Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  “Must be the end of the ebb,” said Hatsumi, and I was suddenly absurdly happy for her. A statement like that was a long way from the pedal boats in Inokashira Park. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The wind fell to the point where we wouldn’t even make Becher Bay under sail by nightfall, so we motored the rest of the way, rounding the corner by dinner time. We anchored between the docks of two waterfront mansions, over a rocky bottom that ground relentlessly against the chain. Perversely, there seemed to be more wind inside Becher Bay than outside in Juan de Fuca. But a night here wouldn’t kill us. We were only a couple of hours from Victoria.

  “We did it,” I said. “Almost.”

  Hatsumi looked haunted. I poured her some wine and went on deck to wrestle the kayak into the water. It was cold and blowing hard. I wished we were tied up to a dock, not anchored; emotionally, the trip was over for both of us. Hatsumi handed Charley down to me and we set out to look for a landing place on the rocky shore.

  “Won’t be long,” I said.

  I really wanted to get out, away from this cold, crappy anchorage where there were no other boats and where the wind and the current grabbed Vera like a tag team, twisting her this way and that. And the worst of it was, we still had to get past Race Rocks.

  I had forgotten about Race Rocks, a collection of lumps that was home to one of B.C.’s oldest lighthouses (it was first switched on in 1860) and, since 1998, one of the first official Marine Protected Areas in Canada. Race Rocks was notorious for weather so bad the place became invisible; one of its first keepers had died after nine days of flying the Union Jack at half-mast to try to attract the attention of passing ships. In good visibility, the shortcut through Race Passage was supposed to be fine, but you had to time it with the current, which shot through like a river. Going around the outside meant going way around. We worried about it for a while, read some guidebooks, and went to bed.

  The wind moaned all night and was still whistling into Becher Bay the next morning. I knew it was foggy before I even got out of bed; I could hear the fog signal. I double-checked the tide tables: we needed to go now, fog or no fog. It took fifteen minutes to chase down the anchor because Vera had swung and circled all night, as though replaying the twists and turns of our circumnavigation. We left at full flood, trusting to chart plotter and radar, and even with the tide on our side, it was slow going in the lumpy seas. To work our way safely around Race Rocks would take another hour.

  “Screw it,” I said. “Let’s go through the passage. It’s not the Nahwitti Bar.” We turned, the current caught us, and in ten confused minutes we were through, running an invisible gauntlet between the rocky shore and the demented whistle of the fog signal. And like that, the picture changed dramatically, as though one backdrop had hastily been substituted for another. The water flattened, Vera slowed down, and suddenly we could see. When I looked astern, there was a fog bank, with the red beanie of the Race Rocks light poking through it. It was as though we had left an entire world behind.

  “By the way, good morning,” I said. “Let’s stay the night in the Inner Harbour. A treat. What do you say?”

  “Yes,” said Hatsumi. “Yes! ”

  “Then tell me how to get there.”

  I watched the prison at William Head slide by on our left while Hatsumi pulled out the chart of Victoria Harbour. The prison looked like a pleasant place, unless you were locked inside and watching a green sailboat chug past. Every now and then, someone would make a break from William Head, astride a log or a jerry-built raft, but they never got far. Now I knew why.

  What would my father have made of all this? For two months, he’d been popping up, unbidden. Whatever schedule his visits had been following, it hadn’t been mine. Now, though, with Race Rocks receding behind us and our sailing adventure all but over, I realized that my parallel adventure with my father’s past wasn’t quite done yet. Now, on my own terms, I wanted a word. Try an overture, see what happened.

  “Remember that time you took us into the O.R. to watch you do a ventriculogram?” I said.

  “Sure.” He wasn’t up on the bow this time or perched on the stern rail. He was right beside me, next to the wheel. He grabbed the smooth stainless steel and gave it a weak, experimental tug. “I’m not sure I’d like one of these things,” he said. “They take up too much room.”

  “I’ve gotta agree with you on that one,” I said. “We never had a wheel, did we?”

