Paddling 2,648km (mostly) North
I spent the summer of 2019 on a 3-month, 2,648km, 110 whale kayak trip. I started in W̱SÁNEĆ Territory, near Sidney, BC, and mostly followed the Inside Passage to the NW end of Sit’ Eeti Gheiyi (Glacier Bay), in Tlingit Territory. Along the way I went on some pretty substantial detours: to the outer coast in Heiltsuk territory, up an inlet for 2 days and portaging around a waterfall onto a lake, and adding on a week and 300km of paddling to go out around the West side of Taan (Prince of Wales Island) in Haida and Tlingit Territory, because I thought it looked neat on a map (spoiler: it was, in fact, neat).
I wanted to write a thing to share with my friends and family, and the through-paddling community on how my adventure went! I’m going to condense the 86 days of my trip into two long-read blog posts. That will obviously leave out lots of little stories and details. If you are keen on more details, you can check out this photo album on Facebook and nerd out on the fine details of my route in the map below (note that I traced the route after the fact, it’s not a GPS track, so is based on my memory, and not 100% accurate).
Ok, here we go.
Part 1: Nostalgia
My first 13 days and 440 km from the Salish Sea to Namgis Territory largely covered territory that I paddled in the summer of 2018 on a trip to circumnavigate Vancouver Island. Some areas in the first 2–3 days I had even paddled as recently as a month earlier. This made for a bit less of a sense of adventure, and lots of nostalgia as I travelled past a bay where I had spent 4 days waiting out a storm or a point where I had once paddled with a pod of 30 dolphins. It was also a very helpful way to ease into the trip: I knew what to expect as I built up my endurance, developed calluses, and got used to reading the weather.
Day 1: Field repairs
I’d planned for my first day to mostly be just about getting out there. I launched in W̱SÁNEĆ Territory near the Swartz Bay ferry terminal, and only had to paddle 6km to SXECOŦEN (Portland Island). I hadn’t done a practice pack of Boat (my kayak’s name is Boat), and the tide came in faster than I expected, so I scrambled on the launch beach to fit everything into my hatches as my dry bags sat in an inch of water and I piled things in my cockpit to avoid them floating away. I finally got everything secured, said a tearful goodbye to my mom and dad, and paddled away. I realized as I paddled to SXECOŦEN that I was basically just kayaking North for the next 3 months, and so I used my deck compass to point Boat’s nose due North, took a few deep breaths, and had a moment with myself.
The first time I took my water bottle off my deck to take a drink, the carabiner attached to it somehow fell off and sank to the bottom of the ocean. As I was unloading my gear at the first campsite, the tapered dry bag I keep all of my clothes and sleeping bag & pad in ripped a 3-inch tear as I removed it (I was too rough, OK?). When I unpacked my secondary map case, filled with charts I wouldn’t need for a few weeks, there was a pool of water in the bottom of it (I had luckily doubled up with a ziploc bag which held, so my maps were OK). I delayed my frustrations by running into the ocean (very uncharacteristic, I never swim in the ocean). I took a metaphorical and literal deep breath, got out my repair kit, and fixed both holes. That night, about 30 minutes after I went to bed, my sleeping pad had lost all of its air. I spent the night sleeping on the ground with my very limited amount of clothing spread out under me as insulation. I found a hole the next day and patched it. The second night, it deflated again. On the 3rd day I found a second hole and patched it. It held up for the rest of the trip. I’m still not sure what happened, it was a brand new sleeping pad. By 10am on day 3, I had used my repair kit five times. Womp womp.
