“We do, Brownie.”
And that’s how we passed the first morning, alone at sea together aboard Heron, nearly drowned by a cargo tanker, totally skunked by the wind, but at least out there and tasting the salt in the sea air, adjusting to the bracing chill over the water, feeling the lightness and freedom of almost being empty nesters, of going for it, wherever it might be.
* * *
After turkey and avocado sandwiches for lunch and a hard ration of one chocolate chip cookie each, we rounded Partridge Point, the westernmost elbow of Whidbey Island. Our Garmin Canadian Hydrographic navigation software, with maps and weather loaded into Heron’s nav system, showed we’d just crossed into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Standing in the open-air cockpit at the wheel, peering at the GPS chart plotter mounted at the helm, we could make out a computerized version of Heron, a black boat symbol swimming steadily over a white computerized sea, trailing a dotted line. These were our “tracks,” the first nascent miles of our journey. We’re doing this! I thought. We’re finally truly doing this! We’re headed north—aboard Heron! We’re finally sailing off for a while!
Only we weren’t sailing.
There was no wind.
* * *
The Strait of Juan de Fuca, a roughly hundred-mile-long, ten- to eighteen-mile-wide stretch of sea, leads from the open Pacific on the west to the San Juan Islands on the east. It is banded by Vancouver Island to the north and the Olympic Peninsula to the south, and can be flat calm or extremely rough, depending on the wind and current. The typical summer pattern, according to our Waggoner Cruising Guide, another indispensable onboard reference, calls for “calm mornings, with a westerly sea breeze rising by mid-day,” I read aloud. “Increasing to 30 knots or more in the late afternoon.”
“Hmmpph,” Skipper Jeff snorted. “Barely five knots, more like it.”
We chugged on, the low drone of the engine like a drug. I fought to keep my eyes open; it wasn’t easy. There was something about being on that boat, the sway of the hull, regardless of whether you were underway or anchored: if you let yourself drift off, you slipped into a coma, a sleep so profound it was almost physically impossible to open your eyes.
In real life what woman ever lies down in the middle of the day? Take a nap? Preposterous! Well, maybe once every two years on a Sunday…But typically? For most of us parents, especially women, there’s so much to keep track of, so many interruptions, so many pressing things to do—work-work to catch up on, or mom tasks to take care of, or phone calls to return, or meals to start, or deadlines to meet, or a sick friend to check in on, or someone to pick up in fifteen minutes—that the concept of lying down and closing your eyes at two in the afternoon is not only ludicrous but virtually impossible, like a small cyclone allowing itself to stop spinning in the midst of forces that demand it whirl on.
But aboard Heron the afternoon stretched lazily ahead. Jeff seemed fine at the helm, so I lay down along one of two teak benches rimming the cockpit, each padded with a four-inch-thick cushion. The low drone of the motor and the postlunch haze after all the stress of departing were deadly; watching fair-weather clouds drift overhead, I allowed myself to close my eyes just for a moment, then fell into an utter stupor, the sleep to end all sleep. All the concerns and busyness of the past few weeks fell away, left behind in Seattle.
“Ah, the narcolepsy effect,” Jeff said, when I regained consciousness nearly two hours later. Someone had covered me with a Pendleton blanket. “How’d you sleep, Bug?”
“Umm, good…but I can’t…keep my eyes open,” I mumbled, my eyelids heavy as lead weights.
I’d come to just before Cattle Pass, the narrow channel between Lopez Island and San Juan Island. If you’re entering the San Juan Islands from the south, Cattle Pass marks your arrival in the storied archipelago. A fresh odor came from the faster current, the smell of cold purity that is the essence of the North Pacific. Late-afternoon light had broken through the clouds, and although the air temperature was still brisk, maybe almost sixty degrees, the water glowed with coppery warmth, reflecting the sun.
* * *
“Cool, whale!” Jeff suddenly exclaimed, leaping up. “Close! Maybe only thirty yards off!”
“Where?!” I bolted upright, instantly awake, every cell in my body charged with adrenaline.
