Tide and Current

View Slideshow

“With the price of fuel these days you don’t want to be bucking the tide if you can avoid it,” says British Columbia tow-boater Don MacKenzie. With a lifetime on boats and his current home port on Sechelt Inlet inside one of the strongest tidal bores on the coast, Don knows a thing or two about tides.

Don MacKenzie’s dad was a marine steam engineer who served on board World War II convoys in the North Atlantic, among other boats. Don himself started out on tugs in the early 1950s at 17 years of age when steam was still common on the British Columbia coast. By 2005 he had, over a 53-year career, travelled a good bit of the world’s watery parts, much of it as an owner-operator.

Owner-operators tend to distinguish themselves from their corporate-employed colleagues and Don is no exception. His pride is in the good boats that he has bought at the right price and the innovations that he has developed to pay for them. Part of Don’s business and marine acumen is his ability to see value where others see only challenge. Like the time in 1977 when he bought an 80-foot tug (renamed Gelnshield) in the Thousand Islands area of the St. Lawrence River. It had been laid up for years and “didn’t have any glass left in it,” he recalled. “I was going to tow it around to the west coast with another boat that I was buying, but when that deal fell through we had to fix up the first boat as well as we could.”

Once the boat was seaworthy, they took it down through the Oswego and Erie canals to New York with the antennas and spotlights removed to squeak under the 22-foot air-draft allowed by the bridges. After visiting with tow-boaters in New York Harbour, they worked their way south to the Panama and up the Pacific Coast to B.C. Another time a partner bought a 72-foot tug (renamed Glengarry) in England and Don sailed it home to the west coast.

One of his most challenging voyages was not even on water. To bring his current boat, the 65-foot Kinnaird, out to the B.C. coast, he used three trucks. Built in Ontario in 1960, the boat was originally assembled on site near Winnipeg, Manitoba, to work on Canada’s largest prairie water, the shallow Lake Winnipeg. By the time the boat was declared surplus in 1994, she had been laid up for several years. But, having been operated in fresh water, she was in excellent condition. “We sawed the house off rather than use cutting torches as they would warp the steel,” Don recalled recently as he conned the handy little tug down the length of British Columbia’s spectacularly beautiful Sechelt Inlet. “Then we pulled the two Cummins engines along with the gears, shafting and props to get the hull’s weight down for the highway.”

Reassembled on the Pacific coast, the tug has served Don well, towing his salvage barge as well as doing general contract towing up and down the coast for a decade. In April 2005 I went for a ride with Don as he set out from his Sechelt homeport to move a spud barge loaded with a crane and other equipment for a marine construction company owned by his son Kevin and Garth McKiel. The 17-mile run down Sechelt inlet takes a northwesterly course. Just after 10:00 as he readied the barge for towing, Don commented to one of the men dockside, “Well, I gotta get going here to catch this tide.”

“What time is the Chuck?” the man asked.

“13:00,” was the reply.

Sechelt Inlet, along with Salmon and Narrows inlets that branch off to the east, has only one narrow exit to the larger Jervis Inlet and the Gulf of Georgia. All traffic must pass through the Skookumchuck Narrows, locally just called “the Chuck”. The name, from the Chinook trade jargon that was used extensively along the Pacific coast in the early twentieth century, means simply and clearly “strong waters”. With well over 100 miles of shoreline and considerable depth, the inlets’ tides must funnel in and out of the Chuck, which was described in the clear language of the 1927 Coastal Pilot as “in breadth less than 600 yards (wide), and is partially choked up with rocks and small islands which, preventing in a great measure the free ingress and egress of the tide, cause most furious and dangerous rapids, the roar of which may be heard for several miles.”

As with other inlets along the British Columbia, when the glaciers that formed then met the sea, they tended to float, leaving a shelf or shallow at their mouths. This shelf brings the Sechelt Inlet depths from more than 800 feet to less than 40 feet and adds to the intensity of the tides in the Skookumchuck, as the seabed and the shores restrict the water’s flow.