Day 4: Crossing the Strait of Georgia from Snuneymuxw to Tla’amin Territory
On my circumnavigation trip in 2018, when I set out to leave the protection of Nanaimo’s harbour in Snuneymuxw Territory, a gale with persistent 30 knot (~55km/h) winds had prevented me from crossing the Strait. So this stretch was sort of my white whale (or some other metaphor that doesn’t involve whale murder). Crossing the Strait is a 12km endeavour, that can be shortened to 9km by using Ballenas Island as a stepping stone. It’s a pretty exposed crossing. Though I would later repeat similar or longer crossings quite a few times, this first one, and my history with the area, made it feel like a big deal. I wish there was more of a story, but: it went well. It wasn’t too windy or choppy and I got it out of the way early. Here’s a picture of me smiling on the water, 5km from any land:
You don’t have to cross over to Tla’amin Territory (the Sunshine Coast) to paddle the Inside Passage. And the stretch along Vancouver Island, sticking to Qualicum and K’omoks Territory, is very developed and fairly featureless. You’re basically paddling along straight coastlines with lots of waterfront homes and camping at car camping sites. The mainland side is much nicer, and only adds an extra 2–3 days on to the trip.
Day 8: Waterfall shower in Homalco & Klahoose Territory
I love rivers, creeks, and waterfalls. I think, because I grew up in a coastal town where all of the main creeks in town have been turned into underground tunnels, I find running freshwater to be just incredibly charming. I never get tired of it. So I didn’t really think twice about a 10km detour into Teakerne Arm in Homalco & Klahoose Territory to Cassel Falls.
Cassel Falls is set in a little cove at the end of the Arm, and falls off of a cliff right into the ocean. It’s very pretty & picturesque. When I arrived, a group of sport fishers and their kids were hanging out looking at the falls, with the kids paddling around in little sit-on-top kayaks. I made a fairly rough landing right next to the falls. This was the first day I needed water and couldn’t access it at a campsite or town, and so filled up my gravity water filter by walking up right next to the falls. I got kinda wet doing this, and felt inspired to have a shower.
I waited for the sport fishers to leave, and then took off all of my clothes (save my sandals, it was very rocky), climbed under the falls, and scrubbed off. At one point I looked around at where I was, what I was doing, and just basked in having this amazing spot all to myself. I let out a big whoop of joy. After I climbed down, I walked around naked for a while, air-drying. I put a shirt on and ate lunch. As I sat, still pants-less, I looked up and realized there is a trail along the ridge above the falls, with a viewpoint situated to give a perfect birds-eye view of the entire cove to anyone walking along it. Drat.
Day 9: Devil’s Hole
For about a 3 hour period while the the tide floods through the Dent Rapids in Homlaco and K’omoks Territory, a whirlpool develops that is large enough to merit a name on some charts: Devil’s Hole. I’ve heard stories of driftwood logs being sucked under and not being seen again. This stretch of paddling presents three sets of tidal rapids in close proximity. I’ve traversed them 4 times now, and in my experience to get through in one go you need to paddle them as the tide turns into your favour (heading North, this means as the tide turns to the ebb, near high tide. Though not actually at high tide, as the tides are so complex in these parts that high/low tide don’t really coincide with slack tide). If the tide is turning against you, or you aren’t quick enough, you have to wait 6 hours for the next slack. Patience is a virtue: sometimes when sea kayaking, being able to wait lengthy periods of time for the right conditions is more important than a strong roll or being a fast paddler. I approached the start of the Yaculta Rapids about an hour early. The current was still moving at about 7 knots (~12 km/h, or a bit more than twice as fast as I can paddle). I hacked a landing on a very barnacle-y rock in a lee just a few meters from the rapids.
I stood on a point with Boat’s nose balanced on a rock and their stern floating over several-meter-deep water. Multiple cruising boats were out in the channel, running their engines to keep stationary in the current. Everyone waiting for slack tide. I threw sticks into the tidal stream to watch where they were pulled. Just as I was starting to think the current had waned enough to paddle, a sailboat out in the channel gunned their engine and started heading north. I got super excited! I ran back to my kayak. I yelled out to the channel “It’s time friends! Let’s all go together!” No one responded. I hauled ass for an hour, initially against the current, then with it as it turned in my favour. I got through Yaculta Rapids, then Dent Rapids, paddled directly over where Devil’s Hole had been just a couple of hours earlier, and let the current pull me Northwards for the rest of the day. I caught my first fish of the trip. It was a lovely day.
