alexsidles
Paddler
[cross-posted at alexsidles.com]
“Kayak Bill” Davidson lived alone among the islands of the Inside Passage, traveling from camp to camp by kayak, foraging for seafood and vegetables along the way. He sold watercolor landscape paintings to earn what little money he needed for basic supplies such as flour, sugar, and tobacco. He died of a gunshot wound under unknown circumstances in one of his camps in late 2003 or early 2004.
Kayak Bill’s bold lifestyle attracted many admirers, some of whom wrote articles after his death about what Kayak Bill meant to them. (“Kayak Bill: A Requiem,” Keith Webb; “Looking for Kayak Bill,” Neil Frazer; “Breakfast with Kayak Bill,” Colin Lake; “A Tribute to Billy,” Francis Dwyer.)
In the words of one of the authors:
Faint though it was, Kayak Bill’s material wake can still be traced today, nearly twenty years after his death. Bill maintained a chain of campsites along the central coast, many of which remain recognizable thanks to Bill’s unique construction techniques.
Seattle-based kayaker Jon Dawkins has spent the past decade and a half amassing information about Kayak Bill and his campsites. He has generously published most of his research on his blog. Relying heavily on Jon’s work, I made a two-week pilgrimage to the central coast to find some of the campsites and retrace the footsteps of Kayak Bill.
00 Route map. I parked my car at the Port Hardy ferry terminal, carried my kayak aboard the ferry, launched the kayak beneath the Klemtu ferry dock, then paddled back to my car at Port Hardy.
My first morning out of Klemtu, I encountered a sailboat transiting a narrow passage. We stopped to chat. They were wrapping up a sight-seeing and cultural tour, their last of the season. My adventure was just beginning. They would be the last people and the last boat I would see for a week.
Even with Jon’s descriptions and maps of Kayak Bill’s campsites, the sites were not always easy to find. Kayak Bill made many close friends among the residents of the coast, but he made enemies, too, people who would destroy his camps if they found them. The central coast is subject to competing land and water claims from First Nations, provincial and federal government agencies, and private property owners. Bill learned to hide his camps in out-of-the-way corners of the coast to avoid treading on other people’s sensitivities.
01 Narrowest part of Meyers Passage. This is a principal waterway connecting the Inside Passage with the outer islands. Kayak Bill, ancient indigenous peoples, and modern residents of Klemtu have all used this route.
02 Kayak Bill campsite location, Meyers Passage. Kayak Bill had a campsite somewhere in this sublimely secluded bay, but I was not able to find it.
03 Pot, Meyers Passage. In the exact location marked on Kayak Bill’s chart, I found a rusty old pot in the forest. There was none of the characteristic Kayak Bill campsite architecture, so I cannot conclude that this is a Kayak Bill artifact.
04 Morning view of Laredo Sound. The haunted, layered appearance of the coast in autumn exerted a strong influence on Kayak Bill’s watercolors.
05 Searching Higgins Passage. Somewhere in this maze of rocky islets is another Kayak Bill camp, but I could not find it despite three hours’ combing.
Kayak Bill’s chief redoubt was Weeteeam Bay and the numerous clusters of islets at the south end of Aristazabal Island. Amid this labyrinth of water and rock, he constructed his largest and most elaborate camps. Here he spent the bulk of each year, decades on end, foraging alone.
It’s one of the most scenic areas of the coast. Visual texture is everywhere you look. Boomers guard the entrances, creating a fortress for kayakers against all but the most intrepid motorboaters.
This stretch of coast is unusually productive of seafood. The wave-washed rocks are covered in large California mussels and gooseneck barnacles. The beaches are full of clams. Shellfish formed the core of Kayak Bill’s diet, so Weeteeam Bay must have seemed like a paradise.
06 Kayaking south end of Aristazabal Island. Kayak Bill was not afraid of ocean swells or rocky shores, but he did try to avoid surf landings.
07 South end of Aristazabal Island. Minutes after I took this picture, a hitherto-inactive boomer fired up just feet behind me and capsized my kayak, costing me my third pair of binoculars in as many years.
08 Kayaking Beauchemin Channel toward Aristazabal Island. It requires multiple crossings of ten miles (16 km) or more to get to the most interesting locations along this part of the coast.
09 Narrow passage, Weeteeam Bay. Kayak Bill often sited his campsites near intricate waterways like this one.
10 Islands in Weeteeam Bay. This maze is confusing for strangers to navigate even with GPS, but for Kayak Bill, it must have felt as familiar as a living room.
