouring. A middle-aged man wearing spotless white gloves and wielding hiking poles appeared out of the mist. I stood aside to let him pass. But he stopped and grinned.
“Ima kara,” he said. Which means “this is just the beginning.”
But ima kara would be useless for radio communication in Canada. I’d have to spell it out every time, I imagined the Coast Guard operator pushing the headphone harder into his ear and waving his hand for silence, writing it down and scratching his head: India-Mike-Alpha-Kilo . . . it would never work. One day, my wife announced the problem was solved.
“Your mother spoke to me last night,” Hatsumi said. My mother had been dead for five years. “She asked if we would name the boat after her.”
“Sounds right to me,” I said.
But when we called on the Register of Vessels, “Vera” turned out to be a popular boat name; Vera II and Vera III were already bobbing around out there somewhere. Cathy Kimoto in the registry office shook her head as she went through the list. It began to look like we were back to Ima Kara.
“Wait,” she said suddenly, flipping back a page. “Vera, just plain Vera. Here it is, but it’s reserved.” She ran her finger down the fine print. “Aha. The guy’s time ran out. You can have it if you take it now.” She dug under the counter for a form.
When Allan called and said he needed a certified cheque, we finally realized that we very nearly owned a large boat. We went to see the notary. Her office was a chaos of papers, piled, peeking out from folders, settled in uncertain stacks on the floor. She sifted through them, clucking. “You know what ‘boat’ stands for, of course?” she said, her head between her knees.
Hatsumi and I looked at each other and a small dog wandered in to sniff at our feet.
“Bring On Another Thousand.” The notary surfaced, red-faced, and waved a document at us. “Sign here.”
The next day was moving day, to the permanent space we’d reserved ten miles south, down Haro Strait. The first thing I did when we stepped aboard our new boat was hang over the side and laboriously scrape off four vinyl Jade Mysts with a putty knife. She was Vera now. I dug out the key, opened the engine seacock the way I’d seen the broker do, switched on the batteries, and pushed the starter. Hatsumi seemed frozen on the dock, and when the engine fired and cooling water shot out the stern, she jumped back.
“Sailing all my life, remember?” I looked up encouragingly and wrestled with dock lines that were stiff as boards. “Although Sidney has changed a bit since I was here last.”
In thirty years, the foreshore around Sidney had become a nautical parking lot. The chart looked like a map for a new subdivision. I hadn’t looked at a chart for a long time, and I turned it this way and that while the Yanmar diesel hawked and spat against the wharf. “Quit dithering,” it seemed to be saying. “Can’t you even find your way out of a marina?”
When we finally pushed off, the channels on the chart were replaced by a maze of navigational spars and buoys. “Red right returning” was all I could remember: keep the red marker on your right when entering a harbour. But there were many harbours here. Within seconds, the depth sounder showed five feet. Five feet was exactly Vera’s draft. I threw the engine into reverse and sand clouds boiled up around the stern, as though we had disturbed a sleeping sea monster. I headed straight for the fuel dock, channels and charts be damned.
“Stand on the bow,” I told Hatsumi. “With the line, the line.” She glared and shrugged. What was a “line” to her? It was what anybody else would sensibly call a rope.
“One of these,” I yelled, waving the stern line at her. By the simple act of taking the wheel of a boat, I seemed to have become my father. A teenager on the fuel dock watched us come on, expressionless. As we nosed in, I tried what Allan had so effortlessly done: put the engine into reverse. The stern walked rapidly away from the dock. We hurled the lines at the kid and let him reel us i
n. When I jammed the fuel nozzle into the filler hole and pulled the trigger, Vera burped a foul splash of diesel into my face.
We passed Zero Rock on the trip down Haro Strait. It was a glorious, calm spring day, and we broke out the sandwiches as a colony of seals watched us chug past. I suppose they were the great-great-great-grandchildren of the ones who had peered indifferently at Frou-Frou and her frightened crew. I decided not to tell Hatsumi about the time I had been here forty years before.
Oak Bay, our destination, was another two hours down the road. When we began our way through the maze of rock and kelp beds outside the marina, Vera seemed to expand, her keel lengthening as the depth sounder’s little grey numbers clicked backward. Docking and undocking, I’d read somewhere, were considered the most stressful part of boating. Now my bladder was confirming it. I wanted desperately to pee, but I hadn’t figured out the marine toilet yet.
