into the labyrinth

after a hectic morning of a too-late breakfast and a water/fuel top-up, we left port mcneill. rafiki rode the tide out around the end of malcolm island, dodging clumps of kelp and logs alike. not far out into the strait (queen charlotte strait, that is), the winds came alive. we raised sail and cruised across on a single tack, splitting through the grey day from one obscure shore to the other. at one point we realized this was the first time we had really sailed in nearly two weeks! yet that was all the excitement that crossing held; other than something that looked like a floating foam refrigerator, we didn’t see much out there.

a whole lot of nothin'

fortunately the entrance to blunden harbour was above a massive fogbank - last time aaron and i came this way we had to rely solely on our GPS to get us in there. though the world around us looked lost in a dream, we were at least able to see the entrance and made it into the harbour safe and sound.

blunden harbour is a spacious anchorage - and a very popular one, for that; one could probably drop anchor just about anywhere in there. we chose to drop on the side closest to the midden beach on ‘nakwaxda’xw territory (part of kwakwaka’wakw nation - their origin story is in the photo gallery). we rowed the dinghy to the shore and sighted a large sign saying “respect ‘nakwaxda’xw territory!”. aaron and i had differing opinions on what that meant - i felt it meant to respect access to the land, but aaron interpreted it to mean to treat the land with respect…. and in the end curiosity won, so we went ashore with every intention to respect the land as much as possible (which we always do), treading lightly as guests.

looking back from the entrance - confusing signage

the midden was rife with shards of sea glass and pottery, and we soon broke the ‘one piece each’ rule. though we spent a lot of time with our noses on the beach, we did also notice old

posts and floorboards of houses since lost to nature. judging by the breadth of the midden and the shape of the shore, this seemed like a well-used site by the local tribe. we dipped into the woods for a peek and saw more floorboards there, resting on a flattened patch

of forest floor and then reaching out over the beach. of course we couldn’t say exactly how old they were, but they were made from exceptionally tight-grained cedar, largely rotted out yet still solid in the middle, and clearly worked by hand.

after admiring the site and a fruitful treasure hunt, we rowed back to rafiki, only to find i had lost a glove! so i hauled myself back to the shore to find it. it’s incredible to notice the difference in my headspace when i am on shore without the kids. this is the wild northern mainland now; i have my eyes and ears peeled for any hint of large animals, and when i’m with the kids i can barely stand to let them out of arm’s length. when i am by myself, i

have one eye over my shoulder, but the protective instinct is noticeably gone - though i certainly still carry my knife. i found my glove - which is a critical garment for me as i am allergic to the steering wheel - and rowed back to the boat to have dinner and call it a night.

in the morning we left blunden harbour in a world of grey. sid helped raise the anchor, then manned the helm to take us back into the strait. sea met sky in the same shade of bright grey, fuzzing out the horizon to a vague suggestion of separateness. even though technically vancouver island was somewhere over yonder off our port side, our bow was facing up into open ocean - damned if we could see a wink of it, though!

and so the day went: grey upon grey upon grey. not long up the strait we began to meet ocean swells that set rafiki to rollicking. the waves weren’t immense, but they were steady and kept on all day. eventually we ducked in behind knight island to get away from the swell, which turned out to be a fun shortcut. we dodged rocks and reefs to sneak through a kelp-laden keyhole at the far end of southgate island, putting us briefly back into open waters, though the swell was less dramatic there.

kelpy keyhole

about a half hour later we were wending our way through the rocks, islets, and islands of murray labyrinth (coolest name ever). in little passages like this, we are putting a lot of faith in our charts to accurately tell us where all the dangers are. i was up on the bow, keeping lookout, but obstacles can come up quickly out of these dark waters. fortunately we made it in without harm, and found ourselves in an ancient haven.

murray labyrinth is a collection of rocks and islands surrounding a secure anchorage, serene despite the open ocean just outside. the name “labyrinth” is well-chosen, as the islands are big enough to overlap and obscure each other, yet dotted with small rocks and reefs shallow

enough to make the entrance quite a maze. the islands themselves are bursting with growth, appearing thick and impenetrable from the water. like most of the coast, the shore looks both grim and unfriendly while being luscious and somehow alluring.

