Clayoquot
Spence called me at 5:33 on the morning we were supposed to leave. We had packed the truck and trailered the boat the night before, but went to bed without knowing if the weather would allow us to leave in the morning. The forecast for the Clayoquot Sound had been in constant flux for the past week, the wind swinging from glassy to gale force without apparent rhyme or reason. Each forecast update seemed completely disconnected from the last-- storms appeared and disappeared, rain swept in and out, and the surf varied between “better pack a bigger board” to “run for the hills”.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“Nothing. I’m tired as fuck. I can’t think this early,” I replied.
“About the forecast.”
“Oh. Lemme look.”
It was still windy, but not where it had been. Down to 15 to 35 knots for the week, it was still prohibitively stormy for a surf trip. But this wasn’t really a surf trip, not in the traditional sense. It was a British Columbia surf trip. A surf trip in BC isn’t a single-minded pursuit of waves. It can’t be. The waves are just too few and far between, the conditions too rough and unpredictable. A surf trip in BC is just an excuse to explore a stretch of coastline where there could conceivably be waves. A surf trip is just the reason you give for getting on a ferry or taking a ten hour drive through old growth forests and clearcuts. A surf trip is the cure for the itch you have to pack fly rods and tents and a chainsaw and maybe even a surfboard or two (if you’re a purist) into the truck and head west. It’s what we told people we were doing when they had seen us loading the Dipper, Eric’s 19 foot tugboat, and stopped to ask questions. People like short stories, solid answers. So we called it a surf trip, even though the real answer was more complicated than that.
“It’s still windy, but it’s not as bad as it’s been.”
“So whadda you think?”
“I think we need this.”
Spence was quiet for a second. We both needed to get out of the city. There were things we were running from—dead end jobs, failing relationships. We didn’t talk about those reasons, but they had hung in the air over the past month as we talked dates and destinations.
“I’ll be at yours at eight.”
We took a ferry to the east coast of Vancouver Island, drove west through forests and mountain passes, and launched the Dipper in Tofino, a port town of fewer than two thousand people that is nonetheless the largest settlement on the west coast of the 300 mile long island. The west coast is all thick rainforest on the steep mountains which drop precipitously into fjords and open coastline. Road access is non-existent. A friend calls his explorations of the coast “pioneering”, and even though we’re far from the first people to travel this coast, it feels wild like few places in North America do.
A young woman in an open aluminum skiff pulled along our starboard side as the Dipper crawled through Tofino’s inner harbour. Loose strands of black hair fell from her ponytail and whipped about her face. A hard west wind made the surface of the harbor dance with light chop. She looked at the Dipper with approving eyes.
“She’s beautiful,” the woman yelled. We nodded our thanks.
“I hope you’re not going far today,” she continued, raising her chin toward the open ocean, where heavy whitecaps churned. “Not a good day to be outside”.
“We aren’t”, I lied. She nodded approvingly and leaned into a hard turn, sending a rooster tail of spray off her stern as she accelerated toward the protected waters east of the harbor.
The Dipper was built to cruise, and we pulled out of the harbour with the speedometer bouncing around 12km/hr. It was maddeningly slow. Commercial fishermen ripped past us, their deep aluminum hulls throwing heavy wakes that bounced chaotically between the harbour’s rocky islets and shallow shoals. The coastline is a maze of islands, inlets and mountains, and even at a crawl we lost sight of Tofino within minutes as we wove north. Spence and I wheeled around the Dipper’s deck anxiously, checking and rechecking the bins of gear we had lashed at the bow, unable to shake our frenetic energy.
Seagulls spun and cried in the moody sky above us. Spence and I eventually ran out of things to adjust and retreated to the Dipper’s small cabin, still bouncing anxiously. Eric was a picture of calm at the helm, his eyes tracing an endless triangle between the chart plotter, the tachometer and the water before the bow. John, our fourth, smoked with his head out of the port side window. Rain swept across the water in translucent sheets, beating the water beneath it to a boil. The cabin was a chorus of white noise-- rumbling engine, the drum of rain, waves gurgling against the Dipper’s wooden hull. We crawled north between islands, looking for beaches to set up camp on. The shoreline was impenetrable, a wall of boulders and heavy salal bushes. Every cove that had looked promising on maps and Google Earth proved too rocky, too low, too overgrown in person.
