PART 2 - Seattle to Heriot Bay
May 30th - Day 1
I took an uber to the Miami airport. My flight was delayed for three hours, because of heavy afternoon downpours, and would not be in Seattle until the early morning. It was a full flight. I was placed in the middle seat in between two obese fellows who hogging the arm rests on either side. I closed my eyes hoping to catch some sleep and prayed the fat guy by the window would not need to get out to use the bathroom.
From the Seattle/Tacoma airport I took another uber to Lake Stevens and met with David, got my kayak to finally begin the journey. It was an almost two hour ride even without much traffic. I did not know that the Seattle metropolitan area was so big.
David was waiting for me outside his house. “Welcome to Seattle! I’m excited for your trip! I wish I could be doing that, but I’m afraid I’m getting married in July.”
“Oh, my condolences to you!” I said with a half-deadpanned look. Perhaps this was not the best joke to make with someone you’ve never met before who is giving you an enormous amount of help, but thankfully he cracked with laughter at my dark humor.
“We’ll go to my warehouse and get a look at your boat. I didn’t get around to opening any of the bags, so I am curious to see what a three-piece kayak looks like.”
We had a quick drive to the warehouse where, to my great delight, I set eyes on my familiar kayak bags. Everything looked fine. “Here are the things you ordered,” David said as he handed me a box with the new GPS unit and fiberglass repair kit.
I was immediately reminded of the missing GPS unit I had been looking for all over my house.. I opened the Kayak bag with the cockpit section, found the dry bag with the electronics and poured out the contents. The missing GPS unit wasn’t there.
“I was totally convinced it would be here.” I mumbled. I was confident I’d be recouping the money and now I felt like I had just lost $400, again.
“It is what it is. Where could that GPS unit be?” I never found it.
I started to unpack my other items.
“How are you getting to the water?”
“Oh, I marked a boat ramp on the Snohomish River. It’s about 6 miles from here. I figured that I would make a portage to get there.” I showed David the marker on Google Earth. He looked at the screen on my phone, and his expression was not encouraging.
“You guys in Miami must not know what a hill is. That ramp is at least a four hour walk with your kayak and is probably not the best place. It will be quite late by the time you launch. Let’s do this, I’ll drive you down to Everett. There’s a big marina there, and the waterfront has several hotels. You can then decide what to do.”
That was wise advice. Having barely slept the night before, my rhythm had been running on adrenaline fumes for the start of the journey.
As soon as we loaded the kayak on the roof rack and were on our way I fell asleep in the car.
“You know David, I think I’ll launch tomorrow. I’m tired, and I haven’t even decided how I’m going to arrange everything I have to fit in the kayak, probably best I don’t rush things on the first day.”
“Yeah, probably better. That’s when bad stuff happens. I’ll drop you off at this really good hotel. It’s where most of the folks at my wedding will be staying. I’ll tell them you’re a friend, and they can probably get you a deal and keep the kayak for the night.”
May 31st - Day 2 - Launch Day
David was right. The front desk lady was extremely accommodating. She put the kayak in their ballroom and acted though my needs were nothing more complicated than a request for an extra bathing towel. I had all the space I could ever need to spread out my gear, and plan how I would pack it all in.
I slept without stress for most of the afternoon and night, and only woke up at 4:00am the next day when my bowels told me to get out of bed. . My biological clock was still running three hours ahead.
The first day of any expedition is best used to get the rhythm of things that will need to become routine. My first task was to set up the new GPS. I called Inreach at 5:00am (8am on the east coast), and had the operator run through the activation and syncing process. To my delight there were no issues, and I felt relieved to do this now rather than the day before.
The next task was to arrange all the gear. I had been so busy with work, back home that I had taken on faith that things would work themselves out.
If there is a saint that looks after kayakers, he must have been watching over me. Everything fit inside just right, and there was even a little bit of room to spare. I put the kayak on the dolly, packed all the gear, and was just about ready to start wheeling things when I noticed that my GPS charging cable was still attached to the computer in the hotel lobby.
“That could have been a terrible headache.” I thought.
I quickly packed it with all the other items and gave one last run down of my bedroom and the lobby, to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything.
I pulled the kayak behind me through the hotel front door and turned down the small road that led to the waterfront boat parking lot, and headed for the boat ramp.
I thought about all the challenges that lay ahead and for the first time had a strange feeling. Barely a weekend had gone by, but my mind felt rested from the daily grind of work as though considerably more time had already passed. I’ve experienced this time dilation effect before. The last time it happened was at the beginning of the Puerto Rico journey. Suddenly, when daily life is no longer on autopilot, your mind becomes present in the moment and aware of every aspect of what you’re doing. Eventually it wears out after a few days, once you are in a new routine, but in the moment things are changing, it feels like drinking a caffeinated drink for the first time.
“Let’s get on the water and paddle and see.” I told myself. “And then when tomorrow comes, it comes. I’ll think about tomorrow when it becomes today.”
