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 (see Voyages to Windward). 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?