Afternoon became evening. The sun was beginning to set. We needed to land somewhere before nightfall. The channel we were in widened and split into two, the north arm headed inland and the south towards the open ocean. Eric turned the Dipper southwest, into the setting sun and a few feet of tight, short period chop that ran up the channel, kicked up by the day’s onshore winds. A long, low point ran beside us and jutted into the open ocean. On the other side of that point was the closest thing to civilization we could hope to find—a sheltered harbor with a dock and some campsites cut into the heavy beachside salal. I had stayed there in trips past. The sun was a palm’s width above the horizon, and we were out of options, save this safe harbor.
In the distance ahead of us, white water exploded against the point’s southern terminus. There was more swell out there than any of us had realized. As the Dipper tracked south towards the open ocean, the slap of surf on the hull turned into a gentle rock, then the boat began pitching. The trough between successive swells grew deeper, and we began to drop and rise, no longer traveling on a flat plane of protected water but instead on the sinusoidal curve of open ocean swell. The grey, wind-torn surface rapidly amassed itself into bands of swell that rolled towards us, spreading across the channel and growing taller in succession, each line higher than the last. We dropped deeper into each trough, the horizon disappearing behind grey walls. It was no gentle pitch; the distance between each steep wave was so short that the bow occasionally dug into the face of the oncoming wave and sent green water spilling over the front hatch and along the gunnels. Atop the waves’ crests, we could see an expanse of rolling grey hills before us, windtorn and crumbling, slowly, inevitably traveling towards us.
We stood in the cabin, bracing ourselves against the seats, the walls, the ceiling. It was too late to turn around; the period between waves so short and the faces so steep that if we were to get caught broadside midway through a turn, we would almost inevitably roll and take on water. We had no choice but to go outside the point and into the open ocean to try to turn around out there, where the sets were less pronounced and the interval between waves greater.
“We can turn if we go outside,” I said. “Let’s get out there, turn, and pin it into the harbour.”
Eric looked back at me.
“Will we be able to get out there?” he asked. I was the only one among us who had traveled this section of coast.
“Yeah, we should. There are some reefs to the west, but they’re nowhere near where we need to go.” We didn’t have a choice. To turn where we were was too risky.
As Eric turned the bow towards the open ocean, another set rolled beneath us and lifted us high above the chaotic grey sea. 500 meters outside of us, a wave a city block long and 6 meters high stood up across the channel, feathered, and collapsed into a spitting, rolling wall of whitewater. Our bow dipped again and the horizon disappeared as we fell into the trough of another band of swell.
Everyone turned to look at me.
“I don’t know what that was,” I stammered. “There shouldn’t be a wave there. There’s no reef there.”
We rolled up the face of another wave and watched as a set broke across the same stretch of water. Eric throttled down and pulled up a chart, zooming in on the point and the sea before it. The reef showed up as a series of grey concentric circles, 6 meters beneath the surface. I had never crossed this point in waves big enough to break in such deep water. Suddenly there was no Vancouver, no failing relationship, no shitty jobs, no overdue assignments, no existential crisis, no harbour around the corner, no campsites; there was only the boat and this reef.
The Dipper growled, the engine impatient at idle. We waited at a 45 angle to the oncoming swells, pitching and rolling as each passed beneath us. John shut the cabin door behind him as he re-entered from the deck, a pair of life jackets in each hand. We pulled them on wordlessly, checking buckles, tightening, pulling at the hems of our jackets so they lay flat beneath the vests.
Eric spoke to everyone and no one. “Tell me when to go.”
The last wave of a set washed over the reef, rolling under a carpet of heavy buttermilk foam that lay upon the grey sea. The horizon was a corduroy expanse of rolling swell.
“After this one. Gun it.” The Dipper roared.