The elaborate architecture of Kayak Bill’s camps distinguishes them from the crude “beach furniture” campsites constructed by other kayakers. A genuine Kayak Bill site features a fireplace made of flat stones buried in the ground or embedded in a firebox. Standing over the fireplace is a triangular “firestand” built of driftwood. Nearby is a stack of firewood, each piece cut to precisely the same length, with plywood or a tarp to keep the wood dry from the rain. Next to the fireplace is a stump to use as a seat. Behind that is a bed of planks. The perimeter is protected by a windscreen of logs or planks standing vertically and held in place by ropes. Overhead is a network of ropes stretching from tree to tree to accommodate tarps and mosquito nets.
11 Kayak Bill Camp I, Aristazabal Island. The tarp supports, firestand, and a small windbreak remain intact.
12 Firestand, Camp I. The firestand allowed Kayak Bill to set objects at different heights above the fire to accomplish different purposes: boiling water, smoking meat, or drying clothes.
13 Gathering water from Kayak Bill’s well, Camp I. A trail, marked by buoys hung from trees, leads from Kayak Bill’s Camp I to a series of small fresh-water wells in the forest.
14 Kayak Bill Camp II, Weeteeam Bay. This camp is smaller and more overgrown than Camp I or Camp III, and sited on a much less accessible beach.
15 Remnants of windscreen, Camp II. Whenever he arrived at a camp, Bill could just throw a tarp or mosquito net, as needed, over the existing infrastructure.
16 Windscreen, Kayak Bill Camp III, Weeteeam Bay. Camp III is the most intact of Bill’s camps.
17 Stakes, Camp III. Kayak Bill drove stakes into the ground to support additional windscreens within the camp, as well as benches and other furniture.
18 Firewood shelter, Camp III. The shelter, wood, and extra saw blades are all original Kayak Bill artifacts. The fishhooks and ziplock bag containing a novel are probably deposits from later visitors.
Kayak Bill’s main camp was even more remote than his three camps around Weeteeam Bay. On Harvey Island, ten miles (16 km) offshore in Hecate Strait, Bill erected a plywood-and-tarp structure so elaborate it was almost more of a cabin than a campsite. He referred to Harvey as a “garden of Eden.” It was a place he could spend happy months at a time.
All his life, Kayak Bill was hounded by people who didn’t think they owed him respect. It began in childhood, when his mother abandoned him and his father deposited him in an orphanage in Calgary. The orphanage was no refuge. It was a place of physical and sexual abuse perpetrated upon the youngest residents by the older boys and certain members of the staff.
Civilized society continued to persecute Bill into adulthood. During his decades kayaking, his camps—which were his home—were frequently demolished by people who thought of him as a trespasser or a poacher. Other times, he would return to a camp only to find it befouled by boaters whose idea of camping involved beer cans and boomboxes. Bill kept moving deeper and deeper into the wilderness, but the meanest agents of civilization kept finding him.
Harvey Island is an ecological reserve. It’s illegal for anyone to land without a permit, much less move into a cabin and forage for shellfish. Bill might have been safe from the more casual breed of vandal here, but civilization wouldn’t leave him alone forever, even in a place so far from anywhere. Bill carved a tree stump into a statue of a human hand, extending its middle finger toward the viewer. He knew they were coming for him.
Vandals come in various guises. The ones who finally found Kayak Bill’s main camp wore uniforms and wielded the law with as much wrath as they wielded their chainsaws. They cut up Bill’s cabin, pulled down his windscreen, kicked over his hearth, scattered his years-old accumulation of clamshells, and burned whatever was left below the high-tide line.
Kayak Bill’s cabin should have been a monument to a way of life our civilization has all but forgotten. Instead, the government reduced it to rubble on our behalf. I hope the middle-finger statue was pointing right at their faces when they came ashore.
19 Harvey Island at three miles’ distance, seen from Beauchemin Channel. There are other, even more remote islands in Hecate Strait, but I don’t know whether Kayak Bill made use of them.
20 Harvey Island, south entrance to channel. Only at high tide is it possible to traverse the channel through the middle of the islands, where Kayak Bill built his home.
21 Remnants of Kayak Bill’s pile of mussels and clamshells, Harvey Island. Bill ate seals, deer, ducks and grouse, and fish, but his main source of meat was shellfish.
22 Ruins of Kayak Bill’s hearth, Harvey Island. If not for having seen the intact fireplaces in Weeteeam Bay, I would not have recognized this as a Kayak Bill artifact.
