The weather in part allowed me to pull this trip off——last year....day after day of 30 knt blows and crappy weather coming in from the SE....this year.....the general trend was NW with the associated high pressure systems and clear weather, a boater’s delight. Flat water and some times no wind at all. Yes, I saw gale, but she was shy this year, and never stuck around long enough to cause fist fights.
These annual pilgrimages for me have always involved bringing a good book along.....a good book is like having rosary beads you can run laps around during all those nights on the hook. A few years ago The Golden Spruce imbued the trip with a certain magic, especially when boat camping with Hecate Strait outside my wheelhouse window. This year it was Susanna Clarke’s book “Piranesi”.
This from a book review:
“........A young man, Piranesi, (though that is not the name on his birth certificate, but a name given to him by the Other) lives in The House, a vast labyrinth of halls and corridors and staircases, filled with exquisite marble statues. Piranesi leads a simple life; he fishes, dries seaweed for soup and fuel, maps and memorizes the tides that at times course through The House, walks the halls in reverence, and keeps a journal, according to his own calendar, of what he observes and feels and comes to know.....”
When you’re alone on the water day after day in a stunningly beautiful place you find yourself hooked in to the harmonic vibrations of tide and rock. You become Piranesi in his House: you might not yet have weaved bits of shells and seaweed into your hair like he does in the book but you quietly succumb to a more primal mode, ushered in on the meditative lapping sounds of water massaging the chine of your boat. Even the guitar I brought with me , laid up against the hull in the forepeak, responded with musical textures as the waters percussed back and forth across the hidey-hole anchorages I use for protection on these trips. Deep bass sounds, with twangy treble overtones when a wavelet broke and scattered on a puff of wind
The exquisite marble statues in Piranesi’s world that watch the tides rise and fall in my world were the glorious hewn cliff faces and amazing rock formations that you see in the Central and North Coast waters of BC. I got inebriated on rock this trip——I couldn’t get enough of the rock formations I saw—-the advance and retreat of ice sheets during the Late Pleistocene left In its wake huge gobs of distorted granite and quartzite that resemble twisted melting gargoyles that plunge down into the breaking waves. At times you shake your head in wonderment at all the shapes and sizes and colors and geometric formations you see. The Staircase on Starfish Island is one of those places where you’re left wondering....what geomorphological conditions could possibly have left this in its path?
