Kayak Bill Camps - Dallas Island

Originally published October 17, 2017

Dallas Island was one of Bill’s primary camps.  At ~21NM from Shearwater it was midway to his camps on Aristazabal.  Dallas is located along the eastern edge of Milbanke Sound and at the entry to Finlayson Channel where it provided superb shelter and a clear view of conditions on Milbanke Sound prior to committing to crossing over to Higgins Passage.  It was a one or two day paddle from his shack on Brian Clerx’s property that he referred to as “Denny Island Camp”.  By leaving Shearwater near the turn to ebb he could get to the Ivory Island / Blair Inlet complex at the turn to flood.  This would give him a push north to Dallas for the final 7 NM.  If conditions or tides didn’t cooperate there were bivy camps scattered along Seaforth Channel and a couple of camps in Blair Inlet where he could hole up.

In 2007 Dave, Greg and I stayed at the Dallas Island Camp.  Bill had spent eight days here in June 2003 on his way out to his more remote camps and had spent two more nights in October on his way back to Denny Island Camp.  He was headed back to Shearwater to do some painting and resupply for what would turn out to be his last trip.  He had just two months to live. 

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.

Kayak Bill Camps

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.

Kayak Bill - A Requiem by Keith Webb

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.

Continued..........

Harvey Island Camp

March 7, 2020

I’ve been holding off talking about Bill’s most remote camp out in Hecate Strait for 15 years.  A friend first told me about it immediately after returning from his visit there in 2005, just 2 years after Bill left the camp for the last time.  About then there were spoilers published by Neil Frazer in Sea Kayaker Magazine (https://3meterswell.blogspot.com/2017/11/looking-for-kayak-bill-by-neil-frazer.html), John Kimantas in “the Wild Coast 2” and Ian Mcallister in “Following the Last Wild Wolves”  but they flew under the radar or maybe nobody cared.  Probably the latter. 

Shortly after Bill’s wake in 2004 my friend was given copies of Billy’s journals and charts by one of his childhood mates from the Wood’s Christian Home orphanage outside of Calgary where the two had spent their early years.  http://woodschristianhome.info/  Using this information, he undertook a solo mission to visit some of the camps marked on the charts and mentioned in the journals.  Those resources led him out into Hecate Strait ~11.5 NM west from Aristazabal Camp III to the Beyers-Conroy-Harvey-Sinnet Islands Ecological Reserve and the site of Bill’s most remote and comfortable camp on the coast.  It was a camp less reliant on tarps for protection from the elements.  Almost a shack rather than a shelter. 

My friend paddled west from Weeteeum Bay into a fogbank on a compass course of 270 degrees, located the islets by sound and arrived on a high tide which happened to be the right answer.  His account was published online by Sea Kayaker Magazine and is available here: https://3meterswell.blogspot.com/2017/12/kayak-bill-requiem.html

On a 270 course out of AIC III

Image by My Shearwater Bar Friend

The Harvey Islets Group is one of the two groups of four in the conservancy out in the middle of nowhere that allows reasonable, albeit conditional, landings.  From the water you wouldn’t consider it advisable as the Harvey camp lies in the center of a maze of islets and is completely invisible from the perimeter of the group.  The area surrounding Harvey is shallow and the anchorage is foul.  Boomers are the norm which caution against approach by watercraft of any type.  At low tide the drying is extensive which further complicates approach and discourages exploration. 

Kayak Bill Camps - Gosling Island

September 27, 2017

In 1991 Audrey Sutherland reported that she had run across Kayak Bill on her way north to Alaska.  He told her that he had wintered at Goose the previous Winter.  He told an acquaintance that he had built it to get away from “tourists”.  It was both a natural and unfortunate choice.  Natural in that Goose is very remote and requires a committed crossing that limited traffic and unfortunate in that he initially built it on a reserve near the north end of Duck Island.  The reserve marked the site that had once been a seasonal harvesting village and the Heiltsuk took exception to it.  After finding it destroyed twice he moved from Duck Island to Gosling Island and it was there that he would spend the last days of his life.

The access to the Goose Group filtered out most casual visitors by requiring a significant crossing of Queens Sound or a northern approach with a crossing of Golby Channel.  A typical crossing of Queens Sound is between 7 – 8 NM.  Crossing Golby from the McMullin Group sounds pedestrian at 2 NM but the water through Golby can move surprising fast during medium to large exchanges and the addition of a typical wind component can make for a challenging transit that some may look at and choose to forego.  Most of the traffic into Goose Anchorage consists of pleasure boaters passing through or locals from Bella Bella / Shearwater who motor out to camp and fish.  During the ‘90’s there just weren’t that many kayakers out there.

