Photo: Looking up Shelter Inlet in Clayoquot Sound towards Bacchante Bay.
The weather radio promised southeast gales so we decided to head up Shelter Inlet to Bacchante Bay to hide for a couple of days. We left in weather so perfect it was hard to believe in the gales: northwest winds, blue skies and warm air. The northwest wind followed us up inlet, winding around bends, all the way to Bacchante Bay, giving us one of the best sails we'd had all summer.
We anchored off the marsh in Bacchante Bay and sat in the cockpit watching a sea lion catching salmon. He would surface with a salmon in his mouth, shake it to break its back, then dive again. Flocks of gulls circled overhead waiting for leftover morsels. In less than an hour, we watched him catch three salmon. It's easy to see why the fishermen dislike these animals!
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Photo: Ahousat General Store.
The next morning we listened to the weather report again and decided that the gales probably wouldn't get inside Clayoquot Sound so there was no reason to hide. We left at 10:00 a.m. just in time to catch the ebb tide through Sulfur Passage into Millar Channel where we motored under cloudy skies against light southeasterlies.
At Ahousat in Matilda Inlet we tied up at the dock by the General Store. The store and surrounding businesses have been for sale for years. At first every year, we'd wonder if the owners, Hugh Clarke and his sister Patty, would still be there but we no longer wonder; they're always there and the store is always for sale. In the store, we stepped over boxes of goods in the aisle and picked over rotten produce in the cold room, but we found just about everything we needed including a zinc for the replaced heat exchanger.
The Ahousat businesses -- a small café, fish processing plant, laundry facilities and showers, motel and hostel are reminders of the west coast of Vancouver Island as it used to be. Most of these businesses were originally developed for commercial fishermen who came in droves to this coast in the summer. Residents, such as those on the Indian Reserve at Marktosis across the Inlet were an incidental year-round customer base. The fishermen are gone, the residents of the Reserve do their major shopping in Tofino via the taxi boat but the General Store soldiers on. What will happen, I wonder, when (if) it finally sells?
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Photo: Dugout Canoe at Marktosis.
After anchoring in the inlet, we took our dinghy through the rocks into the village of Marktosis, home of the Ahousat band of Nuu-chah-nulths. On the beach in front of the village we found a beautiful dugout canoe, painted in colorful designs. A young man in a fancy T-shirt with a picture of a canoe told us he was part of the "canoe family," the term they use for the crew for dugout canoes, and that he had just returned from a paddle in the canoe to Suquamish (across Puget Sound from Seattle) for the annual canoe races. The canoe holds about 35 paddlers and it took about two weeks to get there. They don't race in the big canoe; smaller racing canoes are transported by truck. He told us proudly that his canoe family won many of the races.
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