We woke up and had to mostly decamp even before breakfast. This was managed and we were fully packed up by 9am after our second night on Clark. We travelled inland towards our final camping site on Hand Island. The day was beautiful, sunny and calm. Quite the contrast to the previous day's windy offering.
Our first stop of the day ('bathroom break') was on the beautiful Willis Island. I don't know why this place enchanted me, but it did. Maybe because there were more cedar trees and the forest was deeper and more mystical. Back in the day, all the islands were logged and, whatever grew back, was really whatever was planted by the humans who felt like doing it. Some islands have an abundance of hawthorne trees (not like in the UK, looks more like a pine) some have spruce, some cedar. On Willis you step off the stony, shell scattered beach, over the lost and escaped bodies of debranched pines (from the logging era), to an interior of brown-orange trunks. Cedars are easily spotted because their lowest leaves all seem to stop in a neat circle, like a Victoria lady holding her skirts to avoid a puddle, they end in a round. The floor has the spongy quality of a school playground. Carpeted by a thousand spikes creating elastasticity and gentle walking. The forest is mainly silent, with only a spinkle of human voices behind you.
Ahead, huge pines reach higher than you can Pez-snap your head back and squint. Dead trees form the nutritional bases for new cousins and, eventually, the dead rot away leaving gaping mini caves at the base of the newer growth. Someone had created a wind-chime using fronds and shells. It was magical.
Even the bathroom - teetering over the earth with an 8ft vertical ladder to access (no one wants to do THAT at night) was special.
I used the loo. Whilst tentatively reading signs re what to do if you meet a wolf or cougar and then we left.
The next paddle was more straight and flat, across Peacock Channel. 100 metres away some shy porpoises gave us a show of fin. Again and again as the breached to feed. We oohed and ahhed and clumsily tried to galumph towards them.
We headed between the Brabant islands to Hand Island. This was our camping spot for the night. Hand has a fabulous double beach. That is, two beaches back to back with a bay either side and sun morning and evening.
It was beautiful but in a different way. Hand has the usual gammut of trees, but it's also home to old fruit trees and wild strawberry plants. Brought by the family who lived on the island and who ran a store for whaling boats which stopped on their way to the hunt.
There is a twee picture on the island of a Mrs M.. (I forget her surname), pictured with her three children, two small boys and baby Annie in 1896. Behind her is a perfectly civilised home, with a chicken wire covered veranda (no one wants their children eaten). Mrs M sports a blouse buttoned up the neck and long Victoria skirts.
In the afternoon, some of the group went for a paddle around the island with Ben. NN2 had a go in a solo canoe. I was very proud of him for that. I stayed behind with Peggy, Tiffany, Kevin and the Catherines. We went swimming and played cards in the afternoon sun. Though it's quite nippy when the sun goes in.
Lil Catherine captured crabs while Catherine mindlessly found the Biggest One Ever as it ran over her foot. The water is azure blue where the bottom is stony. Further out it gets darker as the seaweed begins to grow. Despite loving the water, no one wants to swim far from shore.
Later on we explored the interior. There was a trail which petered out.
In the 70s, when the Islands became a National Park, there were only a few people living out in the Broken Group Islands. One of those was Salal Joe, a man who made his living finding and collecting a waxy, green foliage plant ideal for weddings and floral decorations. As the islands became a park and someone near Vancouver opened a Salal farm, the old ways died off and so did the trails.
Along the trail we saw a Banana Slug. So called because its the size, shape and colour of an unripe banana. It really is! Though I didn't believe it til I saw it.
That evening we ate fish curry and rice (which took an age to boil as we all slavered like starving wolves). Deer wandered down to the beach and started to feed, close to (but disregarding) us. Two herons fought for land on the shoreline. Lil Catherine and I had waded out (over painful oysters - I forgot to put my trainers on) to a mini island with dense growth on it. Lil Catherine wiggled and crawled her way to the centre while I anxiously half expected a caved cougar to growl at us. None did of course.
The group talked about a Canadian show called Alone, where competitors are basically abandoned in the wilderness with only ten items of their choice and their wits to survive on. Last one to give in receives a million Canadian dollars. We discussed what we would take with us. My choices:
A chicken
A secure cage for my chicken
A bag of feed
A Jeroboam of champagne (though I should have said a Melchizedec)
Strategy:
Wake up, eat my egg, drink some champers, go back to sleep.
Let me know when you win with my strategy, I'll take 10%.
The camp site here was off the beach on a gentle grassy area. It was flat and comfy and we could pitch the tents close. Ben and Erica pitched their tents on the beach, near the kayaks and away from the clients. I suppose hearing a group of people actively trying to emulate the Waltons at 10pm is less interesting.
I saw a garter snake late in the afternoon (I didn't know what it was I enquired) and Brent saw two later on which he was keen to talk about before being hushed by his daughter.
We were treated to another beautiful sunset. We brushed our teeth, we went to bed. The start is hard but it's amazing how you get into the flow.