I stowed the gear into the kayak hatches (and somehow not quite the same way I had done back in the hotel), put on the dry suit, eased the back of the kayak into the turbid water of the marina, and took the first of what would be at least a hundred thousand more paddle strokes.
“Oh darn, I have two right-handed gloves,” I noticed as I dressed them on. I must have put both the left hands in the back hatch by accident, well they would be staying there for today, I was not getting out to do a relaunch.
After a few minutes, I had to stop paddling.
“The life jacket is too tight.” I moaned out loud. Obviously, I hadn’t adjusted it to account for the extra bulk of the dry suit. I reached behind my back and released the tension on one of the straps, for a moment of instant gratification.
Finally, I felt comfortable enough to get in a paddle rhythm. The water was flat like a mirror, and I was gliding like a sharp knife slicing butter. As I paddled along, I noticed a few seals swimming in the water. I had never seen seals in the wild before.
They stopped what they were doing and looked towards me with only their heads poking above the water. Their dark black eyes focused on me like the periscope of a submarine.
Their curiosity did not last long, however, and once satisfied that I wasn’t something that would produce any food, they dove into the murky water and were not seen again. I learned from my guidebook that they are Harbor Seals, because they are most often seen around harbors, but I would venture to rename them as Burrito Seals or Chipotle Seals. Their sink color and dapple spots very much resembles a tortilla, and their body shape is puffy and cylindrical like a Mexican wrap. And for an orca, I am sure they must have a fair amount of juicy meat like a burrito filled with pulled pork. Perhaps that was the reason they dove away so quickly when I approached; I must have given them a famished wolf kind of stare, that said, “If you come a little closer, I’ll show you that the orcas aren’t the only things that will eat you.”
I paddled a total of seventeen miles.. The headwind picked up considerably soon after my meeting with the seals, every mile after the encounter was earned with considerable effort, but also very satisfying. I slept better in my tent this first night than any other night in the past month when all I did was work in front of a computer screen all day.
June 1st - Day 3
Last night after I had set up camp, a group of folks at the adjacent campsite offered me beans and tortillas for dinner. I gladly accepted, but I think that when kayaking in cold climates, heavy Mexican food may not be advisable. I farted all day long inside my dry suit, and the couple of times I bled out the air the smell was particularly awful.
There was almost no wind today. The only waves came from the boats crossing the sound. By midday I was feeling quite hot and overdressed. I decided this would be a good time to practice a few rolls with the loaded kayak. I dipped into the chilly water, and felt immediately refreshed, but after the third roll, I started to get brain chills as though I had swallowed a large amount of ice-cream.
There were several jet fighters whizzing around in the sky. They always seemed to come in pairs, and their arrival was preceded by a loud thundering rumble. I saw on the map that there’s a military base nearby so that must be where they must have come from, though what they were out to do I do not know.
June 2nd - Day 4
I wondered if this morning I should do a visual inspection of Deception Pass from the Bridge that crosses the strait to see what I was about to get into. I had previously heard that the waters at the throat of the pass can be very treacherous and are full of tidal whirlpools and boils that can change almost from minute to minute and even motorboats can have difficulty making headway against the current. David gave me a warning about it.
“When you get there, you’ll see that there is an island right in the middle of the pass, one side is narrower than the other. The narrow side is rougher, but that is the side most kayakers go through as motorboats favor the wider side, where there is some room for maneuvering. Once you pick a side there is no going back, you can’t fight the current.”
I was camped on Hope Island about three miles from the pass. The water was calm like a lake with hardly any perceptible movement. The high tide had been about half an hour before and so the currents had not yet had much time to develop.
I decided to switch today from the wing paddle which I had used the past two days to the euro blade which gives me a bit more stability on the water, and for good measure, put on my helmet and decided to practice a few more rolls.
To my disappointment, I did not roll back up and had to do a wet cowboy reentry. The rolling techniques of the euro and wing paddles are slightly different, and it takes a few trial rounds to become accustomed to one when you’ve been paddling with the other for a while. I hadn’t paddled with the euro blade in several months.
After getting back in the boat I debated if I should try again. The water was extremely cold, and this extended dip (which was barely 20 seconds) had my core chilled, breathing heavily and yet sluggish.
“I don’t think I want to try this again for now.” I thought. “Better to get going while the tide was still weak and ebbing.”
I decided that I would inch my way to the pass slowly and carefully observing the water so I could judge the conditions. When I got sight of the bridge over the pass, I extended my neck as high as I could to catch sight of any tidal rapids. I could not see any on the wide side of the pass, and this early in the morning there were also no motorboats. I chose to take that route.
To my good fortune, the Deception Pass wasn’t living up to the hype. I crossed under the bridge about two hours after high tide. There were a few whirlpools spinning and tossing driftwood, but nothing scary. The wind was completely calm, and the air was silent. Only after I checked the GPS later that day, did I realize that I had a maximum speed for the day of just over 10 knots. When the wind blows against the current this place would certainly look very different from the bening conditions I had just paddled through.
