Blue Highways of the Inside Passage - Part I

Originally published 11/30/2016

Paddling the Inside Passage changes people forever.  Attempting it is bold.  Completing it is remarkable.  I stand in awe of those who have attempted or completed that task.

Living in Seattle I have the good fortune of being just a day’s drive from Port Hardy which is located at the north end of Vancouver Island.  That allows me access to the Canadian Coast that most North American paddlers would die for.  While I have paddled parts and pieces of the Inside Passage I lack the commitment that is required to do it from start to finish.

The planning and logistics of a trip of that magnitude are daunting and the time requirement can be tough to accommodate with our busy lives.  The Canadian and Alaskan Pacific Coastline is probably a long way from your home.  It certainly is for most North American paddlers so just getting to and from your put-in and take-out isn’t easy for most.   It takes tremendous commitment from beginning to end and I suspect that this combines to make the Inside Passage trip a one-and-done sort of experience for many paddlers.

The IP is well established and serves as the primary route for all water craft with only minor variations that are focused on efficiency of staying on task.  Little is mentioned about what lies just off the route by a day or of lesser-used parallel routes and from an efficiency standpoint that seems wise.

In 1982 William Least Heat Moon released the book “Blue Highways” which was his account of traveling around the United States using lesser used roads which, in the days of paper road maps, were blue in color.  Avoiding the interstate highways/established routes his experience was enriched by traveling the “road not taken”.  since it may be hard for you to return to this remote paradise consider incorporating some “Blue Highways” into your route planning. .………..just in case you don’t get back that way or you need fodder for planning another trip.

As Robert Frost once said:

I shall be telling with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Continued.........Hakai Luxvbalis.

Breakfast with Kayak Bill - by Colin Lake

Originally posted 12/22/2019

Image by Colin Lake

In the fall of 1994, I got a job with a small logging outfit on British Columbia’s mid-coast.  Rather than felling live trees like most loggers do, we made our living by salvaging trees that were floating in the ocean or deposited on shore by high tide.  This method of logging is known as “hand-logging” or “beach-combing”.  We would collect timber from the myriad inlets and channels using a small tugboat, and construct a large floating raft, or ‘boom’ of logs that would be picked up every couple of months by barges travelling up and down the coast. 

Image Colin Lake

Our floating camp was nestled in a sheltered inlet roughly midway between Klemtu and Bella Bella, in the Finlayson Channel area of northern Milbanke Sound.  We were about a three-hour tug boat ride from town, so supply runs were only made every four to six weeks.  The camp consisted of several trailers on top of a barge measuring approximately 10 x 30 meters, with the deck sitting about 2 meters above the water.  Long lines, the thickness of your forearm, ran from each corner of the camp to the shore, maintaining the barge’s protected position at the back of the inlet while still allowing for rise and fall with the tide.  It was common for several weeks to go by without seeing anyone, with the possible exception of a prawn boat or salmon fisher who would unexpectedly tie up at our camp for the night to get out of a heavy sea.  We didn’t punch a clock or work regular hours; available daylight, weather conditions and tides determined where we went and what we did each day.  I was in my early 20’s, and recently graduated from college.  I grew up in a small town in eastern Ontario, and this was the first time in my life that I had spent any amount of time on the ocean - the scenery, weather and wildlife all seemed exotic and overwhelming. 

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..........

Klemtu 2007

Originally Published 3/16/2008

When Dave and I started talking about a trip for 2007 we didn’t have approved time off from our jobs.

We didn’t have a route.

We didn’t have a plan, really.

We were inspired to get back to the coast and do something a little more ambitious than we had done before.

The 2005 trip introduced me to the area and convinced me that I had to return again and again and again until I could say that I had paddled the West Coast of Canada. Bumping into Keith Webb at the conclusion of that trip in the bar at Shearwater was amazing fortune as he introduced us to the legend of Kayak Bill and planted some seeds for this trip. His on-line article for Sea Kayaker Magazine fertilized those seeds. We walked into that bar motivated by pizza and beer and walked out inspired by the legend of a dead man.  If you are unfamiliar with Kayak Bill read Keith's excellent online article here: Kayak Bill - A Requiem

John Kimantas, a Canadian author and sea kayaker, had quietly released a book called "the Wild Coast" which covers kayaking the west coast of Vancouver Island. When I received the book for Christmas I hadn’t seen or heard of it before. What a surprise. Detailed routes, great photos, good natural history. Dave and I were inspired to start planning our next trip.

