The log of S/V Lacuna, spring and summer 2005
Chapter 4
May 16 through 24, 2005. Fancy Cove to Prince Rupert.
5/16/05. When I started weighing anchor at 0900 in Fancy Cove, the sun was shining. Before I was done, a driving squall had hit me. Fortunately, I was dressed for it. My assumption is that it is either raining or will rain soon, so I’m almost always in my rain gear before I even begin the day’s voyage.
A big cruise ship suddely appeared behind me in a narrow passage. Fortunately, they slowed down to look at New Bella Bella, a native community, and I was able to escape from the narrow passage before they caught up.
I stopped at Shearwater Marine Resort in Bella Bella for gasoline and to fill the water tank. Shearwater is an amazing place—very well capitalized (a long-time resident owns it), well equipped, reasonably priced. The gas fill was a mess. The pump had such high pressure (set up for big boats with big tanks, I suppose) that it was almost impossible to meter slowly. It geysered out of the filler, all over the stern quarter of the boat, my inflatable kayak, which was tied next to the hull, and lines and gear in the cockpit. I shut it off in horror and didn’t check to make sure I had actually filled the tank. It was only later that I found that the “fill” was incomplete; there must have been air in the tank when it backflowed. But the attendant was unimpressed by the pollution. He said the worst offenders are the provincial fisheries agents, whose Zodiacs are set up in a way that makes it impossible not to spill gas. And as I found on subsequent fills, it’s almost impossible not to spill even when you’re being careful and you set up your boat to minimize spills.
After a delicious lunch of seafood chowder, phone calls to Jill and my parents, and a shower, I left Shearwater and headed for Clatse Bay in Roscoe Inlet.
It's prawn season, and there are lots of boats heavily loaded with traps.
Even though I anchored late and was tired, I took Bratwurst (as I’ve christened the Sevylor inflatable kayak, a big sister to the treacherous weenies I had when I was young) out for a short paddle that turned into an hour of exploration. Clatse Bay is a beautiful anchorage, the kind my boat partner Ed would love. He’s enamored of freshwater estuaries amid mountains with snowfields. There was a stream cascading down rapids into the bay, flanked by a gravelly beach that rang with the honks of geese and cries of seagulls. Late in the night I heard a wolf howling—three long, drawn-out calls a few minutes apart. This is what I came for!
5/17/05. I saw the most extraordinary sight today—a jellyfish ball. It was a day of astonishing sights, but this especially sticks in my memory. I’m anchored again in Roscoe Inlet, at the same bay where I was last night.
When I got up, I was planning to make some miles. I had hoped to explore the anchorages and passages along Hecate Strait, outside the usual yacht-tour route, but the forecast predicted another nasty storm with SE gales and rain. It was sunny as I weighed anchor and started heading back toward the passage. I picked up one of the guide books, one I rarely read, and saw a reference to Roscoe Inlet as one of the scenic jewels of the Inside Passage. I thought, “What am I doing?” and immediately turned around and motored toward the head of the inlet.
Roscoe Inlet (click here for larger image)
Imagine Yosemite with the valley full of water instead of cars—and imagine boating along the face of Half Dome with 500 feet of water under your keel. That’s what I did today. Every view featured glacier-carved cirques, cliffs, valleys, and domes. I idled along within fifteen meters of a sheer cliff, glacier-polished smooth, that was hundreds of meters high, the face of an 895-meter peak looming over the water. The depth sounder could not find the bottom (on the chart, 154 meters down). Waterfalls cascade down the cliffs from snowfields to the sea.
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Cruising in almost 500 feet of water, next to a cliff that is over 1000 feet high.
But glacier-carved terrain I’ve seen before. I’ve been to Yosemite. My fundamental beliefs were unchallenged by the grandeur of the scenery. But an insubstantial little creature, mostly water and a little gelatinous protoplasm, tore a veil from my eyes.
There are lots of jellyfish in these waters. One species, perhaps 30 or 40 cm in diameter, is made visible by its opaque yellow-orange digestive organs. Smaller than a grape and almost as transparent as water is the sea gooseberry, an animal that makes its living like the jellyfish, capturing smaller creatures it strains from the water, but is of a completely different phylum. The most numerous jellyfish are moon jellies, translucent white, the biggest moe than 15 cm in diameter. As I glance over the gunwale here in the anchorage I can see two or three. They are rather ghostly, mostly transparent with some white-tinted areas, never opaque.