Reaching the Juan de Fuca channel was like entering the football pitch through the tunnel of an empty stadium. The landscape widened in all directions, I had a clear view of the horizon with a few mountain summits in the San Juan Islands visible above the low clouds and the rippling sound of the current.
I hugged the coast and paddled north up to a town called Anacortes. When I was planning the route for the journey, I specifically planned to spend a day here to go to the local pharmacy for a PCR Covid test before crossing into Canada. However, the testing requirement had been lifted just a few days prior. Instead, I stopped in town for a more urgent need. I desperately had to find a bathroom to play call of duty.
I located an outhouse at the local marina, but to my dismay it had an electronic combination lock on it. I sat by the door for a while hoping some local might pass by to use it. My luck was in full swing as someone did after just a few minutes. I gazed out of the corner of my eye to try and glance at how the man typed the numbers on the keypad. It took me 5 tries but I eventually got it. 9137 yay! Deception Pass may have had disappointing whirlpools today, but I was going to make a big one here.
My kayak being much lighter, I made the five-mile crossing to the San Juan islands at top speed. I had hoped to make it as far as Orcas Island, however, I wasn’t yet feeling ready to put in a thirty-mile day. Instead, I stopped a little closer at Lopez Island which was just across the channel at a place called Spencer Spit. I had seen on Google Earth that the spit had a defined triangle shape with a wide beach on either side reaching into the sea towards a small rocky islet. I have noticed these kinds of formations before but on open coastlines where an island close to shore is eventually connected to the mainland. The waves immediately behind the island are calmer, and therefore sand is progressively deposited, until a sand bridge is formed. This is the first time however, that I have seen this type of formation far from the ocean and surrounded by other nearby islands that would have settled the sand long before it would have any chance of getting here. The meandering currents through the Juan the Fuca Strait and its many islands must be just right that this is the place where the sand finally settles out of the water column.
I approached the spit from the south shore before noticing a few tents immediately to the north, and so continued on, passing right in between the tip of the sand spit and the island it is slowly reaching out to.
Unfortunately, there weren’t just a few tents, but an entire tent city with nearly every patch of grass spoken for, but strangely, there was no one around. It was as if I had arrived in a ghost town.
I climbed out of the kayak, pulled it above the high-water mark on the sand, and walked up the short path through the tall grass to the campsite. The tents were all neatly arranged two or three per plot. Some plots had wooden benches and on top of them were dry bags and coolers which I presumed had food and drinks. On one bench was a plastic sack full of hotdog and hamburger buns. I don’t think it could have been more than a few minutes since it had been laid there, or the racoons and crows would surely have ransacked it all by now.
Eventually as I walked from plot to plot trying to find an empty spot to camp for the night, a person inside one of the tents noticed my presence and walked out to meet me. He was a kid whose age could not have been more than fifteen. He seemed to walk with a slight limp.
“High there, where is everyone?” I asked. He seemed a bit hesitant to talk but eventually answered me in a low voice.
“They are not here.”
“I can see that, but where did everyone go? There are enough tents here for some fifty people or more.”
“Everyone went cycling, they’ll be back soon.”
“How come you didn’t go cycling?” I asked before realizing that the question might offend him. He did not answer me.
I found a plot that seemed a little emptier than most at the edge of the campsite and decided to pile my gear there. Whenever the other campers arrived, I would ask if I could lay claim to a small patch of grass for the night.
About 30 minutes later a few cyclists on mountain bikes began rolling in. They were middle school kids, and soon the eerie quiet that had hung over the campsite like a fog dissipated with the chatter and shouting of a dozen little voices. One of the boys grabbed a football and was soon throwing and passing it between his friends. Eventually I heard the voice of an adult, telling the rowdy troop that they would soon be preparing dinner. I approached him to introduce myself and explain my situation.
“Oh of course please do camp right here for the night if you’d like. We are a school group from Utah and every year we take the kids out on a weeklong summer vacation camping trip. This year we decided on the San Juan Islands. There are about a hundred of us in total. Today the activity was cycling. Tomorrow we might go kayaking if the weather is decent. Yes, it gets a bit crazy but the kids love it. Wow, you are on the beginning of a big trip!”
I quickly grabbed the rest of my gear, set up my tent, and started eating my dinner. Today I would be eating canned tuna and canned salmon for the main course, followed by canned pineapple for dessert. I stretched my used socks and undergarments over the tent to give them a chance to soak up the remaining sunshine, and then sat on my folding chair to rest and watch the kids chasing after the football.
At that moment one of the other adults in the group approached me. He didn’t look happy to see me.
“I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to move. We booked the whole campsite for the week, and we do not want outsiders.”
“Your colleague said I could camp here for the night.”
“Well, he is wrong. I’m the one in charge and you have to go.”
I did not see much point in arguing. The best I would get would be a night with unfriendly people who didn’t want me around. I disassembled the tent, packed up my gear, and moved to the beach.