Higgins Pass Camp - Found

Glenn Lewis and I had been searching for this camp for years.  We had a copy of Bill’s chart showing the location of the camp on an island less than a kilometer from the main campsite at the west end on Higgins Passage.  ‘We had pretty good beta on the location but the site was confusing. 

Glenn had talked to a power boater who had met Bill at Higgins Passage and visited his camp.  He described it as having no beach and set far enough back that it wasn’t visible from the water.  Further, he mentioned that in spite of the lack of a beach Bill had concocted some means of dealing with his kayak. 

From the carefully placed ink dot that Bill used to locate the camp on his chart it was hard to discern exactly what he was pointing at.  Glenn and I differed on where the camp would be and in 2017 I conducted an unsuccessful search that was cut short by the ebbing tide and an approaching weather system. 

In 2018 Glenn camped at Higgins Passage during a solo mission and searched about 600 meters of shoreline where it made sense that the camp would be based on the mark on the chart, the description of the man who described his visit with Bill and Glenn’s instincts on where a camp would be based on wind, weather and Bill’s choices.  His search yielded no sign of Billy.  Glenn has been to many of Bill’s camps in the past and knew how these camps disappeared in the forest so I was surprised that his search came up empty.

Camp II - Thistleton - Found

Camp II on Thistleton Island has eluded detection for over 13 years but was “found” in July 2018 by Glenn Lewis.  It’s probable that Glenn was the first visitor the camp had seen since Bill pulled down the tarp and moved three kilometers southeast to establish Camp III.  I don’t know when that move occurred but it was prior to 2003 as Camp III was fully in play that year.

Armed with Bill’s charts Keith Webb searched Thistleton in 2005.  No dice.  Glenn had been there a few times in past years, once with the specific intent of finding the camp.  Both Keith and Glenn struck out.  The nice beach at the northeastern end of the narrow passageway seemed to call their names as well as those of any other visitors the island entertained.  It was the obvious location with a friendly beach and was surely where the camp had existed but no camp was found. 

Glenn’s study of Bill’s charts overlaid with his personal coastal experiences, specific knowledge of some camp locations, descriptions of Bill’s fastidious detail including Colin Lake’s account of his eye for detail in “Breakfast with Kayak Bill” (https://3meterswell.blogspot.com/2017/11/breakfast-with-kayak-bill-by-colin-lake_24.html)  convinced him to take a closer look at where Bill marked his camps on his normally low-tech charts.  Bill had carefully marked the camp’s location on a section of shoreline that Glenn knew to be rocky and inhospitable and was ~120 meters from a friendly place to land so that’s where he would look. 

Kayak Bill Camps - Roar Islet

Tiny Roar Islet is tucked into Blair Inlet and protected from most of the unpleasantness that can occur on Milbanke Sound.  I suspect that prior to the establishment of the Dallas Island Camp this was Bill’s primary staging and receiving site for comings and goings with the outer coast.  He planned camps to be about 25 miles apart and set up what he called “intermediate camps” or “bivy camps” in between.  There were several of these camps set up along both sides of Seaforth Channel.  I think that after the establishment of Dallas Island Camp, Roar became an intermediate camp and probably didn’t see that much of him. 

Approaching Roar Islet

Image by Denis Dwyer

Located an hour north up Reid Passage was a log salvage operation that Bill called “Kevin’s Float Camp – Beachcomber”.  In 1994 he dropped in for a visit and met a recent college grad who was working at the camp.  Over time he would stop by to say “Hello” and enjoy a fresh cup of coffee.  During one of these visits he told the young man that he was thinking about heading out to the Goose Group to get away from the tourist traffic. 

Kayak Bill Camps - Swordfish Bay

Years ago I read a 1992 account by Neil Frazer about a time that he and his wife stumbled upon Bill’s camp at Swordfish Bay.  They were seeking shelter on a cold, rainy, miserable day and pulled into Swordfish hoping for the best.  He described a tiny, well-tended camp beneath a tarp supported by driftwood.  Not large enough to set up a tent but it contained a single bunk and a fire box made of large rocks.  It was integrated into the islet to such a degree that it was hard to detect.  The camp was scrupulously clean. 

Looking south from the tombolo.  

In 2007 while camped at Cultus Bay I paddled the 2 NM south for a look.  I found that the entrance to Swordfish Bay is choked down by an islet and the tombolo that ties it to Hunter Island.  The entrance on the west side of the islet is constricted with rocky shoals that act nasty with southerly swell and wind.  The islet seemed the logical place for the camp so after touring the rest of the bay I landed on its bright gravel and shell beach.  Not a windscreen in sight.  No wooden structure.  Only a clearing barely large enough for a single tent just above the Spring Tide line.  The ground cover was well over my head but I attempted to beat my way into the center of the islet.  It was ridiculously difficult and didn’t seem to match Neil’s description.  I did find Bill’s signature fresh water well consisting of a 5-gallon bucket with holes in the bottom buried in the ground but nothing else.  No other signs of his occupation. 