(NOAA image. Click here for a larger image)
As I was motoring through the inlet, gazing in awe at the cliffs and rocks, I almost passed over a patch of water that was a ghostly greenish white. I jumped. I’d been hearing reports from the Coast Guard on the VHF about an uncharted rock that had been discovered, but it was a long ways away in Estevan Sound. I grabbed the tiller from the autopilot and did a quick about-face, keeping my eye glued on the depth sounder. There were wind ripples, so I couldn’t see clearly into the depths. As I circled it, the apparition seemed to change shape, but the outlines were as indistinct as a cloud patch. It looked like a barnacle-covered rock five fathoms down or more (deeper than barnacles could live), but the depth sounder consistently said 320 to 323 feet as I passed over it. It couldn’t have been a school of fish or squid; they would show up on the depth sounder.
I had to make several passes over it before I could determine what it was. In the shade of the hull, I could see moon jellies—lots and lots of them, dispersed around and fading into the mass. It was a Jellyfish Ball. Thousands of the little jellyfish were congregating in a formation that was slowly shifting shape. Was it happy hour at the singles bar? A convention?
The common wisdom in biology is that jellyfish do not direct their swimming, except perhaps to go shallower or deeper. They’re thought to be at the mercy of the currents. They swim to keep their tentacles moving through the water just as a troller keeps his hooks moving. But they have no brain, no central processing unit. Their nervous system is about as simple as it can be—just a few neurons in a net that controls the pulses of the bell and the retraction of tentacles, and a few balance organs so they can tell up from down. They swim with rhythmic contractions of muscle rings that pull the bell partially closed—like an umbrella opening and closing, the action pushes the animal through the water.
But here, in this quiet inlet, a crowd of jellyfish had found their way to each other. It couldn’t have been the currents—the channel is so deep and the ebb and flood so insignificant that there is no apparent current, and certainly nothing that could concentrate them in such numbers. They had to find their way to this rendezvous. They had to intend to get here, and they had to navigate to this point.
I fear that I have profoundly underestimated their capacity—and their desire to be with others like them. Is it companionship? Sex? I am in awe of life’s mysteries.
This jellyfish ball is also additional verification for my hypothesis that the one universal is that everything is clumped, from the jellyfish in the sea to the galaxies in the sky. I try to remember that when I’m in a traffic jam or stuck in a long line at a grocery checkout.
Predation, competition, and environmental factors affect the distribution of organisms. There’s another side to clumping: the social side. Humans, chimps, wolves, birds, and many other vertebrates show social behavior that we can recognize—they have rich emotional lives, complex interactions, and affinity for each other. But what about jellyfish? Paramecia? Bacteria? Before seeing the jellyfish ball, I would have drawn a line (a fuzzy line, to be sure) that distinguished the organisms capable of (and interested in) social behavior from individualistic automatons driven by simple chemotaxis and programmed instinct. But now that line is gone.
I have long suspected that will and emotion are universal in life. Will provides drive and tenacity; without will, organisms cease to function ("He lost the will to live"). Emotions motivate actions, provide direction, and promote communication with others. The jellyfish were motivated, they had the will, and they found their way to each other. What was their emotional state? Were they filled with longing, with lust, with romance, with loneliness, to seek each other out? How did they know where to meet? How did they navigate to find their way here? What road signs said “This way to the Ball?” How did they feel when they arrived? Did they grow ever more excited as they got closer? Were they conscious of the dance they played out, the performance that made them look like a barnacle-covered rock or a cloud wisp among evergreens to the passing mariner? Did they meet friends? Did they exchange news and gossip?
Skeptics might claim that a certain level of neural organization is necessary before “higher mental processes” like emotion and will can develop. The dancing jellyfish tell me there’s lots more to the story than a mechanical explanation.
At the deepest level, according to quantum physics, the observer, the willful conscious one, collapses the wave function of indeterminacy and brings shape to matter. By logical extension, life is the creator and maintainer of form and organization, from the level of quantum interactions in DNA molecules to the jellyfish ball to the skyscrapers of New York City. Consciousness, it appears, is a universal property of life.
Since neither “consciousness” nor “life” can be defined without dispute (I’ve taught classes in which very bright people searched without success for a clear division between living and non-living matter), I offer the following definitions. I strive not to be provincial and thus do not limit it to DNA-based earth life.
