IV. Skookum Waters, Rapids, Passes
One More Little Rapid
Small marine companies in both the US and Canada benefit mightily from the billions of dollars that have been spent building military boats. Even large companies like Foss and Crowley filled out their fleets in the 1950s and ‘60swith World War II surplus Miki and YTB tugs. On the British Columbia coast, surplus landing craft hauled heavy equipment up the inlets for the logging camps. A good many of these boats still earn their keep working for smaller owner-operators out of ports around the world.
Young Life, a Christian-based operator of youth camps, has a property near the head of Jervis Inlet on the British Columbia coast. Accessible by water only, the Malibu camp owns a significant fleet of boats ranging from kayaks up to the 126-foot 200-passenger Malibu Princess. The kayaks are for the fun of the campers, but the Malibu Princess together with several smaller crew boats are for bringing campers and their gear in and out of the lodge located at the base of huge mountains 32 nautical miles up the inlet from the nearest road at Egmont, BC.
The largest of these water taxis, the Mailbu Papoose, started life as a US Navy “Utility boat”. These were carried on destroyers and other larger craft and served a function similar to that of the old whaler on earlier navy craft. Built at the Uniflite factory in Bellingham Washington, the boat’s role was more mundane than its cousins, the 31-foot PBR, from the same plant that gained fame as Vietnam era gunboats and in the film “Apocalypse Now.”
At 50 by 14-foot 9-inch, utility boats are heavily and in their original configuration they were open boats. The Malibu Papoose has undergone extensive modifications since being brought into Canada. She now has raised wheelhouse, set well forward to give excellent visibility while leaving space for 46 passengers seated in the waist of the vessel.
It is a pragmatic layout well suited to the sort of three-hour trips up Jervis Inlet that Capt. Ron Fearn and deck hand Dave Howell take her on as required by the owners. For Ron, who previously operated a US Navy surplus landing craft carrying loaded cement trucks to a small hydro site up the inlet for the same owners, this is a much more relaxing command. At the end of April 2006, he began the season with a full load of 46 adult passengers on their way up to the Malibu camp. This was for a “tool and tackle” week that invites people to come and work mornings to ready the facility for the summer campers and fish in the afternoon for their dinner. Egmont, the point of departure, is a logging and fishing community just beginning to suffer the weight of urban escapees and rising land prices. But the laid back nature of the place is expressed in Howell’s safety lecture which draws a round of applause.
On the trip up the inlet, many of the passengers that knew Ron from previous trips came up to the wheelhouse to exchange stories and marvel at the beauty of the snow on the mountaintops and the soft green of the newly budding trees along the shore. At places, snow-fed water falls burst straight into the sea from the steep rock of the shore that is only occasionally punctuated with any sign of human habitation. It is picture post card scenery but it can also present some real dangers for mariners. In winter outflow winds spill out of the cold interior blowing freezing spray onto the upper works of boats that cannot find shelter or anchorage along the steep inlet shores.
As the Papoose neared the Malibu camp, Ron advised people to get their camera’s ready and slowed for the requisite photos of what is really a grand lodge with numerous outbuildings set on one shore of the Malibu Rapids. The rapids and the rocky ledges on either side are notorious among west coast yachters as they guard the entrance to Princess Louisa Inlet, one of their favorite anchorages. With a large deck for the campers to watch boats going through the narrows this is a place where more than a few yacht-admirals have lost face and money on the rocks.
This little side inlet of the larger Jervis Inlet is only about four miles long but is surrounded by spectacular mountains rising from 5,000 to over 8,000 feet within a short distance of the shore. The camp’s main dock is just inside the Malibu Rapids from Jervis Inlet. The tide runs at about nine knots through the narrows on both the flood and the ebb although freshets up the inlet can add a force to the ebb at times. As Ron brought the Malibu Papoose up to the Narrows this day, the tide had already turned from low water slack to begin flooding back into the smaller inlet. After asking his deckhand to get the passengers to take their seats so that the boat rode on an even keel, he entered the rapids with the first of the flood lending the boat two or three extra knots of speed.
Going to the left of the small islet that sits in the middle of the narrows, Ron kept his speed up to put ample water over the rudder and maintain steerage way as he followed the current through the chute. Black rock walls, on which low tide exposed purple starfish and barnacles, swept past the wheelhouse windows. As the channel widened on the inside of the narrows, the camp dock came in sight to port. But Ron very deliberately did not turn to it right away. He took the boat and his 46 passengers on down the current stream until he reached a point where the rip between the moving and still water was not so pronounced. Only then did he turn the boat toward the people waiting on the dock. “Some of the yacht people cut across that rip and get in trouble,” he noted while he calmly turned his boat and set it tidily alongside the float.
The passengers, some expressing appreciation of the fine boat handling that they had just witnessed, disembarked to the floats and began getting their assignments for cabins and dinner. Ron gently urged his passengers to get their gear off the boat while he declining an invitation to stay for dinner. “The tide is getting stronger in the rapids,” he observed, “We should get back out before it gets to strong.”
Running the boat up to its full RPM he easily made his way back out into the main inlet and began to retrace his course back down the inlet to Egmont. Ron and I have enjoyed more than a few adventures over the thirty odd years that we have known each other. Now on the way he would stop to show me an eagle sitting on her nest, some Indian rock paintings and a particularly beautiful waterfall. Life on a surplus US Navy utility boat in Jervis Inlet definitely has its perks.
If transoceanic travel is about navigation, coping with the complexity of moving the heavy hull of a boat through waters that can travel faster than the boat’s top speed must have another name. It is often said that shallow waters terrify deep-sea captains. It is equally often said that tow-boating is made up of interminable hours of boredom punctuated by moments of shear terror. I have seen these moments on occasion in storms, but most often, on the B.C. coast, they occur in conjunction with these tidal bores.
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