The boat slips, from water level, didn’t look anything like the neat diagram in the marina office where we’d put down our deposit a week before. I’d overshot the Sidney fuel dock completely — how was I ever going to turn Vera up one of these tiny cul-de-sacs and bring her to a safe stop? As we closed in, I could see movement. One man got slowly out of his own boat and began to stroll with us, keeping pace. Two docks over, a heavyset fellow in shorts had begun to run, his sandals flapping. Vera and her petrified crew came on. A kneeling woman dropped her paintbrush and took off like a sprinter. By the time Vera had more or less turned the corner into her new slip, the three Samaritans were waiting for us, breathing heavily, arms outstretched.
“Just throw us your lines,” they said.
And that was the easy part.
Travels with Lolita
After the unexpected meeting with my father at Portland Island, we sailed an unambitious few hours further north to Genoa Bay. With all the scramble of planning and packing, we needed a few lazy days before the jump across Georgia Strait to Desolation Sound. Genoa Bay was familiar and predictable, a notch in the southeast shore of Vancouver Island with a marina and plenty of anchoring space — a good place for Charley to work on his sea legs. We dropped anchor in mid-afternoon and were immediately surrounded by a flotilla of Canada geese. They paddled around Vera, muttering, while Charley vibrated and sniffed. One of them, apart and alone, was crippled, a leg twisted up and out of the water so that the bird advanced erratically, like one of the mechanical swans in Inokashira Park. I wondered how long it would last.
The sun sank behind its hill, Charley paced, and the water calmed and turned a muddy emerald. The geese had left; now we were surrounded by a constellation of floating seaweed, arbutus leaves, a paper plate. I decided to wash away the scramble and stress of leaving with something clear and sparkling.
“Hand me Lolita, would you?” I called down.
“Excuse me?”
I kept forgetting, Hatsumi’s cultural legacy was as far away from mine, as though we were raised on separate planets.
“That book, the one with the ankles in bobby sox on the cover.”
I like to reread Nabokov every few years — Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin — for the sheer sensual pleasure of his prose. I didn’t need much this time, just a quick hit. By page thirty-five, I had found Humbert Humbert’s description of his mother’s demise: “She died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three.”
“And English wasn’t even his first language!” I said to Charley. I put Lolita down. Charley was starting to look longingly at a scruffy pocket of beach. Almost overnight, the transporting of our dog from boat to beach and back, a chore I’d watched other boaters submit to for years and sworn I would never, ever consent to, had become my new job. Maybe it was because the crunching sound of a boat on the gravel of a new beach seemed hard-wired into me, or just that I was a better rower than my wife. Two days into the trip, and Charley’s bladder and bowels had slotted into my routine.
“Let’s do it,” I said, pulling the dinghy alongside, lowering myself in, holding out my arms. “Come on, jump, I’ve seen you go twice this far.” But I still had to lift him, grabbing the handle on his life jacket and swinging him down like a flailing fluorescent briefcase. Charley’s back legs were catapults, the thigh muscles like drumsticks on a Thanksgiving turkey. His default behaviour when lifted was to jump free. Carrying Charley up a few steps usually meant being kicked in the testicles. This time, he treaded air until landing in the dinghy, then scrambled to the bow and stood precariously balanced on the stem, a hairy figurehead with eyebrows. The closer the beach came, the more he wriggled; halfway there, he toppled over the side and began to swim in outraged circles, his front legs pawing at the water like a boxer working a punching bag. I yarded him back in, and he shot back to the bow, dripping but defiant. As soon as the boat touched the shore, he sproinged off vertically, like a kangaroo.
The only beach in Genoa Bay had an abandoned look, muddy and littered with ghostly crab moults and shreds of blue fibreglass encrusted in mussels. A rotting dock had come to rest under the trees, draped in rusted cables and carpeted in moss. I found a dryish spot and sat down while Charley raced around on the mud, looking for the perfect spot to urinate. When he was finished, he tried to sneak a fish head into the dinghy.
“She’ll kill you,” I said, flinging the thing away and shoving off.