LIFE is a self-organizing system that reverses entropy (only locally) by creating order from disorder, using a flow of energy to organize materials into a pattern that promotes the capture and processing of energy and the spread of order. It shapes the amorphousness of the quantum world into the determinacy of glacier-carved mountains, rainy days, little boats, and words on a laptop screen.
CONSCIOUSNESS is the unifying agent in life and, by extension, in the universe. It is manifest as WILL, the motivating force, and EMOTION, the direction-giver. My friend Amit Goswami, physicist and mystic, maintains that there is one universal consciousness, of which we are all manifestations and parts. To me, that is the divinity of the universe. That’s why I call myself a pantheist. All life, and all the material universe that life holds in existence, is the holy and divine Being.
5/18/05. After a rainy day of passage-making that didn’t include enough wind to justify raising sails (winds were reported gusting to 54 kt in nearby Hecate Strait), I set anchor in Rescue Bay along with four other boats.
5/19/05. I found that when everyone else has a chain anchor rode and yours is rope, it’s a good idea to set a loonngg way away from them. The other boats in Rescue Bay stayed in place as the breezes clocked around the bay, but little Lacuna moved wherever the winds took her. I have 30’ of chain on the anchor, but I had set out over 200’ of rope in addition because the depth was almost 50 feet. I set the anchor in a spot that seemed like a long ways away from everyone else, but at one point I had to shorten the rode by more than 30’ to avoid drifting down on Silver Star, an aluminum trawler yacht. When they weighed anchor in the morning, Lacuna was sitting right over it at the end of Silver Star's rode. I had to move Bratwurst away from the stern so they could lift their anchor. Fortunately, it was a perfectly calm morning, or I would have been out on the bow pulling my rode in even more.
It was a rainy passage today to Butedale, the wettest place I’ve been yet on this voyage. Water was falling everywhere—rain and more rain, but the scenery made it worthwhile. Waterfalls cascaded down every slope. Some were more or less permanent, such as the high, thin white tracery that fell from mountaintop snowfields or the low falls that roared out of the throats of valleys into the sea. Others were temporary and evanescent, carrying today’s rain off the polished rock slopes.
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Butedale (click here for larger image)
At Butedale, the giant cannery is decomposing and decaying. There’s a wide, low waterfall near the dock. Water squirts from big old pipes that supplied the cannery and ran the generators. Water flows out from under the foundations of the buildings. It’s so wet that trees grow on the roofs of the abandoned buildings.
The caretaker, Lou, is a garrulous and inventive soul who’s trying, with limited success, to stem the onslaught of rot and entropy. He harnessed an alternator to an old turbine in the generator building, hooked it to an inverter to make 120V, and strung long power lines to the livable half of a duplex near the dock. There, he has a TV, lights, refrigerator, freezer, and other appliances. He sells showers, ice, and ice cream. I took advantage of the shower—it was hot and there was no timer. Deluxe!
Butedale (click here to see a larger image)
An old engine amid the wreckage at Butedale.
5/20/05. Another day of motoring northwest, this time with less rain and more sun. By noon I was in “The Ditch,” as GrenvilleChannel is called—it’s virtually straight and uniformly narrow for 45 nautical miles. The terrain was as steep but not as high, the waterfalls fewer. I anchored at the south end of Nettle Basin in Lowe Inlet, known as one of the more scenic anchorages in the Inside Passage.
I picked a near-shore spot in such shallow water (20’) that I could put out minimal rode. There was already one 50-foot motor yacht on a chain rode, and by the time I went to bed two other boats had anchored in the same basin. I kept a close eye on the depth sounder, setting the shallow-water alarm to eight feet (then, later, to six feet when the tide dropped and the alarm went off when Lacuna swung close to shore).
I paddled around in Bratwurst, investigating Varney Falls, a wide low waterfall at the head of the basin. Lacuna was anchored near the waterfall, so the soothing sound of falling water lulled me to sleep that night—but not until I had worried and fretted way more than I wanted to.