“There!” Jeff pointed hurriedly toward three o’clock off the starboard beam. “It was small…maybe a minke.”
We both stared, fixated on the spot where the slender minke whale, a thirty-five-foot cousin of the much larger humpback, was—but we didn’t see him again.
But now that we were looking, there was so much more. We grabbed the binoculars and passed them back and forth. Clusters of glaucous gulls swooped and dove and whirled, feeding raucously on upswells of marine life kicked up by the Cattle Pass chop. Small black terns with slender bills darted by with rapid wing flaps. Two pelagic cormorants flew north, their heads and long necks stretched forward, like worried commuters. When the wheeling gulls spotted an appetizing morsel, they all started chanting at once, louder and louder: Caw-wok! Caw-wak! Caw-waak! Caw-waaak! They were as noisy as frat boys at a party, trying to outdo one another before diving in for the tangy feast.
We’d only left James and our suburban life outside Seattle a few hours earlier, but already it felt as if we’d crossed over into another realm: a world with ancient rhythms. And indeed, we had.
Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca are deep basins, glacial troughs gouged out of bedrock by a lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet during the last ice age, about fifteen thousand years ago. As the ice retreated, it scoured the land, gouging deep sounds and sculpting the San Juan Islands at the convergence of Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The channels beneath us, which dropped away a dizzying 800, 1,200, even 1,600 feet beneath the boat, are bathed in upswells of super nutrient-rich particles, a sort of nutrient soup that supports a rich stew of invertebrates and algae, which in turn feeds an incredible diversity of predators and grazers.
Jeff and I were riveted—everything, the shimmering prisms of late-afternoon light dancing on the current; the insistent wavelets lapping at Heron’s hull; the smell of the ocean and salt air—it all felt so alive, as if there were a pulsing life force deep beneath the boat, thousands of feet below us, rising and surfacing. Roxy Music’s Avalon was playing on the iPod Jeff had brought up to the cockpit table, the stylized anthem “Avalon” surging from a portable speaker.
The 1980s British pop soundtrack should have been a weird pairing with our watery surroundings, but the soaring, sea-drenched melodies matched the elation of the moment. Staring out at the wild sparkling scene, we passed the binoculars back and forth, sweeping the water.
“Look, what’s that?” I pointed. A pair of Dall’s porpoises, their backs shiny black, their triangular-tipped dorsal fins neatly slicing the sea, were leaping alongside Heron’s hull like curved commas. I trained the binoculars on them. A moment later a gang of harbor seals with doglike muzzles and comical whiskers floated by, only their heads visible above water. They looked like curious sentries checking out the boat.
“Hi, seals! Hi, porpoises!” I called.
* * *
We rounded Turn Island, the small, forested marine park that marks the southern entrance to San Juan Island’s Friday Harbor, and motored up to the end of a wooden dock. A tall, long-limbed man in faded red shorts and a navy-blue T-shirt emblazoned with Work Less on the back climbed off his sailboat and came over to catch our bowline.
“Ah, full service. Thanks!” I said, tossing the line to him before jumping from the boat to the dock with the spring line and hurriedly threading it through a wooden beam, lashing the boat to the dock, then running back to catch the stern line, which Jeff jumped down and secured. After all the lines were tied, we climbed back to the cockpit, turned the key, and shut down the engine. Ah, stillness. We both grinned, acting nonchalant, like we did this every day. But then we climbed into the cabin below, switched off all the
nav instruments—and, filled with utter relief, did an exaggerated high-five. We had arrived.
CANADA’S AMAZON
It was one thing to dream about the Great Bear Rainforest. It was another thing to get there. The Great Bear Rainforest—or GBR, as I began calling it—is fantastically remote. The region is way beyond the end of the road. It is miles and miles of epic wilderness, a far-flung place so far past the end of the road, there are no roads—no roads, no cars, and very few people. The landscape is boat- or floatplane-access only, and most spectacular, the forest is one of the last places on the planet where wild land still meets wild ocean.