June 3rd - Day 5
There’s nothing that soaks your will to start your day in the morning more than waking up in your tent and hearing the rain pouring. “Oh, do I have to get ready? Everything is damp…”
I delayed getting ready, until of course, call of duty forced me to get up. I unzipped the tent, got my shoes on, and stepped outside. The campsite was again dead quiet. No one else it seemed was awake yet. I decided to retribute the hospitality the gentleman in charge of the school camp showed towards me. I walked to use the campsite outhouse, and after finishing my business left the lid on the toilet seat up to release the noxious aroma from the latrine pit and took with me the only roll of toilet paper. “Good day Sir!” I thought.
After pushing off the beach I took a north heading towards Orcas Island. Finding the way was easy, I just kept an eye for the ferries that run to and from the mainland. They are large barges with the car deck some two stories high, and can be seen from several miles away. However, I felt a little alarmed whenever they approached from behind. Their engine is loud and has a rumble that is difficult to tell how far away they are without constantly looking back to check.
The town of Orcas is perched on a steep cliff some fifty feet above the water. There was a narrow beach at the foot of the cliff, but I am not sure how much of it would remain at high tide, and the tide was now rising. I pulled my kayak up far enough to where it seemed I would have enough time to take a walk. I climbed up the escarpment until I reached a road that led to the village store. I was disappointed the store didn’t have any canned pasta. After eight fish meals of the past four days, I was looking forward to something different in my camping nights. I instead bought three ham and cheese pastries and a bag of salted potato chips for lunch.
I sat on a bench outside the store next to the ferry loading ramp. After less than five minutes the seagulls showed up and I knew exactly what they wanted.
“No, not for you!” I told them, but they were persistent and were almost jumping on me until I tossed them a few chips to leave me alone. Had the seagulls been people, the scene that unfolded would have been a riot as birds started screaming loudly while others were trying to steal morsels of chips from one another. Eventually one grabbed a particularly large piece and made a run for it with most of the others chasing after him.
I paddled a few more miles to another small town called Roche Harbor on San Juan island. From here it’s a twelve mile hop across the western arm of the Juan de Fuca channel to arrive in Canada. The Roche Marina was fancy and filled with large and expensive looking yachts, and had a wide boardwalk overhanging the water. There seemed to only be one hotel in town that I could walk to with my kayak, the Hotel De Haro Resort. The word resort is a bit misleading here, it means they charge you an extra resort fee. Which is usually not disclosed when you book a room online. What does the resort fee include? Well, nothing.
“Is breakfast included?” I asked the front desk.
“No.”
“How about laundry?”
“No.”
“Well, what does the resort have to be a resort?”
“There’s a tennis court up the hill, and a swimming pool. The golf course is extra.”
“Oh yes, I’m sure people come all the way here to play tennis and golf”, I murmured. I looked on the map and saw that the golf course is on the opposite end of the island, some 10 miles away as the bird flies.
“It’s $249 plus the $20 resort fee. We have one room with a shared bathroom. You can park your kayak in the back with the golf carts. You want it?”
“Want is one thing, need is another. Yes, I’ll take it.”
Little did they know that tonight I would be washing all my equipment in their communal shower.
June 4th - Day 6
I crossed into Canada! Conditions on the San Juan strait were dead calm, and the only undulations over the water came from tidal currents making standing waves like a river rapid. Thankfully, the tide was flooding, and the current drift carried me north in the right direction towards Port Sidney.
This side of the Juan de Fuca channel is the passageway for the container and cruise ships heading to and from Vancouver and is a very busy sea-lane. From a glance, the massive ships don’t seem to move very fast, but after 10 minutes, a ship that seemed safely far away can quickly sneak up on you. My dilemma when a ship is heading in my direction was always to judge if it is far enough away for me to keep paddling and cross in front of it or wait for it to pass. If I choose to wait, there is always the feeling that I wasted my time and could have made it across. But if I go for it and try to cross ahead of the ship, who knows if I’ll end up regretting my impatience.
I landed on Port Sidney on a sheltered beach immediately south of the port marina. This was my first time crossing an international border by kayak, and so I was a bit unsure how the immigration process should be carried out. Google Earth showed a customs office in the marina, so I went to check there first. The marina guard told me to walk all the way to the end of the dock, where I would find the customs office shed.
There was no one at the shed and a sign on the window noted that international arrivals should either call the number written on the post sign or use the designated red phone immediately next to it. The phone was dead, so the phone number was the only option. I called the number, and after a fifteen-minute hold, was put through to an operator.
“What’s your boat registration number?”
“Hmmm, I don’t have one. I came by kayak.”
“Ok let me check with the supervisor how we handle that. Ok we’ll make your registration your last name and the word kayak. What was your port of departure?”
“Roche Harbor, in San Juan.”
“Is that Puerto Rico?”
“What? No, it’s across the channel in Washington state.”
“Right, of course.” His voice sounded a little embarrassed.
