Lone Wolf Island: Part I

I spent three days and 79 miles of kayaking out of Victoria, British Columbia, including two nights on Discovery Island, home to a solitary wolf. On Day One of the Adventure I make it through customs and ninja launch my kayak in Victoria, then paddle through chop water and tide rips to get to camp for some exploring around the island archipelago. Total Mileage: 17 miles of kayaking.

I’m not sure if the customs guy liked me very much. 

That whole “I am pissed that you are here, and you are wasting our time,” shtick must come standard in the training.

In fairness, though, I was taking up some time and resources at this port of entry. I had already cut to the front of the line of arrivals, while one of his fellow agents carried the back half of my kayak.

“You know you can get wheels for these,” he told me.

“Yeah, I’m going to look into it.” I said. It was probably the third time someone made this suggestion this morning.

I was the only passenger to carry a kayak on board the ferry from Port Angeles to Victoria, Canada — an extra $6.50 fee on top of of the standard passenger fare.

The goal was to paddle east out of Victoria’s harbor out to a campsite on Discovery Island, nine miles to the east. The island had been closed to residents until only recently because of the island’s latest resident: a solitary coastal wolf, which had somehow crossed through the Victoria suburbs and swum through some nasty currents to end up on Discovery Island alone. The wolf was still there, but the camping ban on the island had lifted recently and I’d decided to spend Memorial Day weekend out there for some lone wolf time.

Before I got to all that lovely paddling and full-moon howling, however, I needed to get my boat to water.

I almost slammed the door-jam with the paddles jutting out of my pack walking into the customs building. I went through the door with a halting squat-shuffle, that didn’t look at all suspicious or draw attention.

My fears of getting turned back, or shipped off to an interrogation room turned out to be unfounded, however.

No one checked to make sure that the hatches weren’t stuffed with weed or severed rhino horns. I couldn’t blame them if they weren’t in the mood to sink their limited staff resources into going through my dry soup mix and fleece clothing. I was out on the street in minutes.

Vendors and tourists mingled on the concrete walk above the harbor. There was no more help carrying the kayak now. It sure was heavy with all the gear. I just needed some water underneath me, and everything could float. Unfortunately, there was also an-eight foot seawall and a chain fence separating me from that bliss. The docks were all marked private. Well…at least there were no signs saying anything against going over the chain and launching off the sea wall.

Fifteen minutes out of customs and it was possible I was already a criminal.

Going over the sea wall with my kayak

It was shallow water below the seawall so I wasn’t brave enough to just shove the boat. I used a couple ropes to lower it down, and got help from a Seattle couple. 

With the boat halfway down toward the water, I heard a pshhht sound inside my cockpit. What the hell?

I saw that the beer that I’d stashed there (I was going to bribe someone into helping me carry my boat) had popped a hole for some reason. Timing!

I could have shotgunned my beer right there in the shadow of the British Columbia parliament. Yet I didn’t want to add to the trouble I was making with my sketchy kayak launch, and opted to pour the beer into a plastic jug.

I lowered the boat the rest of the way, then climbed down the ladder and put myself on board.

I paddled off, into the harbor, (or should I say harbour, now that I was in Canada?) The spelling was one of many ways that the city was twee and Britished out. Charming little yellow water taxis with checkered stripes ferried passengers around the harbor under electric motors. Above it all, the buildings broadcast a complicated Victorian (what else) architecture with all the fussy peaks and balustrades.  Sea planes rumbled over to the west side of the harbor, gained speed and ascended into the blue, cloud-streaked skies.

I drank beer out of the jug than got out of the boat to use a water fountain to fill up my stores for the rest of the trip.

Back on the water, I came upon an elegant wood schooner with high masts and green trim: Blarney Pilgrim. A man I took to be the captain was standing topsides.

“You wouldn’t happen to be from Ireland,” I asked.

“No, the ship’s named after an Irish reel.”

I told him I played mandolin and would have to look that one up, and he invited me to come to the local jam that he played in.

Perhaps I will make it out one of these days.

One of my favorite Victoria Harbour attractions are the house boats. They are grouped together in a colorful neighborhood moored off a series of peers. As a kayaker, I got to voyeur my way around, paddling beneath window frames, while the tourists were confined to the boards.

I was enjoying paddling the harbor so much that I didn’t want to leave. And look, here was a for sale sign. I just needed some money and some citizenship and I’d be good to go.

The twee Victorian sights began to industrialize as I paddled away from the city center toward the open water.

Here, diesel pilot boats waited to help guide the big ships into the harbor. One of these big ships was roped up in a berth near the harbor mouth. Celebrity X Cruises, it read on the side of the towering box of glass and plastic. It looked like a piece of Atlantic City that, for some awful reason, was afloat on the sea. Nothing in the design spoke to the grace of wind or water. 