We spent an uneventful night at anchor, the boat at rest in its allotted position in the bay as though we were curled up in one of those sailing-book diagrams of the yacht at rest, tethered to the elegant swoop of chain that led to the neatly buried anchor. I knew it couldn’t last and found myself recalling an anchoring story I’d heard from David Bruce, a complicated man who dives under people’s boats to replace the zinc anodes that corrode and fall off twice a year. I think he collects stories down there too. He was standing on the dock in his diving suit, dripping, when he told me this one.
“You remember those kerosene lamps we used to hang on the forestay as anchor lights at night?”
I did. As a child, it had been my job to light the sooty clunking thing at dusk, snap it to the jib halyard (the rope you pulled on to raise the foresail), and pull it up twenty feet or so. The lamp would bang around all night, keeping everyone awake.
“Well, this guy decided to put a really long shock cord on his lamp so it would stay quiet.”
Good idea, I thought. Why didn’t we think of that?
“Anyway, the wind got up that night, the boat started to rock, and suddenly the halyard chafed through and the lantern came down onto the deck. Smash! Unzip me?”
David turned around and I yanked on the big zipper that held his dry suit together across the shoulders. It was heavy and stiff, and he had to brace his feet against my tugs. I imagined the lake of burning kerosene running down the deck, the howls as the owner rounded the cabin corner in his pyjamas.
“What’d he do?”
“This is the best part. He sees all that burning kerosene, freaks out, grabs the lamp, and throws it as far as he can. But it’s still attached by that shock cord. He said it came back at him like a comet!”
We both laughed, but afterward I kept imagining those seconds: the fireball hurtling into the night, diminishing, then suddenly expanding again, like a burning boomerang. It could so easily have been me.
***
When we got underway the next morning, the anchor came up pasted with mud and grit; the bottom we had swung over for the night was just an extension of the slimy beach Hatsumi had sluiced off Charley the night before. Mud bottoms are bliss for boaters, holding an anchor like glue. But they tend to come aboard when you leave.
Sailing was impossible along the sinuous channel of Sansum Narrows that separates Saltspring, the largest of the Canadian Gulf Islands, from Vancouver Island. Both the current and the wind were against us, so we motored through, finally raising the sails after exiting the narrows into the more open waters of Stuart Channel. Dodging a tug towin
g two barges kept us on our toes; although sailboats have the right of way over powerboats in most cases, tugs are one of the frightening exceptions. Tugs look slow, but to a sailboat trying to make the most of a fitful wind, they’re anything but. They can’t stop and they would rather not turn. In these waters, tugs had a way of showing up everywhere, dragging barges piled with containers, or vehicles, or booms of fresh-cut logs. They frightened me.
Our next stop, Clam Bay, was as unambitious as Genoa Bay, but there was a tidal rapid coming up, and the next convenient opening was early morning. Dodd Narrows, between Gabriola (the northernmost Gulf Island) and Vancouver Island, is narrow and crowded in summer, so any attempt to “cheat” it — to go through much before or after slack water — meant going against a substantial stream of boats. If something went wrong, you wouldn’t have much room to manoeuvre. Spending the night in Clam Bay would make it easy to hit Dodd Narrows at just the right time.
So we stopped there in mid-afternoon, after picking our way through a scattering of widely spaced navigational buoys, like the last pieces in a chess endgame. Clam Bay fronts the shallow corridor between Thetis and Penelakut Islands. They’re really the same island, separated by a dredged channel through mudflats called The Cut.
The two “islands” are geologically identical, but culturally they are worlds apart. Thetis is privately owned, chopped up into small waterfront lots and larger, interior acreages. Several of the bays are dominated by Christian summer camps. Penelakut Island, a bridge and literally a stone’s throw away, is a reserve for the Penelakut First Nation, who were confronted by a British naval expedition a decade or so after British surveyors named the island Kuper (after the captain of the surveying ship Thetis). By the final decade of the nineteenth century, “Kuper” Island had its own Catholic residential school, a holding pen for First Nations children removed from their homes throughout the Cowichan Valley. You can still see the ruins of the school from the water; it closed, to universal shame, in 1975. Penelakut Island finally got its name back in 2010.