Uncharted

by Kim Brown Seely

  “Yes, but it’s there. Your beauty is emerging.”

  By eight thirty we’d wiped our bowls clean of every last speck of oatmeal and brown sugar, untied the lines from the cleats, and pushed off from Friday Harbor. I took Heron’s helm while Jeff went to record notes in the log. Our GPS position was N 48° 35’, W 123° 03’. The depth was 469 feet beneath the hull, the water temperature a chilly fifty-four degrees. The air temperature, according to the thumb-sized thermometer affixed to the helm, was sixty-six, but it felt more like sixty coming off the sea, glimmering like a million shards of glass beneath the cold morning sun.

  I guided Heron up San Juan Channel, which runs between the northeast flank of San Juan Island and neighboring Shaw Island. I was feeling experienced in a way I hadn’t the day before, left hand on the wheel, right hand lightly dangling a pair of binoculars. To my left (or port) side, San Juan Island’s waterfront estates, all cedar and fir and tasteful glass construction, poked through the trees; to my right (or starboard), Shaw Island looked like a forest of evergreen, but I knew it had bigger properties—some of the islands’ most beautiful—tucked among the firs. We motored past the wild, low-lying Wasp Islands and on toward Spieden Island. Tumbled clouds filled the sky and a faint breeze from the west ruffled the water. There wasn’t enough wind to put up the sails, but no matter; we wouldn’t have room to sail anyway, navigating the narrow channels.

  “Check out Spieden up ahead,” Jeff said, taking over the wheel. “It looks sort of like a velvet lion.” He took the binoculars and we both stared at the island’s tawny flanks and close-cropped yellow grass. One of the driest of the San Juan Islands, five-hundred-acre Spieden is privately owned by Jim Jannard, the Californian who founded Oakley sunglasses. In 1969 prior owners had imported exotic animals such as Corsican sheep and Asian fallow deer to the island, attempting to turn it into a big-game hunting operation. Public backlash from San Juan Island locals soon shut them down. As we passed the island a free-ranging herd, a remnant from that experiment, grazed on the slopes alongside us.

  A violent splashing interrupted our surreal wildlife count.

  “Someone just got eaten,” I said.

  “Yup. Good morning for that seal, bad morning for some fish being ripped apart,” my husband replied.

  In our time afloat we’d come to recognize certain signs: noisy thrashing and slap-thwopping sending up a riot of white water meant a seal or a sea lion tearing into lunch. I liked a Sunday morning marked by nature’s violence. I considered the seal, its belly full. I considered the fish, submitting to the seal. I thought how many months it had been since we’d seen this kind of Wild Kingdom moment play out in real time, months when a more typical weekend interruption might be the disembodied telephone voice of Rachel: “Hi, this is Rachel from Cardholder Services…contact us concerning your eligibility for lowering your interest rates.” But for the next eight weeks we’d be free of annoying telemarketers. Out of range and released from all those electronic pests that are now part of global society, a universal plague for those who crave solitude.

  * * *

  By a quarter to ten we were across Boundary Pass, the liquid boundary line between Washington State and British Columbia. At first nothing seemed different.

  “Hello, Canada!” I called out to no one in particular as we putt-putted along, a trace of wind now dead on the nose. Just ahead the Gulf Islands—the Canadian continuation of the San Juans—were spread out. I peered through the binoculars. The Gulf Islands looked rockier, wilder, and slightly scruffier than the San Juans.

  At Bedwell Harbor, on South Pender Island, we idled around, then tied up once a boat-length spot cleared at the customs dock. Jeff jumped off the boat with our passports, strode up the pier, and called in our arrival on a courtesy phone nailed to a piling, declaring our wine cellar—thirteen bottles. A boat’s crew is required to stay on board while the skipper clears customs, so I sat in the cockpit and tried to look nonchalant, even though I’d just staged my own minirebellion. With apples, blueberries, peaches, nectarines, plums, cherries, potatoes, and corn on the cob not allowed to cross the border into Canada, I’d busied myself earlier burying contraband. I’d squirreled away our apples, oranges, nectarines, lemons, and a precious lime in a tote stuffed behind the robe in my narrow closet. Then, just to be extra safe, I’d stashed the produce bin’s avocados and vine-ripened tomatoes deep in the toes of my wool socks. Hope I remember where I’ve hid everything, I thought, imagining the grisly discovery of an oozing, overripe avocado weeks down the road.