after destroying the biggest pot of popcorn we can physically make on board, we geared up for the rain and piled into tubs for a shore explore. we were on the lookout for a beach, but steep rock and dense brush was all we got. we found one little flat-ish spot where we pulled up and climbed out.

the rocks were extremely slippery, and the kids had a bit of a hard time navigating the beach. sid was put right out about it, but we pressed on for a foray into the forest.

it felt like nobody had been there before, maybe ever. the undergrowth was intense, hardly penetrable except where a little creek came out. pads of moss at least a foot deep gave the whole island a pillowy mattress top that would be most excellent for sleeping on - if it wasn’t a sponge permanently laden with water. on a quest to get a close look at a large cedar, we found an animal hole that gave us a bit of a spook. nobody was home (we think), but it’s certainly irksome to climb over a log and see a big black hole facing you. on an island this small we figured it wouldn’t be a large predator; there were a few animal trails about that led us to guess maybe an otter home. still, our dip into the brush was brief and we soon slipped our way back to tubs faithfully waiting in the tidal surges.

since setting foot on shore didn’t seem to be much of an option, we went for a buzz around the labyrinth instead. we nipped along shores that alternated between bare bluffs of varied colourings and dense vegetation leaning out over the water. the kids made a game of snatching at branches and leaves, which soon turned into buzzing under them, which soon turned into just-how-close-can-we-get-under-them…. pretty close, i’d say!

don't mind my weird screeching...

we made our way around as much of the labyrinth as felt safe, keeping fuel supply and boat vulnerability in mind. it was much of the same - curiously coloured rocks and aggressive vegetation - but no less stunning upon repetition.

groping a grabby shore

writing this a week later, i don’t remember exactly what went down, but i know we had a stressful evening back on the boat and i surely felt shorted out. for the first time, we seriously discussed turning back. it’s not easy for the kids, being in a small space all of the time and with no one else for company but us and each other. for the most part they do well, but sometimes the meltdowns are pretty drastic. in the end we agreed to carry on, but i had to go for a row to regroup.

i climbed into tubs with the intention of trying to photograph the epic evening reflections in the harbour - all the colourful rocks and bluffs and their random formations and patterns made mind-bending reflections on the glassy calm water. but wouldn’t you know the tiniest breeze came along to riffle the surface, making my subjects less than perfectly photogenic. instead i looked down into the water and let nature bend my mind in other ways.

first i noticed black and white starfish all along the shallows, blending in quite cleverly with the spotted rocks below. drifting through a reef, i saw some rock crabs mating (i think), and another one with two barnacles on its head that looked like googly eyes. further on i saw an enormous pale starfish draped over a rock - it would have been too deep to see but for its ghostly colour. back along the far shore i saw what i believe was a graceful kelp crab - and it was indeed graceful, lightly picking its way through the bladderwrack just below the surface. and then i turned my attentions up.

the rock shore meets the forest floor in the most incongruous way here. as time has passed, trees have risen and fallen, and while sometimes they decay to the stage of soil, some have simply become extensions of the island top. shards of log swoop out over the rock, barely recognizeable for the growth bursting off of every seedable surface. to even question that it is a log comes from wondering how the greenery is dangling off the shore in such a way at all. in some places i was ten feet out from the rocks and still with vegetation over my head. generation upon generation of trees, reaching over and out; it felt like the place has been here so long, the island is trying to get off the island. really, no words or photos can do it justice; that kind of strangeness just has to be seen.

barely a glimpse of these strange islands

leaving the lively-yet-eerie shore behind, i rowed back to the boat looking up at a sky streaked with neon pink and fronted by impossibly white clouds. i reached rafiki to see the water flat-calm once again, reflecting our vessel in perfection, her little chimney puffing smoke across the harbour and promising warmth within. whatever the day’s challenges had been, it was worth coming to this special place.

