wind, waves, and everything that can go wrong

on the weather, and broken gear

If Murphy’s Law is “everything than can go wrong will go wrong” then it stands to reason that everything that has gone wrong has because A) it was simply inevitable or B) could have been prevented with airtight planning, but as it was not, was simply inevitable (and therefore is actually was very much “evitable” and very much your fault). As you may have guessed, I tend to get caught up on option B.

When we finally left Shelter Point it was windy in the morning, enough so that we all paused before packing up. When you’ve been windbound for this long you’ve got motivation to get moving. Motivation to paddle other than simply for the sake of paddling— needing to be somewhere, wanting to make progress, running low on supplies— all of these can amount to poor decision making.

We packed up anyway, deciding that even though the white caps and wind waves would make for a difficult launch, it wasn’t anything we couldn’t handle. This was technically true, we’ve all been in much larger seas, but my boat was extremely overpacked, and harder to manage. With all of us carrying more weight than our boats were made to, and with being on the water in a place new to us, we had been in the habit of making extremely conservative calls all summer.

Our marine forecast called for a tailwind from the Northwest in the morning, 15-20 kts, backing SE in the afternoon, 20-25 kts. The marine forecast, both in the US and Canada, is issued by zone. In this instance, we were using the forecast for north of Nanaimo Strait of Georgia, a fairly large zone with open water punctuated by islands and including the inland waters of Desolation Sound and the nearby inlets, which do not have their own forecasts but do have their own, separate weather patterns. So far, we’d found this forecast to be only very roughly accurate. We had been cross referencing with the point forecast from our Garmin InReach and via Windy when we had cell service.

Mountains on Vancouver Island looking over from mainland.

We were far too reliant on forecasting devices in lieu our own knowledge and abilities— something I was growing acutely aware of. We had noticed winds seemed to die off around 5pm every day, about 70% of the time. We had noticed the marine forecast seemed to overstate the wind speeds and surmised it was likely forecasting for the open strait or strongest possible winds. Andy had decided that the Garmin InReach seemed to give the most accurate forecasts, and Windy was comparatively garbage. I disagreed, more inclined to trust my gut than the forecast, and hadn’t observed any accuracy difference between the InReach and Windy.

None of us had the local knowledge or experience in the area to confidently say one way or another what was happening with the winds in the north Strait of Georgia, and conflicting forecast paired with seemingly erratic winds left us increasingly frustrated.

We launched from Texada with 35 L of water that we needed to last us the next 3 days with the wind at our backs riding the ebb tide. This made for an extremely pleasant ride right up until a gust of hot wind from the south hit us in the face. I checked my watch. Precisely 2pm.

We pulled off for a quick lunch at Shingle Beach, just 8 miles from our destination at Jedediah Island. In the 15 minutes it took us to eat lunch, the Sabine Channel in front of us was now strewn with whitecaps.

We pulled out binoculars, trying to deduce wave height in the middle of the channel. The Sabine Channel, and much of the Inside Passage south of Port Hardy, is frequented by cruise boats and pleasure boaters— we ideally would want waves less than three feet, making it easier for them to see us and us to see them.

We have to try, we decided. We didn’t have enough water to take an extra day. Plus, Shingle Beach has camping. If we make it to the crossing and it’s too gnarly, we turn and paddle the three miles back. No big deal.

It had been hot earlier in the day— so much so that Ebba and I hadn’t put on our dry tops, and Andy had been draining sweat out the wrist gaskets of his drysuit.

“We need to stop and you two need to put your dry tops back on,” Andy shouted over the wind, annoyed. He’d mentioned at the beach that we should, and I’d blown him off. He was quickly proved right.

We cut over to a beach on shore to put dry tops on before trying to cross the channel.

“Shit. Guys?” Ebba gestured to the back of her boat. “My dry top is missing.”

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Bit by bit I’ll be chipping away at creating resources for paddlers or visitors looking to recreate this route and/or see some of these places for themselves. The first article in this series is linked below!