Day 10–13: Headwinds
On Day 9, I paddled 45km. On Day 10, I paddled 12km. But not for lack of trying. As you enter Kwakwaka’wakw Territory, there are long narrow channels where the winds funnel (increase) as they head down the coast, and you have to navigate a number of tidal rapids at slack tide. When timed perfectly with calm winds, you can cover lots of distance very easily. When slack tides don’t line up well and strong winds develop, it makes for quite challenging paddling.
On Day 10, I paddled into 20 knot (~37km/h) headwinds for 4 hours and only covered 12 km. It made me miss my window for slack, and I camped on an improvised rock shelf campsite (which was lovely, not complaining).
Over the next three days, the routine was: wake up early, paddle into headwinds all day, hug the shore very closely and fight for every inch around each headland. Put in 2x the energy for ⅔ the distance. Pull off the water earlier than planned when conditions become unsafe, and I am just too tired to put in the energy needed to keep moving forward. Find an improvised campsite in whatever cove is landable. The previous summer, this same stretch with slightly windier conditions had kept me land-bound for 4 days, and I was proud I managed to make headway each day. On the final day paddling in Johnstone Strait, I woke up at 3:30am, packed up my tent in the dark, and got out of the most exposed stretch by noon before the winds picked up. I ate a rockfish for dinner to mark the achievement.
Interlude: “Have you always wanted to do this?”
I get asked that a lot. No.
Many years ago, I remember talking with my friend Pete about how cool it would be to kayak the whole coast of BC. It would take a whole summer! When would we ever find the time to do that? I put it out of my mind and didn’t think too much about it.
I’d been vaguely aware that there was a route called the “Inside Passage” for a few years, since I’d taken a ferry from Prince Rupert in Tsimshian Territory to Port Hardy in Kwakwaka’wakw Territory. And it hadn’t really occurred to me that people kayaked the Inside Passage until the previous summer, when I met Emily Sherwood on the 3rd night of my circumnavigation trip. She was kayaking parts of the Inside Passage, and we wound up travelling together for 2 weeks, and so we talked about it a lot.
The clearest path I can articulate to why I did this starts with a night in my tent on a much shorter trip in 2016. I had just purchased Boat a year earlier, and had taken a week off work in the summer to paddle around the Gulf Islands in W̱SÁNEĆ, Tsawwassen, and Stz’uminus Territory. I had with me a copy of John Kimantas’ excellent Kayaking Atlas, which I was using for navigation. It contains charts for the entire BC South Coast. I found myself in my tent one night flipping through its pages, well beyond areas I could feasibly reach in my 6 days on the water. It was sort of like perusing a travel brochure. But instead of a catalog of package vacations, here was a whole selection of islands, channels, rapids, and remote beaches. And I realized there was nothing really stopping my from seeing any of it. As I flipped through the pages, I thought to myself: what if I went to all of these places? That led me to go on my circumnavigation trip in 2018. Since then, I’ve realized that very few things inspire wanderlust in me more than a spiral-bound map book.
Once I’d gone on one 45-day kayak trip, I was more or less hooked. While I don’t intend to do this every summer, 2019 saw me go through a career transition which guaranteed me as much time off as I wanted in the summer, and my partner and I have started talking about having a kid in the next few years, so I figured now was a good time to do another adventure. And the Inside Passage was on my mind. From there, I acquired another spiral-bound map book, which I flipped through on and off for several months and eventually landed on the route I took.
Part 2: Open Ocean Act 1
The Inside Passage became an established route for shipping traffic because it is a well-protected passage along a very long stretch of coast. It’s not completely protected though. To get through Gwa’Sala-‘Nakwaxda’xw Territory from Vancouver Island to Fitz Hugh Sound requires travelling in open water for about 50–60km, depending on your route. Having paddled about 500km of exposed ocean the previous summer, I also felt called to the outer coast, so made my first major detour out to Goose Island in Heiltsuk Territory.
