The 20-foot Pursuit (my old camera boat) was loaded to the Plimsoll mark as we moved away from the launching ramp in Anacortes, Wash. I didn’t know it at the time, but this exploration of the San Juan Islands, the Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island in this small boat would change my life forever.
I had no idea whatsoever that such a wonderful geographical area existed. All you need is a small boat, an engine and the wonder at what is over the horizon.
Laurie taught me where to dig for clams, and what kind of rocky inlets were best for oysters. I later learned the there is a fuel dock almost every 20 miles with a convenience store.
In contrast to Catalina Island in Southern California where ownership and limited use of a mooring buoy costs as much as $275,000, in the Northwest, the moorage is often free.
We found great places to explore between Anacortes and April Point, and Green Point all the way to Glacier Bay, just to mention a few. Jamming everything into a 20-foot boat means that every time you want to sleep you have to move two-thirds of what you have on board from the Cuddy cabin to the back of the boat (reminiscent of the years Ward Baker and I lived in our car and trailer).
We had a 6-foot inflatable dinghy with a 11Z2 hp outboard motor that occasionally worked. One night coming back from dinner in what became known as Old Leaky, the engine quit halfway home and I had to start rowing. While we were having dinner, enough air had leaked out of our inflatable so that I had to row. And, every time I pulled on the miniature plastic oars in the miniature boat, the boat bent in the middle so that water started coming in on the sides by the oar locks. Fortunately, the tide was with us and we got back to the Pursuit.
However, sometime during the night, the tide went out far enough so that our boat was resting in the mud and waist-deep water. Once again, my lack of knowledge about Northwestern 8- to 10-foot tides almost caused a disaster. Amazing that we’re still alive.
There’s a warning on the charts of British Columbia that at full flood some areas have currents of 22 knots. Obviously, this is a part of British Columbia that you want to avoid at all cost except at total slack. There are stories of 75- and 100-foot-long fishing boats being lost in a whirlpool like a merry-go-round and slowly sinking from site, with not a single piece of wood or steel or person on board ever seen again. This is a part of the world where you pay particular attention to the tides.
People still think Laurie and I are crazy to have done this.
This trip was exciting enough to make me leave Southern California after being born and raised there to move to the rainy Northwest. No matter how much it rains, it’s the most beautiful part of the world in my mind. But Laurie and I are lucky enough to move to Montana every winter, where the rain comes down in the form of white snowflakes.
Between Montana and after making the commitment to build the house on this small island, we really have the best of all worlds.
We can put the crab pots in our boat, drive a mile or so away from our dock, drop them in the water, come back home, fill up the big crab-cooking pot with water, turn it on to boil and go back and get the pots. In that short time, sometimes there will be more crabs than our licenses allow and so we just pick out the biggest ones to keep. Once in a while, the neighbors will sponsor a crab cook off where several of the guests compete for the best and most tasteful variation of boiled crabs. There’s crab sushi, crab tortillas, crab salad, roasted crab and the winner is designated by the applause of the people who test them all.
Since those early days in the Pursuit, we’ve expanded our quiver of boats to include a 26-foot Shamrock with a small Ford engine, a 47-foot Bayliner, a 16-foot kayak and a 16-foot Captain’s Gig. I once added up the footage of all our previous and current boats and realized that we’d owned about 225 feet of boat(s).
Years ago, I had to have shoulder surgery so Laurie and I couldn’t go windsurfing on Maui so we decided to drive around the San Juan islands and see what they looked like from a car. Two weeks later, somebody told us about a wonderful piece of property on Pole Pass.
We walked down on to the point on the property and within 30 minutes, I turned to Laurie and said, “Let’s buy this place.” Four days later we owned it, which had no sewage disposal capability and no way to get fresh water. Both were solved relatively simply by making our own drinking water from the salt chuck with a reverse osmosis machine and getting permission from a nearby neighbor to put our drain field on his property more than 1,500 feet from our septic tank.
Today, we can get in our 26-foot Shamrock, cruise to Friday Harbor for dinner in 20 minutes each way, or to Roche Harbor at the same distance or to West Sound only 10 minutes away. Or, with a little more preparation, we can be off to an adventure as far away as Glacier Bay, Alaska, in the big boat (big to us).
Warren Miller is history’s most prolific and enduring ski filmmaker. Visit warrenmiller.net or his Facebook page at facebook.com/warrenmiller. Read more of Warren’s stories at TheTahoeWeekly.com.
