Voyage of the Uchuck

Sailing with ghosts along the rainforests of Canada's Pacific Coast

Will Ferguson

A dockhand throws the ropes clear and the Uchuck III slides free. I stand on the ship's deck with a face full of wind, feeling like a stowaway--and an imposter.

It's understandable. Although equipped for passengers, the Uchuck III is a working freighter that services logging camps, fish farms and remote native villages on the far side of Vancouver Island. Many of these areas are accessible only by air or sea. This is a working man's ship and I am simply along for the ride.

The Uchuck III is from another era. Built by the U.S. Navy in 1942, she patrolled the waters of the West Coast as a minesweeper during the Second World War. In 1951, she was purchased by a coastal transport company and re-christened the Uchuck, the name derived from a native word meaning "healing waters."

Although refitted as a freighter, the Uchuck III's military origins are evident in the strength of her hull and the thickness of the portholes in her wheelhouse, the glass built to withstand the sort of blast a minesweeper might churn up.

The Uchuck III 's home port is Gold River, a "planned community" nestled in a forest at the entrance of a river canyon. Today, the Uchuck III is on her way to the remote village of Kyuquot (population 350), a long 10-hour journey through Nootka Sound and up the outer coast.

It is a journey into the past, and ghosts are all about: Captain Cook; Chief Maquinna; Captain Vancouver.

Hard to imagine, but at one time Nootka Sound, on the west side of Vancouver Island, was a keystone of international trade. Although now half-asleep and half-forgotten, this First Nations heartland was once a coveted trade zone that brought competing European nations to the brink of world war.

In Canada, we tend to view our history as an ineluctable march west, starting in the east with Cabot discovering a "new founde land" and continuing with Cartier laying claim to the St. Lawrence and with Champlain setting down roots. What was Confederation if not a patchwork of eastern colonies that expanded westward, across thevast interior, until it eventually reached the Pacific?

But there is another side to the story. Literally.

Nootka Sound is where British Columbia began. And as such, Nootka Sound is where Canada as a concept that stretched from "sea to sea," was first set in motion.

Canada's Pacific Northwest was one of the last coastlines in the world to be charted by Europeans. It was also home to a complex culture all its own. The Mowachaht people had been living in Nootka Sound for at least 4,000 years before the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1778.

Blown off course by wild storms, Cook came limping into Nootka in search of a safe haven. He planned on stopping just long enough to repair his ships, the Resolution and Discovery; he ended up staying for more than a month. Nootka Sound will do that to you.

It is a singularly spectacular region, where thickly wooded mountains plunge headlong into the sea and deep coastal fiords lie shrouded in equal parts mist and mystery. It is also a land of immense wealth.

Cook traded metal goods for luxurious sea otter pelts, which his crew sold for a fortune when they arrived in China. The sea otter was as coveted in Asia as beaver pelts were in Europe, and when word got out about the abundance of otter in Nootka Sound, a flood of ships poured in from the U.S. and Great Britain, jostling for position and hunting the animal to the verge of extinction.

Cook never lived to see the upheaval his voyage had wrought. The famed explorer was killed by islanders in Hawaii before he was able to reach the Orient.

As tensions and trade escalated, Nootka Sound become an international flashpoint. Spain sent in a fleet and captured several British ships. The Spanish then built an armed fortress in Nootka as a show of force -- using kidnapped Chinese workers as their labourers.

With the Spanish and British empires spiralling toward war, and the Americans lurking in the wings, an imperial truce was hammered out at the very last moment.

Among Cook's original crew had been an ambitious young midshipman named George Vancouver, who had returned to this coastline 12 years later, and who would eventually give his name to this vast rainforest island. George Vancouver was involved in the high-stakes negotiations between Spain and Britain, but his greatest contribution was as a cartographer. He laid claim to the entire coast through the very act of charting it. Like Adam in the Garden, the Europeans believed they could possess a land simply through the act of naming it.

The Spanish Empire, overextended and bogged down in South America, eventually retreated from Canada's Pacific Northwest entirely, leaving little more than a scattering of Spanish placenames in its wake.

Nootka Sound, a deep cleft in Vancouver Island's west coast, is now home to logging camps and native villages and to a host of wildlife, from black bears to bald eagles, from migratory whales to predatory cougars. Even the sea otter, all but wiped out by the 1820s, has been reintroduced.

We drift past mountains, ice-encased at the summits. Therainforests create a curtain of green along the water, and a cold mist rolls down, filling the valleys and catching the early morning sun. As the Uchuck III threads its way through a maze of islands, I climb the stairs to the wheelhouse and speak with the ship's skipper and co-owner, Fred Mather.

Fred, his son, Sean, who acts as first mate, and their land operations supervisor, Alberto Girotto, bought the Uchuck III in 1994. The ship usually carries a five-man crew (six, if you include their dockside mascot, Shadak, a barrel-chested, well-fed Alaskan malamute). The ship hauls everything from oil drums to pickup trucks to kayakers -- and their kayaks too, which are hoisted out over open water and then lowered with the kayaker inside. The Uchuck III has even acted as a rugged, backwoods version of the Love Boat.

"This couple, they met on the ship," says Fred, still smiling at the memory of it. "It's a long enough trip for people to get to know each other. I guess there was some sort of spark between them. They got married and they returned a year later . . . on the anniversary of their first trip."

It's an oddly romantic story for such a manly ship. After all, the only female member of the Uchuck III's crew is the cook, Donna, a former bank teller from Victoria who has been with the Uchuck III, full-time, for four years.

"Any regrets?"

"None. It's wonderful. At first I was worried because I had never really worked with men before. And these aren't just guys," she says with a laugh. "They're guy guys. It's funny. The first few months they were all polite and everything, having a woman around. But that didn't last long."