Were their celebrities aboard now? If so, I was sure they were loathsome and insufferable.

Oh, Christ, there was another one of the damn boats coming into the harbor now — seven stories tall, coming in hot.

No way I was waiting for the next shiny piece of sea trash to park. I began paddling like hell to get across to the sea wall.

Sharp waves slapped across my bow. A flood tide brought checked my progress with an opposing current. The water turned to washing machine chop as waves from the strait bounced off the seawall, crisscrossing each other. 

Finally, I got out of the path of the oncoming ship, but the waves were goofier than ever. 

I stayed within a paddle length of the wall, staying in the wildest water, but where I would be least likely to be surprised by a speedboat cutting the corner. A couple spectators watched me from above.

“Now comes the fun part,” I called to them.

As I prepared to round the corner I braced my knees hard up into the cockpit so that I could react to big slammer waves that were waiting for me there,

Suddenly, I heard the roar of an outboard going full throttle.

“Oh shit.”

THUD —- THUD —- THUD — THUD —- THUD —- THUD

The oncoming boat slammed off the waves.

The driver came within 20 feet, throwing foam in its wake. I concentrated on moving forward and maintaining stability. Finally, the wake hit me, a second later, I was taking rebound waves coming from the opposite direction.

Now that I was outside the harbor, the flood tide was moving in my favor, carrying me Northeast toward the vast Strait of Georgia, which lies between Vancouver Island and the North American continent.

Speaking of flooding, I needed to pee very badly. The beer had run its course. The beaches, alas, were crowded, and I felt badly about offending Victorian sensibilities with public urination. 

My best hope was to pee out from my kayak, which was going to be extra challenging in the waves. I opted to steer behind some rocks where the water was slightly calmer. I pulled the sprayskirt, tugged the relief zipper on the drysuit and aimed the stream outside the boat. The kayak lurched as the diffracted waves buffeted me from either side. This operation required me to have hands off the paddle, so the only stability was in the hips. 

I emptied about half my bladder,  and almost capsized as an extra large wave set smashed past the rocks. Half relief was better than no relief, so I would leave it there.

I paddled back into the current, and worked at catching waves to make fast time.

Up ahead of me stood Trial Island, a windblown place of grass and rock, adorned with skeletal radio towers.

 The island created a bottleneck in the current, so that the water took on a riverlike appearance. The waves compressed into something smaller, but hard. It was lean, dark, muscular water, rippling with strength. Little whirligigs whipped off of the eddy line. Circular boils blossomed out from unseen depths.

The kayak sped like a over it easily; life was good as long as I didn’t defy the forces around me. Yet, my curiosity was stoked, so I flipped the kayak around and tried paddling. Even giving 100 percent of my effort, I saw that I barely made any progress. I had to focus to keep the boat from bucking out of line. Finally, I bent to the current’s wishes and let my boat swing back downstream. As far as I knew, I was getting close to the end of flood tide when the water should have been slacking off.  In other words, this beast was not going anywhere near full strength. Trial Island indeed.

After the tide rip, I paddled another mile to a golf course, which was at the southwest corner of Vancouver Island. Here, the shoreline bent northwest toward the Strait of Georgia and Port Hardy at the top of the island, 275 miles north of there and halfway to Alaska.

I was leaving that shore to paddle two miles out through the chain islands to Discovery Island. A friend who had been out this way before, told me to watch out here, because those islands channeled strong rips between the Juan De Fuca and Georgia straits. 

I hoped that the catching the tides near slack would ease the bumpiest parts of the ride.

I poked from rock island to rock island, going between kelp stands. I accidentally surprised a large colony of seals, and watched as they heaved their speckled gray bodies to the water to much commotion and splashing.

The rips produced a couple of six inch standing waves to slap through, but it was nothing too challenging. Nonetheless, I found the currents taking me further north than I planned, so I decided to just go around the north side of Discovery through the channel below the Chatham Islands to the north.*

The water here was calm, private. The islands felt a world removed from the bustle of Victoria, marked by solemn pines and beautiful madrona trees meeting hanging out above their reflections. I spotted bald eagles up in the branches, monitoring my progress. This land all belonged to the Songhees First Nation, so there would be no landing there.

And as for the wolf? There was no sign.

When I rounded the south side of the island, I was back in the teeth of the wind. Fortunately, camp was not much further. A small sandy bay offered a protected place to land my kayak.

There was a small, windblown meadow above the beach with picnic tables and camp spots.  No one else had set up shelter, yet. And here I had been worried that I would get shut out of a site, being so close to a major city. I savored the wisdom of my taking my Memorial Day weekend in Canada, where there wouldn’t be so many crowds.

