Leaving the Broughtons after only a week, they remain nearly as much a mystery to us as they were when we arrived.
The Broughton archipelago, named after two of the larger islands in the group, is generally agreed to extend roughly between the northern branch of Knight Inlet and Queen Charlotte Strait along the Inside Passage between Vancouver Island and the BC mainland. Some folks include lower reaches in with their definition of the place, considering the sparse anchorages and settlements between the upper part of the rapids of a piece with the main grounds. The region has a colorful history of logging and fishing stretching back to the late 1800s, and was well-populated by First Nations tribes long before that.
We had passed by this way before, brushing past or through them without stopping for more than a night. But we had heard tell of a mythic cruising ground, a place where some Pacific Northwest boaters spend every summer for decade on decade, so tantalizing are the anchorages, so friendly are the people, so colorful are the communities. A place where mountains rise sheer from salt-water and bears wander the shores unmolested and eagles pinwheel in the sky, seeking only the choicest fish from boundless supplies of native salmon. A place where the history of the region stands out, and draws you back in as you stand in haunted places where millions of natives attended thousands of potlatches since time immemmorial, where young European immigrants bucked logs by hand across massive evergreens that reached, grove by grove, as far as the eye could see.
The Broughtons were all those things, but also, somehow, something less.
The Broughtons are an odd duck, defying easy categorization. The scenery is on par with Desolation Sound, yet they are more scarred by clear-cutting and dotted with fish farms than areas further south. They are more remote than any cruising ground bordering the Strait of Georgia, but in many places, they proved even more crowded in our experience. There are more anchorages, but they are often less protected, smaller, and less serene. The proliferation of fish farms and float homes in many of the best leaves others over-packed, moreso than anything we saw in Desolation.Yet in others, we were the only boat on a given night.
The big draw in the Broughtons seems to be the community. A series of small, funky marinas have more character, and a more devoted following, than the turn-and-burn resupply ports in the Gulf and Desolation. Cruisers we met at Pierre’s, a fixture in Echo Bay, had been coming back year after year (in one case, for nearly fifty years!) and if they did not all know one another, they certainly knew the individuals and families who lived and ran those various stores, seasonal pubs, and marinas.
This may be the ideal form for cruising: a place where you may tuck yourself away in a beautiful, empty anchorage for a few days with no one but seals and eagles and bears for company, stark mountain peaks and trees ascending on all sides, and then hop five or ten miles back out and spend the next evening surrounded by friends and fellows at a raucous barbecue on a floating deck at a friendly, well-stocked, family-run marina.
I can see why a lot of people would spend their summers doing that and go no further.
But for some reason, we didn’t quite engage with the magic of the place. Perhaps it was just our unfamiliarity. We found crowded anchorages where we were expecting emptiness, empty marinas where we were expecting a crowd. Working to some rhythm that we were not attuned to, the Broughtons just set us slightly on edge.
Part of it may be that, as busy as it seemed to us, apparently it’s a slow year up here. Marinas, always operating on the margins due to the limited season, competition from less expensive, larger ports on the Island, and the expense of importing all the supplies, are having trouble making a go of it. Much of the discussion among the regulars revolved around operations that had gone out of business, or which were up for sale, and had been for some time. It takes a particular sort of character to make a go of it running an independent operation in the Broughtons, and unless that breed runs in the family, it may not last long.
We have no complaints about the Broughtons, and, the more we sail these waters, the more we realize how experiences can be colored by timing… rapids we have found placid or easy have terrorized other folks we have met, anchorages that we found shifty or ugly or over-crowded have been blissful and serene for other people. You have to allow for circumstance in all your judgements.
So we’ll be back to the Broughtons again some time, to see if our rhythms match up better some other season. For this year, we’ve left them behind for good.
It is the big waters of the West Coast of the Island that are calling to us now.