  Thirsty after crawling around finding such creative hiding places for our fruit and vegetables, I swung past the galley, opened the waist-high fridge, grabbed a water bottle, and took a slug while simultaneously pulling myself up into the cockpit with a jaunty pirate swagger.

  What the hell? My lips were on fire. Holding in a gulp of the smoky-tasting liquid, I lowered myself back down the steps like a spastic fire-eater straight out of a Fellini-esque circus, spitting what I hadn’t swallowed into the galley sink.

  “Christ, did you fill the water bottles with booze?” I sputtered as Jeff reboarded the boat.

  “Just one bottle. Straight gin. Ha! Nothing like a slug of booze at ten in the morning. That’ll put the Bug in a good mood.”

  “Jeez, maybe you could warn me next time?”

  “Puts hair on your chest.”

  “I don’t want hair on my chest.” I grimaced, still panting. “So how did customs go, we’re clear?”

  “For thirteen bottles of wine we paid as much in duty as it cost us to buy them,” Jeff said. “But at least we’re legal.”

  “Ouch,” I said as I untied the stern, untied the bow, and—with Captain Jeff easing Heron’s hull from the dock—pulled myself aboard.

  * * *

  Unlike the San Juan Islands—where environmental regulations and a kind of Northwest reverse snobbishness dictate that multimillion-dollar retreats peeked from between the trees to preserve the natural landscape—homes here perched boldly. Pender Island’s steep cliffs rose to bald banks capped by spyglass-view homes. We motored out of Bedwell Harbor, then ghosted past the long string-bean island of Galiano to starboard.

  After we stern-tied in a narrow finger of a cove at Wallace Island Marine Provincial Park—a maneuver that required nosing Heron through a lineup of a dozen other boats, calculating where to drop anchor with enough room for the boat to swing, then backing up, rowing a dinghy to shore with a piece of line spooling out from Heron’s stern, jumping off the dinghy, wrapping the line around a tree, rowing the dinghy back, then wrapping the end of that line around a stern cleat with enough length to allow for the tide’s rising or falling but not so much that we’d swing into our neighbors—I realized we were having a new and different, very concrete kind of fun. Nosing the fifty-four-foot Heron into the cove was no small feat, but it was intensely absorbing. In the moments after we’d completed this drill, actually dropping fifty feet of chain without any shouting (we’d developed a series of handsignals: one finger for fifty feet of chain, two fingers for a hundred feet, thumbs up for anchor set and holding), I looked up and noticed the wonder that surrounded us. There were rocky outcroppings layered like baklava leaves, and in the channel beyond them were rock piles blanketed by noisy seals and sea lions and their sausagelike pups. If you ventured too close to the harem, a big-nosed sea lion would poke abruptly from the water, deliver an outraged thunderous burp, and sink.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon reading on either side of the cockpit. I don’t remember what pages Jeff was turning; in honor of Salt Spring, the fertile island rising just to our west, I had High Endeavours: The Extraordinary Life and Adventures of Miles & Beryl Smeeton aboard. Brigadier Miles Smeeton and his wife, Beryl, were a famously daunting couple who settled on Salt Spring Island between their round-the-world adventures in the 1950s and ‘60s. I’d tracked down a copy of Once Is Enough—Miles’s account of their six-thousand-mile passage across the Southern Ocean, and subsequent pi
tchpoling and dismasting in a violent storm a thousand miles west of Cape Horn. In his understated way Miles invites you to vicariously step aboard their ketch Tzu Hang and right into their warm, sturdy marriage, with their mutual admiration for each other and lust for big waves, as well as long doses of undiluted solitude on the seas. As British novelist Nevil Shute wrote in his introduction to the book: “What can one say of a woman who, catapulted from the cockpit of a somersaulting yacht into the sea and recovered on board with a broken collarbone and a deep scalp cut, worked manually like a man with her broken bone and did not wash the blood from her hair and forehead for three weeks, judging that injuries left severely alone heal themselves best?”