The weather really changes as you get into this area. After my first resupply stop in Alert Bay in Namgis Territory, I crossed back to a campsite for the night. As I finished my day, a fog bank rolled in and it started to rain. It felt like a welcome into the next part of my trip, where I knew fog and rain would be a major feature.
Week 3: Fog, Rain, and Tears
Week 3 of my trip was a bit lonely and sad. I had been lonely on and off for the first 2 weeks of the trip, still getting used to the solitude. I was also in an awkward spot navigationally: I had paddled off of one chart book but hadn’t gotten to where the next one picked up. So I was paddling using topo maps I’d printed off of the internet to cover the gap. They had a different scale, and I wasn’t used to them yet. It led to this feeling of not covering very much ground. And it was consistently cold, foggy, and rainy for the first time in the trip, so I spent a lot of time under my tarp or in my tent. I wasn’t having fun a lot of the time, and it was a fairly low point of the trip. For maybe five days in a row, I would suddenly start crying without warning.
On Day 18, I woke up feeling particularly sad, and as I carried my gear down the beach, loaded up Boat, and put on my dry suit and PFD, I cried the whole time. I really just wanted a hug and to talk to someone about why I felt sad. But I was by myself, so I gave myself a hug, wrapping my arms around my torso, my hands barely reaching over my shoulders because of my PFD. And then there wasn’t really anything else left to do, so I just got into my kayak and paddled off into the fog, with tears rolling down my cheeks.
Some really nice things also happened though! I caught my first crab. I came across some deer foraging in the intertidal zone and then swimming from island to island. I relished the first swell as I lost the protection of any island to my West — I love the feeling of bobbing up and down on swell on the open ocean. And I did eventually get used to being alone, and by Week 4 was really enjoying it.
Day 20: Cape Caution
Even the name Cape Caution engenders, well, caution (I imagine that’s the point). The waters of Queen Charlotte Sound mix with Queen Charlotte Strait, leading to turbulence. Swell from the Pacific Ocean is amplified by a very shallow ocean floor that extends well out from the cape.
So, my plan was to give Cape Caution in Gwa’Sala-‘Nakwaxda’xw Territory a wide berth, paddle a kilometre or more offshore, and ensure I had a great weather window. But I got luckier than that. The day I set out to round the cape, there were light winds, waves under 1m, no fog, and I rounded it at slack tide. It was so calm, I could probably have landed on Cape Caution, though I settled for passing within 50m of it. I even met a group of 3 through-paddlers! We crossed paths bobbing on the unusually good conditions, swapping trip details (they were paddling South, from Ketchikan in Tlingit Territory to Bellingham in Lummi Territory).
Day 25: Goose Island
I’d been to Goose Island in Heiltsuk Territory once before, on a field course through UVic in 2014. There’s a feeling of being on the edge of the world — it’s a 10 km crossing from the closest major island, and if you kept going West for another 100+ km you’d just graze the southern tip of Haida Gwaii. While Goose Island is a significant detour off of the Inside Passage, I’d never thought I’d get to go back, and when I realized I could, it was never really a decision any more.
The closest community, Bella Bella, is a 50km paddle away, and only accessible by ferry and plane. The crossing can have very serious conditions: once you start the crossing, you’re committing to two hours of paddling and, if an emergency happens, the remoteness means help is likely at least several hours, if not days, away.
I set out to cross from Purple Bluffs: a beautiful bluff-y point that has a light purple hue under the right lighting. Goose Island sure felt preeeeettttyyyyy far away! I’d done crossings this long before, and there had just been more… land around, I guess? The fact that there was just this one island off in the distance, and nothing much on either side made it feel extra exposed. Because I had incredible weather luck at this point in the trip, there was no wind and only the lightest swell. Just as I started the crossing, a humpback whale surfaced 50m in front of me, then dove with a flourish of its fluke (fluke is a fancy whale name for a tail).