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When I checked the gas gauge (in a cabinet, out of sight), I was shocked to see that it read “E”—an unexpected and unwanted sight! I had been keeping a rough log of hours of motor use, so I entered the data into a spreadsheet on the laptop and crunched the numbers. The consumption looked like 0.45 gallons per hour. At that rate, I should have enough gas to get to Prince Rupert, barely, after the fill at Shearwater. There is no place between my anchorage and Rupert (as it’s known locally) to get gas. I had passed a few miles away from Hartley Bay yesterday—it’s an Indian community of a couple of hundred people, a government dock, and refueling facilities. The guidebooks said that fuel availability there was unpredictable and that it was a good idea to call ahead. But there’s no cell phone service and the VHF won’t reach the 22 miles from me to them.
Was there enough gas? Why did the gauge read “E”? And why had I got such good mileage on the tank-full before Shearwater? Oops—maybe the tank wasn’t filled at Shearwater. After the gas geyser, I didn’t top it off. Could I trust the numbers? Or the gauge? Could I rely on the kindness of strangers and knock on the door of that trawler, begging for gas? Could I head toward Rupert and hope the wind helped or passing boaters had spare gas they could give me when I ran out, drifting helplessly in the channel?
None of the options seemed attractive at all. In the end, I decided that I would have to run back to Hartley Bay, hope that gas was available, and spend a day retracing my steps. The tides would be against me both ways, but I could minimize the adverse current by getting started before 6:00, arriving at 10:00, filling up quickly, and heading back into Grenville Channel again as soon as possible.
I got up at 5:00, was on the way before 6:00, and encountered only a bit of adverse current. I got to Hartley Bay at 10:00, but the gas dock was occupied by a big old seiner and a smaller sportsfishing boat, which was taking on gas. I circled the harbor slowly, waiting for a turn at the dock. After ten minutes or so, the sportsfisher left, but the seiner immediately backed into the space in front of the pumps. At least that opened up some dock space, so I tied Lacuna up to wait for the seiner to finish filling. After 1,175 liters of diesel, the skipper started filling a dozen five-gallon gas cans on deck. Meantime, people were carrying boxes and boxes of stuff down and setting them on the dock next to the boat. I waited patiently, chatting with some of the residents.
When the old guy had finished filling his gas cans, it took him a long time to figure out which cap went with which can. Then he went on to other tasks. I asked him politely if he would mind moving his boat forward ten feet so I could get to the pumps. His engine was running; it would have taken him a minute to untie the two dock lines, move it, and re-tie. He gestured at a beat-up aluminum skiff tee-boned at the narrow end of the dock and said, “I need to load this stuff. Move his boat,” then went back to his chores.
It was obvious that he was a Big Man in the village and that he wasn’t about to move his boat for the convenience of others. I enlisted the aid of the attendant, who moved the skiff. I maneuvered Lacuna to the eight-foot-wide end of the dock, tying her off as best I could. Once more, despite my best intentions, I spilled gas. Less this time than last, fortunately, and this time I removed the cushions and lines (although I still spilled some on Bratwurst). I made sure it was topped off so I could get an accurate reading on fuel consumption then rinsed the kayak with buckets of seawater. I waited until the gas had evaporated from Lacuna before washing her down—I figured it was better to put the pollution in the air than in the water (although around every fuel dock it’s an oily mess). I left the dock and motored back into The Ditch, this time in sunny weather that was dry except for a few sprinkles. I aired out the boat, dried clothing, and took off my shoes.
It wasn’t until I was within a mile or so of Lowe Inlet that the current became adverse. Losing a knot or two (sometimes three), I motored another three hours to East Inlet, where I set anchor in the middle of the north basin, the only boat in sight. It’s not quite as spectacular as Nettle Basin, but it’s close.
Seals basking on a rock in East Inlet
Lacuna in East Inlet (click here for larger image)
5/22/05. The sound of water cascading over rocks near the boat intrigued me. I couldn’t see the water, but I could certainly hear it. It was too late last night to investigate, though, because after I finished supper, I kept falling asleep over the keyboard as I was trying to do some navigation. I planned to stay here for a day to catch up with writing and website maintenance, and after wrestling briefly with myself when I woke up (“It’s only 46 n.m. to Rupert—I could be there this evening.” “And then what—get distracted by the big city, not be able to focus on writing, and want to get the hell out before you’re done?”) I took Bratwurst out for a spin.
The source of water sound was still invisible until I got almost up to the barnacle-covered rocks, and then I could see a bit of water cascading down through the talus that makes up the shore. As I circled the basin, I could hear water rustling unseen through the rocks in several places.