  Heck, I didn’t know what to say about that except that Beryl was obviously a remarkable woman. Beautiful too. Inspired by their partnership and by Beryl’s adventuring, her willingness to think outside the box and buck every convention of her time, I’d adopted them and their romantic quest for hazardous adventure as role models of sorts. Not so much for the sailing feats they’d survived but for Beryl’s zest for life, her spirit. As Miles himself, forever self-deprecating, once observed: “If a flying-saucer landed in front of us and an insect hand beckoned us on board, she would step inside without hesitation, while I, distrustful and suspicious behind the nearest bush, would watch the door close and Beryl take off for infinity.”

  If I were honest with myself, I knew I was more tentative, like Miles. But I tried to keep an image of Beryl—of both of them, actually—in mind.

  Jeff and I had a code we’d use when things got rough: “What would the Smeetons do?” we’d say.

  TIDAL TIME

  The thing about sailing to the Great Bear Rainforest that was so profound to me that summer—and yet also, so very simple—was how pared down life aboard Heron was and yet how rich each moment felt as a result. How there were so few choices to make. Jeans or shorts? Sails up or down? Our job most days was simply to move on, to skim over the surface of the water, to get ourselves safely from point A to point B. Our focus was on calculating the tides and currents, on watching the weather. Our intent was to pay attention. We’d worried we might grow bored, but as we learned to navigate our new world, the hours, strangely, felt more full. In all marriages there is struggle, and ours was no different. But the anxiety I’d had about being alone as empty nesters began to dissipate as we learned to see each other anew. We were finding new ways to communicate, from shared hand signals to shared silences.

  On the fourth day we awoke to a sparkling morning, hauled up the anchor, and headed out to cross the Strait of Georgia. The wind was blowing a steady sixteen knots, and the air had “warmed” to sixty-eight degrees. The water waltzed with light chop. Nursing a cup of coffee in the cockpit, I squinted up at a cornflower-blue sky streaked with high cirrus clouds, noted the cool wind on my face. It all felt delicious, especially with the sun caressing my back, despite the bright red Mustang Survival inflatable life vest cinched around me. I felt capable and, frankly, pretty badass.

  “Jeff, you’d better get your life vest on…now!” I barked. “I’m raising the main.”

  “Who are you and what have you done with my wife?!” Jeff said. He laughed, dropping the bottle of Lexol he’d been using to polish the side rails and snapping to attention with mock exaggeration. “Jesus!”

  Then Jeff mimed a lazy-ass sailor, yawning, reluctantly turning his attention to the cockpit packed with its winches and lines.

  “Yeah, well the wind’s up, and it’s just right. You’d better get ready, bud.”

  We raised the mainsail. Then Jeff cleared all the lines for the jib, and we brought it out, followed by the staysail. Soon we were heeled over thirty degrees, humming along on a perfect close reach. Heron loves this point of sail, feels like she’s doing what she’s designed to do, her big hull rushing through the water with a determined sort of leaping, bounding over waves with clean rapidity. Hanging on to the helm, hands wide on the wheel, is the same sensation of speed and power you might have astride a sure-footed horse galloping across an open field. Except on the water, the steed is the magnificent Heron, the field as wide and blue as the sky.

  Out of nowhere our VHF radio crackled to life. “Heron, calling the sailing vessel Heron. Over.”

  Jeff and I looked at each other. Huh?

  “Heron, sailing vessel Heron. Over.”

  He reached for the radio clipped to the wheel stem. I hung on to the wheel. The port rail now angled precipitously toward the water, and I wedged my feet wide in the cockpit for balance. White spray flew past…

  “This is Heron,” Jeff said, then listened. “Well, thank you,” he went on, brightening. “That’s nice of you to radio over. It’s a Moody. A Moody 54.”

  There was only one other boat within sight, a sapphire-blue-hulled motor yacht; it had been approaching us for miles and was now passing to starboard in the opposite direction. Its captain had made the effort to radio and say how awesome Heron looked, all sails up on this tack, heeled over, displaying her white waterline stripes and fresh coat of red bottom paint. Gorgeous, he’d said.

  “Gosh, that was nice,” I said, after the call. “Well, she is gorgeous!”

