Two Feathers in Our Caps

February-March 2006

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
To download a pdf copy of the magazine click here: > DOWNLOAD

by Lyn Hancock

The Pacific coast of Vancouver Island has innumerable idyllic beaches.

The ultimate marine adventure on Vancouver Island must surely be to round Cape Scott and Cape Cook, especially by kayak. High winds, strong currents, mountainous seas, hidden reefs and rocks, and a shoreline that inhibits landings combine to make these capes two of the most dangerous places on the coast. Mariners who round Vancouver Island’s ‘Cape Horns’ consider them feathers in their caps. I already had a few feathers myself, from my experience here four decades ago, in a Federal Fisheries patrol boat, a fish boat, even a rubber boat—but never in a kayak.

So I jumped at the chance of joining nine other kayakers and two canoeists, all members of the Nanaimo Paddlers club, on an 18-day expedition from Port Hardy to Zeballos, almost 300 kilometers, last summer. We were to benefit from the detailed preparation and practical experience of our leader Glenn Lewis, and we committed to staying in a group, getting up dark and early, sometimes as early as 4 am, to avoid gale-force winds that can spring up on summer afternoons.

I had a special reason for joining the group. In the 1960s, I had lived on Triangle Island off Cape Scott, and on Solander Island off Cape Cook, while studying, filming and collecting seabirds for the New York Zoological Society and white-footed mice for the University of British Columbia. These two seabird colonies are the most important breeding areas for seabirds in BC, and now have been protected as ecological reserves. Millions of puffins, murres, auklets, petrels and pigeon guillemots nest on these precipitous cliffs each year, yet most people have never seen these intriguing birds. In the decades that had passed since my time on Triangle and Solander Islands, I had never seen a puffin and seldom a murre. Now was my chance.

We expected bad weather sometime during out trip, but not at the outset, while still in Hardy Bay. Within minutes of launching our heavily laden boats, we found ourselves spread far apart fighting 20–25 knot headwinds, white-capped waves and the incoming tide. It was impossible to make our intended campsite on Balaklava Island across Goletas Channel before dark. Fog rolled in, the seas worsened, landfall smudged into oblivion and we crept cold and exhausted into a dismal gravel beach behind Duval Island instead.

We did not reach any of our planned campsites for almost a week. Strong wind and confusing currents, drenching rain and a lack of suitable landing sites plagued our journey as we crisscrossed Goletas Channel, sought the protection of Nigei and Hope Islands, crossed the infamous Nahwhitti Bar, rejoined Vancouver Island and worked our way around the top. In an effort to catch up to our schedule, we found ourselves doing long days in arduous conditions, almost 35 kilometers one day. So much for paddling in the morning and relaxing in the afternoon!

Ironically, we saw more wildlife in the worst weather of that first week than later, when calm seas, hot sun and gorgeous beaches distracted our attention. And Glenn, John, Joan and Ted kept us well fed with various kinds of fish.

Dozens of bald eagles peered down in pairs from lofty trees. Several humpback whales breached. I was fascinated by the distinctive white eyes in their tails when they slapped the water before each dive. A lone minke whale foraged around us but its spouts kept eluding my camera as did the breaches and tail slaps of the humpbacks. We even saw sea otters, a species that was non-existent in BC during my earlier travels, evidence that these endearing mammals are expanding their range, not only down the west coast but now around the top of Vancouver Island into the Inside Passage. Innumerable rafts of rhinoceros auklets bobbed on the waves, more than I have ever seen, probably from Pine Island at the northeast end of Vancouver Island. In the sixties we recorded the first observations of rhinos on Triangle Island.

The north coast of Vancouver Island is characterized by long crescents of fine, white, sandy beaches—Cape Sutil, Shuttleworth Bight, Nissen Bight, Nels Bight—but they were all hidden from our view by incessant heavy rain, and our strategy of paddling point to point to save time and to avoid rocks and surf landings.

