Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  Herringectomy and Rising Sun

  We spent a quiet night at Westview. I’d fallen asleep to the muffled rumble of cars driving off the ferry from Comox, and I awoke at 5 a.m. to the reassuring sound and stink of large marine diesel engines. The fishing fleet was heading out. We ate breakfast with the VHF radio on; the weather looked good all the way to Refuge Cove, well into Desolation Sound. Another long day after that and we’d be halfway through the rapids, almost as far as we’d made it last year before chickening out and turning back.

  “We’ll probably have to motor,” I told Hatsumi as I dried the breakfast dishes. “But the engine’s been fine so far. And anyway, if something goes wrong, we’re a sailboat, right?” Nothing was going to go wrong.

  We cleared the breakwater and turned north. The ferry from Vancouver Island, across the glassy strait, was well off in the distance. “We’ll be long gone by the time it gets to this side,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.” I put Vera on autopilot. “Is there any of that coffee left?”

  Then the engine died. To be strictly accurate, it didn’t die, it began a death rattle. Normally, the sound made by the exhaust is a rhythmic throat-clearing, like an old man ambling down the sidewalk, hawking and spitting. What comes out is seawater, after it’s been circulated through the engine to keep everything cool. That gentle hawk-splash-hawk-splash is the most reassuring sound a boater can hear, and it goes with you everywhere, always in the back of your mind, whenever you’re shuffling along under power.

  But now it had stopped. The old man wasn’t spitting anymore, he was just coughing, a tubercular rumble that Hatsumi and I caught at the same moment.

  “Shut it down — now!” She reached the kill switch first, and suddenly it was very quiet. We were right in front of the ferry dock.

  “I just rebuilt the water pump,” I said.

  “There’s no wind,” Hatsumi said.

  “And there’s a ferry coming.”

  “What should we do?”

  Ferries seem slow and stately when you’re on them, but when you’re in their path, their advance is inexorable and, frankly, frightening. This one would be on top of us in ten minutes. On board, passengers were probably already listening to the docking announcement and looking for their car keys. I could radio the vessel, state the obvious (“We’re the idiot in your path and we can’t move”), or I could fix the engine. I clambered down below, found my cellphone.

  “What are you doing?”

  My friend Chris answered after two rings.

  “Ho!” he said when I’d described our predicament. “It’s not the pump, right?”

  “Can’t be.”

  “Then it’s perfectly logical. Close the seacock and start taking the cooling system apart. Something’s stuck inside. What fun! I wish I was there.”

  “Me too,” I said. After that, Hatsumi may have said, “What are you doing?” several more times, but I ignored her. “Just keep your eye on that ferry,” I said. “Dear.”

  The seacock lets the ocean enter a fat rubber hose that leads to the water pump. In a minute, I had the clamp off. There was a brief, savage struggle while I yanked on the hose, then off it came too, depositing me on my backside with the thing clutched in both hands, like a teenager caught masturbating. Protruding from the end of the hose was the tail — just the last inch or so — of a fish. It came out reluctantly, with a noise like a kiss.

  What kind of malign fate had sent a juvenile herring up our cooling hose? I knew it was a herring; despite having been squeezed cylindrical in cross-section, it still had the characteristic bulldog lower jaw. But what were the odds? They had to be astronomical.

  I flicked the herring over the stern and screwed the hose back on.

  “Clupea harengus! ” I shouted up to Hatsumi. “Nishin, you know, a small one. Let’s get out of here.” She started the engine, which cleared its throat mightily and spat a herring-free jet out the stern. The ferry was close enough to see passengers on the deck. They stared at us as we splashed away.

  That made two engine problems for sailboats at Westview. First Valma’s boat, and now ours. Did a herring committing suicide in your water intake qualify as an engine problem? But I’d fixed it, and the solution had nothing to do with all those boating courses. I switched the autopilot back on, Vera performed the usual drunken lurches while the machine’s obsolete Australian circuits came to an arrangement with the rudder, and we gradually settled into a northwesterly course along the mainland shore.

