Spindrift, page 3
“If you’re flying on water you don’t have somebody telling you what the wind’s doing, or where it’s coming from, or which way to land. It’s all at your own discretion more or less, and it’s your judgment that counts. Like right now. We get some pretty strong winds sometimes in the Twin Otter aircraft. It’s a STOL aircraft. In other words, it’s good for short take-off and landing. And I’ve been into Victoria in it blowing, I guess, fifty knots, which is about as good a clip as you want to be landing in because the aircraft starts flying at about sixty knots.
Landing in gusts, well, it’s all in how you read the water. You get indication on the water of which way the wind is coming from and what kind of speed it’s going, you can see the cat’s paws in the water giving an indication of gusts. If it’s a big gust you land in it. But if there’s a whole bunch of little gusts the aircraft wants to fly and then it doesn’t want to fly. So, if you can find an area of calm water where the wind is constant you can try to land in that. That’s preferable. If not, look for a big area of wind, a big gust, and set it down right in there.
If you’re getting whitecaps in this area, that’s just about time to shut it off. We’ve had occasions in Vancouver Harbour and in Victoria Harbour when it’s been just too rough to take off. The wind isn’t too strong, but the water conditions will be just too rough on the aircraft with a big load. You could end up breaking fittings and struts and things like that. So I would say about two- or three-foot waves that’s breaking is about time to shut it down all right.”
—from Salt Water, Fresh Water (1979)
Tidal Tempest
Tom Koppel
The Skookumchuck Narrows and Rapids of British Columbia conjure up well-justified awe and apprehension. While the First Nations term “Skookum” now describes a “seaworthy, tautly built and tiddly” sailboat, it originally meant “strong or turbulent.” “Chuck” meant salt water. In a classic case of redundancy, coastal sailors now refer to the whole ocean as the “salt chuck.” Tucked in behind the Sechelt Peninsula, the Skookumchuck Narrows formed the historical trading route for generations of four major divisions of the Coast Salish tribe—Tuwanek, Skaikos, Kunechin and Tsonai. Today, boaters come in search of challenge and excitement. Those who have dashed through the boiling rapids on a full flood or full ebb 14-knot current can attest to the thrill.
“Skookumchuck” means “place of strong waters” in the Chinook coastal jargon, the traditional lingua franca of the Natives on the northwest coast. And the spot named Skookumchuck Rapids, located along the British Columbia mainland shore north of Vancouver, fully earns that designation. Hiking in from the road with a friend one time, I first noticed a distant rumble pervading the still forest air. Then the wooded trail opened up and we came to a cliff overlooking a raging channel of white water. Off the nearest point of land, jagged standing waves rose some two metres (about six or seven feet) into the air like sharp teeth. In other places, water plunged into deep, gurgling holes. Swirling green bands of turbulence were swept along with the flow and spun off into powerful back eddies where they were deflected by the rocky shoreline.
In mid-channel, the torrent gushed through a gap between small islands and fanned out into a plume of milky rips as it rejoined the main stream. Seagulls wheeled and swooped over the tumult and foam, hunting for fish that had been injured in the natural cataclysm or simply thrust to the surface by the powerful upwellings. It was like an angry river, but the water was salt, not fresh. And rather than plunging down a steep mountainside, it was being propelled by the ebb and flow of the Pacific tides.
Skookumchuck Rapids has some of the fastest tidal currents in the world. It is one of a score of places on the Inside Passage where swift tidal flows put on spectacular displays, create special conditions for wildlife, and give mariners sleepless nights. It is the shallow, constricted entrance to a network of fjords (locally called inlets) that cut deep into the coastal mountains on the eastern side of British Columbia’s largest body of sheltered water, the Strait of Georgia, which separates Vancouver Island from the B.C. mainland. Also called Sechelt Rapids, Skookumchuck is like the narrow neck of a very large bottle that is repeatedly filled and emptied as the tides rise and fall.
