‘A rich and benign lifestyle’

Gumboots in the Straits: Nautical Adventures from Sointula to the Salish Sea
by Lou Allison (ed.), stories compiled by Jane Wilde

Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2024
$26  /  9781773861548

Reviewed by Tom Koppel

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“It was an amazing and foolhardy but grand adventure with an extremely steep learning curve,” writes Hubert Havelaar about the first voyage on the gaff-rigged sailboat he had built. The boat “became our ticket to explore the coast and meet dozens of kindred spirits on boats and from communities between the Gulf Islands and the Broughton Archipelago.” He soon built a larger boat. He and his family eventually settled on pastoral Cortes Island. “My childhood dreaming evolved and stretched into more than sixty years of ‘simply messing around with boats’: navigating channels, rounding capes, cruising straits, heading up inlets and anchoring in idyllic coves.”

Havelaar’s brief memoir is just one of 27 in Gumboots in the Straits, a collection of stories by now-old men who came to the BC coast in the 1960s and 1970s, edited by Lou Allison, and compiled by Jane Wilde. It was a time when work and places to live were easy to find, opening the way to exciting experiences in boating, commercial fishing, and self-sufficient rural living. These deeply personal tales are especially fascinating to me, because I myself came to BC in those years. Many of the contributions read like the story of my own life. I even knew some of the people mentioned, as friends or acquaintances. Jeff Hartbower, for example, was intrigued to meet people on Vancouver Island who were living off the grid. I did that for ten years, at a time before cell phones and affordable solar panels made it much easier. He got into boat work, as did I, building my own wooden sailboat and doing boat repairs for others as one way of scrounging a living. Eventually, he built his own house, as I also did on Salt Spring Island after years of renting and caretaking on two smaller boat-access-only islands.

Harry Williams bought a Klepper folding kayak, which was also my own first boat. I used it mainly to explore the Gulf Islands on short jaunts. Williams, however, paddled his tiny craft right around Vancouver Island, including the exposed West Coast. Another time, he flew to Haida Gwaii, circumnavigated the archipelago, and then paddled right across notorious Hecate Strait to the Mainland of BC. I, too, crossed Hecate Strait, but in the relative comfort and safety of a sizable sailboat.

John Helme tells the story of a group of wharf rats from Salt Spring who set out to use a large retired ferry as a floating home and workshop to repair and restore small boats. Jim Russell, a friend of mine, had the funds to purchase the Cy Peck and have it towed north to Cortes Island. “I knew I had found my new home,”Helme recalls. “My heart and soul were captured….After we dropped a 2000-pound anchor in Quartz Bay…I found myself falling more and more in love with the untouched beauty of that area. The crisp air, the silence, and the feeling of being completely disconnected from the modern world all captivated me. Eventually, my future partner, Beverly Hollingsworth, and I would settle in Quartz Bay….[in] an abandoned one-room cabin that we made our own…for our first winter together.”

Quite a few contributors were part- or full-time commercial fishermen. Howard Pattinson tells how his father matched the funds Howard and his brother Alan had as down payment for a salmon troller. But it was off season, so they first used it for clam digging. Prepping for the salmon season, they had to bottom-paint the boat. It could be hauled out on a marine railway, which would be expensive. In the end, they propped it up with wooden beams as the tide fell, scraped the bottom and applied the copper paint. An old-timer, watching, kidded them about being “too cheap to use the ways.” I also had bottom-painted my sailboat each year without a costly haulout by leaning it against the dock pilings at the Salt Spring Sailing Club. It was there that I got to know Pattinson’s late father, Dick. Working out of Alert Bay, he had served as the communications hub for the entire North Coast. Flying his own float plane, he installed and serviced the radios at canneries, logging camps, and every other remote facility for decades. Retiring to Salt Spring, Dick Pattinson became an intrepid sailor. Even in his 70s and 80s, he circumnavigated Vancouver Island nearly every summer, often with a friend but sometimes alone. According to his obituary, he did it 14 times.

Many of these stories feature capsule profiles of fascinating coastal communities. Lasqueti Island remains to this day, by choice, entirely off the Hydro grid and is served four or five days a week by a passenger-only ferry. Sointula, a major boat-building and fishing centre, was founded by radical-left Finnish immigrants. Laid back Cortes Island has what was my own absolute favourite anchorage, totally sheltered Gorge Harbour.

And then there was Alert Bay, the epicentre of activity for the salmon fleet during its heyday, before recent decades of decline. A vivid aerial photo in the book shows hundreds of boats at extensive docks in the 1970s. Will Soltau’s story tells how his seiner “repaired our net and reprovisioned in Alert Bay on the weekends between openings,” which usually ran from Monday through Thursday. This is celebrated in the lovely song Sunday Night Seine Boats by country/folk troubadour Alan Moberg, who himself fished as a young man.

Gumboots in the Straits is a book of poignant nostalgia, even romance, evoking the BC coast as experienced by men now in their 70s and 80s. It was a special time and place of beauty, serenity, opportunity, and adventure for those attracted to the sea, boats, and closeness to nature. As Robert DeVault recalls: “Our loose circle of friends lacked any unifying ideology, and we tended to be almost perversely independent, but we shared an admiration of the people who settled the coast before us. They seemed to be living within their means, however humbly, and if they had to work hard to keep their boats going and gardens growing, there was a level of engagement with their world that seemed more in line with what we believed to be a rich and benign lifestyle…It’s all different now. I could not do today what I did then. You can’t even buy fuel in most places anymore. There is very little available work, and no land to purchase. I will never know what my life might have been if I had chosen a different path, but I certainly have no regrets for the wonderful years I have spent on the coast.”

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Tom Koppel is a veteran BC author and journalist who has published five books on history and science. For 35 years, he has contributed feature articles to major magazines, including Canadian Geographic, Archaeology, American Archaeology, Equinox, The Beaver, Reader’s Digest, Western Living, Islands, Oceans, and The Progressive. His book Kanaka: The Untold Story of Hawaiian Pioneers in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest (Whitecap Books, 1995) is available by email from  koppel@saltspring.com  Tom lives with his wife Annie Palovcik on Salt Spring Island. [Editor’s note: Tom Koppel has also reviewed books by Ian Gill, Dr. Allen Jones, M.D., Kirsten Bell, Steven Earle, Daniel Kalla, and Britt Wray for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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