  The day was brilliantly clear, the barometer skyrocketing, and the view west reminded me how much of Vancouver Island was serious mountain. With the binoculars, I could clearly pick out Mount Albert Edward, high above the city of Comox, where Hatsumi and I had backpacked before Vera came along. To the east, I knew, were more mountains, many more; we were on roughly the same latitude as the ski mecca of Whistler. As soon as we rounded Sarah Point into Desolation Sound, the views of the Coast Range would open up, and for the rest of the trip north, we’d be in a corridor of snowy peaks. There were places in Desolation Sound where, anchored in your boat, you felt as though you were in an alpine lake.

  But we wouldn’t go to those places this time. We squeezed past the reefs that pepper the water around croissant-shaped Savary Island, making yet another mental note to visit its famed white sand beaches “maybe next year.” Off to the right, Dinner Rock was a forlorn hump a half mile off the shore, its peak marked by the cross commemorating the four people who lost their lives when the MV Gulf Stream, a ferry on its way from Powell River to the town of Lund, hit the rock at night in 1947. The wreck is still down there, a popular dive site.

  How many wrecks would we pass near, even over, on this trip? Especially on the west coast. The Graveyard of the Pacific, people called the southwest corner of Vancouver Island. Many of the maritime disasters of the last century involved ships coming from California and across the Pacific as the colony of British Columbia began exporting lumber, coal, fish. Again and again, especially in winter, vessels lost their way trying to enter the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The accounts were so similar: the weather closed in, the captain thought they were somewhere else, the sudden, horrifying glimpse of breakers before hull met rocks. The chances of getting off a holed ship were slim, especially when an SOS described the wrong location. Those who actually made it ashore often died of exposure. Finally, a life-saving trail, complete with a telegraph line, was constructed from Bamfield to Victoria in the early twentieth century. If everything went well, we would be in Bamfield in a month.

  Dinner Rock is only a few miles from Lund, the town founded in the late nineteenth century by the Swedes Frederick and Charles Thulin and is literally the end of the road. The Pacific Coastal Highway is a network of roads that starts in Chile and ends in Lund. As we chugged past, water taxis streaked back and forth from the beaches at Savary Island, and the boat traffic increased as we squeezed through Thulin Passage a few miles further north. Thulin Passage separates the mainland from the Copeland Islands, a chain of jewels that was already jammed with cruisers at anchor. The Copelands are popular with kayakers, many of whom start out in Lund or are dropped off by water taxis, and I picked out the emerald greens and cherry reds of their long noses pulled into the trees. Now that we were in kayak country, we had to be extra careful. Even though they tended to travel in groups, their cigar shapes all but disappeared whenever the surface was disturbed by even the slightest chop.

  “Not now,” I said to Charley, who had been up and sniffing hard from the moment we entered the passage, as though trying to pull everything, islands and kayakers included, into his nose. “You can do your thing in Refuge Cove. Hold it for another hour.”

  Twenty minutes later, we were around Sarah Point and officially in Desolation Sound — itself a relatively small open area bounded by West Redonda and Cortes islands and the B.C. mainland, although the name is loosely used to mean the region “north of Campb
ell River and south of the Broughton Archipelago.” Suddenly we found ourselves looking down the long corridor of Homfray Channel, and there, twenty miles away, was the snow-slathered exclamation point of Mount Denman. From this point on, there would be lots of mountains.

  Who was this Denman? He seemed to be all over the place: both Victoria and Vancouver have a Denman Street, Denman Island was a day behind us, and now this mountain. To answer this question, and hundreds of others like it that niggle at me every time I look at a chart, I had invited John Walbran along with us.

  Captain Walbran was a character. He was born in Yorkshire in 1848, served as a ship’s officer all over the world, and went to work for the Canadian Pacific Navigation Company in 1888. Then, as master of the government steamship Quadra, he spent what looked to me like a fantastically eventful five years charting the British Columbia coast, filling in the gaps left by earlier British and Spanish navigators and, more importantly, getting involved with the locals by servicing lighthouses, inspecting boats, transporting police, and rescuing whoever needed rescuing. Those five years furnished him with the material for his next big project, the writing of British Columbia Coast Names: Their Origin and History, published in 1909. The book is addictive, despite being more than a century old.