By 10:35, with the tug made up on the starboard hip of the barge, the tow was underway and making about 5.7 knots with a fair but not yet strong tide. MacKenzie explained that he preferred to make up to the barge like this when working in fast water, although many B.C. skippers prefer to work the tow on a line. Don learned barge handling with less well-fendered wooden tugs with fine fantail sterns that wouldn’t take the banging a modern well-fendered steel tug can handle when stopping up a tow with the tug’s stern.

With the tow all squared away, Don turned the wheel over to his fill-in deckhand, David Little, who is actually Capt. Little on coastal tugs in his regular job. Over coffee in the tug’s comfortable galley, Don pointed out the boat’s quality aluminum companionway ladders and a number of lights and other fixtures that he salvaged from the 387-foot Canadian destroyer escort HMCS Chaudière, which was stripped and sunk in the inlet as a destination for divers. Salvage, whether it is simply a ladder from a stripped vessel or the tricky righting of an overturned fish boat, is a passion of Don’s. In his seventieth year he is outfitting a salvage barge with four-point anchoring and a number of different winches. “My wife says it is alright so long as I build it out of all the stuff that I have around and don’t go buying any new stuff,” he says with a smile.

Sechelt Inlet, like others on the coast, is spectacularly beautiful, with mountains rising thousands of feet from the water’s edge. The water is deep and clear and, on a sunny day in April, it is coloured a deep blue. As the Kinnaird made her way down the inlet towards the Skookumhuck, there was time to read about the passage in the most recent version of B.C. Coast Pilot, which starts with the word “Caution – because of the tortuous nature of the fairway and strong tidal streams…it is recommended that no vessel in excess of 40 metres (131 feet) long and 3.4 metre (11 feet) in draught should attempt to enter the inlet.”

With her tow, the combination of barge and tug was near this 131-foot restriction but Don said many larger vessels entered the inlet with some regularity, but most try to make the passage at slack tide. “We have come in with a 14-knot tide on the flood,” he said, “but going out there is no good clean flow of water and we are all really cautions of the ebb. The way it runs in there along the shore you get really large whirlpools. On bigger tides there really isn’t any slack at all. The back eddies slow down and become the next tide. A 16-foot high water outside the Chuck will be only nine feet inside the inlet before the tide turns to ebb.”

The water just doesn’t have the time to squeeze through the narrows during the changing of the tides. But it tries hard, routinely running at 13 to 14 knots, and the tide book shows occasional 15.8 knot currents. On that April day, the peak of the flood had been at 10:00 with a relatively benign speed of 8.5 knots. The low water slack set for 13:25, but Don said it could vary 20 to 40 minutes when a southeaster was blowing outside in the Gulf of Georgia. At 13:15 the little islets that are strung out in the middle and eastern side of the passage were in view and he depressed the button on the VHF, “Securitae, Securitae, tug Kinnaird outbound with derrick barge alongside,” he announced.

Within minutes the GPS showed that the boat’s speed over the ground had increased to 7.4-knots, so the ebb was still running at two knots. As the boat came up on the light at the end of one of the islets, Don explained that he was watching the point ahead relative to the distant shore to gauge how hard the vessel was being set down towards the western shore. He brought the bow up a little to starboard to clear the point. At the same time he pointed out that the back eddy behind the point was building with the push of the new flood in against the ebb so, even though this was a relatively small tide, there would be no leisurely slack water. In a little over two hours, at 15:45, the tide would be flooding back into the inlet at 8.4 knots and making rapids with a good high curl that allowed kayakers to come in and surf on the leading edge of the curl while keeping an eye peeled for tugs that might come booming through with the tide.

The extreme of the narrows called Sechelt Rapids on the charts extends only about a half mile before widening out somewhat to the longer reach of the Skookumchuck that extends another mile or so down to join Jervis Inlet. Don stayed on the barge hip on down to the mouth of Jervis and into Pender Harbour, where he picked up an extra crewman for the longer run down the coast. With more open waters ahead, he moved to a towing position with the barge. For B.C. coastal tow-boaters, this is a routine passage well timed to escape the brutal force of the tides while taking whatever small savings those tides can spare the fuel bill.