Paddling through choppy water off the west coast of Vancouver Island, I don’t hear the powerboat approach until she is almost upon us.
“Hey, do you guys want some fish?” the skipper asks. One of four fiftysomething women aboard the small runabout, she explains they’ve caught more seafood than they can possibly eat.
Shortly into a four-day sea kayaking excursion with Wild Root Journeys, our group of mostly novice paddlers still has plenty of food stashed in our hatches, but it’s hard to turn down freshly caught salmon and prawns.
“Don’t let them be too generous,” owner Silke Hockemeyer shouts over the wind as her lead guide, Agnes Seaweed Wisden, heads off to secure the bounty to her bow.
This is good advice when visiting the territorial home of the Tseshaht First Nation, where the gift-giving tradition of potlatching – meaning “to give away” in Chinook jargon – remains alive.
Sharing wealth and navigating the seas surrounding the Broken Group Islands is one of the longest unbroken traditions in Canada. This archipelago of nearly 100 scattered isles and rocky outcrops inside Barkley Sound looks like mostly untouched hinterland, but archeologists say the region has been inhabited for more than 5,000 years and was once one of the continent’s most densely populated spots north of Mexico before colonization.
The 106-square-kilometre area received protected status in 1970 and is now one of three separate regions of Pacific Rim National Park Reserve along with the neighbouring surfers’ paradise of Long Beach and well-trodden West Coast Trail.
The combination of rich cultural history and natural beauty is what first attracted Hockemeyer, a lithe woman in her mid-30s who has spent the past decade guiding commercial sea kayaking trips up and down the B.C. coast and last year launched her own ecotourism company here.
“This feels like home,” Hockemeyer says. “This is my calling, taking people out into the wilderness and helping them come out of their shells. There’s nowhere I’d rather be.”
It’s easy to understand why. We spend our days gliding through calm, crystal-clear lagoons teeming with starfish and hopping between islands while spotting seals, porpoises, deer, black bears and bald eagles. We scramble through the bush on Benson Island to find ancient red cedars as thick as silos and a sea cave that spits back incoming swells with an explosive roar that suggests a dragon is hiding inside. We try without success to spot a mysterious, two-metre-tall face carved into the cliffs of Reeks Island that was discovered only a few years ago and we feast on meals seasoned with wild bull kelp and sea asparagus.
The nightlife is also surprisingly lively for such a remote location. Many tidal pools are home to bioluminescent phytoplankton that glow turquoise in the moonlight when disturbed by, say, a tossed stone or the sweep of a paddle. I can’t resist the temptation to dive in on our final night, which creates an aura that’s like a personal aurora borealis.
Campfires are also usually permitted below the tideline even during peak wildfire season, and so swimmers who brave the chilly water at night can warm up beside one afterward. Just as they’ve likely done for thousands of years.
This story was first published as part of the Globe & Mail’s second annual Hidden Canada travel feature. (© Copyright (c) the Globe & Mail)
Andrew Fleming 