Once I got out there, I decided I should hang out for a bit! I stayed a day, and made friends with a lone person named John anchored in a small sailboat in the anchorage opposite my campsite (he had me over for tea and told me about how he once kayaked the Inside Passage without maps. He would just follow the shipping traffic). On my rest day, I decided to bushwhack across the island to do some beachcombing on the West side of the island. I spent 20 minutes fighting my way through the extremely dense, 6ft tall salal, and eventually came out just 50m up the beach from where I’d started, having become turned around in the bushes. I went back to my campsite, got a compass, and managed to make it across without getting disoriented this time. After about 100m, the ecology changes completely and all of the salal disappears, replaced by thick moss growing over bogs and small, stunted pines and yellow cedar. That night, I found a thick patch of orache (wild spinach that grows on the beach), cooked some in my dinner, and harvested a big bag that lasted me several days.
Interlude: The White-Male version of history
On a trip of this size and scope, just planning the basics of route, gear, food, and the logistics of getting to/from the trip are a major undertaking. I’ve found that keeping on top of finding things like interesting attractions along the way and the natural and human history of the area to be a bit daunting. Luckily, a trip like the Inside Passage is well-traveled enough that there are several books written about it. In my opinion, a good guide book for a kayak trip combines the necessary safety and navigation information, campsite recommendations and summary of key attractions with relevant cultural, historical, ecological, and geological information. It’s a hard thing to do, and it’s definitely done pretty well by some.
On this trip, I brought The Wild Coast 2 by John Kimantas (which covers only the Central Coast & North BC Coast section from Kwakwaka’wakw to Tsimshian Territory) and Kayaking the Inside Passage by Robert Miller. Both are very useful resources. In writing The Wild Coast 2, Kimantas heroically paddles pretty much every nook and cranny on the whole coast, thoroughly documenting a network of campsites in regions where finding a place to pitch a tent at high tide can often be a challenge. By contrast, Miller’s effort is more of an extended trip report, with sometimes highly varied levels of detail from one region to the next. He is also very funny, witty, and covers human and natural history in much more detail than Kimantas.
And in the variation between these two books, a problem is highlighted. Where The Wild Coast 2 mostly restricts its historical references to sites of significant historical events, it doesn’t restrict its discussions of First Nations to the history section. It includes a First Nations section in the beginning of the book and at the beginning of each section of the book. In certain instances, Kimantas includes cultural landmarks cited directly from First Nations cultural inventories, and references contemporary management issues. He notes that certain beaches look nice, but should be avoided as they are on an important cultural site. He marks Reserve land on his maps and directs you to avoid camping there. (I don’t suggest that Kimantas does a perfect job here, and he is clearly trying).
By contrast, Miller mostly only mentions Indigenous Peoples either at the beginning of a chapter in the historical introduction (in a classic “this was their land and then white people got here” kind of way) or as a supporting actor to a European protagonist in a historical anecdote. He uses the term “native poaching” at one point, suggesting that it’s possible for it to be illegal for Indigenous Peoples to harvest their traditional resources on their own territory (according to Indigenous law and the Supreme Court of Canada, it’s not). He uses the word “understandable” to describe the motivations behind the racist and harmful 66-year potlatch ceremony ban by Canada, and that the practice has “waned” among Indigenous Peoples, without including that potlatches are commonly practiced to this day. He uses historical quotes using racist terms like “savages” (and much worse) without doing anything to critique or deconstruct them. He also uses the outdated term “Indians” (the second edition of the book was published in 2018). As someone who lives nowhere near the place he writes about (Miller lives in Arizona), it feels as though he didn’t get any Indigenous persons’ perspectives in writing this book (though it could be that he did, and their influence on the final product was just undetectable to me).
At the same time, Miller seems to idolize the European explorer, writing at length about Cook, Vancouver, Mackenzie, and Muir, who “discovered” different portions of the route. He dedicates a full 6 pages to the history of Imperial Russia as context for Russian colonization of Alaska, while not making room for a single story (of the many, many available) of modern Indigenous resurgence along the route he describes. I spent a lot of my trip feeling outraged at the sometimes racist, often ignorant, and always white-male-biased approach to history in Kayaking the Inside Passage. So, I thought I would just get that off my chest.
