Looking out of my tent on a rainy morning.
My first morning on Texada Island was a rainy one, but the wind was calm and the seas smooth. I set up my alcohol stove just outside the vestibule to my tent and had some coffee and hot cereal for breakfast. A crab fisherman’s boat maneuvered slowly offshore playing Led Zeppelin over the stereo system as they picked up and emptied their traps. I did not really feel like breaking camp and packing up in the rain so I took the opportunity to make some notes and read over the information I had with me on Texada Island and hoped that the rain would end soon.
Looking north up the shoreline of Texada Island on a rainy morning.
After noon, the rain ended. I packed up and got ready to launch. As I steadied the boat parallel to the shore in completely calm water getting ready to enter, a set of waves from a barge that had passed about five minutes before reached me. I saw them building as they approached and the sea bottom became shallower. All I could do was to hold on to the boat and let it rise and fall with each wave as it passed underneath. This was a slight annoyance, as now the cockpit needed bailing out, and I was soaking wet before even launching. From this point on, I made sure no wakes from passing boats would catch me by surprise while launching.
Not long after setting off, the wind began to pick up out of the southeast, which initially helped me along as I was paddling to the northwest. As time went by and the wind and waves increased, it became increasingly uncomfortable to be on the water. Added to that was the unusually large number of submerged rocks that lay just offshore along this stretch of Texada Island. I would be paddling 100 yards out and all of a sudden, I would see waves breaking over the top of a barnacle-encrusted boulder. This went on for miles and it was something I had not seen yet on this trip and would not see again. Because of this, I could not take my eyes off the water in front of me for a second, for fear of running full speed into one of these hull-crushers.
My second campsite on Texada Island.
My destination for the day was the Shelter Point Regional Park, a fifteen-mile paddle. The strong wind however forced me to cut this day’s paddle short. I had been staying fairly close to shore to try to keep out of the strongest winds so I was keeping an eye out for a suitable place to camp if one came along. About a mile north of Davie Bay, I found a good site along a crushed shell beach full of big drift logs. I could see from driftwood on the beach that my tent site would be just above high tide. Since high tide this evening would be at 9:00pm, it was not too risky because I could watch high tide rise and begin to fall before I went to sleep.
I did not take note of what time I landed today, but I had covered around 11 miles.
