We finally got the right boat. Friends offered to guide. It’s time.
We are off to the Gulf Islands, Desolation Sound and the Broughtons. Nature on steroids. Other places, Utah, California, you know – the usual vacation haunts – can have sunsets spreading pink, orange and purple over the sky or glittery crystalline beaches, but here in Canada’s island chain, in her bays and passes on the West Coast and through the inside passage, it’s a deep sensory extravaganza.
There is an ancientness, a depth of color – to everything: the sea water, the evergreen trees, even the rocks worn away by relentless waves. The sense of history is also heavy here, the evidence of people and their stories so old no one remembers them anymore but knows of them because of the remains of entire cultures long-gone but not erased.
On a cool morning in Poet’s Cove, our first morning on our trip, we woke to a misty sky and a thick silence, except for the sound of bagpipes. We took our coffee to the flying bridge and sat back to listen to a lone sailor standing on the bow of his 30-something foot sailboat, playing sweet Irish songs for at least 30 minutes.
No one spoke; no one cleaned their boat or dragged carts along the dock. We were a fellowship of boaters greeting the morning in silence.
As soon as our bagpiper quietly stepped off his bow and carried his pipes to the cabin, the usual dockside clatter and conversation began, slowly, until it felt like any other day. But we were not the same. We had all shared that moment in silence.
This blog will be about a trip in a boat.
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