23 Kayak Bill’s tarp and windscreen ropes, Harvey Island. The goons didn’t have the guts to climb the spruces and cut down the ropes Kayak Bill had hung.
24 Amid the ruins of his hearth, tobacco and whiskey for Kayak Bill. Sorry I missed you, buddy.
25 Sunset, Harvey Island. At low tide, the islands are defended by a drying reef hundreds of yards wide, but in the end, it wasn’t enough to keep out the intruders.
Looking for Kayak Bill is not the only reason to visit the central coast. The kayaking here is some of the best in the world. The central coast offers a huge range of experiences, from maze-like clusters of islets, to long, winding channels, to large, open bodies of water (“sounds”) so exposed to ocean swells they attract pelagic birds such as Leach’s storm-petrels, sooty shearwaters, and northern fulmars.
26 Goo-Ewe salmon stream, Higgins Passage. Spawning salmon crowded the stream so thickly the entire surface of the water rippled and the air reeked of fish, attracting flocks of ravens, crows, and eagles. Here my GPS died for no apparent reason, throwing me back to the good ol’ map and compass for the next nine days.
27 Kayak at Cape Mark, off Athlone Island. South of here, I hewed to the outer coast and camped on nothing but sand.
28 Sunrise, west coast of Athlone Island. The weather remained benign until the last four days of the trip.
29 Black-legged kittiwake, Beauchemin Channel. This handsome species was present in low numbers throughout the central coast.
30 Sooty shearwaters, Laredo Sound. The twin nostrils of the bird’s “tubenose” are visible.
31 Sea otter, Milbanke Sound. In 2022, the sea otters were much more numerous and widespread than the previous time I kayaked through here in 2011.
32 Raft of sea otters, Grief Bay. On a day of high swell, the sea otters seemed to be as grateful for the shelter of Grief Bay as I was.
33 Kayaking Queens Sound. Here I encountered my first humpback whales of the trip.
34 Beach on Snipe Island. The Goose Islands are justly famous for their beautiful sandy beaches.
[CONTINUED IN NEXT POST]
[cross-posted at alexsidles.com]
“Kayak Bill” Davidson lived alone among the islands of the Inside Passage, traveling from camp to camp by kayak, foraging for seafood and vegetables along the way. He sold watercolor landscape paintings to earn what little money he needed for basic supplies such as flour, sugar, and tobacco. He died of a gunshot wound under unknown circumstances in one of his camps in late 2003 or early 2004.
Kayak Bill’s bold lifestyle attracted many admirers, some of whom wrote articles after his death about what Kayak Bill meant to them. (“Kayak Bill: A Requiem,” Keith Webb; “Looking for Kayak Bill,” Neil Frazer; “Breakfast with Kayak Bill,” Colin Lake; “A Tribute to Billy,” Francis Dwyer.)
In the words of one of the authors:
Bill occupies a place in my imagination because he reversed the course of civilization. Except for Bill, civilization is a one-way trip. …
In a material sense, Bill's wake was as ephemeral as the wake from his kayak. However, I doubt that he realized the emotional wake he had left behind.
Faint though it was, Kayak Bill’s material wake can still be traced today, nearly twenty years after his death. Bill maintained a chain of campsites along the central coast, many of which remain recognizable thanks to Bill’s unique construction techniques.
Seattle-based kayaker Jon Dawkins has spent the past decade and a half amassing information about Kayak Bill and his campsites. He has generously published most of his research on his blog. Relying heavily on Jon’s work, I made a two-week pilgrimage to the central coast to find some of the campsites and retrace the footsteps of Kayak Bill.
00 Route map. I parked my car at the Port Hardy ferry terminal, carried my kayak aboard the ferry, launched the kayak beneath the Klemtu ferry dock, then paddled back to my car at Port Hardy.
My first morning out of Klemtu, I encountered a sailboat transiting a narrow passage. We stopped to chat. They were wrapping up a sight-seeing and cultural tour, their last of the season. My adventure was just beginning. They would be the last people and the last boat I would see for a week.
Even with Jon’s descriptions and maps of Kayak Bill’s campsites, the sites were not always easy to find. Kayak Bill made many close friends among the residents of the coast, but he made enemies, too, people who would destroy his camps if they found them. The central coast is subject to competing land and water claims from First Nations, provincial and federal government agencies, and private property owners. Bill learned to hide his camps in out-of-the-way corners of the coast to avoid treading on other people’s sensitivities.
