by Pat Ardley
Many years later, there was a fellow living in the inlet who was selling the newest satellite system from Galaxy. I bought the equipment, and he set it up for a total cost of about six hundred dollars. He helped our caretakers work out any kinks and was always available if they ran into any problems, which were few and far between. This system was on one small satellite and the telephone system worked off the internet, which was wireless and much more reliable. A letter from Martha Stewart would no longer be a surprise, as we have now joined the new age of communications. The only problem was that if the internet was down, then the phone didn’t work either. This company has a Fair Access Policy (fap) and if you used too much bandwidth, the company would fap you, which meant shutting down your access to the internet for a full hour. With so many crew now bringing their laptops and guests often wanting to go online, there were quite a few times that the internet was down. We had to put controls in place that limited what the crew could do online. No more downloading movies and uploading photos to their Facebook pages. This smoothed out the works, and other than on very cloudy days or very rainy days or very sunny days, the internet worked just fine. We could contact equipment people, grocery suppliers, airlines and guests and generally run the business the way that it should’ve been run.
Relative Calm
It was now 1991, and we had built up our clientele to the point that we filled all twelve guestrooms with twenty-four guests who were arriving from all over the world. These visitors would be flown on two chartered Harbour Air Twin Otters straight from Vancouver. We had barrels of jet fuel on the dock so the Twin Otters could fuel up and would not have to stop to refuel on the trip back to Vancouver.
We had twelve staff plus me and George, and our kids were nine and six and were both great helpers. We had a new fleet of custom-built sixteen-foot speedboats with fifty-horsepower motors on each. The boats had smooth sides and gunnels so the large fishnets wouldn’t have any points to get caught on while netting “the big one”—super-sized chinook and coho. Each boat had a top that easily snapped into place if it suddenly started to rain. Theoretically, each boat could hold four fishermen, but we had twelve plus two extras so we had one for every two guests.
We ordered golf shirts for our crew to wear when they were working. Each shirt had the person’s name embroidered on the front. Little Jessy, honoured to be considered part of the crew, looked down in anticipation at her shirt and noticed that her life jacket covered up her name. There is a long-standing tradition for people living on floats that children have to wear a life jacket while they are outside. They are allowed to remove the jacket only when they are able to swim the full length of the floats, fully clothed, and climb out on their own. This was a very tall order because, by this time, our floats covered an extensive area, and it would be a long swim in drastically cold water. Casey had managed this swim a few years before. Jess had to have her name showing on her crew shirt, so she didn’t hesitate as she stepped out of her life jacket and headed to the far end of the last guesthouse and jumped in. After gasping for breath for a minute or two, Jessy started swimming. George, Casey and I and several crew walked along with her, calling encouragement when she started to slow down. She finally approached the boathouse at the extreme opposite end of the lodge floats and, with a beatific grin on her face, hauled herself out onto the last lash log on the last float and triumphantly marched past the crowd amid a huge round of applause and went back to work on the dock.
We still had our wonderful chef, Peter, who cooked lunch and dinner for our guests for five summers. He worked for one of our guests’ companies cooking in the oil fields of northern Alberta for the winter when we were closed. He loved coming back to cook for our fancy-schmancy guests who appreciated his fine food. In the oil fields, he had men hand broccoli soup back to him with the question, “What is this shit?”
One afternoon Peter was preparing racks of lamb. As he was working on the bones, Casey asked him what he was doing. Peter replied, “I’m getting the lamb ready to cook later.” Casey was startled and asked with dismay, “Do you mean you kill lambs?” Peter took time to think carefully how to word his reply. “It’s okay,” he said, “we only kill the stupid ones.” This seemed reasonable to Casey and he wandered away to drum up some business for his Wilderness Tours. On changeover days, Casey made a small fortune by towing guests in a separate rowboat while he rowed them around my island and sometimes into the back of the bay, all the while providing a running commentary about what the guests were seeing in the sky, on the land and along the shore. He also charged Peter one dollar for a handful of cedar branches to decorate the buffet table with. He made us so proud!
We also had a breakfast cook that summer who was up at 3 AM every morning to start getting breakfast ready and then baked bread, cookies and desserts after the guests headed out fishing. She prepared the snacks that went out on the boats with the guests in the morning and afternoon.
Things were going very well. They were going so well that George started feeling antsy. The crew worked like a well-oiled machine. There was a fellow hired to do most of the fish master job, but George still ran around in the boat when he wanted to give the fish master a break or when he took guests out in the afternoon for scenic tours. The fish master was in charge of bait runs and lunch runs and making sure that guests were catching fish. But with everything going so smoothly, George started thinking up new projects.
Casey made a small fortune by towing guests in a separate rowboat while he rowed them around my island and sometimes into the back of the bay, all the while providing a running commentary about what the guests were seeing in the sky, on the land, along the shore and in the shallow water.
He said to the kids, “My God, aren’t we lucky? We could be living in Lebanon. Instead, here we are in the middle of a huge forested, coastal wilderness area. We can construct our own laws up here. We can build our own business here. We live by doing what we think is right—there aren’t many places like this left in the world.”