We went through a standard list of questions about what I was carrying, (no guns, pets, perishable foods, or marijuana) plus the standard Covid questions, and then I was free to go.
I checked the time, and it was already 3:00 pm and I decided to stay in Port Sidney for the night. I considered continuing to a campsite outside of town some eleven miles farther, but the breeze would have been against me, the hotel next to the beach where I had arrived had one room available, and it just seemed too convenient. And I wouldn’t have to eat canned fish for dinner.
June 5th - Day 7
Again, the sea this morning was calm like a mountain lake. Not even a slight puff of wind, and the clouds were hanging low and covering the summits of the mountains.
I was concerned about leaving my kayak on the beach for the night and relying on only the good character of Canadians to keep it from growing legs and wandering around somewhere. Those thoughts gave me a strange dream. I dreamt that I was looking at my kayak floating away in the ocean, filled with water and rolled upside down so that only the stern was above the surface, like you would see the sliver of the roof of a car drowned in a flooded street. Somehow, I fetched the kayak out of the water with one hand, lifted it above my head, and poured all the water out in a long cascading waterfall into the sea. My sudden superhuman strength should have been a tell that I was dreaming, but at the time it felt completely normal. Perhaps the interpretation of the dream should be that for what is valuable to me I will not spare any no effort to save, and hence why I was worried about the kayak staying exposed during the night. If something had happened, I could not have done anything, no matter how much I’d want to.
As I paddled in the channels between the islands separating Vancouver Island from the Strait of Georgia (The name of the waterway changes north the San Juan Islands from Juan de Fuca to Georgia) I came across a sleeping seal in the middle of the channel. Its head was bobbing just above the water, and at first, I thought that it was a gray buoy, until I saw its little eyes closed. I wonder if seals dream or not. For humans, the sign of dreaming is the rapid movement of the eyes under the eyelids. For the seal I could not tell. If they dream, they must dream about catching fish.
I inched a little closer to him. “Good afternoon sleepy!” I said to him.
Immediately he woke up a little startled.. When he saw what I was he seemed more annoyed than threatened and dove off to find a more tranquil place.
I’ve camped on the southern end of Valdez Island next to an abandoned barn. The grass was overgrown, and the barn roof had rotten away a long time ago. On the broad side of the barn someone had sprayed some graffiti that read, “Native American Land, No Trespassing.” I had no intention going any further than where I was now. Seems a bit strange to me that if this were private property, then why would no one be looking after it?
The real owner of the property was swimming in the water and he gave me a disgruntled look. Some fifteen feet from the water’s edge was a large California Sea Lion that kept poking his head above the water to observe me.
I looked directly at him and shouted “Yes, what’s up?” to which he dove into the water only to reappear a little farther down the shoreline.
He made a loud grunting sound from the water as if to say, “What are you doing on my beach?”
“The beach is big enough for the both of us. You won’t be seeing me once I’m in the tent. Chill out. And don’t make noise when I’m sleeping.”
June 6th - Day 8
Yesterday I covered thirty-two miles. No wonder I felt exhausted. I took things a little easier today and went at a leisurely pace until the town of Nanaimo, eighteen miles further north and just beyond the islands that shield Vancouver Island from the Strait of Georgia. This is the first place where I can look across the whole width of the strait, it's about 20 miles wide, but the mountains on the mainland make it seem like the opposite shore isn’t that far away. Only when seeing how small the container ships look on the horizon does the distance become apparent.
Once in town I had an important thing to do; change my dollars into Canadian money. Any settlement north from Nanaimo will be remote and may not always have the means to accept credit cards. Unfortunately, I discovered that none of the Canadian Banks will exchange your money if you’re not one of their clients. A very big inconvenience for tourists from south of the border, for no apparent benefit to anyone.
I searched for an exchange house on google and found the closest one was a Quickie Mart about two miles away in a strip mall. I called ahead to make sure they did indeed exchange money and was assured that they did.
“What’s your exchange rate?” I asked.
“1.22 Canadian for one Dollar, plus a fee of four Canadian dollars.” said an Indian voice.
The official exchange rate was 1.33 Canadians to 1 Dollar. “OK I’ll be there in an hour.”
I exchanged about $250 dollars to which the teller at the register gave me several $20 Canadian bills and a few $5 bills. I particularly liked the five-dollar bill. The back side shows the Robotic Arm in the International Space Station which was built by Canada.
“You want Loonies or Twoonies?”
“What are those? Looney Tunes like Bugs Bunny?”
“No Loony is the $1 Canadian, it has the loon bird on the backside so we call it the Loonie. The $2 has the polar bear, so I guess we should call it Bearney, but since it’s worth $2 we call it the twoonie to rhyme with the loonnie. Yes, confusing I know, took me a while to get used to it too. Stay long enough here and you’ll start calling them that as well.”
“Ah got it. So, what’s a good place to eat here?”
“You want a Canadian experience, check out the Tim Horton’s across the street.”
