Ken's Rules

Object: the object of the sport is to position oneself in very large waves far from shore, and enjoy the resulting motion.

Equipment: there are two pieces of equipment:

The first piece of equipment is a large nylon bag, seventeen feet long, air-filled for buoyancy, propped open with a wooden frame, and usually assembled in three sections (the "kayak", the "spray skirt", and the "dry suit"). The bag has three small, tightly-sealed openings: one for the head, one for each of the hands.

The second piece of equipment is a stick, about as long as you are tall, flattened on both ends.

Technique: There are only three rules: (1) Stay in the bag. (2) Inhale when your head is out of the water. (3) If you find yourself impatient--impatient to be elsewhere, or impatient to find a spot to inhale--try pushing at the water with the flat stick.

Tadpole, phase...n+2

Here's Tadpole with all seven flat deck-beams fitted. The space without beams, of course, is the cockpit--beam number 3 is the footrest, number 4 is the backrest. The next stage is to lash the beams and gunwales together. Then two last beams, these two curved, will be carved and fitted to raise the deck into an arch at knees and shins. After that it's time to think about ribs. (Total cost of boat so far: $110).

Below is the view from the bow. The tenons still need to be trimmed. The plywood forms squeeze a bit of "recurve" into bow and stern; this will be retained by lashings.

Island Visitors

Two recent visitors:

A buck near my kayak shop, inspecting the new deck beams for Tadpole. (Yes, well, he's blurry, but he just WAS that blurry.) Three does, and their fawns, hang out here on a regular basis, but this is the first time one's brought a boyfriend home. He was socially a bit awkward, and we frankly didn't have a lot to talk about--he's had no boating experience whatsoever--but he seemed impressed with the grass, and delivered a wicked monologue on the subject of our neighbors' fenced-in gardens.



A lion's mane on Bryant Beach; Lee Ann's foot in foreground. Review your Sherlock Holmes before getting YOUR foot this close to one.

Tadpole, phase...n+1

The greenland-kayak-with-hand-tools project progresses too slowly to continue the "weekend-by-weekend" account, but it does make some progress. (It's also acquired a new name: "Tadpole"). Here the temporary spreader has been replaced by two deckbeams, one a backrest, the other a footrest. The beams are through-mortised into the gunwales, in the style shown in Cunningham's book. It's advanced from two pieces to four pieces! It looks like it's going to grow up to be 17.5 feet long, with a 19.75 inch beam.

Next year: Winter Harbour - Fair Harbour (Aug 13 - Aug 28 2005)

After this year's trial run at the Brooks, what I propose for next year is a two-week-plus-a-weekend trip from Winter Harbour to Fair Harbour. The weekends on either end of this period would be used in travelling to and from Port Hardy, and in shuttling vehicles back and forth between Port Hardy and the two end-points, so we could have transportation at both ends of the trip. Port Hardy is the ideal base camp for this shuttle: the (gravel) road to Zeballos, and on to Fair Harbour, and the (gravel) road to Holberg, and on to Winter Harbour, both converge within a few miles of each other on the highway between Port Macneil and Port Hardy.

I envision the trip itself -- for which we would then have twelve days -- consisting of eight legs, each a fairly easy day (10-12 miles) if conditions are favorable. The end of each leg, and therefore the campsite for each night, might be: (1) the beach tucked just behind Kwakiutl Point (Bern and I have stayed there); (2) the beach just east of Heater Point (the five of us camped there twice this summer); (3) Guilliams Beach (our base camp this summer); (4) Amos Creek, between Cape Cook and Meares Point (none of us has been there, but we've seen it in the distance from Solander); (5) Jakobsen point on the South Brooks (none of us has been there); (6) Battle Bay, or somewhere in the Bunsbies (Bern, Akwon, and I have spent a fair bit of time there); (7) Somewhere near Kyuquot (either Spring Island or the beach where Bern, Akwon and I camped just west of Kyuquot Village); (8) Rugged Point, at the southeast point of Kyuquot Sound. In a pinch, we could bypass Rugged Point and head directly up the Sound to Fair Harbour, though the outer beach at Rugged Point has beautiful surf (and many bears!)