  “Never needed one.”

  “But you did need to show your sons how to do a ventriculogram.”

  “I thought you might be interested in what your old man did for a living.”

  “Did the guy live?”

  “You think I can remember that? But yeah, probably.”

  “Were you disappointed none of us went into medicine?”

  It took him a while to answer. We were closing in on Victoria now. Finally, he said, “At first, yeah. Then later . . .”

  “You mean, after all the stuff that happened?”

  “Even before that. Trust me, you made the right decision.”

  He didn’t sound unhappy, or even cranky. For the first time since he’d popped up that chilly morning in Princess Bay, he didn’t seem cold either. He watched the land stream past and his knobby fingers worked slowly at the buttons of his red wool jacket. I knew I should say something — reassure him, even thank him. At least help him get that damn jacket off. But the things that came to me all sounded trite, or maudlin, and when I finally opened my mouth, a seaplane emerged from the harbour, engines screaming and climbing fast. I craned my neck to watch it pass over us, so close I could see the rivets on its white fuselage. By the time I could be heard again, my father was gone.

  ***

  Entering Victoria Harbour was surprisingly easy; all we had to do was stay on the right side of the well-marked seaplane lane. It was high summer again, the end of August, and we tied up right off the tourist-clogged causeway that ran beneath the Empress Hotel. Buskers played banjos and violins, street artists scribbled awkward renditions of tourists, and Hatsumi, responding to some deep instinct, fell to flaking the mainsail. A lugubrious older man stood over me as I retied a line. He looked like an elderly beagle waiting for its owner to return.

  “Where have you come from?” He had a thick German accent. I figured he was a tourist.

  “Bamfield,” I said. “Well, not directly, we stayed somewhere else last night.” Who cared about the details? This guy wouldn’t know what I was talking about.

  “I am going there,” he said. “In the next days. Then we continue around the island.”

  I stared up at him. Probably I looked surprised.

  “Just we are waiting for the wind a little bit to settle down.”

  “You have a boat,” I said.

  “Oh yes. Every year, I do this.” He nodded morosely. “The wife, she is just now doing shopping.”

  You’re going around the island in reverse? At the end of the season? I hope you have radar, I thought. And a good engine. And a strong stomach. Because you’re nuts.

  “Better you than me,” I said.

  Hatsumi and I passed the rest of the day in a kind of daze. I led Charley through a forest of tourist-calves to find flower beds to pee in. We took a harbour ferry across to the liveaboard marina on the other side of the harbour, where we fantasized about buying a bigger boat and moving in. After dinner, I listened half-heartedly to the weather forecast (another gale in Juan de Fuca) and decided to deal with it tomorrow. That evening, Chris and his wife, Karen, stopped by on their way back from chemotherapy in Vancouver. Two ferry trips and a day spent sitting with tubes in his arm, yet here he was, clambering aboard to welcome us back. I was profoundly happy to see him.

  “You just came to see the engine,” I said.

  “I don’t need to. I know it’s fixed.”

  The next day was windy as promised, thirt
y knots finding us the moment we rounded the massive breakwater that protects Victoria Harbour. Even under reduced sail, Vera galloped past beaches and mansions like a dog straining at the leash. It was the best sail of the entire trip, and it only lasted an hour. When we shot through Enterprise Channel and came in sight of the breakwater that marks the Oak Bay Marina, I found myself wondering, What would happen if we just kept on going? If we turned right instead of left, back up Haro Strait again? Would my father reappear at Portland Island, as though nothing had happened?

  But a lot had happened in the last two months. Hatsumi and I had finished what we’d started, and my own obsession with my father’s collapse had led me to a place where I was unlikely ever to run into his ghost again. I swung the wheel. Vera came through the eye of the wind, we did the usual things with winches and jib sheets, the sails filled again, and we headed home.

  Notes

  Sea Trial is a work of non-fiction that spans many decades, fields, and locations. There is ample opportunity for errors of fact or usage; where these are found to occur, they are my own.