He loved the adrenaline rush of having to race against time, and having to keep lots of balls in the air while the odds were stacked against him. I, on the other hand, enjoyed the well-oiled machine. I wanted to be able to take the time to be with the children. I thought that by now I should be able to sit and read a book in the quiet afternoon.
Given the large population of grizzly bears behind Addenbroke Island, George thought we could add grizzly watching to our list of activities. At the end of the summer season he chartered a float plane and packed it with a tent, sleeping bags, a small rowboat, shovels and a little food. He and Casey then flew to Elizabeth Lake, which was only accessible by air. They were dropped off at the edge of the lake, and the pilot was instructed to pick them up in four days. The small beach was covered with grizzly bear footprints—a fact that I was blissfully unaware of until much later. I didn’t want any part of this excursion. I felt that I was far enough out in the wilderness without chartering a plane to take me even deeper into the hills. Jessy and I had our own lovely time. We spent hours in the garden and my new greenhouse. We went around visiting friends for tea and playtime. We had the playschool at our house. We cooked together and had fancy dinners at the dining room table. We also spent some deluxe afternoon time reading. First I would read to Jess and then we would each read on our own, or Jessy would draw to her heart’s content, as she was developing a talent for everything artistic.
The grizzly-watching plan was put on hold. The cost of flying guests even farther into the middle of nowhere was going to be too high. The next plan was to offer painting retreats. We sold out five-day trips with four well-known artists, including Robert Genn and Mike Svob, who taught the workshops, and George and Jessy would run them around to the interesting canneries or beaches in the inlet. These retreats were a tremendous success. People who signed up were over the moon at the chance to work with such great painters in such a beautiful setting. But once again, it was
the airfare that ended the workshops. Why would people pay such a huge cost to be flown to a workshop when there were ones that could be driven to? It was too bad, though, because these trips could help with the shoulder months of our fishing seasons. We needed the people whose eyes light up with anticipation when talking about flying to Rivers Lodge for the fishing.
Sometimes we brought in helicopters. The chef would pack a picnic lunch and guests would be flown onto the glaciers at the head of the inlet. I flew with one group and felt that I had entered a prehistoric land.
In 1992 we built a new tackle shop on a float that jutted way out from the rest of the floats. It had plenty of room on it for a helicopter to land. Sometimes we brought helicopters in for adventures during the summer. The chef packed a beautiful basket with a delicious lunch, and the helicopter would fly guests up onto the glaciers at the head of the inlet. I put a red-and-white check tablecloth and napkins in the basket to create a lovely visual contrast when the cloth was spread out on the snow at the edge of the ice. I went on one of these trips and felt like I had been teleported to a prehistoric land. I expected to see dinosaurs ambling over the next mountain peak.
Helicopter river fishing—George in the foreground. Some very wealthy companies and individuals loved river fishing away from it all. As it just so happened, they needed a fishing guide. George had to be with the guests every trip.
Some groups also booked the helicopter to transport them to remote rivers for flyfishing that was even more “away from it all.” One long-time guest, Adrien, booked a trip in the late spring to take him and his girlfriend out to the beautiful, long sandy beach on the west side of Calvert Island called Bolivar Beach. The beach would be all their own for the day since it was virtually inaccessible other than by helicopter. The pilot dropped them off with a basket of lunch and a bottle of champagne and flew back to the lodge. Adrien proposed to his girlfriend in this most romantic of settings and when they flew back later, she was wearing a stunning emerald engagement ring.
That same afternoon, George and I had walked across the stiff legs from behind the second guesthouse and over to shore to check on the big water tanks up the hill. The tanks sat on an area just out of sight, amongst the trees, so someone needed to check on them regularly. The odd time the water would stop running in the pipes, and we would find that a grizzly had chewed its way through one of the black lines. You could tell when it was a grizzly because of the size of the bite. One time George found one of our flotation barrels that once held forty-five gallons of apple juice concentrate with the bite mark of a grizzly. Its huge jaws squashed the side of the heavy plastic barrel.
Back to our romantic jaunt in the woods. We checked the lines and everything looked fine. We had to head back before the tide went out too far or the log we crossed would be too steep. My boots were not as secure as George’s, and as we headed down and across the log he took my hand. He said, “Keep low,” and a surge of warmth went through me for my darling who was being so considerate. Then he said, “ ’cause if you start to fall, I’m letting go!”
The Next Big Step and Half of One
School was becoming more important. The correspondence teachers actually expected Casey to show good results with his work, and now Jessy was school age. Rivers Lodge was showing results for us as well. I was the one who did the accounting so I started actually paying George and myself real wages. All of my paycheques went into an account that would hopefully become a down payment on a house in town. We wanted to spend a little more time in Vancouver, so we rented an apartment on a short-term basis in the area we were most familiar with and where lots of our friends lived, which was West Vancouver. We knew where we wanted to live so I scouted out the nearby elementary schools to find the right fit. Casey was enrolled in one and attended for two months in the fall and again for two months in the spring. The following year, I wanted to spend a longer time in each place, Rivers Lodge and West Vancouver, because moving the office was so complicated. I needed to work on our accounts and George needed to keep in touch with guests, so there was always a lot of paperwork that kept us busy. We stayed four months, including right through the Christmas season that year. The next year we stayed for five months and we started looking for a house to buy.