Work kept me close to home in 2006 so I wasn’t able to travel but Dave did go back to the Central Coast and spent a rainy week at Cultus Sound with Larry and Connie Longrie. During that time John Kimantas released the Wild Coast 2 which covers the coast from the north end of Vancouver Island to Prince Rupert. John’s descriptions of campsites that Dave and I had stayed at were spot-on and gave us confidence in using the Wild Coast 2 as a planning tool for the 2007 trip. We wanted to spend as much time as possible “outside” and finding information on the Outside Passage was not as easy as the Inside Passage. The Wild Coast 2 filled in lots of blanks.

Dave and I both wanted to explore the area between Banks Island and Milbanke Sound but recognized that we were challenged by logistics. We needed to try to fit our trip into a two week window if we were going to persuade a third person to join us. We felt that we needed a third partner to share this trip with and, as you know, finding the perfect adventure travel companion is tough. We wanted the safety and strength that a skilled and level-headed partner would provide.

I knew Greg Polkinghorn a bit from work and had paddled with him a few times. I knew that he was stronger than most paddlers had reason to be and had more experience on kayaking trips than I had. Smart guy, strong, no hidden agenda. I had shown him photos of the Bella Bella trip and knew that he was interested but he had lots of competing priorities. I threw it out there to see if he would consider it and to our delight Greg signed on!

Dave, the best qualified to design a trip plan assigned the task to me. Not sure why he did that but I shared my ideas with Keith Webb and John Kimantas. Keith was very generous and spent time on-line and on the phone candidly discussing his experiences and learnings chasing “Kayak Bill”. He also shared copies of Bill’s charts along with GPS coordinates of campsites that worked and didn’t work at spring tide levels. John Kimantas encouraged me where I wavered, confirmed the validity of some thoughts and suggested that I re-examine my plan where it didn’t pencil out for him. Eventually I submitted a plan to Dave who did the preliminary chart work and made a few suggestions. That plan, for the most part stuck and that was what we showed to Greg. Nothing extreme or crazy. Bigger crossings than I had done before. Reasonable exposure with bailouts. Three Kayak Bill campsites with the possibility of more. Maybe see a white bear. Ton’s of new territory. A bit of time in familiar haunts. Sounded like a great trip.

Bella Bella 2005

Originally published 8/6/2005

Seattle to Port Hardy

7/23,  Saturday,  Day 1

Clear

Traveling from Seattle to Bella Bella, British Columbia takes about 25 hours. Some of that time is spent waiting for ferries but you won’t get there much quicker than that.  Maybe you can take a later Tsawwassen ferry and wait in a longer line.  Your call.  I hate being late, though.  That’s my personal problem so 25 hours it is.

Dave and I left Shoreline at 2:30 AM on Saturday the 23rd of July.  We stopped briefly at the rest stop short of Arlington to meet up with Larry and Keith who we would be paddling with.  All three of them are veterans of numerous kayak trips, with Larry and Keith having visited this area at least four times in the past.  Dave had been to the region once.  This was my first overnight kayak trip, period.

Dave explained to me how each of us had particular job responsibilities to perform:

Keith enjoyed cooking and had done all of the meal planning so he had procured the food and would prepare the meals.

Larry, having a pyromaniacal bent, would build and nurture the fires.  Any food prep done over an open fire was also his responsibility.  

Dave’s job, he claimed, was to clean the fish that our meal plan dictated we provide by hook or by crook (more on that later).  

My job was to clean up after the meals.  I inherited that responsibility from Dave who considered cleaning fish a major step up.

Leaving the Arlington rest stop we caravanned to the international border where we were “greeted” by a singularly humorless Canadian border guard.  Think of a young Randy Newman with a short early-70's Caucasian Semi-Afro receiving a failing grade at UC and you have a visual of this guy in his glass booth.  We guessed that his demeanor was due to his disappointment in not being a part of the big drug bust on the BC-Bud-Smuggling-Tunnel under the border the week before.  http://www.historylink.org/File/7928

Picture him in a cold booth and uniform

Photo of young Newman, early 1970s - Getty Images

Or maybe he had been a part of it yet now found himself back in his cold, dark guard shack reviewing passports of kayaking reprobates.  A bitter pill to swallow.  I should mention that one of us had been denied entry into Canada twice for a “crime” that had since been de-criminalized.  I will say no more about it other than to say that it wasn’t me.  We didn’t know what the computer records told him and weren’t about to ask as he had the look of someone desperate to get even.  He didn’t keep us long, though, as he was clearly too depressed to concentrate or have a meaningful conversation so we were off for our rendezvous with the 5:15 AM Tsawwassen ferry to Nanaimo.

Kayak Bill - Foraging

Published 4/7/19

Disclaimer:

I Am far from an expert on the ins and outs of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.  As interested as I am in the topic, I find that my distaste for all stages of food preparation makes it more likely that my hair will grow back than that I might become someone you should look to for guidance on what to eat in the wild.  I do know a little bit about Kayak Bill, though.

I have great admiration for individuals who have learned to live off of the land and sea and I hope to someday attain that knowledge.  For now, I will study the accounts of foragers, fellow paddlers and the rich history of our First Nations who host our visits to their territorial waters.  Perhaps the most celebrated BC Coastal paddler of our time who succeeded in living off the land was Billy (Kayak Bill) Davidson. 

Obviously, fish played a primary role in his diet for its nutritional value and because it was so easy to come by.  He also ate a lot of clams and mussels.  Mussels were a favorite for their size and flavor.  Large mussels provided “steaks” that were easy for him to prepare.  Whether he was ever sick from PSP is not known to me. 

Though there are many types of “vegetables” that grow on or near the shoreline he primarily ate Goose Tongue, Sea Asparagus, Wild Carrot (Queen Anne’s Lace) and Wild Pea of some sort.  The flowers and buds of the Wild Carrot were eaten and as far as the Wild Peas go, he stuck with new branches that were still curled up like a bud.  The peas, themselves, were not eaten.  While Goose Tongue and Sea Asparagus are easy to discern, both Wild Carrot and Wild Peas look very similar to poisonous plants that can be lethal.  I’ll pass on those two.

Bill would also harvest deer and seals.  Seals became more important to his diet as he moved further out from the mainland and his First Nation’s sources of Oolichan grease.  He had been utilizing Oolichan grease for dietary purposes but the Oolichan fish is rendered down to oil by the ton.  It’s a messy process that requires infrastructure and labor.  Not something that a solitary individual would provide but he found that oil rendered from Seal blubber replaced his need for Oolichan. 

Bill would choose a small-ish seal to shoot so that he could manage getting it back to camp.  He would skin it and then remove the blubber layer from the meat.  The blubber was cut into small cubes about 1” square.  Any smaller than that and it was too small and slippery to handle.  The cubes of blubber melted down to oil when put into a hot flying pan.  The oil was poured into containers for storage. 

The meat was cut up into pieces that would fit in his large pot and boiled until it fell off the bone.  It was removed from the pot and the oily water was thrown out and replaced with clean water.  The meat was squished up by hand into a hamburger-like texture, mixed with sea water and made into patties.  The patties were then smoke dried over the fire, placed into stacks and stored. 

To prepare them they were put into water overnight and allowed to rehydrate.  He would put some seal oil in a pan, add the seal burger and cook.  He claimed that the seal oil tasted like bacon grease and that the seal meat was indistinguishable from tender beef.  He felt that the “too-strong” flavor that kept folks from choosing to eat seals was mitigated by pouring off the initial water and boiling it again with fresh water. 

Next came the flour and rice.  These staples were brought from town.  Usually Shearwater.  The flour was used for making chapatis.  He mixed sea water with the flour and added oil for flavor.  The chapatis were made over the fire, dipped into oil and eaten.  Rice would be prepared with chunks of fish, bivalve, seal or “vegetable” added. 

When Bill traveled, he would carry a container of blubber oil and a stack of dried seal burgers.  The oil would last as long as bacon grease before turning rancid.  Goose Tongue and Sea Asparagus are everywhere so they could be quickly be gathered most anywhere that he camped. 

Aside from using the seal oil for food he used it on a rag to keep his knife and tools from rusting as well as oiling his .22 rifle.

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.