01 Narrowest part of Meyers Passage. This is a principal waterway connecting the Inside Passage with the outer islands. Kayak Bill, ancient indigenous peoples, and modern residents of Klemtu have all used this route.
02 Kayak Bill campsite location, Meyers Passage. Kayak Bill had a campsite somewhere in this sublimely secluded bay, but I was not able to find it.
03 Pot, Meyers Passage. In the exact location marked on Kayak Bill’s chart, I found a rusty old pot in the forest. There was none of the characteristic Kayak Bill campsite architecture, so I cannot conclude that this is a Kayak Bill artifact.
04 Morning view of Laredo Sound. The haunted, layered appearance of the coast in autumn exerted a strong influence on Kayak Bill’s watercolors.
05 Searching Higgins Passage. Somewhere in this maze of rocky islets is another Kayak Bill camp, but I could not find it despite three hours’ combing.
Kayak Bill’s chief redoubt was Weeteeam Bay and the numerous clusters of islets at the south end of Aristazabal Island. Amid this labyrinth of water and rock, he constructed his largest and most elaborate camps. Here he spent the bulk of each year, decades on end, foraging alone.
It’s one of the most scenic areas of the coast. Visual texture is everywhere you look. Boomers guard the entrances, creating a fortress for kayakers against all but the most intrepid motorboaters.
This stretch of coast is unusually productive of seafood. The wave-washed rocks are covered in large California mussels and gooseneck barnacles. The beaches are full of clams. Shellfish formed the core of Kayak Bill’s diet, so Weeteeam Bay must have seemed like a paradise.
06 Kayaking south end of Aristazabal Island. Kayak Bill was not afraid of ocean swells or rocky shores, but he did try to avoid surf landings.
07 South end of Aristazabal Island. Minutes after I took this picture, a hitherto-inactive boomer fired up just feet behind me and capsized my kayak, costing me my third pair of binoculars in as many years.
08 Kayaking Beauchemin Channel toward Aristazabal Island. It requires multiple crossings of ten miles (16 km) or more to get to the most interesting locations along this part of the coast.
09 Narrow passage, Weeteeam Bay. Kayak Bill often sited his campsites near intricate waterways like this one.
10 Islands in Weeteeam Bay. This maze is confusing for strangers to navigate even with GPS, but for Kayak Bill, it must have felt as familiar as a living room.
The elaborate architecture of Kayak Bill’s camps distinguishes them from the crude “beach furniture” campsites constructed by other kayakers. A genuine Kayak Bill site features a fireplace made of flat stones buried in the ground or embedded in a firebox. Standing over the fireplace is a triangular “firestand” built of driftwood. Nearby is a stack of firewood, each piece cut to precisely the same length, with plywood or a tarp to keep the wood dry from the rain. Next to the fireplace is a stump to use as a seat. Behind that is a bed of planks. The perimeter is protected by a windscreen of logs or planks standing vertically and held in place by ropes. Overhead is a network of ropes stretching from tree to tree to accommodate tarps and mosquito nets.
11 Kayak Bill Camp I, Aristazabal Island. The tarp supports, firestand, and a small windbreak remain intact.
12 Firestand, Camp I. The firestand allowed Kayak Bill to set objects at different heights above the fire to accomplish different purposes: boiling water, smoking meat, or drying clothes.
13 Gathering water from Kayak Bill’s well, Camp I. A trail, marked by buoys hung from trees, leads from Kayak Bill’s Camp I to a series of small fresh-water wells in the forest.
14 Kayak Bill Camp II, Weeteeam Bay. This camp is smaller and more overgrown than Camp I or Camp III, and sited on a much less accessible beach.
15 Remnants of windscreen, Camp II. Whenever he arrived at a camp, Bill could just throw a tarp or mosquito net, as needed, over the existing infrastructure.
16 Windscreen, Kayak Bill Camp III, Weeteeam Bay. Camp III is the most intact of Bill’s camps.
17 Stakes, Camp III. Kayak Bill drove stakes into the ground to support additional windscreens within the camp, as well as benches and other furniture.
18 Firewood shelter, Camp III. The shelter, wood, and extra saw blades are all original Kayak Bill artifacts. The fishhooks and ziplock bag containing a novel are probably deposits from later visitors.
Kayak Bill’s main camp was even more remote than his three camps around Weeteeam Bay. On Harvey Island, ten miles (16 km) offshore in Hecate Strait, Bill erected a plywood-and-tarp structure so elaborate it was almost more of a cabin than a campsite. He referred to Harvey as a “garden of Eden.” It was a place he could spend happy months at a time.