Glenn led us to Experiment Bight tucked behind Cape Scott so we could wait in safety and comparative comfort for the best weather to round the first of our Cape Horns. You can’t see the lighthouse from either the landside or the waterside unless you hike over the eerie, Tolkienesque sandbar from Experiment Bight on the north side of the cape to Guise Bay on the south side, and then through the rainforest on what’s left of a wooden corduroy road built in World War II for the Cape Scott radar station. The lighthouse keepers knew we were coming, but their position on a hill in the trees hid us from their radar screen—little comfort if, while rounding the cape, we dumped under their noses.

It was humbling to remember that this desolate but magnificent coastline had been the home of up to a thousand Danish settlers a hundred years ago, and to several First Nations villages for thousands of years before that.

A dramatic storm erupted that night but by morning the wind was light, so despite still heaving seas, we decided to use slack tide to attempt Cape Scott. Glenn played it safe. Responding to his signals, we advanced as a flotilla in sets of three for an hour-long rollercoaster ride through Scott Channel. To our left, surf crashed and spumed on jagged black rocks; to our right, rollers crested just out of reach; ahead a formidable line of standing waves threatened to topple us. My companions would disappear into troughs below me then reappear above. It was incredible but comforting to realize that if we trusted our kayaks and kept calm, the huge waves just rolled underneath us.

My exhilaration was tempered by my disappointment in not taking photographs while passing the Scott Islands, especially Triangle Island whose familiar pyramidal hump lay on the horizon. I knew my mates would not relish me dropping my paddle and lifting my sprayskirt to fumble for cameras in these rolling seas.

As we rounded the famed Cape Scott, we had no chance to celebrate. Hour after hour we paddled south—Hansen Bay, Cape Russell, Sea Otter Cove, San Josef Bay—far out to sea to make up for lost time and to avoid the perilous coastline. We traveled the misty landscape with Steller’s sea lions porpoising beside us and seabirds flying overhead, in incessant rain and glistening hailstones that bounced on our decks like giant golfballs.

Striking scenery, few communities and only the occasional paddler.

Drenched, cold, tired and hungry, we aborted our plan to reach a campsite in Raft Cove and surged ashore to set up our tents just east of Cape Palmerston instead. Perhaps it was due to our sun dance, but the next day the rain stopped, the sun came out, we draped our sodden gear over the rocks and after two days, we finally dried out.

We still had our second challenge ahead—Cape Cook. But we rejoiced, especially me (an Aussie) that the next seven days were superb—dry, sunny and warm, though not necessarily calm. They were days in which I discovered that the seldom-visited white sand beaches of Vancouver Island’s west coast are like the beaches in Western Australia that I knew as a kid. I have long been familiar with the beaches between Ucluelet and Tofino, but I was not prepared for so many stunning, but much less accessible, expanses of white sand, each one better than the one before, with heart-thumping prints of bears, wolves, cougars and raccoons to be found on the sands each morning.

We paddled south, camping in Grant Bay, Restless Bight, Side Bay and—best of all—the beaches of the Brooks Peninsula, a massive rectangular chunk of land that juts 13 kilometers out to sea. Such beaches are invariably fronted by a minefield of hidden rocks and reefs, guarded by sea stacks and islets, lined by surf, and bookended by rugged headlands. Some of them were elusive pocket beaches that we didn’t believe existed till Glenn led us in. Most are unnamed.

One of my favorites is just south of Aster Bay on the north side of Brooks, a place that Glenn called Ambrosia Beach, an appropriate name because that is what it is—ambrosia for the body and ambrosia for the soul. It’s really a string of three beaches, two of which form a tombola at low tide. At such times you can walk for several kilometers along a seamless beach that looks out to Hackett and Guilliams Islands, scope out seabirds and sea otters, or just sit and contemplate the picturesque scenery.

It was hard to leave the Ambrosia beaches but we could not relax properly till we had cleared Cape Cook. Ever since Grant Bay, a long cape of white cloud, with tiny Solander Island off its tip, had been beckoning us. Crossing Brooks Bay, we experienced white-capped seas and rogue waves (Richard was almost side-swiped by an unexpected boomer). But I only had eyes for the birds.

