Most days I can hear the sea-wind, mewing along Discovery Passage. That sea-wind calling and pulling. When I get tired of brick and stone I find myself hungry for the sea's edge, where the passage shouts at me from the rocks.
The passage itself is the ocean found between Vancouver Island and Quadra Island. Campbell River is directly across from Quadra. The wild old ocean smashing where blowing winds hide.
Johnstone Strait is the channel that connects to the north with the Strait of Georgia to the south.
It's a place for eagles. A place for whales. A place to watch and be watched.
Cape Mudge on Quadra Island, in Quathiaski Cove, is a lighthouse that can boast being 118 years old. It's light can be seen from Campbell River even from the limits of the land.
In 1847,the Passage was named by Captain Henry Kellett of the British Royal Navy, after Captain Vancouver's Ship the HMS Discovery. It seems like this area has had it's share of famous visitors.I wonder what they first thought when they saw the windy green of the forests and the unquiet sea.
Captain Vancouver toddled through these waters in 1782. As did the consort ship of James Cook from 1776-1780, also named HMS Discovery. We are a happening place, I guess.
These days there is a British Columbia ferry going between Quadra and Campbell River, on the big Island. Bringing people back and forth. Forth and back. Sometimes you can orcas swishing in their pods, next to the shore. The passage being about 25 kilometres long, there is a lot of life teeming along with it.
When the wind is bitter, at Tyee Spit, you can stand on the edge, listening to the scraping of sea on rocks of the shore. Over the windy trees watch eagles storm into the waves, grasping at their catch.
Northern residents of orcas total about 217 in 16 pods, and they patrol the strait and northern waters of the Island. Best time to see them is from May to October. They swim smooth, fast , velvety in the water. Oblivious to everything but the hunt.
From Tyee Spit, Painters Lodge looms from the forest and boasts fishing tours like no other. All you have to do is sit back and see the sights. And come back from the sea's edge with a renewed spirit.
Deep and narrow, Johnstone Strait and includes cargo freighters, log booms and cruise ships in the summer months.
When passing by,its as if they were huge toys bobbing around on the ocean. They sway and heave through the water, seemingly with no effort. Just waiting for a giant child to pick them up.
"While I follow the sun, while I drift and roam to the ends of the earth, like a chip on the stream,
"O for a soft and gentle wind! I heard a fair one cry; But give to me the snoring breeze, and the white waves heaving high. The good ship light and free, the world of waters is our home....
There's tempest in yon horned moon, and lightning in yon cloud. The wind is piping loud, the lightning flashes free. While the hollow oak our palace is, our heritage the sea!" (Allan Cunningham 1791-1839 "A Sea Song")
Its as if there are spectres of fog and light lurking above the sea.
The mists blow. The tides surge back and forth. And those spectres become real.
"The morning light, the real light, had finally come, and as in Genesis, it was divided from the darkness.here and there in the thick and overhanging sky there were rents like windows in a dome, through which great shafts of golden, rosy light shot down.
The lower clouds lay in a band of deep shadow all about the horizon, infolding the ocean distances in dim obscurity, producing the illusion of enclosed space....
They were like curtains drawn over the infinite, like veils let down to conceal mysteries too gigantic for the imagination of mankind.And then, little by little, in the growing light another vision appeared from afar, a towering promontory cut like a rosy cameo against the dull grey sky." (Pierre Loti 1856-1923 "Morning at Sea")