All his life, Kayak Bill was hounded by people who didn’t think they owed him respect. It began in childhood, when his mother abandoned him and his father deposited him in an orphanage in Calgary. The orphanage was no refuge. It was a place of physical and sexual abuse perpetrated upon the youngest residents by the older boys and certain members of the staff.
Civilized society continued to persecute Bill into adulthood. During his decades kayaking, his camps—which were his home—were frequently demolished by people who thought of him as a trespasser or a poacher. Other times, he would return to a camp only to find it befouled by boaters whose idea of camping involved beer cans and boomboxes. Bill kept moving deeper and deeper into the wilderness, but the meanest agents of civilization kept finding him.
Harvey Island is an ecological reserve. It’s illegal for anyone to land without a permit, much less move into a cabin and forage for shellfish. Bill might have been safe from the more casual breed of vandal here, but civilization wouldn’t leave him alone forever, even in a place so far from anywhere. Bill carved a tree stump into a statue of a human hand, extending its middle finger toward the viewer. He knew they were coming for him.
Vandals come in various guises. The ones who finally found Kayak Bill’s main camp wore uniforms and wielded the law with as much wrath as they wielded their chainsaws. They cut up Bill’s cabin, pulled down his windscreen, kicked over his hearth, scattered his years-old accumulation of clamshells, and burned whatever was left below the high-tide line.
Kayak Bill’s cabin should have been a monument to a way of life our civilization has all but forgotten. Instead, the government reduced it to rubble on our behalf. I hope the middle-finger statue was pointing right at their faces when they came ashore.
19 Harvey Island at three miles’ distance, seen from Beauchemin Channel. There are other, even more remote islands in Hecate Strait, but I don’t know whether Kayak Bill made use of them.
20 Harvey Island, south entrance to channel. Only at high tide is it possible to traverse the channel through the middle of the islands, where Kayak Bill built his home.
21 Remnants of Kayak Bill’s pile of mussels and clamshells, Harvey Island. Bill ate seals, deer, ducks and grouse, and fish, but his main source of meat was shellfish.
22 Ruins of Kayak Bill’s hearth, Harvey Island. If not for having seen the intact fireplaces in Weeteeam Bay, I would not have recognized this as a Kayak Bill artifact.
23 Kayak Bill’s tarp and windscreen ropes, Harvey Island. The goons didn’t have the guts to climb the spruces and cut down the ropes Kayak Bill had hung.
24 Amid the ruins of his hearth, tobacco and whiskey for Kayak Bill. Sorry I missed you, buddy.
25 Sunset, Harvey Island. At low tide, the islands are defended by a drying reef hundreds of yards wide, but in the end, it wasn’t enough to keep out the intruders.
Looking for Kayak Bill is not the only reason to visit the central coast. The kayaking here is some of the best in the world. The central coast offers a huge range of experiences, from maze-like clusters of islets, to long, winding channels, to large, open bodies of water (“sounds”) so exposed to ocean swells they attract pelagic birds such as Leach’s storm-petrels, sooty shearwaters, and northern fulmars.
26 Goo-Ewe salmon stream, Higgins Passage. Spawning salmon crowded the stream so thickly the entire surface of the water rippled and the air reeked of fish, attracting flocks of ravens, crows, and eagles. Here my GPS died for no apparent reason, throwing me back to the good ol’ map and compass for the next nine days.
27 Kayak at Cape Mark, off Athlone Island. South of here, I hewed to the outer coast and camped on nothing but sand.
28 Sunrise, west coast of Athlone Island. The weather remained benign until the last four days of the trip.
29 Black-legged kittiwake, Beauchemin Channel. This handsome species was present in low numbers throughout the central coast.
30 Sooty shearwaters, Laredo Sound. The twin nostrils of the bird’s “tubenose” are visible.
31 Sea otter, Milbanke Sound. In 2022, the sea otters were much more numerous and widespread than the previous time I kayaked through here in 2011.
32 Raft of sea otters, Grief Bay. On a day of high swell, the sea otters seemed to be as grateful for the shelter of Grief Bay as I was.
33 Kayaking Queens Sound. Here I encountered my first humpback whales of the trip.
34 Beach on Snipe Island. The Goose Islands are justly famous for their beautiful sandy beaches.
[CONTINUED IN NEXT POST]
[cross-posted at alexsidles.com]
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