Vancouver coastal waters:
Friends -
Confession time: I’m a closet mariner.
Landlocked as I am, I read stories of the sea; embrace the writing of Chichester, Slocum, Moitessier, Lundy, and Goss, detailing their solo sailing efforts on blue water. I’ve read about the perfect storm, the ‘96 Vendee Globe disaster, and the trials of the great sea battles. For fiction, I’ve read Forester, Beach, Monsarrat, and others.
For all that, my experience at sea can be counted in hours, rather than months or years. A recent trip to Vancouver Island gave me a further taste of the mystery and the lure of salt water. Here are some photos from that trip.
1. Leaving Port Renfrew, on a 28 foot fishing boat, in the early morning. Crew: 1, passengers: 4. The spring air, passing over the colder waters off the coast, creates a dense, heavy fog, whose tendrils reach onto the edges of the island. The spruce and cedar loom like spectral sentinels as we idle past on our way to open water.
2. Moving up the coast at about 20 knots. This photo was one of the few which I was able to take with any clarity, as we were moving into a small swell, and this created quite a chop at the speed we were running. From the start, the Captain would not increase speed while I lolly-gagged outside the small cabin taking photos. Suitably chastened, I returned inside, and spent the outbound trip facing aft, braced against a forward bulkhead and a cabin table. Or something. Looking out the open door, and trying to hold the camera steady in the low light kept me occupied for most of the hour and a bit which took us to travel up the coast, then out several miles. Fortunately, the view was spectacular, and my mind was occupied with echoes of old salts’ tales of Torpedo Boat raids along enemy coasts.
3. The seamless transition from water to air is a mystical place. Here we float, a few miles off the coast, with no indication that there is anything but ocean and fog around us. The old ditty from Irving Berlin’s "We Saw The Sea" (1936), with Fred Astaire, kept running through my head.
"We joined the navy to see the world. And what did we see? We saw the sea… We joined the navy to see the girls. And what did we see? We saw the sea…"
4. Returning toward the coast, the edge of the fog was dramatic. The dark of the forest overwhelmed the contrast from the available light, creating a solid mass rising out of the waves.
5. A couple of days later, we stood looking south from the shore of Victoria, across the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The snow clad Olympic Mountains, reaching to nearly 8,000 feet in Washington, tower in the distance.
As a sidenote, I discovered a little antiquarian bookstore in Sidney, B.C., with the name "The Haunted Bookshop". An excellent shop, I made some wonderful acquisitions, including a first edition of "No Passing Glory" by Andrew Boyle, the 1955 biography of Leonard Cheshire, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for completing 100 bombing operations over Germany during World War II, at a time when fewer than 25 in 100 crews survived to complete 30 operations.
I also purchased an 1899 edition of "Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne 1812 – 1813", with a re-built spine, but otherwise in good original condition. Sergeant Bourgogne endured the expedition into Russia as part of Napoleon’s Grande Armee, one of only twenty-six men in his regiment to survive the campaign, and his account ranks as a companion to Philippe de Segur’s "Napoleon’s Russian Campaign". Left on the shelves was a four-volume history of the 13th Hussars, a regiment of the Royal Army, covering its history from the early 1700’s to the post World War 2 time, as the price was more than my allowance would permit.
I did notice a poem, however, in a frame hanging on one of the shelves:
The Haunted Bookshop
(for Howard Gerwing)
Isn’t haunted.
Not by definition at any rate.
However, if Ciardi is to be believed,
every word contains a ghost,
is a root into the past, and writing
is an act of raising the dead, a way
of communicating, and all our bodies
are like graves perhaps, resting
places haunted by life, and these ghosts
are merely movements of language
we feel on the backs of our necks,
and the shop a place of origins
….
(by jim szpajcher)
