Sea Trial Read online

My father went on with his futile dissection of the outboard, and my brother sailed the boat until the hand holding the sheet was a claw. The foresail exploded in Baynes Channel, the final gauntlet before Victoria. We coasted into a tiny cove near Ten Mile Point, a place of waterfront houses with kelp beds, not petunias, out front. I was sent ashore. It was almost dark. I remember slipping on seaweed-slick rocks and realizing I couldn’t get any wetter, making my way, still wearing my life jacket, up a pocket beach toward the lights of a house. A woman opened the door.

  “Oh dear,” she said. “You look like a drowned rat.” I dripped onto her welcome mat.

  “Can I please use the phone?” I said. “I’m supposed to call my mother.”

  ***

  After my father died, I spent an afternoon driving up the western shoreline of Haro Strait, nipping seaward whenever I saw the triangular “Beach Access” sign. Somewhere, I felt certain, there was a rock ledge or crescent of shingle where relatives could gather and release his ashes into the ocean. The cliffs near Cordova Bay (another of those Spanish names) would have been ideal. But the logistics of tide and wind were wrong, and although older relatives might have been able to scramble down to the water’s edge, we would have had to winch them back up.

  So I kept looking. Closer to Victoria, I took a turnoff I’d never noticed before and found myself in a pocket cove you could barely squeeze a boat into. There was a house on the rocks, looking out over Baynes Channel, and in the moment of realizing the place was too public for scattering a person’s remains, I also realized I had been here before. As a drowned rat.

  I really wished those fishing boats had stopped. One of them should have; even in the absence of a radio Mayday, maritime law dictates that a vessel in obvious distress be assisted. Somewhere on this coast there’s at least one ninety-year-old ex-skipper mumbling and farting in front of his TV who remembers too. And don’t tell me you couldn’t see us; we were bright yellow.

  I don’t know what happened to Frou-Frou, except that she was replaced by a succession of larger boats as my parents struggled to figure out how to sail. I learned to sail too, but I stayed scared. Four hours hiding under the foredeck in Haro Strait, tossed around like a marble in a tin can and waiting for the end, left me with the kind of knee-jerk fear that a place like the Nahwitti Bar brought back with a vengeance.

  My fear didn’t keep me from sailing; as a teenager, when I was old enough to take the family boat out alone, I would push it to the limit, carrying too much sail and driving the rail down into green water. Rough sailing didn’t bother me. But deciding to go out, watching those trees lash and sway and then stepping into the boat, that took me back under Frou-Frou’s foredeck every time. It still does.

  Leaving

  After my father capsized once and for all on the bathroom floor with the last of the little strokes that had been ganging up on him for years, Hatsumi and I spent four years getting to know Vera before setting out to circumnavigate Vancouver Island. Every summer we took her farther north along its east, or inner, side. Each time, we stayed out longer: first days, then weeks, then months. A true offshore voyage — across the Pacific, or down to the Caribbean — was seriously discussed.

  But wasn’t there somewhere we could go to test ourselves in offshore waters without actually selling the house and leaving the country? Where the waves were bigger and the protection harder to find? We needed an offshore tryout — especially me, with my eight-year-old self running off to hide every time the wind rose. That’s where the idea of circumnavigating Vancouver Island came from.

  Getting ready for a long boat trip isn’t much different from going camping. Lists proliferate, get lost, and are reconstructed; stores and suppliers are visited; tempers flare and fizzle; arrangements for real-world responsibilities are cobbled together, collapse, and get rebuilt. All I can think about is what unobtainable item I’ve forgotten and when the engine will cough and die for want of a simple part I could easily have put in my spares kit.

  A two-month trip, which was the time we figured we’d need to circumnavigate Vancouver Island, meant books, CDs, guitar and music, enough clothes to survive between laundromats, engine oil and the pump to change it with, spare filters and parts, dog food, toilet paper, and an astonishing amount of rice and dried seaweed. And the cargo I hadn’t gotten around to telling my wife about yet: the yellowing transcripts and medical papers jammed into grocery bags and wrapped with duct tape. I had slid them into the dead pockets of space that exist even on a boat — behind the toilet pump-out hoses or wedged above the autopilot brain that hung over the spare berth. These were my father’s things, the hard evidence of a calamity that had befallen him decades before the strokes finally ended his life. Sooner or later, I would start exhuming them, reading them, making sense of them.