As the tide floods into the nearby Strait of Georgia, hundreds of billions of gallons pour through the narrow channel into Sechelt, Narrows, and Salmon inlets, and the show begins. After about six hours, the water level inside the nearly eighty kilometres (fifty miles) of inlets has risen as much as three metres (ten feet). The flow slows to a trickle and goes slack. Then, after only ten or fifteen minutes of relative calm, the tide out in the strait ebbs, and all the water in those inlets begins to rush back out again. At peak spring tides, it surges through some places in Skookumchuck at more than sixteen knots.
Skookumchuck is only one of many tidal rapids on the B.C. coast. Farther north along the mainland coast is Nakwakto Rapids, which is the gateway between the open waters of Queen Charlotte Sound and nearly landlocked Seymour and Belize inlets. There, too, the water can race through at around sixteen knots, and a much larger volume of water moves at this high speed than at Skookumchuck, so the display is in some ways even more spectacular. In the middle of Nakwakto is Turret rock, a tiny islet also known as Tremble Island. A government surveyor once decided to sit out a tidal cycle there. The islet shook so violently from the force of the current that he lay face down, clung to the tufts of grass, and stuffed his ears against the roar. Seen from the air when a big tide is running, Tremble Island looks like a ship plowing into turbulent seas. It kicks up a huge white bow wave on the end that is being hit by the tidal flow and leaves a long, swirling wake of turbulence in the other direction. Even the orcas (killer whales) that frequent the region negotiate Nakwakto only near slack tide.
—from Ebb and Flow: Tides and Life on Our Once and Future Planet (2007)
Ice
The ability to differentiate between hard ice and soft ice, and between passable and impassable pack; to recognize weathered floes with their dangerous underwater spurs; to detect lines of weakness and to select the most suitable leads, etc., can only be gained by experience, and no amount of text-book knowledge will stand in its stead. Sea ice is a navigational hazard of the first order, and should be accorded all due respect.
—from Handling Ships (1954), Admiralty, B.R. 2092, for use in the Royal Canadian Navy
Ice
David (Duke) Snider (1957– )
Operating vessels efficiently and safely in any ice regime takes more than theory. It takes understanding of ice physics, growth and degradation, and movement combined with a full understanding of one’s own vessel’s capability in ice. Hard-earned experience and competence must be combined with careful planning and executing ice passages, and all this must be overlaid on theoretical knowledge. Time and time again, operators without experience and competence have taken on the ice, particularly polar ice, with the added danger of harder old and multi-year ice, and found their voyage either slowed considerably or failed completely.
As the Royal Canadian Navy looks to a future of increased Arctic operations, this hard-earned wisdom must be taken into consideration in developing manning and training.
—from “A Polar Ice Operation: What it takes,” in Canadian Naval Review (2015)
An Archipelago of Ice
James P. Delgado (1958– )
Some call it the roof of the world. Others called it terra incognita, the unknown land, or ultima Thule, the remote north. It is now known as the Arctic. The name comes from the Greek arktos (bear), for the region lies beneath the constellation of the Great Bear. An imaginary line, drawn by geographers on the globe at 66°30' north latitude, marks the Arctic Circle; beyond it lies the top of the world. It is also the location of one of the world’s longest-sought secrets, the Northwest Passage. Europe’s quest for this passage spanned four centuries. Thousands of sailors and more than a hundred ships participated. The ice of the Arctic still holds some of their bones.
The Northwest Passage—or passages, for there are many potential routes—winds through an archipelago of ice, an intricate maze of islands and peninsulas in the oft-frozen Arctic Ocean. Between land and ice, there is little open water, even during the brief summer. Although most of the Arctic is ocean, it is often frozen, and yet always moving. The ice thwarted most would-be conquerors of the passage. Shifting, drifting, it parted to let ships through, then closed like a trap, imprisoning ships and crews, or crushing them. Or the ice simply remained impenetrable, a barrier as solid as rock, denying access across the top of the world.
Because of the experiences of explorers, some of them ill-suited to and ill-prepared for the rigours of the Arctic, it is popularly known as an inhospitable, deadly land.
The Arctic—and the Antarctic—are the coldest places on earth. Temperatures during the short Arctic summer rarely rise above 10°C (50°F). In the long, dark winters, when the sun never rises, temperatures drop to –51°C (–60°F). And then there is the persistent wind, which can bring a deadly chill. Much of the land is permafrost, or soil permanently frozen to a rock-hard consistency. Because of its barren appearance and the fact that there is little precipitation, the Arctic is known as a “polar desert.” …
Solid ice, ranging in thickness from 0.6 to 4 metres (2 to 14 feet)—covers about 6,000,000 square kilometres (232,000 square miles) of the Arctic Ocean. Nearly half the surface of the water that does remain open is filled with ice floes. The ice generally drifts southward and eastward, and some of it is carried out of the Arctic and into the Atlantic; this includes icebergs that calve off the west coast of Greenland. The circular current of the Arctic creates a heavy-pressure ice system in the archipelago and the Northwest Passage, and lighter ice off Siberia. The heaviest concentration of ice, and the gathering place for many ice floes, is the Beaufort Sea, where the greatest average ice thickness is found. Converging ice creates ridges and hummocks in both the Beaufort Sea and in the intricate waterways of the Northwest Passage. This tortuous, ruptured and riven landscape of ice appears unlikely to be able to support life.
And yet for all its ice, the Arctic Ocean is filled with plankton, which bloom in the brief summer to form an important primary link in the food chain. The fish that feed off the plankton are eaten in turn by ringed seals or walrus.
The Arctic Ocean also supports whales: grays, finbacks, and bowheads, as well as two of the most unusual looking and famous whales, the ghostly white beluga and the long-toothed narwhal. The long, curved tooth of the narwhal grows only on males, gaining length over the years. Early explorers and whalers in the Arctic believed the narwhal was a sea unicorn; early Viking tales of these unique mammals may in fact be the origin of the tale of the unicorn.
The Arctic also supports human life and has for thousands of years.
—from Across the Top of the World (1999)
The Northwest Passage and Climate Change
Glyn Williams (1932– )
The impact of global warming upon the Arctic has become a potentially divisive issue, both internationally and at home, among those with special interests in national sovereignty, natural resources and trade. Some are apprehensive at the threat of wide-ranging environmental damage and the degradation of Inuit culture. Meanwhile, the gap between sea and ice is widening. Today, vessels of every description undertake voyages through various parts of the Northwest Passage.
Since Henry Larsen’s two transits in the St Roch [1940–42, 1944], dozens of craft ranging from strengthened cruise ships to small yachts have made their way through one or other of the several waterways that make up today’s northwest passage. In 1954 the Canadian naval icebreaker HMCS Labrador became the next vessel after the St Roch to negotiate the passage, and up to the present there have been more than a hundred transits by surface vessels, as well as at least two by nuclear submarines. In all, seven different passages have been navigated, the choice of route being dependent on the size and draft of the vessel, and on ice conditions. The shortest and most northerly route, by way of Lancaster Sound, Barrow Strait, McClure Strait and the Beaufort Sea, is also the least used because of the heavy ice that normally blocks McClure Strait. The most frequently used route turns south from Barrow Strait into Peel Sound and Victoria Strait, and then along the mainland coast to Bering Strait.
Two of the most notable voyages in Arctic waters in the last forty years have been those of the Manhattan in 1969 and the St Roch II in 2000. Following the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, the American tanker Manhattan (with a displacement of 155,000 tons when loaded with sea water for the voyage) was sent on a voyage intended to investigate the passage’s commercial possibilities. The giant tanker was heavily and expensively strengthened to resist ice (during the shipyard work her hull was cut into four sections, and then reassembled). Assisted by a Canadian icebreaker [CCGS John A. Macdonald] and by air reconnaissance, the giant tanker bludgeoned her way from Baffin Bay to Barrow, Alaska, in less than a month to complete the navigation of all except the western extremity of the passage. On the return voyage, carrying a symbolic barrel of oil, an unstrengthened part of the vessel’s hull was damaged by ice, leaving a hole “large enough to drive a truck through.” …
No greater contrast could be imagined than the voyage in 2000 of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police catamaran Nadon, renamed St Roch II [for the voyage]. She left Vancouver, escorted by an icebreaker [CCGS Simon Fraser], on a commemorative voyage that followed the track of the original St Roch in 1940–42. The icebreaker proved unnecessary, and the light [20 metre long] aluminium catamaran reached Halifax, Nova Scotia, in little more than three weeks. Her commander, Sergeant Ken Burton, reported seeing only a few icebergs and some small floes along his route. The easy transit was a reminder of those fanciful accounts of apocryphal voyages through a northwest passage that once excited enthusiasts for its discovery; and seemed to point to a future in which global warming might make summer transits of an ice-free passage a normal feature of world shipping …
This seemed to be borne out when in 2007 six vessels—an icebreaker, an ice-strengthened vessel, two yachts, a ketch and a catamaran—completed individual transits either through Barrow Strait, Peel Sound and Victoria Strait, or by way of Prince Regent Inlet, Bellot Strait and Victoria Strait.