i had my fingers crossed going to bed hoping for a smooth day to round the cape and a clear sky to see out to sea - and my wish came true! we raised the anchor in a smooth harbour (got some of the reflection photos i wanted!) and set back out to sea. sid spent the whole morning outside with us in the warm sunshine, which was a welcome change. we spied clusters of sea otters (my first time seeing them in the wild!), floating around in their families - sometimes by the dozen, it seemed. their cute fuzzy heads peeped up at us as we went by, not nearly as flighty as most of the other creatures we pass. we waved to them as we swabbed the decks and tried to enjoy the motion of the rollers.

reflection perfection

it was great to be able to see across to vancouver island as we passed it by, mostly to give the kids perspective on where we were. the very tip of it was smothered by fog, but it was cool to show them a big geographical detail like that. we waved to japan, and sid even declared he wants to sail there one day! (i’ll take that declaration with a grain of salt, but it did excite me to hear him say something positive about sailing.)

hallooooo van isle

we rounded cape caution under a beautiful sun, nearly hot but for the edge of a pacific wind. aaron brought us quite close to the shore to ogle the sandy beaches and admire the breaking waves (‘surf breaks!’, he said). i’ve heard horror stories about rounding the cape but have been fortunate both times i’ve passed it *knock on wood*. all we got were rollers, otters, and the occasional whale - can’t complain.

the weather changed as we came in to smith sound. the sky got a bit more grey and the winds picked up, though not quite enough to really sail. we motorsailed into the sound between the mainland shore, obvious islands, and submerged rocks with mysteriously breaking waves scooping over their tops. it would be an incredibly tricky area to navigate without a chart, paper or electronic; my hat is off to all the early people who plied these waters relying solely on their skills of observation.

with a humpback off our starboard bow and our destination straight ahead, we cut across to the north shore of smith and entered into mill brook bay - debating once again on whether or not we had been there before. turns out we had, though seven years later it surely did look different. aaron took the kids for an explore while i did domestic things (which, um, maybe have been reading…) and tried not to hear our obnoxious neighbours in the bay.

from mill brook bay we made our way around to river’s inlet, a staggering piece of the coast. more sea otters speckled the seatop around us, and a humpback whale puffed up way too close to our stern. the morning had been cool, but as we came into river’s inlet, the sun burst out and we were all shedding clothes as quickly as we could.

otters ahoy!

we fished our way along the shore, catching only a nibble, and then turned in to home bay - a place we both definitively agreed we had been before. there is a very memorable shipwreck in there (a sunken barge, it seems), and another boat washed up on the shore at the end of the bay. both were still there, though significantly more barnacle-y than before. we dropped anchor in what may have been exactly the same spot as last time to call home bay home for the day.

aaron wanted a moment of quiet time, so i took the kids for an explore in the dinghy. we surmised from the charts that there *might* be a creek near the entrance to the bay, so we went there in tubs. again, being on the mainland, i am on predator-detection mode, so it’s very hard for me to relax, especially if i am the only parent. that combined with the swell pumping against the shore and grinding the dinghy on the rocks made me ever more agitated. being the responsible ‘adult’ also made me the un-fun mum. we scaled the high rocky shore long enough to discover a very cool faeire hole; sid had spied a cave on the way in, but on closer examination it was a log overhanging the rocky shore that actually made a hole in the forest floor. when we climbed up into it, we went abruptly from rolling rocks to thick forest. it was a cool way to break into the bush, and it would have been even cooler to explore it more, but i was too concerned about the dinghy to go any farther.

i ushered the kids back into the boat between swells - we timed it well - and set out to explore the beach closer to rafiki. except that damn motor kacked on me just around the bend! i gave a few frantic pulls at the cord, slicing myself with my own fingernail, before busting out the oars to row into the next bay over. it wasn’t a mad panic, and tubs is super safe, but it’s just stressful with the kids on board. they were very calm and collected as i rowed, even encouraging me as i cursed *someone* up and down for buying a second-hand motor. in the end i got it started again and we buzzed back to the end of the bay to explore the idyllic marsh. it was a soothing stretch of green grass and afternoon sun, and the kids were sweet to me, even though by now i was a bonafide grump. what can i say, boat life isn’t always easy.

either way, we said goodnight to our second-to-last familiar anchorage, ready to turn up into the wide entrance of fitz hugh sound the next day

home bay, river's inlet

(to be continued…)