  * * *

  By the morning of the fifth day, we’d forgotten what day of the week it was.

  “So it’s Thursday. Just in case you were wondering,” Jeff said. “August fifth.”

  “It is?” I replied.

  We were way outside normal time now. We’d crossed over into Tidal Time: a state of mind where time is determined more by the sun and the moon and the tide than anyone’s wristwatch, cell phone, or calendar. It had taken us four days of hard motoring north into BC waters to get here, plus a few days of shifting our physical and emotional states after that, letting go of the outside world with its system of engagement.

  There was no place we had to be. We felt light as mist. We felt giddy…free! We’d docked the night before in Pender Harbour, home to a community of artists and retirees drawn to the hilly coves and islands of BC’s Sechelt Peninsula. Now we were skimming across a bay in Heron’s inflatable dinghy, looking for the grocery store. Since the boys would be joining us three days hence, it seemed like a good idea to stock up on fruit and chips and maybe some Kokanee, a Canadian beer. (The drinking age in Canada is eighteen, so we let the boys drink on the boat—even though James wasn’t twenty-one, the drinking age in Washington State.)

  But that was the only place we had to be: meeting the boys’ floatplane on a dock at Cortes Island on August 8.

  That was our sole agenda.

  * * *

  We finally shoved off around one o’clock that day, motoring up Agamemnon Channel toward Jervis Inlet—one of the many great fjords and the deepest, dropping away to 2,402 feet beneath us—that cut into the BC interior. As I surveyed the land, more mountainous here but also defined by these dramatic fjords, I realized we’d come far enough by then that the terrain had begun to change. The landscape around us was still dark forest-green, but the towering conifers blanketed entire mountains instead of capping rockbound islands. Occasionally, we’d spy an outpost of a cabin clamped hard as a barnacle to rock in a cleared section of trees. But mostly, to both port and starboard, rugged hillsides cloaked in aromatic cedar, spruce, and hemlock rose straight out of the water. There was no beach between forest and sea; the trees simply took over where the water stopped. Beyond them an infinity of mountains extended into the distance.

  With the sun warming the day to temperatures in the low seventies, we shed our fleece, layer by layer. Off came the baseball caps and Gore-Tex. Out came the sunscreen. The water was glassy, its surface taut as cellophane. Before long we were stripped down to nothing but T-shirts and jeans, munching lunch from plates balanced on our laps: mixed-greens salad topped with chopped apple and hazelnuts. We put Heron on autopilot and kicked back in the cockpit, feeling like we had everything we needed stowed aboard and could just keep going—cruise to Alaska and then cross the Pacific maybe, no pr
oblem.

  “Nectarine?” I asked, grandly. “Chocolate chip cookie?”

  “Sure, why not?” Jeff grinned. “How about both?”

  After about nine miles we reached the junction of Agamemnon Channel and Jervis Inlet, turning west into Jervis’s wide mouth. We then not only left Heron on autopilot but also—since the water was so deep and the fjord nearly half a mile wide—both left the cockpit, each of us riding one of the boat’s burnished teak seats that together form a pair of perches mounted on opposite sides of the stern. We were pointed toward the distant peaks of Vancouver Island, and beyond that, the Pacific rolling all the way to Japan. With fifty-four feet of Heron floating before me, I felt powerful riding into the sun, sort of like an Egyptian queen being ferried down the Nile.

  “I love this!” I shouted across to Jeff, spreading my arms.

  “This is where all civilization breaks down!” he shouted back, smiling.

  As it turned out, he wasn’t that far off. Since we’d pretty much left civilization behind already, all that was left now was the breakdown.

  ETCH-A-SKETCHED IN BLIND BAY

  Small stunted pines sprouted from the islands and their windswept escarpments. We motored through them slowly, checking depths, noting the other boats already anchored, debating where a good spot for Mighty Heron might be. Like we did most days, we’d considered the various anchoring options described in our cruising guides, calculated distances, checked our charts, and decided together beforehand where we’d go. We were prepared. Descriptions of the forty-two-acre Hardy Island Marine Provincial Park sounded alluring: “Provides a small protected anchorage…The warm, clean and green waters surrounding the area are reminiscent of a more tropical place.”