Every time I have been to Canada, I have seen at least a few of these Tim Horton’s chain restaurants. They seem to be ubiquitous in Canada with one in every corner, like Starbucks in the United States, in fact, it has been described to me as the Starbucks of Canada, yet I had never been to one. I googled the name to read up about the restaurant chain.
Tim Horton was a real person I learned; a man who played in the Canadian Hockey League from the 1940s up until the mid-seventies, mostly for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Another search for his name turned up hundreds of vintage photographs of a handsome young man with short spiky hair, chiseled jaw, and comically broad shoulders. His expression while in uniform isn’t at all intimidating for a hockey player; he looks like a good mama’s boy, however, a short biography described him as a formidable Defenceman and Enforcer. In hockey, the Defenceman Enforcer role is to prevent the opposing team from scoring, and also doling out a large can of whoop-ass on any adversary player engaging in dirty or violent play against his teammates, especially against the goalie (I didn’t know, but apparently a little violence isn’t against the rules in hockey, and some underhandedness is actually expected from the opposing team) . Yet even in this role, Tim Horton was a legend. He was nicknamed the Superman, on account of his baby face good looks combined with superhuman strength (and apparently, he was also extremely nearsighted and wore thick framed glasses when off the rink which made him look like the superman alter ego Clark Kent). The feats of strength credited to him are comical and yet borderline plausible. He could lift a forty-gallon beer drum over his head, toss a railway tie like he was playing fetch with a dog, and push over cement barricades to drive his car across a blocked intersection. He was feared and respected, and so his games were relatively clean affairs. I suppose that when Theodore Roosevelt said that you should “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Perhaps you could be extra soft on the talk if you carried a hockey stick.
The restaurant franchise came about because Tim Horton, despite his tough but fair character on the hockey rink, also had a very sweet tooth and a culinary talent for baking muffins. The franchise logo, Tim Horton’s name written in bright red cursive font on a white background is apparently Tim Horton’s own signature.
“So, which one of these is Mr. Horton’s favorite?” I asked the lady at the cash register pointing to the muffins on display.
“Oh, he definitely was a fan of the carrot muffin with cream cheese filling. In fact, he invented it.” She answered me with a laugh, noting that she was in on the joke.
I decided to get a box, so I could try one of each. I bought one chocolate, one raspberry, one carrot, one fruit explosion, and one blueberry. “Since there are only five flavors, but the box fits six, I’ll get a second carrot muffin to honor Mr. Horton.”
“I’m sure he would be very pleased if he was still alive today.”
“Oh, so he doesn’t run the chain anymore?”
“Nope. He died in 1974 in a car crash. We are part of Burger King now.”
After arriving back in the hotel, I decided to eat one of the muffins before bed. If I had a hat with me, I would have taken it off to Mr. Horton baking skills. The carrot muffin was delicious.
June 7th - Day 9
First sunny day of the journey. Not a cloud in the sky this morning, and as I looked towards the southeast down the middle of the Georgia Strait, there was a tall conical mountain that rose above the horizon, which I think was Mt. Baker some one hundred miles away.
As I was paddling out of Nanaimo, I ran across a couple paddling a double kayak north of the harbor. “Did you see the bear that lives on the island?” Said the man.
“No, good thing I didn’t camp there.” I said.
“Ah, he doesn’t always hang out on the island. Sometimes he swims to the mainland and wanders into the town. He’s around for sure. We were hoping to catch a glimpse of him, maybe he is on the other side.”
I wondered if he was joking, or if someone had played a joke on him. The island had a thick forest, dense enough to lose your way in it, but it wouldn’t have taken more than an hour to paddle around, and I wondered how the bear could find enough food to live there.
“Oh, maybe curious kayakers who come snooping around.” I thought.
I continued on my way up the coast before making a ten-mile crossing to Texada Island. About halfway I stopped at a small group of rock islets. The largest of the islets had a lighthouse and a few other buildings. As I got closer, I realized that the islet was a fairly large island. A small road ran down the middle of the island connecting all the structures and made two steep switchbacks down to a loading dock where a couple of seals were sunning on the rocks. I looked at my GPS and was puzzled because it showed me over open water. I looked at Google Earth, and it was the same thing. The island didn’t seem to exist, at least not on any map.
When I got closer to the dock, I noticed a truck parked next to it, and a man wearing military fatigues. I waved at him, and he waved back, but when I landed next to the dock, he was quick to say that I was not allowed to be there.
“So sorry but no visitors. This is a military base.”
“Can I just stand up while I am in the water? I need to pee really badly.”
“OK, be quick about it. Oh, and when you go, don’t go towards the east. That’s the hazardous area, and you will be in big trouble if someone catches you there.”
I later looked at the Google Earth image of the area a bit more carefully and noticed that the open water where the islands should have been had a different tone of blue from the rest of the ocean, as if someone had deliberately airbrushed the island group out of existence.