  So, what about Denman? There he was in my copy of Walbran: Rear Admiral Joseph Denman, commander in chief of the Pacific Station. In 1864, the year he’d bagged his own mountain, Admiral Denman had taken the ship Devastation around to the west coast to “punish” the Ahousaht people for murdering the crew of the trading vessel Kingfisher. If we made it around the Nahwitti Bar, we’d be in Ahousaht in a month.

  Refuge Cove, the place Charley was so looking forward to peeing in, is soaked in history too. A perfect harbour tucked into the lower lobe of West Redonda Island, Refuge Cove has been the social centre of Desolation Sound since its settlement in 1866, gradually accumulating a collection of float homes, boats, and cottages, the population rising and falling with the vagaries of logging and fishing. Most of the land was bought in the early 1970s by a group of Vancouver academics who formed a co-operative and who still own the place. The weathered wood store that sits on dubious-looking stilts is a madhouse from mid-July to the last week in August, providing the flood of cruising boats with groceries, popsicles, charts, and fishing lures.

  When we got there, the store’s owner, Colin Robertson, still had the wary look of someone waiting for something to happen. It was July 11, a Sunday. “They’re coming,” Colin told me as he handed me the diesel hose to top up our fuel tank. “By midweek, give them time to get here from Seattle if they left today.”

  By the last week in August, Refuge Cove would be thinning out, and the store shuts down again in October. Not much of a season. We weren’t much help with Colin’s bottom line; we only needed twenty-five litres of fuel.

  “You need some big powerboats in here, fast,” I said. Colin just smiled.

  “Oh, they’ll come,” he said. “Maybe they’ll bring us a break from this weather.”

  It was so hot, the creosote on the exposed pilings was dripping, like enormous black candles. Charley developed sunstroke and began to squirt diarrhea onto the dock. I hosed it off and then turned the tap on him while he stood, shaking. We did laundry, and I bought a copy of Anna Karenina from the tiny used bookstore run by the acerbic Reinhold Hoge, one of the founding members of the co-op. It cost me $3. I took it below, where Hatsumi and I flopped, boneless as starfish, waiting for the sun to go away.

  And then, in one of those little wrinkles in the order of things that, at least for me, seem to happen more often in boats than anywhere else, Charley began to emit a low gargling sound from the cockpit.

  “For God’s sake.” I dragged myself up the ladder. The setting sun lit Refuge Cove like a stage. On the concrete fuel dock, the hoses lay like a nest of torpid serpents. The weathered sides of the Refuge Cove Store glowed, and their reflected image rippled out over the calm water below. A retired couple in the Lucky Louie sipped drinks in lawn chairs arranged on the dock, attended by the strains of oldies. Was that what Charley was objecting to?

  Then I saw the white sailboat. She went past us, quite close, turned slowly and headed for the opposite finger. Charley muttered some more.

  “I think you should see this,” I called back to Hatsumi. The boat was flying the Rising Sun.

  “Let’s go,” I said, untying the dinghy.

  “But we don’t know them!” Sometimes, my wife could be quite Japanese. For her, hurling yourself, Western style, at someone you didn’t know was simply uncouth. And maybe she’s right, but this time, I insisted. How often do you see the Japanese flag flown from a sailboat in Desolation Sound?

  Yoshio Asanuma and his wife, Fumie, were on their way back from Alaska and Haida Gwaii. They’d sailed Foxglove from Yokohama the year before, a violent ride that cost Fumie two broken ribs, and they planned to leave the boat in Vancouver for the winter. Next year, when they returned to Canada, they’d take her south, the beginning of a planned six-year voyage through the Panama Canal, up the eastern seaboard, and over to Europe.

  Yoshi was barefoot, wiry, and burned brown. It didn’t matter that he was getting started on his sixties; the face beneath the salt-and-pepper hair was still a boy’s. Yoshi’s rudimentary English was about as good as my Japanese, but he was obviously banking on a combination of his own considerable charm and the exoticism of a Japanese flag to get them into places we’d never manage to penetrate. Within minutes we were aboard, Hatsumi and Fumie were off and running, and Yoshi and I set about getting to know each other without sharing anything more than a love of boats and a determination to get the most out of life.