I paddled up to a floater that shares the basin: a spruce tree that fell in recently. It still had needles, and bright green new growth was sprouting at the ends of the branches. Tangled around the base of the spruce were young red cedars and hemlocks, and underwater I could see salal leaves. Its main roots were snapped off. From their shape, it seemed as if they had been wrapped around a rock; the bark that covered them showed that they were mainly above ground. Its trunk was curved, as if it had been leaning progressively further over as the years passed. My guess is that it had been rooted just above the intertidal zone until its weight and leverage against the roots were enough to snap them, letting it fall into the water.
The forest is a very thin veneer on the mountainsides. Ten thousand years ago, there was no soil—there was only rock scraped clean and polished by the glaciers. In this geologically brief time, life has colonized the rock. It begins with lichens, bacteria, fungi, and algae, collecting dust, rock particles, and decomposing organic matter into a thin film. Herbaceous plants set roots, stabilizing the growing soil. Shrubs, then trees, send roots into cracks and across surfaces, forming a web that holds the whole community together against the inexorable forces of gravity. Sometimes one tree falls, like the floater in the basin. Sometimes the web fails and whole swaths of forest slide into the sea. There are many landslide tracks visible on the steep slopes. They must create some big tsunamis when they hit the water!
A landslide track.
5/24/05. I’m at the dock at the Prince Rupert Rowing & Yacht Club, a lively place with lots of traffic—as is quite obvious to me, because I’m right at the foot of the ramp down to the dock. Everybody that goes to or from a boat passes next to Lacuna. Here’s a place where the boom tent really pays off—I have good privacy with both front and aft halves in place, although it limits the view.
Lacuna at Prince Rupert Rowing & Yacht Club
It’s a beautiful day today, which more than makes up for the miserable day yesterday. The passage from East Inlet to Prince Rupert featured rain, low clouds, rain, an occasional cold breeze, and more rain. It rained harder, it rained softer, but it never quit. The clouds were so low that there was no seeing the scenery except what was right along the shoreline. I had programmed the course into the GPS (I’m using the chartplotter only when in narrow passages, confusing archipelagos, and when finding a place to drop the anchor) so I didn’t have to keep looking at the charts, but I still found excuses to duck into the cabin regularly for respite. The autopilot and outboard just kept us moving along. Fortunately, there was virtually no traffic until close to Rupert.
Prince Rupert (click here for larger image)
I was glad I’d been practicing my docking skills, because the dock attendant had me go down a blind alley that was barely wider than Lacuna is long. I had to turn her sideways at the end to tie up to the walkway. Judicious use of the rudder, reverse gear, and cocking the outboard paid off with a smooth stop, the beam of the hull a foot from the dock, the boat centered in the space. Whew! I didn’t want to disgrace myself by banging into another boat or the dock, especially not at the yacht club. I’d been watching the fishermen and the Indians handle their boats and learned a lot from observation.
Prince Rupert has so many bald eagles it’s amazing. Just before I got to the harbor I saw 30 or 40 riding an updraft. This morning, I was awakened by two or more who were perched near the dock, whistling to each other. They perch on the antennas at the BC Packers fish cannery next door. They scavenge in the intertidal zone in town when the tide is low.
Prince Rupert has a good feel—there’s a lot of civic pride, a sense of community, and good humor. PRR&YC is in Cow Bay, so there are cows everywhere—the trash cans and fuel tanks are painted in a black-and-white milk cow pattern. The coffee shop is Cowpuccino’s. The hair salon is Cowlicks.
There are some good hiking trails in the city. I walked for 45 minutes this morning next to a creek, hardly seeing a house, within the city limits. It feels great to walk again! My back has been so sore because of the lack of standing headroom in Lacuna. Even though I stand most of the day when making passage, there’s something that’s painful about having to crouch down every time when going below.
There was a very low tide this morning. Many boats were stranded. Lacuna was right next to the mudbank but fortunately, she kept floating.
Low tide at PRR&YC (click here for a larger image)
I'll stay here another day, organizing charts and cruising guides, doing some boat maintenance, taking walks, and taking showers. It's great to be hooked up to shore power and use as much juice as I want--I even ran a little electric space heater all night to dry out the boat (and myself).
--Dennis Todd