  I even tossed in a few fisheries books. It looked as though I was about to land a respectable contract that made use of my background as a biologist. The number of sockeye salmon returning to spawn in the Fraser River, once one of the biggest salmon producers on the planet, had collapsed. There hadn’t been a commercial fishery for four years, and critics of the government’s management of the resource were clamouring for change, explanations, blood.

  A royal commission into the fate of the Fraser sockeye had been ordered by the prime minister, the costly legal machinery of a commission was being assembled, and the commission needed consultants to analyze the threats to Fraser sockeye — overfishing, climate change, pollution, the usual suspects. I had been asked to prepare a report on salmon farms. As far as I or any other fisheries biologist knew, linking the decline of Fraser sockeye with salmon farms was a stretch, but six months’ work was six months’ work.

  “Call it the way you see it,” the commission told me. “You’ll have to testify, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Should it?”

  “I can’t think why,” I said. My father had handled lawyers, hadn’t he? And in circumstances a lot more hostile than an inquiry into some missing fish. Maybe I’d even learn something that helped me understand the ordeal he’d gone through before he died.

  “No hurry,” they said. “Sign the contract when you get back.”

  So, happily betrothed but with the wedding and consummation safely in the future, I congratulated myself: not only would I test myself against the rapids and the rocks and finally unravel a family knot, our voyage would take us right along the juvenile sockeye’s migratory route up the east coast of Vancouver Island, from their home river to the open ocean. We’d literally be swimming with the salmon. Whatever salmon farms they encountered on their way, we’d see them too; wherever we stopped for the night or for provisions, there would be people — commercial fishermen, aboriginal people, environmentalists, even salmon farmers — for whom the subject of salmon survival was an icebreaker second only to the weather. I couldn’t lose. I just had to add my biologist’s hat to the ones — sailor, husband, son — already on board.

  To everyone who asked where we were off to, I said the same thing.

  “Oh, as far as we can get, I guess. Might even go around the island.”

  “Good for you,” they always said, as though they hadn’t detected my indecision. By the time we were ready to push off, I knew the boat was ready, but I still wasn’t, and that “might even” was still the best answer I could give. The previous year, we’d planned for a month exploring the Broughton Archipelago, but we bailed out on the doorstep, hiding from the Johnstone Strait gales for three days before admitting we were more comfortable in the benign waters of Desolation Sound. Turning back and sailing home the easy way had turned into an endless rationalization of what we both knew had been a bad case of nerves.

  We’d had all winter to think about it. This trip would be a trial of sorts, making up for last year’s failure. At least, that was the plan.

  ***

  Most recreational boaters circumnavigate Vancouver Island counterclockwise: up the east coas
t and back down the west. The reasoning is this: even if the winds are on your nose all the way up the inside, those same northwesterlies will give you a sleigh ride back down the other side. That makes perfect sense for sailboats, which will theoretically have fifteen or twenty knots of wind right on the beam, where they like it the most, and the swell will just roll by beneath them. It’s a little different for powerboats, which tend to be hard to steer going away from the wind, but most of the boats going around the island are sailboats.

  So we would be fine. Vera was built to sail around the world. Instead of worrying about the boat, I concentrated on finding out what were the major hurdles on the west coast — beside the dreaded Nahwitti Bar that everyone had warned me about. A month or so before we were to leave, I unlocked Vera, went below, and lit the stove. The twenty new charts I had bought for the voyage were in a fat roll on one of the berths. While the water boiled, I untied them and began to fold them in quarters so they would fit inside the chart table. They were mostly charts for the west coast; we already had most of the east coast covered. I kept them in order so that by the time my coffee was ready, I had a neat, two-inch pile that started in Port Hardy, near the top of the island on the east side, then progressed around the top and back down the west coast all the way to Victoria.

