After Margaret and I had sold our
house to buy our wonderful new Ericson 34, "Greta", it did not take
long for me to start talk about sailing up the Inside Passage to Alaska. We had
talked about it long before, with our old boat, "Echappee", but had
never gotten serious. We did some reading about how to do it, attended
lectures by fabulously successful sailors, and with a much more capable boat,
we figured we could do it. After all, we had some sixteen years of
sailing experience in the Puget Sound area.
We had spent just about all we could afford on
the boat; we got lucky with charts as we were able to borrow a complete Inside
Passage set. GPS was available then, but it was expensive, I thought, and
if it came to a choice between radar and GPS I thought probably radar was the
better one.
So one morning we went to West
Marine in Anacortes and talked to a salesman about radar. I was fairly
well persuaded to buy until the sales fellow started talking about the
additional expense of mounting a set, added weight aloft, or spoiling the
appearance of our gorgeous boat by mounting it on a stalk in the stern.
So that sale was not made. I had actually tried a GPS some time past, and
never could get the hang of it, so Margaret and I decided that we would get
neither. After all, her father had made that trip up as far as Skagway
from Washington during the war years several times and he had done it without
these new-fangled gadgets. We could too.
Daughter Holly had written to us
from her Philadelphia college that the trip would be fun, and we would probably
have opportunities every few days to stop at some town and enjoy the delis and
restaurants that British Columbia would be bound to have. We checked the charts, and after Nanaimo it
looked as if the towns were a little far apart but we never doubted that we
could get the necessary coffee and cinnamon roll at frequent intervals.
There were places on the chart like Bella Bella (perhaps an Italian restaurant?)
and Klemtu (Chinese maybe?) and surely at least a deli at Butedale. We
found out differently, as soon as we got past the Strait of Georgia.
Everything was great for the first
week or so. We had a pleasant surprise that Westview, next to smoky
Powell River, was a nice town. We had come from Pender Harbor, a
collection of little towns, and plenty of opportunity to buy goodies. But
then, past Cape Mudge and Campbell River come the nasty currents of Discovery
Passage, and the fearsome Seymour Narrows. We tied up at Brown's Bay
after shooting the Narrows, where there is a neat fishing resort, and a
restaurant to go with it. After that, there was not much for
"civilization" until Port Hardy.
Bella Bella turned out to be quaint,
picturesque, and had the history of having been moved from one side of the
channel to the other. The Native people decided this was a better
location, but not all of them moved. Now there is an old Bella Bella, and
a new Bella Bella. The old one is behind a big rock in the channel, and
is not so accessible by water. New BB has a store which is open a few
hours per day, but the most business is done at the fuel dock where we found
there is always a lot of activity, with lots of pleasure
boats and work boats coming to fuel up. No deli, no cinnamon rolls, no
quaint shops, not much use for tourists except at the fuel dock.
Klemtu is not all that far from BB,
and it too is a Native village where the most business is done at the gas
dock. There is a store that sells groceries and a few other items, but
its business hours are even fewer than the store at Bella Bella. I got
the notion that the people who live there get along by themselves, thank you,
and are not much interested in attracting any tourists, even if they do need
gas or diesel fuel.
Much further on the way up the
Inside Passage is Butedale. This town was described in "Sailing Directions"
and in a book called "Charlie's Charts" as having a post office, at
least one store, and a fuel dock.
It is located right beside a roaring waterfall, and is a sheltered
harbor. There are high mountains on three sides of it, and Work Island is
out in front, sheltering the harbor from the fourth side. On paper, it
looked like at least a hope for the coffee and cinnamon roll. A
well-stocked store perhaps. The surrounding mountains blocked off the
light for much of the day, and gave the entire harbor a forbidding look.
So here we came, motoring confidently into the harbor, and found that it looked
curiously deserted.
The docks looked rotten. I
found out how rotten they were by attempting to tie Greta to a piling. It
broke off in my hands. What appeared to be the wooden fuel dock was awash
where it was not actually sunken. No pumps. There were buildings
ashore which I suppose were the remains of a fish cannery, but these buildings
were obviously abandoned and rotting. About the only thing moving in the
harbor was the waterfall.
