We floated into Port McNeill on a stuttering light breeze that couldn’t decide on a speed or direction, helped along by the beginnings of the flood current carrying around Pulteney Point on the north tip of Malcom Island. We gave up not long after passing south of the Pulteney Point light and doused the sails, motoring into a busy, grey harbour dotted with commercial fishing boats, runabouts, floatplanes, and big cruisers describing slow arcs at the end of their rodes as they shifted with the wind.
We got the next-to-last available spot on the docks at the Harbour Authority, a shock; we’d heard the docks had been expanded since our last visit, and they have been. Apparently, so too has the popularity of this congenial replenishment stop at the mouth of Johnstone Strait.
We’ve learned to book two nights for most of our port stops these days, to reduce the stress and aggravation of trying to accomplish every necessary chore in eighteen or twenty-four hours of dockside access. Consequently, after stopping off at the harbour office and getting in some long, luxurious four-minute showers, our first priority was to find a burger.
Conveniently, Gus’s Pub remains right where we left it across the street from the harbour office, and we wandered across and grabbed a booth as the wind, too late, picked up with an escort of low, grey clouds.
It was a Saturday afternoon and the bar was getting full. The North Island Timing Association was running drag races out at the airport, and grizzled amateur drivers were filling up after a day of burning rubber at the makeshift speedway. Confused-looking cruisers wandered about looking for tables amid talk of gearboxes and blown head gaskets. A few loggers, out of work with the dry weather, looked out the windows hopefully from time to time, wishing that the clouds would bring rain.
The burgers were great, as they almost always are after a month spent dreaming of them.
There was a lot besides burgers that we needed to get our fill of in Port McNeill. Besides Port Hardy, a place we don’t know well, Port Mac (as it’s known in this neck of the woods) is the last significant supply stop before launching out into the great wide open spaces beyond the shelter of Cape Scott. From here, if you aren’t headed back into the Broughtons, you face a choice: north, or south?
We’re going north, but not to Alaska. At one point, we had considered heading up the Inside Passage further. Mandy did, and probably still does, want to go see glaciers. I have always been less enamored, and more skeptical, of the remainder of the leg to Alaska from here. The remoteness appeals to me; the weather does not. We’ve been as far as Bella Bella before, and it’s beautiful, but not particularly more beautiful than the rest of the BC coast, and it tends toward cool and grey. Coming from Seattle, I can get my fill of cool and grey any given winter, and I don’t need to fill up my summer with such stuff as well.
But I might have liked to get back to Calvert Island, and to spend some time exploring the Hakaii Luxvbalis Conservancy, beautiful, remote places that take some time to get to and reward those who do so. Perhaps some other summer; that mythical one we keep dreaming of where there is somehow more time.
Instead, we’re merely getting far enough north to scoot around the tip of the Island, and then head south again… hoping for blue skies, distant horizons, and unspoilt anchorages. There is much to appeal on the West Coast as well; I’ve been dreaming of the cool green waters winding into Klaskish Basin, and soaking in the warmth in Hot Springs Cove before walking the beaches near Tofino and poking around the infinitely entertaining anchorages of Barkley Sound.