Wheelhouse Rambler Getaways (Day 3)
Day Three:
Life on board has taken on a comfortable routine. Some of the group are bivouacked on the daybed at the back of the wheelhouse, new best friends of Philippe or Mike as they guide the Aurora through the inlets and straits; others have staked out the common room cribbage board and cookie jar while sharing life stories. But we all snap to attention when it’s time for offloading, since watching the crew juggle the cargo is almost as much fun as onshore exploration. At 7:30 this morning, the mist clings to the mountains and a light drizzle turns the sky the colour of unbleached muslin. Down south, it would be a miserable late autumn day; here it is and Emily Carr painting. The smile that almost always lingers on Philippe’s face has vanished, however. The crew is attempting to lift a grapple loader in Guilford Island’s Shoal Harbour, and someone, somewhere, has messed up on the measurements. The loader is 30 centimetres too wide to make the ramp.
On the way to the tiny floating community off the white-shell beach of Echo Bay, we drop prawn traps with marker buoys in the Burdwood Islands, 10 islets near the mouth of Knight Inlet just north of Guilford Island. According to Mike, the prawning here is the best he’s ever seen. (The last time the Aurora dropped traps at Burdwood, the crew pulled up 288 prawns. At that news, and instant lottery springs up among the crew and guests to predict how many prawns we will each be allotted for dinner tonight.) By mid-morning we’re headed south from Echo Bay for a tiny rocky cover wrapped by trees and a visit with Billy Proctor, a local so intriguing that his friend, the renowned B.C. whale researcher and scientist Alexandra Morton, co-wrote his biography; Proctor’s houseboat is now an indispensable stop on the Aurora’s scheduled itineraries.
Tranquil as the setting of his small home is, away from even a village as small as Echo Bay, Proctor still has years of adventures to recount. He was born here in Alert Bay, where his only two siblings died of meningitis as children, and in 1941, when he was only seven, his father left Alert Bay in his boat in the middle of the night; the boat came back but Proctor’s dad didn’t. “He was a bit of a drinking man,” Proctor explains. Somehow he and his mother (a “tough old hombre,” says Proctor) survived, living off the land. Later, Proctor worked as a commercial fisherman until the fishing dried up. He now lives on his pension and the curious like us who come to see his gift shop and extraordinary museum with its bottle collection and marine relics. His boat, moored below the house, is a clue to his current mission – Proctor is raising wild salmon in a hatchery to restock streams in the Broughton region. He is also fighting to save wild salmon and their ecosystems, threatened he feels by the 27 salmon farms in the area.
As we “ooh” and “ahh” over the ancient bottles, including Chinese opium containers, vials for pain killers and cough remedies (some 150 years old), Proctor watches us with amusement, as someone might study an odd species in a zoo. Asked how often he goes to Vancouver, he chuckles: “I’d rather run into a grizzly in a creek. I went one time for three days for a book signing three years ago. “Too damn long for me.” As to Vancouver’s chlorine treated drinking water: “I’d rather eat a little deer shit.” BY 11 a.m., we’re dropping the ramp onto the rocky beach at Burdwood Island, where clamshells jut out of the rock sand between the up-ended roots of arbutus, hemlock, balsam and cedar trees; a metre or so away, the beach is a dazzling white expanse of crushed clamshells. For thousands of years, this was a Kwakwaka’wakw summer camp; ancient trading beads can still be found poking through the clamshell sand. As we look for beads, the darkening sky shrouds the trees and the powerful smell of seaweed mingles with the tingle of an impending rainstorm. We scramble back on board and churn off to view three waterfalls in Tribune Channel, the most dramatic of which looks like a tumbling mass of fine Victorian lace; aptly, it’s named Lace Falls.
By the time we return to the prawn traps everyone is salivating. What will it be? Three hundred? Five hundred? Bruce pulls up the first trap – empty. This is not looking good. There are three prawns in the second trap and 32 in the third. Divided among us at dinner, that’s only 2 prawns each, though Donna ensures we don’t go hungry, serving up massive quantities of grilled steak, corn on the cob, salad, baked potatoes and chocolate zucchini cake. Life has slowed so much that, at this point, it’s enough the evenings high drama involves taking photos and cheering on our guests, Cindy and Laurie, as they battle it out for supremacy in dominoes. No one is looking forward to rejoining so-called civilizations in two days.