A google search for “Strait of Georgia BC, military base,” turned up several articles about a place called the “Whiskey Golf Hazardous Area” which is just east of the island and serves as a torpedo firing range for the American military, where some three hundred tests are done every year. When there is a test going on, the area is completely shut off to all boat traffic. A submarine, surface vessel or even an aircraft fires a torpedo, which runs along for several miles just below the surface before it lands on the sea bottom and is then retrieved by a deep diving team. The provincial government of British Columbia is apparently very unhappy about all the disruption to boat traffic. The Canadian Federal Government promised to pay British Columbia $125 million for the inconvenience, but so far only paid them $1.88 million since the 1960s.
I soon got back on the kayak and carried on towards Texada Island.
June 8th - Day 10
After hearing yesterday’s bear story from the kayaker I decided to hang all my food in a bag over a tree limb about eight feet off the ground. It would probably not have been high enough to dissuade a persistent bear, but it was the best I could find. Given that all my food is either canned or factory sealed, and I had thoroughly washed the trash so that no morsels were left, I felt pretty confident that it would be hard for a bear to catch a whiff of anything. Even so, the woods just up from the beach were thick and dark, and I woke up a couple of times at night when I heard a strange sound outside the tent. The next morning, however, there was no evidence that anyone or anything had made a visit the previous night. The food bag hung from the tree just as I had left it.
A much bigger and pressing problem were all the mosquitos that seemed to magically appear soon after dusk. The underside of my tent rain fly filled up with dozens of them.
I didn’t think to bring bug spray, and before allowing myself to fall asleep I made sure to kill every single one inside the tent.
I remember many years ago when I went to northern Canada, during the summer months for a canoe trip the flies were a pestilent nightmare. During sleep hours they gathered under the rainfly by the hundreds, and their collective buzzing sound was like getting poked in the ear with needles. Sometimes that was literally the case; if you rolled in your sleep, any exposed part of your body touching the tent would have the flies nipping you through the fabric and you would wake up to find several itchy bite marks in the area.
These flies weren’t anywhere near as bad, but I think that the experience left a mark on me, and I always try to be very careful not to touch the tent fabric while I sleep. This night I peed inside one of my water bottles, rather than risk going outside.
The morning brought a strong and consistent breeze from the southeast that persisted along the whole length of Texada Island. I had a thrilling downwind run with the sail and was sliding from one swell to another. At the northern end of the island near Gilles Bay I caught up to another kayaker who must have camped a few miles ahead of me the previous night.
I was surprised how difficult it was to see his boat, even when I was already close to him. Whenever he slipped into a wave trough he disappeared without a trace, and only became visible again when both of us were on separate wave crests.
“Lovely day, is it not?” He shouted.
“It sure is! Good luck. Where are you headed?”
He responded something but the wind muffled his words. The push I was getting from the sail meant I must have been going some two times faster than him, and I was soon out of hearing range.
I got as far as a town called Lund. With a good deal of help from the tail wind I covered almost thirty-eight miles, the longest day so far.
I had seen on google maps that not far from the town’s marina boat ramp was a small hotel which would make it very convenient getting out of the water and finding a comfortable place to spend the night. When I arrived, the place seemed lovely. The hotel had a lush garden with colorful flowers where bumble bees hummed busily, and several benches where people could sit and enjoy the sunset. I soon imagined myself sitting, stretching my legs appreciating the mixture of ruby red, ginger orange, and wine violet sunset colors of the sunset over the Georgia Strait.
Alas, those thoughts were a little premature. I pulled my kayak to the hotel entrance door and found it locked. A waitress at the pub next door informed me that the hotel has been closed for the past two years because of Covid, and that the only campsite was a thirty-minute drive away.
“Well, it’s late for me to get anywhere, and I am certainly not walking a distance that would take a car half an hour.”
“You know, what you may want to do is to camp on the marina parking lot. Pitch your tent after dark and be gone before sunrise. It’s a little busy now, but this place turns into a ghost town at night. You can also use the marina rest area, there’s a clean bathroom there. The combination for the lock is 369#. Don’t tell anyone I said that though.”
I enthusiastically thanked the waitress, ordered a soda drink, and gave her a 100% tip. If ever I can claim to have received excellent service, this was the occasion. I sat on the bench overlooking the water sipping my drink and for the next hour tried not to think about anything and just appreciate the moment. It was a very lovely sunset.
June 9th - Day 11
I sat on the bench yesterday after sunset as I waited like the waitress said for everyone to leave. At that moment, thought came into my head.
“Why don’t I sleep in the marina bathroom instead of pitching the tent?”
The bathroom was clean, there was a shower (cold water, but a shower nonetheless) and enough room on the floor for me to lay out the mattress. This was a hobo’s dream. In addition, I would have less gear to pack up in the morning and be gone before anyone noticed anything. A no brainer, I thought.
I slept well at night. Perhaps a little too well. I lost track of time in the morning and was awakened by the sound of a car tire rolling over the gravel in the parking lot around 5:00 am. I jumped up and began to frantically pack up everything before someone decided to use the restroom only to find an exasperated, bearded, naked hobo when they flipped on the light switch.