Kayak Bill Camps - Extended Point

Extended Point had strategic value as a staging site for comings and goings from Calvert Island and crossings of Smith Sound.  It is the southernmost camp that I have visited.  I’m sure that Bill had camps between there and the Broughtons.  Randy Washburne told me of finding one of his camps in the cove at Wilby Point.   Perhaps he didn’t build others and just used camps established by others.  Do you know?

2009 

I first searched for the camp in 2009 when Dave Resler and I were southbound from Prince Rupert.  I “knew” exactly where it was but we didn’t find anything.  The top of the beach seemed too steep, the logs too high and the forest too thick.  We came up empty.  I knew that it was there someplace.

Kayak Bill Camps - Cape Calvert Camp

“Cape Calvert Camp” is located in Grief Bay at the southern tip of Calvert Island.  At just under 8 NM northwest of Extended Point it’s an easy paddle provided that conditions on Queen Charlotte Sound are accommodating. 

The bay is protected by the Sorrow Islands that sit approximately 800 meters offshore and block unfriendly seas from almost all directions.  If Extended Point was Maintenance Hell, Calvert Camp was Paradise as most large logs either drifted past Cape Calvert or got caught up on pocket beaches to the west.  The logs that did make it into the bay collected mostly on the rocky west end of Grief Bay leaving the eastern end relatively clean and the forest accessible.  

Kayak Bill Camps - Mustang Bay

Mustang Bay is on the southeast edge of Hunter Island just off Naulau Passage.  “Mustang Bay Camp” is ~26 NM from “Cape Calvert Camp” and ~32 NM from “Extended Point Camp”.  Close to that “25 miles between camps” mark that Bill preferred. 

From Mustang Bay to Swordfish Bay it is just over 12 NM that can be traversed with little exposure.  Naulau Passage is benign in almost all conditions and some southerly exposure would come crossing Kildidt Sound to the Serpent Group then running in the lee to the Kitty Hawk Group.  I suspect Bill stayed put when “conditions” were expected.

 

All that I know about Mustang Bay is this description:

“On tiny island in a group of 3 in mouth of Mustang Bay (Hunter Island).  Have to go for water via kayak.  “Two unintelligle words” of wood, good clamming, nice spot, hard landing @ LW”.

Two clusters of three islets fit the description.  A northern group with the largest island at ~700 meters in length and a more southerly group with the largest at ~170 meters.  They all look like hard landings could be expected under various tide levels and winds.  Good clamming?  Not sure where that would be unless it is on the largest of the 6 islets.

I’m not certain when this camp was in use.  During the last year of his life he didn’t travel to the southern camps and I suspect this camp was more than a bivi camp but probably not a whole lot more. Since choice driftwood for constructing a major camp would not have been plentiful I would be surprised if I learned that there was a full windscreen.  Also, the fact that the island had no water source would be very inconvenient. 

It’s on a part of the coast where my travels don’t take me and searching those islets could be very time consuming and unrewarding.  I doubt that I will ever go have a look but if you have information or are interested in having a look-see please let me know.

I would love to know more about this one as it is a mystery to me.  Have you been there?

Continued..........

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.

Kayak Bill Camps - Aristazabal

Bill had pushed his camps north beyond Seaforth Channel as far as Wallace Bight but I don’t think that he fancied the reaches and may have found them claustrophobic and leading to nowhere that he wanted to be.  There is the issue of bears, too, which the majority of his camps avoided by location.    In general, his camps seemed strategically located to avoid population and provide stepping stones to increasingly remote locales. 

Aristazabal Island forms the western edge of the Outside Passage at Swindel and Price Islands.  The southern tip of the island is separated from Price by 7.1 NM of Laredo Sound which tapers down to Laredo Channel and just 2 NM south of Shotbolt Point.  It can blow up fast and strong anywhere along the length of the island so most crossings occur in this area with few choosing the longer exposure in Laredo Sound.  In that context it makes sense that Bill would choose the longer crossing supported by camps established on both sides.

Kayak Bill Camps - Cockle Bay

Bill had been out for nearly four months and was taking his time getting back to Shearwater to resupply.  On October 2, 2003 he experienced a “Perfect traveling day along Swindle Island shore” while paddling from Higgins Pass Camp to Dallas Island nudged on by a light westerly breeze.

Eastbound on Higgins Passage

After two nights on Dallas he did a surprising thing.  A man who considered 25 NM an average day traveled just under 4.5 NM through Moss Passage to the Heiltsuk Cabin located on the eastern shore of Lady Douglas Island in Cockle Bay.