CRUISING THE NORTH COAST WILDERNESS

PRACTICAL TIPS FOR EXPLORING

NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA

by Michael Boyd, photos by Karen Johnson

The North Coast of British Columbia is the area between the northern end of Vancouver Island, Cape Caution on the mainland side, and the Alaska border. It’s a land of wild beauty, from the fjords reaching deep into the mainland Coast Range to thousands of islands along the Pacific shore with their white sand beaches. There are no cruise ship stops, so the only tourists are fishermen at fly-in resorts and cruisers on their own boats. We love it.

Getting there requires time and commitment. Cape Caution is about 300 miles from Seattle. The section of the coast around Cape Caution is exposed to the Pacific Ocean and weather, which might require waiting for a good window to get around. But once past, the waters are largely protected and the possibilities for cruisers almost endless.

We love cruising there on our Eagle 40 pilothouse trawler, Mischief, but found neither our experience throughout the South Coast nor the guidebooks fully prepared us for this new area. So, here are some thoughts about the boat, navigation, anchoring, and living aboard that we have discovered from cruising the North Coast.

The Boat

Good news, even though most of the boats we encountered on the North Coast tend to be large, so long as you choose suitable sea and wind conditions for your craft and your experience, almost any boat can cruise this wilderness paradise. It’s how you manage the boat that makes the difference when cruising a remote area like the North Coast.

Be failure-proof as much as you can. This means preparing redundant systems and workaround procedures for as much of the unexpected as possible. On one trip, most of our problems were related to the house batteries and luckily we had more than one way to charge them.

Take critical spare parts with you. We’ve used some of our spares on every trip, and were glad we had them. There is no real marine supply store for a stretch of almost 300 miles between Port Hardy on the northern tip of Vancouver Island and Prince Rupert, which is only about 20 miles south of the Alaska border.

Plan for engine maintenance, such as oil changes, during the trip. Yes, this means sailboats too. With a lack of wind in the summer months, you probably won’t be sailing as much as you’d hope, so the engine hours tend to pile up. There is boatyard-type service available in Shearwater, but that’s the only place until you get to Prince Rupert. And they tend to be very busy, so expect to wait. We inquired about getting help for our battery problems and were told the marine electrician wouldn’t actually arrive for another 10 days and there was already a two week waiting list. In other words, building skills in advance and bringing tools that allow you to do a bit of your own basic engine work is a very good idea as you travel farther north.

Navigation

Even the direct route taken by ferries, cruise ships, and tugs will have its navigational challenges. But for almost every cruiser, most of your North Coast exploration will be off that route and into the intricate fjords of the mainland side or the myriad islands and passages of the ocean side — and that raises the degree of navigational difficulty.

Your main navigational challenges, other than not hitting