Warmed by the Pacific and fed by the rain, the Great Bear Rainforest spans a 250-mile swath of evergreen-cloaked fjords and rocky, forested islands that include most of British Columbia’s central and north coast. Sometimes known as Canada’s Amazon, the Great Bear covers an area the size of Ireland and contains one-fourth of the world’s remaining intact temperate rainforest—the operative word being rain.
I was worried about the rain. Precipitation falls eight, ten, sometimes twelve months a year here—cumulative rainfall measuring 78 to 117 inches annually. Why would anyone living in Seattle, one of the world’s wettest places, averaging 38 inches of rain each year, even consider spending their hard-earned summer in a place that’s even wetter? I’d ordered a video, a National Geographic documentary about the Great Bear Rainforest, and set up a screening for Jeff and the boys one night in the winter before we set sail.
“Fifteen feet of precipitation can fall in this place each year!” the dramatic narrator intoned. “But the wolves and bears seem to shrug off the downpour. Everything here must shrug off the rain. Aboard the Achiever [the film’s sturdy-looking research vessel], there is a soggy sense of exhilaration…”
The boys looked on in disbelief while the Achiever’s hardy crew pulled on Gore-Tex pants and hooded slickers, then motored toward shore hunched in an inflatable dinghy, rain skewering their backs.
“Looks like fun,” Jeff said sarcastically.
The next scene featured a crazed wolf biologist scuttling around the soaking wet woods on his hands and knees collecting wolf scat. Rain dripped off his eyebrows and puddled along his collarbone as he carefully scooped fresh wolf poop into a vial.
The wolf man sniffed the wolf scat and smiled contentedly, as if he’d discovered a fine wine.
“He’s nuts!” Sam said.
“Poop man,” James said.
But incredibly, none of the three questioned our Great Bear plans. I hoped maybe the Nat Geo crew had sailed in early spring, the wettest season, and that by the time Heron made it that far north in late August and early September, we’d catch the Great Bear’s eight-week “dry” season, when it still rains but less. Months before, we’d pulled out our charts and traced a route from Seattle to Princess Royal and Gribbell Islands, the uninhabited “mother islands of the white bear,” in the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest. We’d added up the nautical miles and the days, calculating we could make it there and back in the two-month window we’d have before the Northwest coast weather turned from long summer days and golden autumn light to winter.
To get there we’d cruise north from Seattle to Desolation Sound, a section of the BC coastline riddled with deep inlets, islands, and coastal mountains at the northern end of the Strait of Georgia. We’d then head north again, navigating a series of treacherous tidal rapids, braving the stomach-churning Johnstone Strait, and rounding the aptly named Cape Caution before making our way north farther still. Our Waggoner Cruising Guide warned:
North of Desolation Sound you’ll find colder water, harsher weather, fewer services, and a greater number of rocks, reefs, and tidal rapids…Careful planning is paramount. You need to know the times of slack water at each rapid, and you need to know how long it will take to get to each rapid. You must have complete and up-to-date charts on board, and a copy of Ports and Passes. You must be comfortable calculating the times of slack water at the various rapids. For transiting shallow channels, you must also calculate the times and heights of tides.
These warnings intimidated me, as was their intention. The challenges, along with the greater distances, rain, and colder weather, are the very real reasons why so few cruising boats head north from Desolation Sound or round Cape Caution beyond that. As I tidied up that first August afternoon at Friday Harbor—putting the Waggoner and our charts back in the bookshelf, cleaning the galley, stowing the binoculars—I hoped we weren’t in over our heads. Then, while Jeff hosed down the boat to get the salt off and puttered about, his way of relaxing, I pulled on a pair of running tights, dug out my running shoes from the depths of the drawer beneath the aft cabin bed, climbed the companionway to the cockpit, and stood slowly, stretching my arms and legs after my first day in the cockpit.
“Bye, honey!” I waved, loping up the aluminum ramp leading to shore from the finger piers where Heron was secured in a quiet corner of the harbor. I passed eight or ten other boats tied for the night; they ranged from thirty- to fifty-foot sailboats, to a lovely 1920s wooden launch, to several white-fiberglass power cruisers, top-heavy as floating appliances. One of these, an immense chunk of floating white plastic, was fittingly called Cream Cheese. At least they have a sense of humor, I thought, grinning; even the round life preserver hanging off the stern was named Bagel.