“Tufted puffin overhead!” I shouted gleefully the moment I recognized a colorful sea parrot whose gaudy orange beak, clown-like white face and golden tassels are better known on Canada’s Atlantic coast than here in BC. Only Joan, who never misses a wildlife sighting, understood my ecstasy.

I had seen my first puffin in 1964 on Solander Island, where 300,000 pairs of tufted puffins and some horned puffins nest. Mated birds, using their beaks as pickaxes and their feet as shovels, dig tunnels into the grassy hillsides to lay their eggs. I had felt my first puffin when my researcher husband told me to stuff my arm into a burrow. It was an adult who latched onto my glove with a vice-like beak that gripped my fingers to the bone. I preferred to feel the black, fluff-ball chicks, four of whom I raised in a box back in Victoria, the first puffins to be raised successfully in captivity.

That day in Brooks Bay, as whole troupes of puffins flew in formation above our kayaks, I whooped for joy. But we saw fewer of them as we rounded Cape Cook and later learned that very few puffins bred in 2005, the lowest count on record.

Since my time there years before, a weather station had been erected on Solander Island, and Glenn, ever cautious, kept in constant contact with it as we approached. He had been soliciting weather data since he had awakened at 3 am. The wind was blowing 20 knots but waves were only one or two meters high. He said it was going to get much worse. “Some of you may not feel comfortable in these waters and winds,” he cautioned. “If you don’t want to go through, say so, and we’ll return the 12 kilometers or so to Ambrosia Beach.”

Despite the delights of Ambrosia Beach, none of us were prepared to return in the Kamloops Kelowna Trail Vancouver Victoria Striking scenery, few communities and only the occasional paddler. hopes of better weather another time. We were Vikings all. We had faith in our leader.

We formed our flotilla and paddled on. Just when we had passed through the worst of the waves off Cape Cook, Jean came to a sudden stop, the nose of her kayak wrapped completely in heavy fronds of bull kelp. She tried to cut through them with her paddle but she was too entangled and her knife was in her deck bag, also wound in kelp. She tugged, she pulled, she lifted, and just before we arrived to help, she finally escaped.

Lyn on Hammock Beach, showing off her Aussie style.

Mindful of the downside of kelp, we nevertheless took advantage of the calmer waters within the kelp beds and thus made our way round Cape Cook safely.

We had now successfully rounded our two Cape Horns and added two feathers to our caps!

We’d earned a rest and rest we did on the south side of the Brooks Peninsula, just west of Jackobsen Point. I call it Hammock Beach because earlier campers had erected a hammock of fishnet and driftwood lumber which I commandeered for almost a whole day, thanks to my tolerant paddle mates.

Here my fellow paddlers scurried to find shade in the rain forest while I hot-footed it (literally) down to the ocean. Low tide had exposed an enormous stretch of white sand which ended in a sheet of shimmering aquamarine glass. I washed my hair and bathed in water that felt like silk, imagining myself a kid again Down Under.

There was much more to come on this trip, including an encounter with bears which wouldn’t leave two of our campsites, a sea otter that foraged beside our camp near McLean Island, ‘Miss Charlie’ at Kyuquot (the famous harbor seal I had first met there almost 40 years ago), and three days of perpetual fog between Kyuquot and Espinosa Inlet which we navigated thanks to a variety of methods—GPS, charts, remembered experience, latitude, longitude, guesswork. This trip could have been a book!

© Lyn Hancock is the author of There’s a Seal in my Sleeping Bag and There’s a Raccoon in my Parka, the story of her travels around the BC coast by plane and rubber boat in the 1960s, studying the creatures of the coast. You can get a copy of the updated version of There’s a Seal in my Sleeping Bag by contacting her at lynhancock@shaw.ca. She lives in Lantzville on Nanoose Bay, on the east coast of Vancouver Island