Originally published October 3, 2012
Billy Davidson
At one point or another every paddler who travels the BC coastal waters hears about Kayak Bill Davidson. For me it came on August 4, 2005 in the Shearwater bar at the culmination of my first coastal kayaking trip with Dave Resler, Keith Blumhagen and Larry Longrie. Having run out of food we had cut our trip short and paddled in from Quinoot Point. We were feasting on pizza and beer when a dark haired, sunburnt man walked up to our table and sat down. He smiled and introduced himself as Keith Webb. We poured him a beer.
He had something
to tell us that he simply had to get out. He began recounting the trip
that he had just completed following in the wake of Kayak Bill. He told
us how Bill had established camps at remote locations on the coast while living
a semi-hunter/gatherer life style for 28 years and how he had just returned
from visiting some of those camps. We poured him another beer. He
talked for hours about Bill’s journals, charts, windscreens, fire stands and
many camp sites. Keith’s friend Brian Clerx showed up so we poured him a
beer, too. Brian lived nearby and talked about his friend, Bill
Davidson. He told us how Bill had spent a couple months each year
painting in a cabin on his property in order to finance his next ten months of
living off the grid. He told us about the boardwalk and trail that Bill
had built through the forest for his daughter and invited us to his home to
view one Bill’s paintings. I was intrigued.
Fresh from his
trip Keith submitted an article about Bill to Sea Kayaker Magazine where it was
posted online.
Over the next two
years Keith and I stayed in touch and I learned more about Bill Davidson and
the life he lived. When Dave Resler and I returned to the coast in 2007
we had eight Kayak Bill camps marked on our route that would start in Klemtu
and end at Shearwater. On that trip we discovered that what Bill labeled
as a “Bivi Camp” on his charts was not always a desirable campsite and
contained no obvious infrastructure. In fact, some the spots he marked as
Camps took a vivid imagination, lots of determination to find and showed little
if any signs of his passing. Often there was nothing to see and in most
cases there were much better, albeit, well known and obvious places to
camp. Many were just sites he used as stopovers on his way from one real
camp to another. Some camps we could not find at all.