Four days of driving and eight (or seven) days of paddling leaves four (or five) days in reserve: for healing blisters, waiting out storms, collecting water, fishing, loafing under a tarp, making boat repairs, or (for the ambitous) doing day trips and surfing with empty boats. I would personally love to spend as much of that as the weather permits exploring the very outside reach of the Brooks -- between Solander and Meares Point -- because we aren't going to get there very often.

What do we most need to practise this winter in order to be readier next year than we were this?

(1) Reentry and roll. Having seen Craig's "ride out of Dodge", I'm convinced: This is not a pool trick. If for whatever reason you take a swim, a reentry and roll is faster than any assisted rescue, and infinitely faster than any other self-rescue, for getting you back in your boat and ready to rock.

(2) Reentry and roll on BOTH SIDES. From where I saw the action, Craig didn't have a lot of choice; if he'd moved to the other side of his boat (either under or around), he'd have been in a weaker position.

(3) COORDINATION OF RESCUES: Who announces that we have a problem? ("Houston, we have a problem...") If nobody does, we mill about like steers, waiting for somebody to take charge. All Winter we practise rescues, and they work; but in around nasty rocks with mean water, we need a protocol for who takes what first step in identifying the problem; and who calls the shots during the rescue: the victim? or a rescuer?

(4) During crossings, particularly foggy crossings under GPS, we likewise need coordination. We have been singularly unsuccessful in keeping the group sufficiently close together that (a) they can recognize and respond in an emergency, and (b) they can respond promptly when the navigator calls for a change in strategy.

(5) Practise landing and launching in surf, surf, and more surf; practise control in wind, wind, and more wind; get thrashed in reflected waves where we can find them (Point Atkinson?)

Incident at Cape Cook (The Brooks, Part 3)

But for the Brooks, skill at handling beaches is probably not as important as skill at handling rocks.



Entering and exiting even relatively protected bays requires running a gauntlet of rocks, with surf breaking over rocks often creating chaotic conditions, as in this photo by Norm from "Whale Beach", our camp near Heater Point. Chris Ladner tells us two paddlers recently watched their boats beaten to pieces in this same area, an incident from which they escaped by a swim and a twenty-mile hike—barefoot!



On our way back from Solander, we had a lesson in how quickly a group can get in trouble. The photos below are by Norm; there's a link on the sidebar to all of his photos of the Brooks trip.



The trip to Solander was the highlight, and the primary objective, of the Brooks trip. The Brooks itself is this odd rectangle of land that juts out from northwestern Vancouver Island, and funnels tide and wind in such a way that the Brooks characteristically has the most turbulent weather on the coast.




Solander island sits two miles off the very tip of the Brooks, and is notorious for fickle and violent weather.




The crossing from Cape Cook was lively, but not stressful. Norm's Dick Tracy wristband anemometer registered 19 knots of wind, but even this diminished as we neared Solander.




We spent a pleasant two hours playing in rock gardens and reflected waves on the outside of Solander. Craig has some quicktime movie footage of this; see the sidebar link, "Akwon and Ken get soaked", in which Akwon and I bob in one direction while Craig, with camera, bobs in another. We all clowned shamelessy for the camera, making sure we got Solander in the background ("Yes, we're really out here! This isn't just pool practise!") Other movies with Craig's little Sony camera (in a waterproof case) include "Craig's foamy ride", "Craig and Ken's corny twin roll finish", "Rolls and rescues", "Norm's solo", and "Dom and Ken practise a bow rescue at Solander". (The photo below is also by Craig).





On the way back, we continued to play in the surge and reflected waves off the cliffs and boomers east of Cape Cook.