"The crew gets along well?"

"They get along better than bank tellers, I can tell you. It's a lot of fun," she says. "The guys pull pranks on each other all the time. But there is this unwritten code: You never mess with someone's coffee, their food, or their bed."

"No short sheets or salt in the sugar bowl?"

"God no!"

As the Uchuck III docks at the Kendrick Arm logging camp, a shuffle of black bears waddles along the shore, just a stone's throw from where the workers on the dock are unloading supplies. "Up here, bears are like raccoons," says one of the dockhands. "More of a nuisance than anything." Except, of course, that no suburban dweller ever has to worry about being mauled and left for dead by a raccoon.

The dockhand shrugs. "OK, so they're a little bit more dangerous than raccoons."

From Kendrick Arm, the Uchuck III pushes north along Tahsis Inlet before making a sharp turn west, squeezing through the narrow waters separating Nootka Island from the mainland of Vancouver Island.

By this point, I have struck up conversation with a fellow passenger, Tom Pater, who is on his way home to Kyuquot. Tom, the district electoral representative, divides his time between Kyuquot and the community of Courtney, on the east side of Vancouver Island.

We pass high, sheer-drop cliffs as we near the docks at Ceepeecee. The name sounds as though it was derived from a native word, but in fact, says Tom, "It's a transliteration of CPC: the Canadian Packing Corporation, which built a fish packing plant here back in the 1920s. There hasn't been a fish plant at Ceepeecee for years, but the name has remained."

Just past Port Eliza, the Uchuck III enters an area known as "the rolling roadstead," where the water is funnelled between reef and island. Donna closes up her cupboards and battens down the hatches.

The Uchuck III can only make it through here in good weather; on choppy days the ship has to swing out into open water. Today is considered calm -- "flat weather" as they say -- but this narrow alley of quick-running currents still creates a rollicking ride, the waves rising and falling in a queasy procession. It is here that the Uchuck III, long and narrow and prone to rocking, earns its stormy-weather nickname "the Upchuck."

From the "rolling roadstead," the Uchuck III runs wide, into open sea, to avoid a particularly treacherous line of reefs. The sea swells are larger, slower. The entire Pacific Ocean is behind the waves, creating long swells and sudden drops. A scattering of seabirds lifts off as we angle inward past Union Island, an exposed outcrop forested with wind-stunted trees. "Natural bonsai," says Tom.

Windswept doesn't begin to describe Union Island. "Wind tormented," would be more accurate. Wind punished. Wind slapped. Wind imprisoned. The trees are twisted in near agony and the stone beneath them looks like knuckles rubbed bare.

"In winter, the prevailing southeasterlies blast through here," says Tom with a certain masochistic pride. "We get six or seven hurricanes a winter. Gale force winds."

Once past Union Island, we enter the protective embrace of Kyuquot Channel and the wind becomes muted. Slightly. Even the intrepid Capt. Cook found Kyuquot Sound inaccessible. Turned back by reefs and high winds, Cook chose Nootka Sound, farther south instead. On a small island a house appears, incongruous and unexpected. Another house appears. And then another.

We have reached Kyuquot, a clustered archipelago on the far side of the world; a village of islands. The original Mowachaht community is clustered together on the mainland, but the larger village is scattered across nine separate islands. The water channels between the islands are the village's roads; the traffic signals here are for boats, not cars.

Kyuquot is a wonderfully ramshackle, arbitrary place. Some of the homes are grand cabins, some are simple boxes, others are tumble-down shacks, collapsing in slow motion, soft and wet and soggy. It is a village of stilts and docks, a cat's cradle of piers, caught in a balancing act between water and shore.

The waves lap in, thick with seaweed, in a soup of weeds and flotsam. The shore is jumbled with driftwood. When I arrived in Kyuquot, the village's most famous resident was lying on the shore catching the day's last rays of sun. Charlie, a harbour seal saved from hunters as a pup and raised by a local family, refused to be returned to the wild and has adopted Kyuquot as her home.

"She's like the neighbourhood dog," says Tom. "She makes her rounds and people give her fish. She's very contented. "

A mix of native Canadians and the descendants of Finnish fishing families, Kyuquot operates to its own rhythms and according to its own rules.

"It's the closest you will ever come to a working anarchy," says Tom.

Kyuquot marks the end of the journey, and the sun is setting in impossible reds and warm afterglows of gold. The crew of the Uchuck III has a cabin for its overnight passengers and we are ferried across by boat. The Uchuck III itself will return with the dawn, but Tom has arranged for me to hitch a ride back to Gold River onboard the Air Nootka mail plane.

I shared my ship cabin with the other passengers and we marvelled at the collection of islands and homes in Kyuquot, and the long voyage we had just completed. The dictionary tells us that "unique" is an absolute and as such can have no comparisons. But surely Kyuquot and the voyage of the Uchuck III is "more unique" than most journeys. It is certainly one of the "most unique" places I have ever seen.

The following day, I lift off on a seaplane ride, the mountains folding themselves inward below us. In by sea, out by air. The pilot, and president of Air Nootka, is a friendly man by the name of Grant Howatt, who handles the Cessna 180 with the greatest of ease.

Grant started flying with the Canadian Navy, and after that he worked as a bush pilot in the Northwest Territories, out of Fort Simpson. He runs scheduled mail runs into Kyuquot and flies native band leaders, sport fishermen and hunters in and out. If there is anyplace else on Earth he'd rather be, it doesn't show.

"Keep your eyes peeled for whales," he shouts as we follow the coastline of Maquinna and Cook back toward Gold River.

But I see something even better: It is the Uchuck IIIx herself, cutting across the polished silver of Nootka Sound, plying her trade, heading for home.

Ottawa Citizen
September 23, 2001