We had watched as other couples raised their children in the inlet and then moved to town when they were school age. We had thought that we wouldn’t do that because we were happy away from the city and schooling didn’t seem, at that time, as if it could pose a problem. Funny how your life changes when you have kids. I was more than ready to have some fun city time, so the two situations meshed very well for me. Before we packed up for town that fall, our friends in Whistler let us know that the cabin next to them was for sale. We jumped at the chance to have a place in ski country. We were both avid skiers, and the kids enjoyed skiing, tobogganing and snowball fighting when we stayed with friends there. Being from the Prairies with those long, long, freezing-cold and snow-piled winters, I appreciated driving the hour and a half to enjoy some fun in the snow and then the short drive back to West Vancouver with its green grass. We bought the cabin and put the city house on hold for the moment. We liked to live by George’s credo: Eat your dessert first.
Around 1995, George started to think that opening another fishing resort was a good idea. He found a piece of property just outside of Port Hardy that was perfect and then started on the paperwork. This was going to be very different from building a resort in Rivers Inlet. Nearly twenty years before when we started Rivers Lodge, we didn’t need permits for anything. In Port Hardy, there were so many government offices to deal with, so many officials to meet with, so many permits to obtain that this project was going to take a massive amount of time and energy. He worked with my sister Marcia’s husband, Murray, on a design for the main building that would blend in with the surrounding trees and hills. George applied for water rights to be able to use the fresh water that was on the property. He checked out what forms were necessary to use the foreshore for a dock. He was working his way through one layer after another of bureaucracy and getting bogged down in this new project close to civilization, where every step needed a stack of permits and licences.
After our second season of skiing whenever we wanted, George started to rethink the new project, which was to be called Silver Point Resort. Did he really want to put that much effort into filing all those permits, following all the new regulations, flying from the lodge to Port Hardy and back throughout the year? We were having fun, and as Marcia always said, “Fun is the best thing to have!” All that work and back-and-forthing would cut into our Fun Time. We decided not to continue with the plans. We did, however, continue with the paperwork, started ten years earlier, for a foreshore lease for the property we were floating over in Sleepy Bay, including the area where our tie-up lines crossed over to shore. (Twelve years later, and long after we had abandoned the plan near Port Hardy, we received notice that our application for the water rights for Silver Point Resort was not approved.)
In the meantime, we had a whole lot of fun!
Boats Break Down
It was now 1996. I was invited to my nephew’s wedding in Winnipeg on the BC Day long weekend in the middle of the summer. I replied, “not able to attend.” There wasn’t enough room to explain why.
Quinn and Jen, this is why! We had twenty-six people booked for the long weekend. We usually took twenty-four guests at a time but we could fit an extra bed into two of the rooms if necessary. The planes full of visitors arrived on Friday afternoon. Guests were shown to their rooms then came back to the lodge for a quick bite to eat while they filled out fishing licences. Then the new guests were given a tutorial on how to hook up bait and—very important—how to net a really big salmon. The crew had all of the boats ready, cleaned and fuelled, with snack in the front, bait and tackle box at the side. They helped the guests pick out their preferred fishing rod or they redid line on rods that guests brought wit
h them. Then, after a quick lesson on running the boat, they headed out, following George to the fishing grounds.
At this time, the crew changed all the beds and cleaned all the bathrooms again. Earlier in the day, the rooms were cleaned but the bed linens would not be changed until the new guests arrived. There would be several hours that the guests would have to wait for their return flight while the crew looked after cleaning and fuelling the boats, boxing the guests’ fish and moving the luggage out to the airport. The guests would have time for lunch before they left and, sometimes, guests would go back into their rooms for a nap. We found that changing the sheets after the new group arrived cut down on the number of beds that had to be changed twice. I helped put the fresh produce away that came in with the guests, and the chef started working on the evening’s four-course dinner. I heard one of the guests calling the lodge to say their boat engine had stopped working. I called them back and let them know that Jessy, who was now eleven, would head out with another boat for them to use. It was a good thing we had a couple of extra boats and motors by then. Jess and the guests would change boats out on the water and leave Jess drifting in a broken-down boat. As I passed the VHF a few minutes later, I would hear another boat, then another calling to say their motor had stopped working. Casey, who was now fourteen years old, headed out towing another spare boat and helped one of the couples climb into it while George picked up the other two fishermen and helped them fish from Sportspage. They left the three boats drifting with Jessy in one of them. Are you confused yet?
I must interject: all of these motors were either brand new or had been meticulously worked over by a mechanic before they were carefully stored in town during the winter. We’d have them shipped back to the lodge, where George would hoist them back onto the speedboats, then test each one to make sure it was running like a fine watch.