The excitement started when Craig put on his helmet, signalling that he was going to join Akwon close in by the cliffs. (Nobody had cameras ready for any of this). I looked away for a moment, and when I looked back Craig had accomplished a brilliant seal landing, and was now perched in his boat several feet above a turbulent surge, the highest wave of which deposited him there. He scrambled out of his small cockpit and stood on the rock, gazing—or so I saw it—triumphantly down at the rest of us. My own involuntary reaction was to laugh, to applaud—at the same time, beginning to wonder just a bit how he intended to get down (was he up there to take a pee?)

The rest of us milled about in the chaotic water with no clear plan and absolutely no coordination. It dawned on us—I think I was the last to realize—that Craig really didn't want to be up there in the first place, and that this was a crisis, not a stunt. I now know that Akwon had capsized in an unexpectedly breaking wave; that Craig thought Akwon was taking too long to roll, and moved in for a rescue; and that a still larger breaking wave dumped Craig's boat on the rock just as Akwon rolled successfully back up.

Craig emptied his boat twice; each time the next big wave filled it again, and pushed it aggressively across the rock toward him. He stepped over the boat to avoid being crushed.

We still had no plan. I tried to nose in to the rock, anticipating that Craig could jump off and grab my bow, a rescue we'd practised. It was a foolish move: my fate was almost the same as Craig's, a wave lifted me up and shelved me, on a rock several feet below Craig's; I braced, stayed in the boat, and fortunately the next wave slid me off the rock and dropped me back into the water.

Having had minutes of paralysis during which we did nothing, now all at once we did too much. I moved to a pocket of water behind Craig's perch and shouted for him to jump in with his boat. He did, and I moved in close, intending to have him grab my boat in one hand and his in another for a toggle-tow...only to collide with Norm, who was converging from another direction with a throw rope which he tossed in Craig's direction.

Craig by this time was entirely master of his own fate: now in the water with his boat, he ignored his two clumsy rescuers and performed a reentry-and-roll that was as slick and instantaneous a self-rescue as I have ever seen. It reminded me of nothing so much as the western movie cliche: the hero leaps off the roof of the saloon and lands on the back of his horse, which he then rides out of Dodge to safety. Craig did the same; we followed him. A few barnacle cuts, and a large chunk of missing gel coat, were the only physical reminders of the incident.

Mean Water (The Brooks, Part 2)

So why? Why is the Brooks so empty of other paddlers (to say nothing of sailors, fishermen, jetskiers and board surfers) in the middle of a mild August? Granted, it's a long way from most places, but not prohibitively so: Bamfield (for the Deer Group) or Toquaht Bay (for the Brokens) are three hours from Nanaimo; Side Bay (for the Brooks) is about eight. The road is rougher than that to Bamfield, but no worse (though longer) than that to Toquaht.

Yet even at Easter we saw five times as many paddlers in the Brokens as we saw in August on the Brooks; and in July in the Deer Group (east of Diana anyway) double kayaks on ecotours were thicker than horseflies, and water-taxis from Bamfield dumped whole families on the beach for the weekend, then went back for more.

It comes down to the Brooks' reputation for being mean water, I suspect. It's not really in my best interest to tamper with that reputation—I love the solitude, and I'm glad to find a few places the commercial operations leave alone. The books all say, "Leave the Brooks to experienced paddlers", and I wouldn't disagree, but it's worth asking the question: How experienced is experienced enough? What skills does the Brooks require?



What the Brooks requires most, of course, is the skill to know when to stay on the beach. But the water isn't mean all the time, and it isn't equally mean everywhere. Even on Guilliams Beach, just five miles from Solander, two little offshore islands—Guilliams and Hackett—provide an amazing amount of protection.



Just how much protection we didn't fully appreciate until we paddled outside them and found a boomer Craig dubbed "the meat grinder". Alas, everybody was too busy to take a picture of the meat-grinder.

I would be nervous taking anyone to the Brooks who didn't have reasonable comfort with surf landings.