  Kyuquot Sound, Nootka Sound, Friendly Cove. The names I’d grown up with, from stories and news reports and history books, were suddenly in my hands. Towns like Winter Harbour and Tahsis, places whose names were familiar but I could never really pinpoint, well, now I would be locating them on a chart, navigating to them, tying up to their docks, and stepping into them. By the time I’d finished two cups of coffee and worked through the charts, my wife had joined me.

  “There’s nowhere to sit,” Hatsumi said.

  “True, but at least they’re all in order. You’ll like that. Now listen, I’ve figured out what we have to watch out for.”

  “Are you going to put all these charts away?”

  “Of course I am. I always do. Now, the first obstacle is the rapids.”

  “We’ve done rapids.”

  “Right, so we do a few more. Then Johnstone Strait, which we mostly avoid, get an early start for the last bit, and bang, we’re in Port McNeill.”

  “Can we go to Sointula?” Sointula was where we first got the idea of buying a sailboat; it’s close to Port McNeill. I rummaged for the chart, making even more of a mess.

  “Sointula’s right across the strait, so yes. Two more short hops to Port Hardy, then Bull Harbour is the jumping off point for Cape Scott.”

  “What’s Cape Scott?”

  “The second obstacle. Here.” I pulled out the right chart. “But I looked it up. You just have to hit it at slack tide.” Slack tide is the moment when the sea takes a fleeting break between rising and falling. In places like Cape Scott, where wind and tide can gang up to confound the mariner, taking tide out of the equation makes life a lot easier. Hatsumi frowned at the chart.

  “What about waves?” she said finally.

  “Well, I guess we’ll find out. Probably depends on the day. Oh, and wind. Apparently, it gets worse if it’s windy.”

  “Oh.”

  “Or foggy. But look, after that, we’re on our way south again! Although we do have to get around the Brooks Peninsula. This thing.”

  I pointed to an ugly stub of land a day south of Winter Harbour. It looked as though it had been glued onto the west coast.

  “It’s big,” said Hatsumi.

  “Yeah, but you just go well outside it.” I tried to sound breezy and confident, as I generally do when something worries my wife. But there was no getting around the fact that Brooks Peninsula stuck out an awfully long way. I remembered reading about it in a little book called Weather Hazards; like all promontories, the Brooks Peninsula causes winds to speed up. It’s the Venturi effect, the same phenomenon that provides lift for an aircraft wing. Brooks was notorious for nasty winds. I soldiered on.

  “That’s what the books say. Stay well offshore. Wait for a calm day. But hey, after that, it’s a straight shot south.”

  “And this one?” Hatsumi’s finger went unerringly to Estevan Point. It was, I had to admit, another promontory.

  “Look, by the time we get there, we’re pretty much home. A couple of days in Barkley Sound, soak in the hot springs, you’re going to love it.” Hatsumi was beginning to sound like all the other people who had tried to warn us off the circumnavigation. She looked closer at the chart.

  “Where do we stop once we leave Barkley Sound?” She lifted the chart table lid to find her calipers, dislodging a few charts.

  “Never mind, I already calculated it. It’s ninety miles, Bamfield to Victoria.”

  “Ninety miles? With nowhere to stop?”

  “Oh, there must be places. Look, we’ll figure it out. It’ll be a sleigh ride.” Breezy again. That last day took us through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. When it got windy in Victoria, which it routinely did, Juan de Fuca was where the wind came from. And at the end of it was Race Passage, which I decided not even to mention. We would do it, somehow. Once we turned the corner at Cape Scott, we’d have to. I gathered the charts and clipped them together.

  “See, all neat and tidy again.”

  But Hatsumi looked dubious. “What about Charley?”

  Charley was a dog, not a human, but Hatsumi didn’t really make the distinction.

  “The waves, I’m worried about the waves. You don’t know waves like that. I do. In Japan, the ocean is all offshore. What if he starts to freak out?”

  Charley was outside in the cockpit, stationed in his usual crouch by the jib winch and staring down strangers. Schnauzers usually have their tails and the tips of their ears lopped off, but Charley still had all his appendages, and he used them like signal flags. His beard bristled.

  “Look at him. He loves the boat. He’ll be fine.”

  “And those are the only problems?” I could see she was still worried about those waves, and I didn’t blame her. I’d been to Japan and stood on the shore; the place was a cauldron. I imagined her on an interisland ferry as a girl, puking and apologizing like everyone else.

  “Well, yeah, there was this bar thing someone mentioned, Nahwitti something. But it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. Around Cape Scott somewhere. We’ll figure it out.”

  Nahwitti Bar is right at the top of Vancouver Island, roughly at the halfway point, so we had plenty of time to solve whatever navigational conundrums it posed. By the time we reached it, we’d have planned our way through six sets of rapids and talked to the dozens of fellow cruisers I assumed would be going the same way. It was just another of those coastal hazards that everybody had to deal with. It didn’t do to dwell on the risks; in that direction lay the unavoidable conclusion that everywhere was dangerous. The only detail that niggled at me from my study of the charts and guidebooks was that Nahwitti Bar and Cape Scott were awfully close together, and safe passage for both seemed to depend on tidal conditions.

  “We’ll figure it out,” I said again and tried to put the Nahwitti Bar out of my head. We had a lot to do before we got anywhere near it.

  ***

  By the end of June, tanks were filled with propane and diesel and water, bedding had been shoved into the V-berth in the bow, tools were stacked in plastic boxes in the spare berth. I set the battery-operated sprinkler timers to water the garden every three days and tried not to imagine them malfunctioning and firing random fountains at the neighbours for two months. Then we locked the house, put Charley on the leash, and walked the half hour to the marina. There was nothing left to carry.

  A flat calm forced us to motor north all the way up Haro Strait, which was on its best behaviour. The sun dazzled on the mirrorlike surface, and I pulled on an old canvas hat salvaged from my father’s closet. The brim kept flopping down into my field of view. As we chugged past Zero Rock
, I had the disconcerting feeling that I was seeing this familiar place with his eyes. We passed a few commercial fishing boats going in the other direction, their long poles at forty-five degrees. But there weren’t nearly so many of them as when I was a child, and my father’s hat kept blocking the view. I skimmed it out over the calm waters and pulled on one of my own. His old one receded astern in Vera’s arrow-straight wake as the autopilot took us north. There wasn’t much to do except watch out for logs and think about the past. I suddenly realized it was July 1, Canada Day. My father’s birthday.

  The Archive

  My father’s effects were like flotsam on a beach, each wave leaving something behind as he weakened and died, until the beach was littered with his life.

  And there were so many John Harveys. The prairie kid who was happiest snaring gophers with his friends and crawling underneath the boardwalk on Main Street, who left home at sixteen and never came back, not even when his father died. The disillusioned high school teacher who borrowed money, went back to school, and became a doctor. The photographer who filled our house with the smell of developer and fixer and our family albums with images that were much more than snapshots. And the trophy-winning violinist and peripatetic physician who kept searching for the place where medicine was practised the way he thought it should be.

  Getting a handle on a life like this one seemed impossible; there was always going to be something I couldn’t quite grasp. After he died, I took a lot of that flotsam into my own home and went gamely through it, sometimes laughing, occasionally crying. I spent a month classifying, labelling, and judging, before distributing and disposing. Worst of all were the drop-offs at the Sally Ann, roaring away from the beaten chair and the obsolete stereo abandoned on a wet sidewalk.

  In sheer tonnage, the photographs dominated the collection, and that seemed fitting. Photography and music had been the passions in my father’s life that never faded, and he had left many pounds of meticulously labelled negatives and prints. Among the best were the black and white portraits of his fellow physicians, handmade sixteen-by-twenties he had shot in a hallway, or an operating room, or the smoke-laden doctors’ lounge. My favourite bore a caption that typified the mordant sense of humour that my father tried to suppress but never really could: in this portrait, the doctor is grinning, a cigarette in one hand and the other hand aloft, the thumb and first finger measuring off an inch or so of air.