  Some people’s names have been changed, the criterion being whether I felt there was any risk, no matter how small, that someone might not be completely happy with being identified. Spelling of First Nations place names follows usage on official band council websites current at time of writing. Other place names are spelled as they appear on the Canadian Hydrographic Service marine charts for the area.

  Water depths are expressed in feet rather than metres or the seldom-used fathoms. Speed through the water follows the universally accepted convention of knots (nautical miles per hour); the same goes for wind speed. One nautical mile is 1.85 kilometres.

  Acknowledgements

  Writing of this book was made possible by generous support from the British Columbia Arts Council and the Government of British Columbia and from the Canada Council for the Arts.

  Many people were involved in the events related in this book or helped in its creation. I would like to extend special thanks to Allan Thackray and William Bullock for encouragement and critical reading of the manuscript for legal and medical aspects, to Charley Brown for sharing his memories of practising medicine with my father, and to my brother and sister, Rod and Sarah, for filling in crucial memory gaps. My wife and navigator, Hatsumi Nakagawa, was always there to remind me what really happened on the boat, and thanks are also owed to our parents and children, for putting up with our being out of touch for months when we should have been closer to a phone. Finally, the Victoria Medical Society Library helped me out with technical references and provided a home for many of my father’s framed photographs.

  Friends with boats who in one way or another helped us through many tricky passages include Chris Denny and Karen Platt, Stuart and Anthea Piets, Dave and Nancy Young, Gordon and Bruce Jones, Yoshio and Fumie Asanuma, and Ivan Boyadjov.

  For the actual work of writing and production, I want especially to thank David Greer for his unfailing encouragement and endless capacity to read and advise on whatever I write. Amanda Lewis and Shaun Bradley provided critical analysis of earlier drafts and suggestions for revisions, while Emily Schultz and Jen Albert continue to be the best editors a writer could hope for. Jack David of ECW Press did me the honour of believing in this book, while other members of ECW’s amiable, creative, and efficient team, including Rachel Ironstone, Jessica Albert, Laura Pastore, and Amy Smith, made production a real pleasure.

  About the Author

  Brian Harvey grew up on the west coast of Canada and trained as a marine biologist. He began writing newspaper columns and science-travel articles for magazines in 1997. His first full-length book for a general audience (The End of the River) was published in 2008 and was followed by two works of fiction (Beethoven’s Tenth and Tokyo Girl). He lives in Nanaimo, B.C.

  Copyright

  Copyright © Brian Harvey, 2019

  Published by ECW Press

  665 Gerrard Street East

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4M 1Y2

  416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Cover design: David A. Gee

  Cover photo: © Jonathan Stead/Millennium Images, U.K.

  Map: Jessica AlbertAuthor photo: Theo Harvey

  To the best of his abilities, the author has related experiences, places, people, and organizations from his memories of them. In order to protect the privacy of others, he has, in some instances, changed the names of certain people and details of events and places.

  Library and archives canada cataloguing in publication

  Harvey, Brian J., 1948-, author

  Sea trial : sailing after my father / Brian Harvey.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77041-477-8 (softcover)

  ISBN 978-1-77305-339-4 (PDF)

  ISBN 978-1-77305-338-7 (ePub)

  1. Harvey, Brian J., 1948- —Travel—British Columbia—Vancouver Island. 2. Harvey, Brian J., 1948- —Family. 3. Sailing—British Columbia—Vancouver Island. 4. Vancouver Island (B.C.)—Description and travel. 5. Harvey, John Edgar, 1912-2008—Trials, litigation, etc. 6. Trials (Malpractice). 7. Parent and adult child. 8. Autobiographies—I. Title.

  PS8615.A77383Z46 2019 C813’.6 C2018-905307-0 C2018-905308-9

  The publication of Sea Trial has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country and is funded in part by the Government of Canada. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Ce livre est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada. We acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,737 individual artists and 1,095 organizations in 223 communities across Ontario for a total of $52.1 million. We also acknowledge the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, and through Ontario Creates for the marketing of this book.

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