Dom demonstrates below the BCU doctrine of backing-and-filling between waves to avoid having to surf them. (They say your friends on shore, who can see the next wave better than you can, should help you with your timing. Note that in one photo Akwon's signalling Dom to back up, at the same time I'm waving her to come ahead. Sometimes you're better off ignoring your friends altogether.) Backing-and-filling may be best, but sooner or later (I'd guess one landing in three) you still end up on a breaking wave and have to side-surf, loaded boat and all.



The surf we encountered was tiny—mid-August surf, two to three feet—and the consequences of broaching weren't catastrophic. But EVERY landing during the day (and every launch) required coping with some degree of surf, usually complicated by some degree of rocks. Without the ability to side-surf, you accumulate bruises in the course of a week.



Nowhere did we find clean, spilling, Long-Beach-style surf. Here, it dumps. When it's small, it dumps right on the beach—ouch!

Guilliams Bay (The Brooks, part 1)

The five of us (Akwon, Craig, Dom, Norm and I) arrived on Sunday, August 15, at the end of a very long logging road, two and a half hours from Port Alice. We loaded the boats at a beach on Side Bay, shrouded in fog and surrounded by salal-berry-purple heaps of bear shit. (All the photos in this post were taken by Craig and Dom. Alas, they forgot to take a picture of the bear-shit).



We weren't yet brave enough to navigate Brooks Bay in the fog, so we waited until we could see across to Heater Point. The first night was spent at a nameless beach just south of Heater, and since it's nameless we named it: Whale Beach, for the grey whale that visited us Monday morning, rolling on its back (scratching?) in the shallows twenty feet from our campsite and waving its enormous flippers in the air. By Monday afternoon we'd arrived at our base camp, halfway out the north shore of the Brooks Peninsula and the last real beach. It too is nameless on the charts. It's a half-mile inshore of Guilliams Island and the topo maps call it Guilliams Bay, though at the time we continued our naming campaign and called it Wolf Creek, for the wolf tracks that appeared each morning on the creek-bed.



Out of habit, we weighed our boats down with bags and bottles of fresh water: 15 liters in my case, enough for five days to a week. In the Brooks this proved overkill, something we'll remember next year. All the creeks that show on the charts actually had water, even in this very dry August. At Guilliams Beach the creek snakes around a long sand bar, with a brackish pool perfect for warm(ish) baths.



A hundred yards upstream—amidst tracks of bear, wolf, mink and something else I couldn't identify, plus the tracks of the five of us heavy with water bags and cans of bear-spray—the sand gives way to rocks and woods, and the water is emerald-clear and delicious. I knelt down (I'd always seen this in cowboy movies; it might work better with a horse in tow) and drank from cupped hands. When I got back to camp, Norm was already dosing his creek water with oxidants of some sort, counting off seconds on his wristwatch as creek-water and chemicals fizzed in a bottle. Neither one of ever got sick, so I guess both methods can be said to work equally well.



The very best water we found was the waterfall near Sapir Point, on a beach we named (in what a friend derides as our Lewis and Clark mode) Bearbath. The bath part is documented...



As for the bear...we never saw him (we never saw ANY bears on this trip!) But ten feet from the waterfall was a purple pile. (Again, Dom forgot to record this...)



Every hour on the hour one or another of us commented in amazement at the three seemingly contradictory facts: this was by far the most spectacular kayaking environment any of us had ever seen; the weather was as good as we had any right to expect on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island; but (and here's the contradiction) there was nobody here! Over the course of a week we encountered two other kayakers, and they turned out to be fellow Jericho denizens, Kulbinder and Piers. We saw one (!!) sport-fishing boat, one coast guard cutter, and half a dozen large sailboats.



Even on land, in our five hours traversing logging roads we passed one lonely vehicle. And on water, the great majority of the time, there were no boats but ours, no people but us, right out to the horizon. On much of the horizon there wasn't even land to be seen.