Part 3: Looooooong narrow channels
From Bella Bella in Heiltsuk Territory to Prince Rupert in Tsimshian Territory, the Inside Passage becomes its most Inside Passage-y: the route mostly hugs the mainland coast and is dominated by a series of very narrow, steep and long channels.
Day 38: Waterfalls, Orcas & Hot Springs
I launched into a foggy morning in Princess Royal Channel in Gitga’at, Kitasoo/Xai’xais, Tsimshian, and Haisla Territory. The shores along Princess Royal Channel are precipitous; rather than meandering tributaries combining into larger creeks and rivers, the steepness of the topography ushers water along much of the channel directly down to the ocean. When it has rained recently, there are little creeks falling out of the forest every minute or two of paddling, along with larger waterfalls every so often. It’s charming and impressive.
I generally stopped once a day to fill up a water bladder, which I would then purify in a gravity filter at my campsite in the evening. While I typically accomplished this on a beach of some sort, on this particular morning, I thought it would be fun to fill up with water from one of the mini-waterfalls falling from a cliff. I edged up to the cliff and it took a few tries to fill up my water bladder without drifting away from the waterfall before it was full. I had just pushed off and was about to stow the water when I heard the whale breathe. It’s a very distinctive sound, if you are close enough to hear it.
The author of one of the guide books I’d brought on the trip talks about orcas and kayakers: that there is no recorded incident of an orca attacking a kayaker, that there are recorded incidents of a pod attacking a sailboat, and that, in the author’s opinion, if you see an orca it is safest to head to shore. “Pffftt!”, I thought, when I first read that. Nonsense. If they’ve never attacked a kayaker, they’ve never attacked a kayaker, and I wasn’t worried. That day however, as the orca headed directly towards me, I started to second guess myself. Should I head for shore? I looked around at the impenetrable shoreline all around me. There was absolutely nowhere to land. So I just said softly “I am just visiting, I’ll be on my way soon, and I really appreciate you sharing your territory with me.” A few seconds later, it surfaced about 10m away from me with a burst of mist from its blowhole. I stopped breathing. It continued towards me, the tip of its dorsal fin getting closer to me and the water until it fully submerged just 5m away, almost close enough for me to reach out and give it a tap with my paddle, had I been feeling reckless (I wasn’t). The whale (it was a male, based on its long dorsal fin) swam directly under me and surfaced 15m to my other side. It headed about 40m away, and began wriggling on the spot near the surface of the water.
A couple minutes later, its friend, a female orca this time, swam directly behind me, about 5m behind me and just a few metres from shore. The two met up and swam North together. Because orcas cruise at about 3–5 knots, and I paddled at about 3 knots that day, they were 50m-100m from me for several minutes, and stayed within view for about half an hour. A while later, a pod of 5 orcas swam down the channel in the other direction and passed me. I was on the water until about 7pm that day, pushing to get to the Bishop Bay Hot Springs in Haisla Territory. I had a lovely evening soak in the hot springs. There was a humpback whale somewhere in the bay, and the sound of it breathing carried across the water. I could hear it as I fell asleep that night.
Day 40: 8/10
I stayed an extra day at the hot springs, because hot springs. The “beach” at the established campsite there for kayakers to use is actually just a sloping rock shelf covered in algae in the upper intertidal zone, with large rocks covered alternately in slippery seaweed and barnacles in the lower intertidal zone. Every morning of my trip, I carried my gear down to the water in 3–4 trips, then picked Boat up on my shoulder and carried them down. The morning I left, the tide was low and I decided to get Boat down first, so I could put gear directly in the hatches as the water came in. I picked my way carefully down the rock shelf, concentrating hard on not slipping and falling. When I got to the bottom of the rock shelf, I extended my foot down off the edge. As I did that, I had to lean back, and instead of Boat’s weight being balanced over my hips and shoulders, it was all on my back. I felt a sudden, intense pain in my upper back, and did my best to put Boat down gently.
