Furry Wombat

Oh dear. This got very, very long.

I arrived on Saturday evening. We got up Sunday morning with a plan to pack all day and depart Monday morning.  But, first, I had to finish this one thing for work….  That complete, we had a visit from the cat sitter, meal planning, shopping, and packing still to go. And H was busy getting the electronics ready: new car stereo, new superphone for finding restaurants and hotels, audiobooks loaded onto MP3 player, navigation charts loaded onto GPS, big camera, little camera, camera batteries, etc. Meal planning for extended kayak trips is a challenge. It’s different from backpacking. For backpacking, you must minimize weight, so everything is dried (water is heavy), cooking times must be short (fuel is heavy), and cooking prep must be simple (no extra tools). But for kayaking, the situation is a bit different: volume is important but weight is not so important. All water must be carried with us, so if it comes in the food (canned food) or next to the food (dehydrated food), it makes no difference. And this time, we would bring proper knives and a cutting board.  My head in the cupboard, we discussed the menu for more than an hour, taking notes on meal plans and a shopping list.  We went to TJ’s and two regular markets.  And there was an extended stop by REI so I could fret over shoes.  I sighed, glancing over at the expensive, freeze-dried backpacker food — surely it wasn’t so bad?  We have fun with backcountry cooking, but sometimes we overdo it.  By the time we got home, H was exhausted and I, still on mid-Pacific time, was wired. I washed and dried all the vegetables, put them in labeled ziploc bags, sorted all our food into labeled grocery sacks by day and meal and then crashed.  (Kale, washed dried and stored with paper towels in a ziploc last >10 days without refrigeration!  Same for romaine and pattypan squash.  Carrots, parsnips, and potatoes last even longer.)  Cow and H were already well asleep.

Monday morning. We haven’t left yet. H is up and wrapping up electronics.   Cow and I get up later.  I try to complete the food project. Food starts going into dry bags. Too much food! We can’t possibly fit it! I reject food for unspecified purposes and low calorie density items. I repack the food.  I repack it again.  I start to pack the car (car packing is my specialty!).  Gear gets sorted, boats get loaded.  Checklists!   Now it’s getting dark.  Out for Thai food, to bed.  We will depart Tuesday morning.  A day late, but well-packed and not a thing forgotten.  Indeed, perhaps we have been too thorough.

Tuesday.  Last minute food shuffling.  H makes scones!  Cow waits in the car.  We depart by 7:30am and drive 846 miles to Bellingham, WA.  Yummy sour cherry scones (oh how I love the jarred morello cherries from TJs).  Silly H, but yummy scones.  Stopping for dinner in Tacoma at The Southern Kitchen, we shared a plate of cornmeal fried catfish, slaw, beans, and collards.  It was quite a good spot (thanks, Superphone!).  We listened to some Sherlock Holmes adventures (boy, are those terrible!), some pulpy nonfiction writing on the history of counterfeiting (meh), a reading by David Sedaris (love!), and some music.

At our hotel in Bellingham right by Western Wash U, I inspected our room for bedbugs (damn the internet!), but found only a few carpet beetle larvae (eaters of wool).   Exhausted.

Wed, an early start.  Fill water bags in hotel bathtub.  Purchase two 2.5 gallon water cubes.  Head for the border. “Where are you headed today?”  To vacation on Vancouver Island!  “Are you carrying any weapons?”  Nope, not us!  Careful, that’s 100kph, not 100mph.  And to Tsawwassen for the car ferry to Nanaimo.

H lost me in the ferry bookstore.  I was concerned that I had nothing with me to read, and eventually found a book that would be ok.  Turns out that books on boats cost even more than books in airports…  Never did read it, either.  We drive off the ferry and west across Vancouver Island, keeping an eye out for some lunch.

We pass through the small town of Coombs.  Not quite touristy, but the small businesses clearly take advantage of its location on the road to Tofino.  A busy cafe on our left caught our eye as we slowed to go through town.  A cafe with a turf enviro-roof.  Wait!  Those are goats grazing on the roof!  But we continued on a little way, until we passed a sign for Fresh Meat Pies.Unable to pass this up, we turned around, missed it, turned around, and found it.   We stopped in.  The display cases were empty, but a list of 20 or more types of pies were listed.   The proprietress came out after a few moments.  Sensitive to the empty display cases, we asked gingerly what kinds of pies might be available?  Oh, all of them!  And we hemmed and hawed.  She asked where we were from, what we did. We learned that her daughter was in graduate school, her middle son was attending UBC on a soccer scholarship, and her youngest would be off to college next year.  She and her husband both had college degrees (his in engineering, like H), but they decided to do this little business instead.  It was conveyed a little defensively, probably because we both work at the university — I sure hope we hadn’t somehow communicated superiority.  Indeed, I was thinking how nice it would be to have a little pie shop in some beautiful corner of the country….  Were there any pies in season?  No, all of the fruit was local and organic, but came to them frozen.  We decided on a 4″ strawberry rhubarb pie (ah, the perfect sourness of rhubarb…) and a 4″ Cornish pastie.  Yum!  The crust to filling ratio of a 4” pie is a bit high for me, but still a tasty lunch.

In another hour, we were in Port Alberni.  We stopped in to the Huu-ay-aht First Nation main office in Port Alberni.  While we would start our trip in the Broken Group (part of Pacific Rim National Park), we hoped to paddle across Imperial Eagle Channel to the Deer Group.  One of the recommended places to camp in the Deer Group was at Kirby Point, land held by the Huu-ay-aht Nation.  H had called a couple weeks before to inquire after staying at Kirby Pt.  The resource manager was pleasantly surprised to be asked for permission.  Apparently, folks are typically presumptuous enough to camp without asking.  We had agree to stop by the office.  The Nation is in the midst of an amazing transition, having recently signed a treaty with the Canadian government, they will take possession of extensive tracts of land on Vancouver Island next spring.  Imagine setting up the bureaucracy for a nation from scratch!  We had a nice conversation, looked at some maps, and made a donation for the use of their campsite, thanking him and wishing them well on such a challenging and exciting endeavor.  We picked up some sandwiches for dinner and headed off to our launch spot: Toquart Bay.