At the top of the ramp I turned and began trotting along the shoulder of a two-lane wooded road rimming the island. My legs felt wobbly, as if the dirt path etched into the grassy shoulder was mysteriously rising and falling. There were very few cars. When a driver passed, maybe once every five or ten minutes, he or she would give a little wave.
I emerged from the woods to a clearing where fields of dry grass swept toward the San Juans—in August the islands lay like brown bears sprouting fir forests on their backs. There was a certain certainness of late-afternoon light here; it glinted off the yellow-gold fields exuberantly by midsummer, shafting itself around each blade of grass so that everything appeared almost illuminated from within. As I picked up speed, my heart leaped a little at the island’s sunlit air and the sensation of being off the boat after only a day. In the weeks to come there would be fewer and fewer opportunities to walk, let alone run, once we reached the rocky, forested, bear-populated islands to the north.
The road entered the woods again, a tangle of fir and alder and cinnamon-barked madrone, and I descended a long hill toward the Sound. Suddenly, the scrub parted and a tawny brown doe stepped out, maybe twenty feet in front of me, and delicately crossed the road. I kept going, nearly colliding with the spotted fawn that skittered out of the dense foliage after its mother. At the base of the hill the road rounded a wide curve with waterfront homes built on a low bank opening onto San Juan Channel. In the distance beyond I could see the shining white glacier peak of Mount Baker rising over the sea, still capped with snow. Now I was breathing hard. I knew my friend Pete’s house was around the next bend, so I kept going. Pete had died suddenly a few years before; not only had he left his young wife behind, but the grief was compounded because he had been one of those irrepressible souls whose tragic absence in his early fifties left a gaping hole in our world. Doubled over at what had been the entrance to his long forested driveway, I whispered, “We miss you, Pete. Damn you and your hilarious self…” I stood. Listened. The leaves on the tall trees stirred slightly, but otherwise, everything was silent as eternity.
When I turned to start back, my heart filled with the sad acceptance that Pete was no longer here, coupled with my wondering whether, in some ways, he was. By then evening shadows were advancing. Thank you for watching over us, I prayed in silence.
The air was cooling off. Uh-oh, I thought. Jeff will be worried.
Then I spied a flash of movement up ahead, and a small gray fox darted across the section of road I was running toward—the silver tip of its tail like a flag, as if to say: I heard you, I’m here.
I froze, my heart full. I’d never seen a fox
in the wild before. They are shy, secretive creatures, and it is very rare to encounter one.
Then, dead sure that Pete had in fact heard me, that maybe this was a sign, I smiled at the notion that his spirit could be with us, watching over Heron—even though he hadn’t known much about boats—and hightailed it back to the dock.
* * *
We awoke at dawn the next morning but couldn’t bring ourselves to get out of bed—it was so darn cold in the cabin. So we lingered beneath the sheets while the sun warmed Heron. It was weird waking up without kids down the hall and pets underfoot.
“I feel honored to be in a room with such beauty,” Jeff said, starting to laugh, gazing at me in my hideous turquoise-and-orange-flowered flannel pajamas.
“Hmm, that’s generous of you,” I said apologetically, though I was laughing too. “I know they’re terrible, but they’re part of my strategy!” I’d wrestled the pj’s on under the covers, and after all those contortions wasn’t about to take them off. My plan was to leap directly from bed into a pair of Ugg slippers, then wrap a terry-cloth robe on top of the flannel. After that we’d drink coffee until we were warm enough to shed the flannel for jeans, long-sleeved T-shirts, and fleece or wool sweaters, it being August and all.
I took four steps from the aft cabin to the main salon, where Jeff was dialing in the day’s marine weather forecast, and turtled my head out of the hatch. It was a sunny, dewy morning.
“Ah, breakfast with Bug!” Jeff grinned, looking up.
I grimaced. “Still not looking so hot, though.”
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