I decided to get camp set up early and do some more kayaking after. I set the tarp up and reinforced it with driftwood, set damp clothes on a sunny picnic table, weighting them down with rocks so they wouldn’t blow away.

As the clothes dried, I decided to jog the short trail nearby. The path followed the coastline to an overlook where I could look back to the USA and see the full sweep of the Olympic Mountains going east to west. Port Angeles was lost in the haze below Klahhane Ridge. Beyond, the snows of the Bailey Range shown above the distinct notch carved where the Elwha flowed out from the heart of the mountains.

Closer range, that was — yes it was! — a big ol' wolf shit! Lying right in the path!

It was a log pile with lots of hair, same as I’d seen in Minnesota. A spray of tiny asters grew around it.

I pumped my fist. It was already worth it coming out here.

Wolf sign

Another wolf sign

The wolf shit was going to be hard to top, but I decided to continue exploring. I got back to my kayak for a couple more hours paddling aimlessly through the Discovery Island, Chatham Islands archipelago. The couple of square miles held innumerable tiny islands to explore and mess around. The currents were delightfully unpredictable. I could paddle hard against the flow for five minutes only to have it reverse as I rounded a corner.  I made plenty of time to look down at starfish and up at eagles. Meanwhile, the stronger tide rips between Discovery and Vancouver Islands had picked up, and I could watch as the foam atop the churn caught the sinking sunlight.

It was whimsically pleasing to be able to poke in and out of channels and explore islands, a nice break from the aggressive point-to-point paddling that I often do around Port Angeles, where there aren’t so many islands.

I got back to the camp beach to find another kayak pulled up on the driftwood above tideline, while a man set his dinner at a picnic table.

The polite thing to do would have been to have introduced myself immediately and struck up a conversation. I was getting chilled in the steady wind though, and decided I needed to get into warm clothes before I started talking and got even colder.

Fifteen minutes later, I walked over and introduced myself.

His name was Sandy. He was a cheerful Canadian living in Victoria, who garnished his sentences with generous helpings of “Eh?” and “Dope.”

“This campsite is so dope. It doesn’t get much better than this, eh? I paddle out here all the time and there’s hardly every anyone around. People don’t know what they’re missing.”

Sandy was keen to have a fire, though the signs said this was off limits. The fact that there were cords of flammable driftwood on the beach just waiting was very tempting.

He set up a small blaze below the tideline, and I decided I wasn’t going to miss out. 

I brought my cook-pot over and we swapped stories about paddling adventure as the sun sunk below Vancouver Island.

He had a wife who was going through medical school, two kids and a third on the way. “I’m a stay at home dad.” 

“God bless, Canada.”

Life in Victoria was definitely dope. There was kayaking and biking around town and skiing in the mountains to the north. His kids were still young, but were already taking to Dad’s outdoor ways. 

In a couple weeks, however, they would all be moving three hours up the island to the smaller town of Duncan. They would be closer to the skiing here, and the cost of living would be much lower than Victoria’s. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that people of modest means were getting priced out of there — it was just like any other nice city. Tech workers and fund managers got to kick it on the houseboats,; everyone else packed their bags.

View of Olympic Mountains from Discovery Island

As I slurped down my potato/spit pea soup, Sandy showed my his Coastal Pilot book, which illustrated the network of currents between all the nearby islands and how those currents changed at different tide levels. It reminded me of the circulatory system in its complexity and interconnectedness. 

One thing the book told me, was that I could tide ride north the next morning and back south to camp by afternoon. It would be a long paddle, but I could probably even reach the Gulf Islands if I wanted to. I had explored a small part of that large chain of islands last summer, and had a great time. To get there and back, it would be at least a 30-mile commitment, however, maybe more.

 I’d figure out what I wanted to do in the morning.

Gratitude for the navigation help and the company compelled me to offer Sandy some of the apple/banana bread I’d prepared in the microwave the day before. A full moon blazed a white trail over the water. I waited for a howl to rise out of the hinterlands behind me, but there was nothing.

Legal or not, there are few pleasures like a driftwood fire. It put warmth in my bones. I felt we had a small civilization on the cobbles, complete with trade, fire, and education —  although we didn’t have a customs house, declaration forms or any celebrities to call out bingo numbers. In a few hours, the rising tide would wash right over the spot, erasing the brief history of our culture. 

I was fine with that. 

There's nothing like a driftwood fire.

*Discovery Island is named after the ship commanded by George Vancouver, the British explorer. who ventured into the Strait in the 1700s, searching for the Northwest Passage.  The Chatham Islands are named after Discovery’s companion ship, the Chatham.