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For the last few weeks, rather than wear our dry tops and sweat all day, Ebba and I had been stowing our dry tops— mine fit behind my seat, and hers under her deck bungees at the back of her boat. Borrowed from me, I absolutely would’ve said something if I’d thought the dry top wasn’t stored in a good-enough location. We hadn’t had issues so far, and the bungees seemed secure.

Sometimes, paddling, you have to learn lessons the hard way. I’d always been told that anything stored on your deck or in your cockpit is something you need to be okay with loosing— it might wash off your deck, or in a rescue scenario anything stored in your cockpit is likely to end up in the water. In general, you can mitigate this risk with conservative paddling. This is less true of the things stored on your deck.

Lesson learned— the deck of the kayak is not the place to store any piece of gear you absolutely need to continue the trip. With the open water paddling we had yet to do to get back to Bellingham, continuing forward without the dry top was a no-go.

We turned back to Shingle Beach to search a wave-tossed three miles for a waterlogged dry top. More or less a lost cause.

Okay, we can’t go forward. I thought to myself. How do we get back? From Texada Island, one of us could take the ferry to Powell River. There might be a place to rent a car there, or otherwise someone could hitchhike back to Bellingham where Andy’s car and fresh clothes waited for us. It probably wouldn’t be easy, but we could do it. Was there an airport in Powell River? How much would that be?

Andy pulled up next to me while we searched. “This is going to slow us down so much,” he said. “We’ll only be able to paddle on glass calm hot days.”

“Andy, we can’t keep going at all,” I said. “We don’t have enough food or water or fuel to just wait for the right weather. We’ll have to rent a car in Powell River, go pick up your car and leave from here.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

"Ebba where are you going?”

“I see something, I’m going to check it out!”

Andy and I looked at each other. A dry top in the ocean is a needle in a haystack. Never mind that it was probably water logged immediately, and extremely unlikely to float in those waves.

“I found it!” Ebba shouted, heaving a soaked, purple Level 6 dry top out of the sea.

“You’re shitting me.”

She was not. Somehow, due to a stroke of extremely good luck and Ebba simply not giving up even when Andy and I both had, Ebba had found and plucked the dry top from the sea.

We finished paddling into Shingle Beach.

“If it’s too far a carry let’s just hop on the water again in the evening when it’s calm and try and push to Jedediah.”

Andy and I walked up to investigate and discovered to our delight that Shingle Beach had camping options right on the beach, so no gear carry at all! We set up shop to let gear dry out.

“The water filter has a tear in it,” Ebba announced, examining our Sawyer squeeze bag.

“Damn, for real?!” I asked. A multi-month expedition is bound to be hard on gear, but I’d bought the Sawyer Gravity Filter new before we left, on the strong recommendation of fellow kayakers. We hadn’t particularly abused the water filter, and it was a pretty essential piece of gear generally. We had just enough water to make it across the Strait of Georgia, granted we could find water on Texada tonight. After that, there was only one more site that we’d for sure need to filter at, and we could probably patch the filter.

(It turns out the filter part of the Sawyer screws on to the MSR Dromedary, which is a score!)

Out a water filter, we refilled water bottles at a nearby spring and popped in Aquatabs, better tasting than iodine, so that the extra night on Texada wouldn’t put us out fresh water for the crossing.

A sea lion at Shingle Beach in the morning.

We met the campground host, Triton, and talked with him while the sun sank. He told us stories and mentioned offhandedly that a flight from Powell River to Vancouver was only $200— we laughed. “Good to know!”

The next morning, we had an easy paddle into Jedediah before the wind picked in the afternoon. At this point, a lot had gone wrong. From my trip to the literal hospital to short on fresh water and fuel and the dry top now the filter.

We were happy to be on Jedediah, one of the prettiest islands we’d camped on on the way out.

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Big thanks to all of my current paying subscribers, you guys are keeping the air in the sleeping pads! I’m back in front of a computer again, and have had time to go through some of the photos on my DSLR camera. Here are some of those photos, and the micro-stories behind them: