Kayak Bill Camps - Higgins Passage

This is another camp that has evaded me and it was a key stop for Bill.  It was here that he could look up and down Laredo Sound while waiting for the conditions to allow a safe crossing to Aristazabal.  He spent the last three days of June and first 3 days of July 2003 here waiting out a moderate storm on his way to camps on the outer coast of Aristazabal.  He entertained a kayaking visitor on June 28, found a new mussel bed and complained of mosquitoes.  Returning for 5 days in late September he complained again about black flies and mosquitos, commented on the number of wolves in area and a Grouse that he shot at but missed. 

Glenn Lewis encountered a man in Higgins Passage a couple of years back who had run across Bill at this camp and described it as not having a beach and being set back in the forest enough that it wasn’t visible from the water.  That could have been the reason I wasn’t able to find it in 2007 as I was looking for a windscreen.  Maybe he is the visitor Bill met on July 28.  My efforts at locating the camp failed again in late July 2017 but I’m pretty sure I know where it is now.  While lacking an easy access beach other aspects of Higgins Pass Camp make it “Classic Bill” in that it is unlikely that you would ever know it was there or ever stumble upon it.  How it has survived the ravages of the Great Bear Rainforest remains to be seen. 

Approaching Higgins Passage from the west on a clear day is an exercise in patience and confusion.  The western shoreline of the outer BC coastal islands trail off into the Pacific as a complex and confusing mass of broken islets and exposed rock.  Navigation, by chart is difficult and GPS improves the process by only a small margin.  By cheating with GPS, and still getting the maze wrong, I eventually stumbled my way to the island where Kayak Bill Davidson maintained this primary and strategic camp.

The island wraps around a protected lagoon that can only be accessed at mid to higher tides.  I entered with a 2.1-meter tide and barely got in.  The shoreline here is rocky and fairly steep.  The gentleman that Glenn met said that Bill had some sort of means for managing his kayak on that steep shoreline.  The area that I had marked had a friendly-enough landing for high tide but not-so-friendly at anything less.  I found a clam garden tucked into the farthest reaches of the lagoon which Bill, no doubt, benefitted from.  The village site and IR of Goo ewe is just a mile to the east and I believe that this “lo’hewae” was part of that aboriginal village infrastructure.

The tide was ebbing so I didn’t have long to explore and got out just before the tidal door slammed shut.  I’ll be back.

Continued..........