Wheelhouse Rambler Getaways (Day 2)

Day Two:

The early risers - and I find to my surprise I'm one of them - have already snacked on hot buns and coffee and watched the sun rim the mountains with light by the time the rest of the group assembles for a lumberjack breakfast of eggs and sausages. At 8:30 a.m., we stagger off the ship to meet Ken Taylor, manager of Marine Harvest Canada at the Sonora Point fish farm, who proceeds to tell us everything we would ever want to know about raising salmon. Statics fall from his tongue like leaves in autumn: There are 12 pens with 65,000 fish each for a total of 823,000; on this run we will drop off 130 tons of food. Ken talks about the care taken with the farmed stocks and makes sure that we disinfect our feet before stepping onto the walkways around the pens of leaping fish.

By 11a.m., the Aurora is pulling up alongside the beach at York Island, 240 km northwest of Vancouver off the eastern tip of Hardwicke Island, where she lowers her ramp so we can walk off into a Second World War history lesson. The island is deserted now, but between 1939 and 1945 it was the more vital place in Canada's national defense system; it once bristled with roads barracks, concrete gun and searchlight emplacements and generator facilities. We pass through the deserted buildings slowly being consumed by Douglas fir and hemlock, a homegrown Angkor Wat, as our guides Mike Pratt and Bruce Stockland relate gripping stories about the men who manned the defenses, including how they would do anything to get off the island. One took to sitting in a tub with another tub on the top(he had gone "Yorkey" and thought he was a clam). Some committed suicide from sheer boredom. Another went berserk and shot the canine mascot. And one volunteered for a mystery mission but was recalled at the last minute (saving him from service in Z force, the ill-fated clandestine unit decimated by the Japanese in September 1944).