  Descending into Foxglove’s cabin was like climbing into a hermit crab’s shell. Yoshi and Fumie’s boat was as crammed as a bachelor apartment in Tokyo. Every surface, including the cabin ceiling, was stuck, stapled, hung, or simply jammed with the necessities of life for a cruising Japanese couple: post-it notes in English and kanji, eagle feathers driven between books on Panama and the West Marine catalogue, a spinning rod and reel, cans of engine oil and juice, a propane-fired rice cooker. He rummaged under his berth to produce a six-foot-long tuna gaff, the lethal hook made of stainless steel and frighteningly sharp. When Yoshi caught a tuna, he meant to keep it.

  Yoshi and I soon became adept at conversing by scribbled diagram — an engine coupling, more fishing gear — and these got added to the piles. We drank beer from the stainless steel freezer that protruded through the chart table next to a weatherfax receiver. A half-completed weather map of the North Pacific hung out of the machine like a tongue.

  “Low pressure,” Yoshi intoned, stabbing at the riot of whorls. “I don’t like.” Yoshi, I would learn, would do anything to avoid heading out into a low. We learned that he’d taught himself to sail in the tricky conditions of Japan’s coastal waters, and his first offshore experience was sailing Foxglove, singlehanded, from New Zealand to Yokohama. I have a copy of the book he published about this voyage; I don’t understand a word of it, but that’s definitely a younger Yoshi on the cover flap.

  To get where he was now, Yoshi had put in long years as master of a Yokohama Port fireboat. “Very slow. All day, sit in office. Many reportings.” In all his time with the fire department, there wasn’t a single emergency. Then he spent a couple of years operating a monstrous power cruiser for some rich businessmen needing a place to entertain their cronies (“Very old!”), and finally retired at sixty. Now he could throw away his monogrammed coveralls and go around in a faded T-shirt and shorts. His life was just starting.

  Yoshi had opinions about everything nautical. Before long, we were on our knees in front of his engine. He drew my attention to the tension of the alternator belt.

  “Loose,” he said, tugging the floppy rubber belt to and fro. Conventional wisdom has it that belts should be tight. But Yoshi was a mechanic too, among other things. H
e had his engineer’s ticket, which included diesel repair.

  “Loose! Good!” I made a mental note to back off on Vera’s alternator belt.

  Regarding the constant problem of the weedy tendrils that grow on your waterline, where sunlight is strongest, Yoshi dove once again into a storage locker, like a squirrel scrabbling in its nest. I watched his butt for a moment, then he resurfaced with several small green cans.

  “Mix with paint! Then, smooth, smooth.” He mimed a careful sanding of the entire waterline. “Then paint, paint . . . good!” He held up a triumphant thumb and pressed the cans of wasabi on me, his face alight. Maybe it really does work; wasabi is, after all, antibacterial and was traditionally added to raw fish for just that reason. It’s likely it kills algae too.

  And so it went. There were Yoshi’s charts (ancient paper charts covered in scribblings, and a pirated, out-of-date disc of dubious electronic versions on Windows 98); there was the way he navigated by feel; there was his deathless celery plant growing in a bucket in the cockpit (“Fresh! Always!”). Yoshi was addictive.

  We cobbled together a meal from our combined supplies and exchanged plans. We might see Yoshi and Fumie again at the end of the summer, when (if) we made it back down the west coast to Victoria. The tangle of wires erupting from their ham radio meant they could send and receive emails; they’d let us know when they arrived. Fumie left that sort of thing up to Yoshi.

  “I don’t know anything,” she told Hatsumi, although that was patently untrue. “Then I can’t be frightened. Just I encourage!”

  When we told them we were going around Vancouver Island, Yoshi became solemn. He held up his hands, palms out, as though fending off an oni, a devil.

  “I look at chart, don’t go,” he told me. “Very bad, many many rocks. And all . . .” He asked Hatsumi for the English word. “Ah. Lee shore, yes. Very bad.” This from someone who had single-handedly sailed to Japan from New Zealand, crossed from Japan to Alaska, and explored Haida Gwaii.