Grizzlies, Gales and Giant Salmon. Pat Ardley

      One afternoon while George was working under the frame covering the OM, I took our small skiff out for a ride. I slowly motored out of Sunshine Bay and picked up speed as I entered the large protected area called Klaquaek Channel. Klaquaek is surrounded by many low, tree-covered islands, and some people say it reminds them of the Lake of the Woods in Ontario. It was a beautiful sunny day with no wind to create even the slightest ripple on the water. When I was in the middle of the channel, I stopped the boat and drifted for a while. Then I shut the engine off and drifted along in the sudden peace. This would prove to be a big mistake!

      There was absolute silence as the boat gently floated along with the tidal current. I sat up straight on the seat in front of the motor with my hand on the tiller bar. I knew the water was very deep here—between 450 and 550 feet at its deepest. And the water was very dark and I was all alone and far from shore. My heart was pounding and I started gasping for breath. I grabbed at the pull cord to start the engine. I had to stand up to get enough momentum to pull hard enough and yanked the cord three times, four times, five times and it still wouldn’t start. The darkness seemed to envelop the boat and I could feel it rising up to surround me. I braced my foot against the wooden seat and pulled with all my might. The engine kicked in and I dropped quickly onto the seat, threw the gearshift into forward, thankful that I hadn’t left the engine in gear or I would have been catapulted overboard while the boat took off on its own. I zoomed back into Sunshine Bay as fast as the boat would go, and not wanting to slow down I almost ran the boat up onto the float. I hadn’t even slowed down to let Bob, our neighbour with the automatic rifle, see who I was. I staggered into the house and threw myself onto the bed. I hadn’t quite cured my fear of water and possibly I had added fuel to the fire.

      After that, every once in a while, I would have another panic attack, which is what I decided I had that day out in the boat. It’s funny how your mind can play tricks on you. They would come out of nowhere, sometimes in the middle of the night, or sometimes just before we were supposed to go out in the boat. George took his boating comfort for granted and thought that I was just being irrational. He had spent so much time in boats that he thought everyone should love them. “What could possibly be so scary about being in a boat?” he asked. Maybe nothing, but at times I thought my heart was going to jump right out of my skin. I wrote a letter to my doctor in Vancouver describing what was happening to me. He prescribed pills that would settle me down. I thought there must be a better way.

      The beginnings of our lodge, 1976. The building with floor to ceiling corner windows is on a float that was built in 1938. This building became our house/lodge. The building/float to the right of centre originally had one room, a breezeway and a workshop full of fishing and logging gear. The Om is on a float to the right of the guesthouse.

      I read about “behaviour modification” techniques. It was not unlike meditating your way through your greatest fears. I started practising the technique—deep-breathing while focusing on something completely outside of what is happening—and was able to rein in some of the worst attacks that I had that didn’t even seem to have anything to do with water. It was a good place to start.

      Fishing for Rockfish

      Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t cheap to live in the wilderness. We needed money. That winter we asked everyone in the inlet if they needed any help or had any jobs that we could do for them. Ray Reese was a commercial fisherman who lived in Finn Bay, right across from neighbours Ken Moore and Gus Erickson. He came over to Sunshine Bay one day to discuss getting our help to commercially fish for rockfish. It was January though and not the best time to be going out on the high seas in his pint-sized green wooden boat but George thought it was a good idea, mainly because we could really use any money that we could make. I figured that Ray, at fifty-eight years of age, knew quite a lot about the weather and waves and what his boat, the Janet, was capable of handling, or he wouldn’t still be around. We decided to become temporary commercial fishermen.

      We started working with Ray at his place in Finn Bay the afternoon before we would go out on the fishboat. There were a lot of details that needed to be organized ahead of a fishing trip. We had to get all the hooks and lines out and coil them carefully into buckets, then prepare small chunks of frozen squid and herring by the bucketful, ready to be hooked onto the lines as bait. We made sure our rain gear was all there and ready to be jumped into. Rain jacket, bib rain pants, knee-high gumboots and a big black sou’wester. We fuelled the Janet with diesel and put a jug of drinking water on board, made sure all knives were sharp and the gaff was hanging within reach. These preparations took several hours and we headed home by 3 PM so we wouldn’t have to travel back to Sunshine Bay in the dark.

      When we got back to our house, I raced in to get the stove heated so I could make supper. I contemplated making out my will. It wouldn’t take long. I started cooking brown rice by Braille while George worked on lighting the lamps as the darkness filled the cabin. I was not feeling confident with the fishing plan. Ray wanted to have a large tank on board that he would fill with salt water as we travelled. He wanted to keep the rockfish alive because they would be worth more. His plan was to travel to Port Hardy as soon as the tank was full of fish. We were really relying on his expertise here and thought he knew what he was doing. We ate our dinner of rice and canned fish and went to bed early. We would have to travel in the dark to Ray’s place so we could leave there by 5 AM for the fishing grounds.

      There are two things that I dislike more than travelling in a small boat and that is travelling in a small boat in:

      1 freezing weather

      2 the dark

      Ray’s float was tied up in Finn Bay about four miles from ours, a long cold trip in the dark. George was driving our small skiff very slowly in case there were any logs or rocks in our way. Even when it is pitch dark, you can still make out the shape of the shoreline and we followed the shore as much as possible, but at times that was even scarier because we knew there were reefs of rocks in several places between our house and Ray’s. I actually felt a little relief when we finally stepped onto the larger Janet and chugged out of Finn Bay toward Fitz Hugh Sound.

      The Janet was a very slow, roly-poly boat and with the swell that was working its way into Fitz Hugh Sound from the open water, we were dipping and rolling and dipping and rolling all the way out. The cabin of the Janet was designed for one person, with a small bunk in an area that was ahead of the steering wheel and down a couple of steps. Tools, batteries and emergency cans of food were stored under and above the bunk. Ray had his little oil stove going, and with the heat and the rolling and the horizon disappearing I didn’t last very long inside the warm cabin. Holding on to anything I could grab, I made my way up the back steps and out onto the deck. This wasn’t much better because diesel fumes would envelop me and make me gag. Occasionally, a gust of fresh air would swirl around me and I would gulp it down as fast as I could.

      Diesel fumes remind me of all the times that I took the bus in Winnipeg after we moved there when I had just turned thirteen and had to lunge at the back door to get off before I threw up. I would walk a mile, breathing the fresh air and then catch the next bus that came along. Sometimes it took three buses to get home. Sadly, there was no getting off this bus—we just kept chugging along toward Calvert Island. I don’t think I need to remind you about how cold it was sitting on the back deck. It was January and the salty spray that blew up from the boat’s wash froze onto the windshield, the fishing gear and me.

      Ray finally slowed the boat down and came out on deck to get the gear going. No one had come out to make sure I was still there. I’m sure they knew that I would be holding on for dear life. Or they were very deep into a good story. Ray was full of them. At one time Ray was a heavy drinker. He was one of the old-timers who helped his neighbour and friend Gus Erickson (more about him later) drink large crocks of homemade beer. He didn’t have far to go at the end of the night so he had always made it home safely. One night, Ray was very drunk and very annoyed with his other neighbour, Ken Moore, who was running his generator for lights. The rumble of the engine was loud and clear, coming across the bay. Ray finally ran out of patience and shot out Ken’s living room light bulbs from