When I was done packing, I cracked open the bathroom door and peeked outside to make sure no one could see me in the act of the crime. When I saw no one, I quickly got all my gear out the door and snuck out unseen. Complete success, I thought. Well almost complete. After a few minutes I went back to use the restroom.
“Eh, how’d you get the combination for the commercial bathroom?” said a man wearing commercial fishing bibs.
“Well, hmmm…”
“Did Dan give it to you?”
“Yes! Dan gave it to me.” I answered without even thinking.
“Oh, God Damn Dead-Beat Dan. I’ll have a word with him when he’s in and crack the whip on his ass. I’ve told him not to give away the combination, word gets out, and then everyone all the way to Powell River finds out about it. We changed it just last week.
I was happy the man said he would be cracking the whip on “his ass”, rather than “her ass” as that meant Dan was probably not the waitress who was so kind to help me yesterday.
I hope that Dan, whoever he is, isn’t too dead-beat at his current job, or he may be looking for another one starting this afternoon. I put the boat on the water and got going before I had to answer any more questions.It was a rough crossing to get to Quadra island. I had originally intended to take a rest day at Lund, as the forecast showed the winds increasing substantially and a lot of rain coming in from the Pacific Ocean on the heels of a low-pressure system. But with the hotel closed, and not wanting to find out Dan’s fate. There was no choice but to go.
The winds on the channel stirred big waves and several were washing over my boat deck. Strangely, the wind and the waves weren’t exactly aligned. Although the waves were perpendicular to my direction, the wind was somewhere between a beam reach and a close haul which made it very difficult for me to hold my heading and I had to make stroke adjustments almost constantly.
After passing Hernando Island I turned north to catch a bit of shelter between Cortes and Marina islands before attempting the final crossing. On the way the rain intensified, and visibility became very poor, especially with my prescription goggles which kept fogging up and I had to stop to wipe them constantly. Looking through the haze I noticed a brown blob almost directly in front of me which I thought at first was a huge sea lion before I realized it was a giant boulder with the waves breaking over it. I leaned hard to the right and missed it, only to then find myself pointed right at another rock, to which I leaned immediately to the left to avoid that one as well. Those were close calls. I wonder how those two rocks ended up where they were, everywhere else the water was deep, and dark.
The last stretch was a seven-mile crossing from Marina Island to Heriot Bay on Quadra Island. I considered camping on the sand spit on the north of the island and attempting the crossing the next day when the weather would be much better, but the rain eased up a little and I sensed that this was my r window to make the crossing there and then. I pressed ahead.
About halfway the rain intensified once more and for a while the opposite shore was hidden in a veil of mist and the only thing to guide me in the right direction was the Cortes to Quadra ferry which I knew was headed to the same way. Once I was close enough to see the shoreline again, I noticed the ferry on its way back to Cortes Island was taking a more southerly route. It was deadheaded right for me.
“Really? You have the whole channel, and you want to come this way?” I quipped at the ferry.
I made a sharp tack downwind and jetted out of its way as fast as I could. At some point the bow wave from the ferry must have merged with the swell as I was hit sideways by a monster wave surfing sideways in a bongo slide. The wave vanished as quickly as it appeared.
After the ferry was gone, and I was close to land, I paddled past a skinny sandbank called Rebecca Spit that protected the main settlement of Heriot Bay; the waves abated and with the exception of the heavy rain coming down all around, there was a eerie sense of quiet in the air. The spit was thickly forested, and the shoreline littered with driftwood logs. I wondered how this feature got its name, and who the famous Rebecca might be, perhaps some protectress of mariners seeking to escape the rough seas. Unfortunately, I could not find any sources that shed light on the mystery.
I landed on a pebble beach directly in front of the only hotel in town, the Heriot Bay Inn, whose placard was visible from the kayak while I was navigating through the harbor. After getting all the gear and the kayak up above the high tide mark, I approached the hotel entrance, while still wearing my damp dry suit and water dripping off my wide brim hat from all the rain outside.
“Please tell me you have a room for tonight.” I whimpered to the front desk lady.
“Goodness me where did you arrive from? Were you swimming with your clothes or something? You’re soaking the carpet.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry. I just paddled in from Lund across the channel.”
“Have you? You must have been the only one out there. It’s a whiteout. You can barely see out the bay. Well, let’s see, yes, we do have one room left, but it is right above the pub, and tonight is karaoke night. You’ll have to pardon the noise; they stay kind of loud until about 2:00 am. The singing on most nights is… how to describe it… amateurish, but after everyone’s had a pint or two it doesn’t sound so bad, eh.”
“It will be just fine.”
“Ok then here is your key, and if you need to call the front desk my name is Rebecca. I am the one staffing the night shift tonight until 10:00 pm.”
“Oh, like the….”
“No, the spit is not named after me, and no I do not spit there either. Every tourist asks me that, and it drives me nuts.”