I’ve had chronic back and neck pain on and off since 2012. It runs in the family, and hasn’t been helped by years of working for non-profits that don’t invest in proper ergonomics. I’ve done a lot of work over the past few years to manage it, and there have been times where it’s so bad I couldn’t get out of bed. That day, on the rock shelf, the pain was an 8/10. I hunched over, breathing shallowly. I walked up the “beach” to the campsite, and laid down on a tent pad. If I laid perfectly still on my back, it only hurt when I took a breath in and my ribs expanded.
I tried to decide what to do. My gear was all in the forest. Maybe I could just get my tent set-up again and rest for the day? My kayak was down by the ocean and the tide was coming in. I couldn’t imagine picking it back up again and carrying it back up to the forest. It started to rain. My experience was that the spasms normally lasted 15–30 minutes. I figured I had an hour until the ocean carried my kayak away. So I decided to just hold still for 30 minutes and reassess. I breathed into the pain, rain falling on my face.
A week earlier, I’d had a much less intense kink in my back in the same place, and had actually found the low intensity, repetitive motion of paddling to be quite healing. Once the spasms went away, I decided that it would be less aggravating to carry my gear down than my kayak up. I took 5–6 trips to carry it down, using a paddle as a cane to help me stay balanced. Once I got on the water, I altered my route to ensure I would pass a campsite within the first 10km. I moved at about 60% my normal pace. Each paddle stroke hurt, though only just a little, and less and less as time went on. By the time I got to the first campsite option, I was feeling pretty good, and decided to go to the next one! In my optimism, I decided to try fishing. I hooked a huge salmon, and I excitedly pulled it in. Too fast. It jumped violently out of the water, eventually snapping the line. Gotta play it on the line longer. I felt excited. I found a perfect little patch of moss on a rock above a pebble beach to camp on. The day turned out pretty well.
Day 42: Intimate Cetacean Encounter
The fog started to clear an hour into my second day in Grenville Channel, in Tsimshian Territory. I had worn my dry suit that morning, and conditions were very calm and sunny and I got too hot by 8am. I pulled off the water to take my dry top off. As I got back on the water, a humpback whale surfaced 100m South of me. As I paddled North with the cliff-y shore about 20m to my left, the humpback surfaced between me and the shore! I kept paddling, keeping a consistent course and pace, and the whale kept swimming between me and the cliffs! It surfaced every 2–3 minutes, and for 15 minutes was always right next to or just behind me. I could see air bubbles break the surface as it breathed out under water. When it surfaced, I could make out the bumps on its back and clearly see the undulation of its spine as it propelled forward using its tail fin. Eventually, the channel opened up to a bay and a small gravel beach, followed by a point. As the seafloor became shallower at the beach, the humpback swam under my boat and surfaced on the other side of me. It stayed with me for another 3 breaths, then swam off.
Day 45: Halfway
I’d spent day 44 frustratingly close to my half-way resupply stop of Prince Rupert in Tsimshian Territory. A half-day of paddling could get me there, but a storm came through and I did the responsible thing and holed up in a protected cove to wait out the heavy winds and accompanying rain. On Day 45, I was up at 4am, and in Prince Rupert by 11am. My incredibly helpful friend, Rodrigo, and his partner, Andrea, hosted me at their house. This gave me a home base to do a bunch of gear repair, shower, do laundry, sort out some logistics for crossing the US border, call my parents and partner, and charge my radio, phone, inReach, and battery pack. I had packed up half of my food before my trip and my friend Laura had gotten it to Rodrigo for me. I bought a few things I needed, ate sushi and chips, and slept in a bed! I left Prince Rupert with the fullest and heaviest boat since Day 1. I had to paddle 25% harder to keep up the same pace, though I managed!
To be continued
I’m going to write another post about the second half of my trip soon, and will link it here when it’s ready!