—from Arctic Labyrinth: The Quest for the Northwest Passage (2009)
The Imprisoning Sea
Neil Bissoondath (1955– )
For the bookish young Raj Ramsingh, growing up on the fictitious Caribbean island of Casaquemada, the sea is a threatening presence that encircles and traps him in the brutal social disintegration of his society. “To me, its blue-grey expanse, heaving, alive, offered suffocation; to me, it spoke not of freedom and possibility limitless but of confinement and possibility limited. I dreamt not of sailing towards its horizons—they led nowhere—but of escaping them …” Ultimately, for Raj, as for so many immigrants to Canada since the 1960s, it would be the airplane that would carry him to his new land. Here he remembers childhood summer holidays with his cousin, Surein, at his Uncle Grappler’s old rented beach house.
Surein, truth to tell, surprised me. In the early evenings, while my grandmother and Aunt Sylvia prepared dinner in the kitchen downstairs, while my grandfather read the newspaper and Grappler worked at his fishing gear, while I, with a controlled desperation, clung tenaciously to the images of greater certainty that formed from the words, Surein would drag a wicker armchair out to the porch, sit just beyond the reach of the light with his back to us, and gaze fascinated out at the very spectacle that frightened me most: at the misting of the sea in the descending night, at the melancholic merging of water and sky into a wistful extinction. At these times I admired Surein, envied his strength and wondered, with no answers, what soft part of him was touched in his unapproachable absorption there at the edge of the big, open, comfortable house. Later at night, in the sky overhead, in its blackness rent by the undimmed dazzle of countless stars, we sometimes saw a satellite floating rapidly by, a travelling point of light lower than the others but as bright. It was this, metal, manmade, more than the stationary stars; more than, for all their spectacle, the shooting stars; more than even the lunar eclipse we witnessed late one evening, the slow and inexorable darkening of the full moon to a circle, defined by the lightest of coronas, only a little less dark than the surrounding night, then its crowing revelation of received brilliance; it was this, the fashioning hand of man in the distant vastness, that seized me, mesmerized me, thrilled me, took me, with my books, beyond the suffocation of the limiting, imprisoning sea.
—from A Casual Brutality (1988)
Moments of Wonder
Yann Martel (1963– )
The hero of Martel’s novel finds himself cast away on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean following the sinking of the cargo ship Tsimtsum. Sixteen-year-old Pi Patel shares his ordeal with the only other survivor of the disaster, a Royal Bengal tiger known as Richard Parker. Despite the horrors of hunger, thirst and exposure, the crashing violence of an electrical storm moves Pi to an ecstatic realization—he has moved beyond terror and rediscovered happiness.
Once there was lightning. The sky was so black, day looked like night. The downpour was heavy. I heard thunder far away. I thought it would stay at that. But a wind came up, throwing the rain this way and that. Right after, a white splinter came crashing down from the sky, puncturing the water. It was some distance from the lifeboat, but the effect was perfectly visible. The water was shot through with what looked like white roots; briefly, a great celestial tree stood in the ocean. I had never imagined such a thing possible, lightning striking the sea. The clap of thunder was tremendous. The flash of light was incredibly vivid.