The turn-off was better marked than we expected, and the dirt road was wide and in good repair.  It was late afternoon when we pulled into the Toquart Bay campsite.  The office was the trailer home of a nice woman named Pat.  We talked about the incoming weather, our primary concern, and settled our bills: $10/night to camp, $3/night to leave the car.   Our plan was to stay the night, then launch in the morning.  The campground itself isn’t particularly nice.  There are a couple adequate outhouses, no potable water, and cheek-by-jowl campsites on a sandy spit, each separated by a picnic table and firepit.  But it didn’t matter.  The setting was beautiful, there were few other campers, and we would soon depart. Needless to say, Cow was very excited.  So excited, in fact, that he kept jumping around and getting his horns stuck in the ceiling of the car.

As we began to unload the car and set up camp, the first pair of kayakers came in.  They had been brought in by the water taxi: the weather was picking up at Lyell Point.  We were concerned about this.  Weather radio was predicting a storm front coming in.  Wednesday was a beautiful day, but wind and rain were to come with the storm front over the next couple days.  This is what we had risked by coming so late in the season.  High season is during the months of lowest rainfall: July and August.  But here we were, risking a trip at the end of September.  A group of six more paddlers from Seattle showed up about an hour later.  They had been on Clark Island for a week and raved about the perfect weather.  But a storm was coming; it was getting a little rough out there.  Concerned, but undeterred, we repacked the food again, put up the tent, and ate our sandwiches.

Rain was likely that night.  We set the fly on the tent and battened down the hatches.  The rain came around 3 am.  No cats or dogs, just steady rain.  I woke up a couple times and found myself dry.  Good.  But by morning, it was clear we had taken on some water.  It was clear that the fly would not be adequate for a decent rain.  Water pooled in some areas and seeped through the fly and then, collecting a bit, seeped through the roof of the tent, rolled toward our feet and dripped.  Thing were soggy, but not soaked.  H got out of the tent and immediately put on his dry suit.  I tried to dry off the inside of the tent as H boiled some water for breakfast, but soon gave up and got my drysuit on, as well.  A few more kayakers arrived.  The fishing boats started to come in.  Rain is no problem for sea kayaking, save the poor visibility: wind is the real challenge.  We kept weather radio on, waiting for the next forecast, but it didn’t change — the rain was here to stay for a couple days and the winds would pick up later. We thought hard about launching.  It wasn’t dangerous — we could get to our first campsite before the winds arrived and hunker down for the next 2-3 days as the storm passed.  We both (more me) have a hardcore streak — we weren’t gonna wuss out because of rain. I recounted my fourth grade story of the totally lame Girl Scout Troupe:  we went camping, it started to rain, so they packed us up and took us home.  In my mind, this was the epitome of lameness.  Would the Boy Scouts have gone home? I think not.   But here we were, with soggy gear, looking at several more days of sog.  And we thought the better of it.  This is supposed to fun, afterall.  This is vacation.  So, already soggy and a few days of rain ahead of us, we did a little rescheduling.  Our plan had been to launch Wed morning (it was already Thurs morning because of our extended packing) and return 7-9 days later, spend a couple days in Victoria, then drive home.  Instead, we would head to put our city days at the front of the trip.

We repacked the car and headed off to Tofino in the afternoon.  Tofino is a cute town at the end of the road on the west coast of Vancouver Island.  It’s a bit like a Pt Reyes Station or any other small, touristy, but nice town on the edge of a national park.   The main part of town is 2 parallel streets for 3-5 blocks.  We had a tasty lunch at SOBO.  Our food rule is generally to eat the most intriguing things on the menu.  We had a roasted beet salad (conventional but very tasty), yummy bread, fried polenta sticks (intriguing and surprisingly good) and tasty tasty fish chowder.  H was especially pleased — he is allergic to shellfish and was so pleased to find some shellfish-free chowder.   Since I am not allergic, I also had a single oyster on the half shell.

We walked around town, stopped in the dive shop but gave diving a pass, perused the obligatory art shops, most of which were lame, but I liked this one, where I found a really neat two-panel painting of bull kelp by Darla Reid that I should have bought but passed up because it was huge and because I feel too bourgeois buying art especially because I think H looks askance when I suggest dropping a thousand dollars on a painting…which reminds me of how absurd it is… and yet, things of beauty sometimes do bring longterm pleasure… anyway.  It was a cool painting.  In this style, with all that texture, but in blues, two large panels (2′ x 4′ ?) with bull kelp (Nereocystis lutkeana), which looks like this underwater and like this washed ashore.

We drove the ~4 hours to Victoria Thursday evening, settling into a hotel, pitching the tent on one bed to dry while we used the other, and stringing up all our wet stuff.   We spent a couple days in Victoria, which I won’t detail.  Other than brunch at Mo:le, which is supposed to be pronounced mo-lay, but I think it’s cuter if it’s called mole (I have an inexplicable penchant for the starry-nosed mole), and dinner at Zambri’s, where we split a panzanella salad, orchiette with housemade sausage and peaches, an inexplicable fried roasted pork shoulder, and a chocolate pot-de-creme.  And I had a glass of Bacchus from a local vineyard ( Blue Grouse), another vice which H avoids because it turns him red and vaguely ill.

I think that’s enough stream-of-consciousness nonsense for now.  In the next installment, repacking the food again!  But this time, for an actual launch.