We all look toward the distant cruising destinations of our dreams. Paradise always seems to lie in the South Pacific, or somewhere beyond Cape Horn. My little shallow-drafter, however, has given me a different point o view. When I slip into the nether world of the creeks and hidden marshes, I find that peace and joy lie as close as a mile or two from my home mooring.
On a cruise in busy Trincomali Channel, among British Columbia's coastal islands, Galadriel passes the floating circus of popular Montague Harbor, to dry out in the serenity of a gravelly basin on tiny Hall Island. There she spends her night in a mini-cove only a boat length in radius. As I watch a quiet sunset and listen to ravens in the branches that overhang my deck, I am grateful to the cruising guidebooks that describe this island as a non-achorage.
In the busy lagoon at Sidney Island, boats cluster in dozens along the moorings int he deepwater channel. Yet the place offers a separate world, far removed from the outboard dinghies and the transistor radios. Many a summer evening has found my little sloop ghosting under sail or paddle over the mile-long expanse of marshy flats, to fetch up eventually on the mud behind a low island at the basin's southern end. At low water, when she sits on her keels upon the broad level plain on the drying salt marsh, Galadriel might as well be alone on the surface of the moon.
These are delightful havens, and yet ut has turned out that my special Bali Ha'i is a place that lies even closer to home. Only about three nautical miles from my berth in Oak Bay on Vancouver Island, the complex little archipelago of the Chatham and Discovery Islands stretch out in an intriguing blue chain along the horizon.
This group encloses a labyrinth of shallow passages and tiny gunkholes, some of which even minimal-draft twin-keelers can enter only at the top of high water. During the intervening hours, she sits in smug solitude behind a portcullis of drying sand across the mouth of the cove, happily trapped for the duration in a private world of her own.
A few years ago a friend of mine, on his return from a global circumnavigation, anchored for a night in one of the deeper inlets among those islands, and the experience overwhelmed him. "I can't believe this place", he said, "It's just what I've sailed around the world searching for!".
His home berth, like mine, lies just a couple of miles from this unpretentious, unchonicled paradise.
By Phil Teece.
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