It was late, and we wanted to stay
there for the night, so lacking a sturdy dock, we decided to anchor. This
is a small harbor with not much room to swing around an anchor. This is
also a deep water harbor,
and so requires a lot of swinging space for all the anchor rope you let out in
order to make up for the l00 or more feet of water depth. We cruised
around trying to find some place shallower than the rest, and finally anchored
in about 90 feet with less rope than the yachting books recommend. But
there wasn't much breeze and since we were the only boat there, we didn't have
to worry about crashing into someone while we were asleep.
Not long before dark another boat
showed up, a cabin cruiser that I would have guessed to be about 40 feet.
This boat was listing to port about ten or twelve degrees and traveling
slowly. I guessed that he was in trouble, as the boat made straight for
the dock below the abandoned factory building, a dock we had rejected. He
found a place to tie up, right over a shallow spot, and I thought perhaps he
wanted to intentionally ground the boat. When the tide ran out, he could
at least inspect the bottom and figure out what caused the list. It
appeared there were two men aboard; they went up on the dock and explored
around in the old factory and in the bunkhouse above on the hill. I
wanted to do the same, but Margaret insisted that it was entirely too dangerous
to walk around on all those rotten planks.
The tide was indeed running out, and
sure enough the other boat was left on the high spot, under what was probably
the loading dock of the cannery, where the fish were taken from the boats in
earlier times. Neither of the two men came to inspect the hull, they were busy
prowling around in the buildings. Night came; it got dark, but not
pitch-black. We went to bed and slept peacefully for a while.
Somewhere around midnight there was a
kind of loud clunking noise which apparently came from the other grounded
boat. I thought maybe it had just shifted position on the rock it was
sitting on. It didn't happen again so I went back to sleep. I was
having a good sleep, but Margaret kept poking me and saying she was hearing
noises. I would go back to sleep, but minutes later, poke, poke, poke,
"How can you sleep through all this?" I thought it was easy,
because I had not heard "all this". Margaret had turned on the
VHF radio to find out if the other boat was in real distress. They were
trying to contact the Coast Guard at Prince Rupert, which is quite a trick at
that distance with a line-of-sight VHF radio, but they had some
success.
From what they said, we gathered
that they wanted a chain saw. Could the Coast Guard bring them a chain
saw, or tell them where they could get one. Well, no, they either
wouldn't or couldn't, and it was then that Prince Rupert asked if there was
another boat in the harbor that might be of assistance. So they called
us, could we help them. No, of course we did not have a chain saw either,
but we found they wanted it to cut off a piece of the dock. They
apparently had gotten themselves so strongly attached to the dock they were
afraid they would slide off the rock they were on, and pull the rest of the
dock right down onto their cabin. Pieces of the dock had already broken
off their antenna while they were speaking to us. So we had to relay all
messages from "Akbar" (the name of the other boat) and Prince Rupert.
A tug boat was notified by Prince Rupert to come, and we had to relay messages
to them. Evidently the tug was already in the vicinity and could be there
in an hour or so.
I was still trying to sleep between
pokes by Margaret and squawks from our radio, but finally gave up when the tug
arrived, lights blazing, at maybe 2:30 am. Nope, the tug didn't have a chainsaw
either, but they thought they could get a line aboard Akbar and haul it off the
rock. No doubt this would have brought the rest of the dock down on the
boat, but they never did succeed in getting a line between the two
vessels. An hour later the tug left the harbor. Before long it
started to get light, even though Butedale seems to be in a pocket of darkness
most of the time.
Now
the tide was rising, and Akbar was beginning to float. Margaret and I
were thinking about breakfast and all the sleep we lost, when I glanced out and
saw Akbar, under way, leaving the harbor with the same ten to twelve degree
list to port. Later we heard some radio transmissions from Akbar to
Prince Rupert. Where had they come from and where had they gone through
Canadian Customs? Akbar admitted that they had not passed through
Customs, and hastily allowed that they would do so at Prince Rupert. This
struck us as odd, to say the least, because there had been at least three
opportunities to do so before Prince R. After all, they were within just a few miles
of the Alaskan border now, and within the law, they should not have stepped
ashore in Canada without passing Customs. Where had they come from?
California. Where bound? They said they were delivering a boat to Ketchikan.
Prince Rupert said, rather ominously we thought, they would be waiting for them
at Customs.
We never heard from, or saw the
Akbar again. Butedale is deserted and continues to fall apart. No
coffee, no cinnamon rolls.
Top photo by Jean E. Straatmeyer
Bottom photo from www.nauticexpo.com
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