Klemtu 2 Port Hardy 2023

After six years of retirement preparations, Covid restrictions and the business of selling our house, buying a new one and moving to Everett it was time to return to the BC coast and the Great Bear Rain Forest.  It had been even longer for my paddling partner, Dave Resler, who made it clear that he was going, no matter what.  All he asked me to do was all the planning and preparations.  Piece of cake, right? 

Honestly, I wasn’t convinced that he would really be able to go so I put off planning longer than I normally would have and when I did start I found that all of my nautical charts and charting tools had disappeared in our move.  Unbelievable!  I bought enough replacements to cover the waters between Port Hardy and Caamano Sound as I figured that I could come up with something interesting there but then found that Garmin had discontinued support for Homeport, the charting program I use.  Double unbelievable!  I had lost significant functionality in their decision to cast me aside but figured out enough workarounds to where I could get by. 

With my new charts and crippled Homeport application I decided to create a trip that would be familiar yet have enough new twists and turns to be interesting.  I felt that it would be most efficient (and fun) to ferry up to Klemtu and paddle back to Port Hardy by whatever route struck our fancy and that the conditions would accommodate.  Most of our “planned” campsites were just options and not hard and fast daily destinations.  Heresy, for some, but that's how I roll.  It would be a vague route that would allow us to change with the wind.  The chart work took me a couple of months of consistent work to complete. 

After losing all of my charts, finding my charting program “broken”, several of my dry bags delaminated, battery cases rusted shut, some safety gear expired or worn out and other key gear missing in action I shouldn’t have assumed that I was through the “broken phase” of the trip.  And I wasn’t. 

Dave had a new Garmin Mini 2 that would allow limited texting.  Since this brought a new expectation to our trips and because I was sensing that there might be some communication issues regarding conditions, movement, etc. I asked local paddler, mentor and all around good guy, Bill Porter, to act as our interpreter when and if a message really needed clarification and the guy who would handle things if we really needed help. 

This is the story of the Carhartt Duct Tape Tour.

Joey-Walks-with-White-Feet

Originally published December 2019

A significant storm approached as we were exiting Gale Passage.  Gale bisects the Bardswell Group and opens into Thompson Bay which faces south into the open Pacific.  If you were to continue south from Thompson Bay your first landfall would be Antarctica.  That is a hard-to-comprehend amount of fetch and while this storm wasn’t being driven by some historic low-pressure system that movies are made of it was big enough to get every sea-going vessel’s attention and it was going to make Thompson Bay an unfriendly environment to the extreme.  There may have been good places to hide from a storm in the bay but they were hiding from us and were not marked on our charts with the exception of Cree Point and Islet 48 which lay another 3 NM upwind from Cree.  Dave and I had previously stayed at the Heiltsuk cabin on Quinoot Point located 2 NM in the wrong direction and downwind from Cree.  We viewed it as our last resort option.  We thought that, if need be, we could probably slip through the backdoor route between Dufferin and Potts Islands that is blocked at low tides and requires a slippery and ankle breaking portage.