Excerpt : Rescue at Telegraph Cove

Excerpt: RESCUE AT TELEGRAPH COVE by Keith Keller Photo: Kevin Johnson 'A sense of impending doom was definitely on me. I was starting to think about my funeral. I just didin't see how we were going to get out of it.' .......The popularity of both sea kayaking and whale watching has in recent years inspired something of a renaissance in the tiny community of Telegraph Cove on Vancouver Island's northeast coast. This isolated pocket, once a hub of lumber-related activity, was on the verge of falling silent in 1979 when the Wastell family, for decades the operators of Telegraph Cove Sawmills, closed their antiquated operation. Taking an entrepreneurial leap of faith, employees Bill Mackay and Jim Borrowman teamed up to launch a venture called Stubbs Island Charters. In addition to hauling freight and running dive charters, the pair intended to take the paying public into Johnstone Strait to show them the killer whales that have made the area world famous. Telegraph Cove pioneer Fred Wastell, who had spent much of his life towing logs and hauling lumber in and around Johnstone Strait, told the pair bluntly: "Nobody's going to pay to look at those darned blackfish." He did, however, offer to lease them his pride and joy, the sixty-foot Gikumi. From those humble beginnings, Borrowman and Mackay and "those darned blackfish" have made Stubbs Island Charters a major coastal eco-tourism attraction.
........Kayakers by the thousand make pilgrimages to Johnstone Strait to paddle among killer whales and to explore the adjacent Broughton Archipelago. Many arrive unprepared for the rigorous conditions they're liable to encounter. As a result, Borrowman and Mackay have over the years delivered many exhausted, wet, humbled kayakers to safety on the Gikumi and its new sister vessel, the Lukwa. For sheer drama, however, none of their rescues match the one they performed on the first day of spring, 1988, with the assistance of fellow Telegraph Cove resident Dan Mooney. In an ironic twist of circumstances, the couple they rescued, Debra Kuykendall (now Debra LeClair), then a student at Oregon State University, and her boyfriend, geologist Kevin Johnson, would almost certainly have died if the high winds which contributed to their misadventure hadn't forced Mooney to take the day off work. Kevin Johnson:....I'd tried kayaking, not necessarily sea kayaking, but kayaking somewhere, and read something in a magazine about it. I've always liked Canada and thought it would be a great opportunity to go out there and give it a try. ........We drove up to Port Angeles and took the ferry over to Victoria and stopped at a place in Victoria that rented us a sea kayak. They gave us some advice for some nice areas where you could kinda go around a bit—nice protected areas, that kind of stuff. Being totally unfamiliar with the water conditions up there, I thought, "Hell, let's just drive up the island, look for another spot, maybe we can find a little island to camp out on." All this kind of thing. That's pretty much what we did. We drove up the island and ended up in Alert Bay. .......I was a little more enthusiastic about it than Deb was. I think she was a little more cautious and I was a little more of a risk-taker at the time. We got out there and the weather was a little rainy and a little cool, but nothing unexpected for March. We put in and the water was beautiful, nice and calm, and we went out maybe a mile to an island, got some of our stuff out, set up a camp. There were several little islands there in the area, and there were eagles around and the water was crystal clear. .......We got up the next day, and the wind had picked up and things were a little more active. Deb was kind of relying on me to be the team leader, and, unfortunately, I was out of my realm. I didn't have a good grip on what the conditions were out there. I could see the weather was getting a little snotty, but we didn't have any water there on the island and I was getting a little nervous about staying out there any more than a day. I said, "Let's go for it, try and make it back to where our car's parked." We were both pretty nervous about it. Deb LeClair:...Things looked pretty choppy. I got that real bad feeling in my gut, looking out and seeing it get progressively worse. Both of our thoughts were, not knowing the weather patterns up there at all, that it could get really bad. We might be stuck here on this island for days. We didn't have food or water for days. .......I didn't feel good about it at all, but he kept reassuring me: "Ah, you know, we grew up on the Oregon coast. This isn't any worse. It's no big deal." Trying to convince me of that. Now when he looks back on it, he knows it was a really wrong choice. I remember at one point almost being in tears about going. Just that feeling of, "No, this isn't okay," and, "Wait, I have to go to the bathroom one more time." .......By the time we broke down camp, there were definitely whitecaps. That made me real nervous. .......The other thing was that the chart and the tide book we had didn't seem to coincide, so we couldn't even tell the tide for where we were. That was really stupid, because they were against us. Johnson:..We got through a little bit of rough water and that wasn't too bad. The tide currents up there are really something, extremely fierce. There was some pretty big water for what the day before had been smooth as glass. Not understanding the tides up there, I didn't realize that if we'd just held tight for a few hours, it probably would have eased up quite a bit, and we would have had a much easier time of it. We got within probably thirty yards of an island big enough to put in to and get all our stuff up on. It had some trees on it and was somewhat protected. At the time I was aiming at that thing. But we were dealing with something that neither one of us could handle. It was beyond our experience. LeClair:..The person in the back controls the rudder, and at that point I remember very well asking him why we kept shifting. He kept changing course on me, I thought. We had a plan to head straight for this little island, but out a little bit, then cut in and ride the current into it. And I kept saying, "Why do you keep changing our course?" He didn't say anything for awhile, and I said, "Why?!" I was getting really tense then. He finally said, "I'm not. I've got the rudder all the way the other way." That's when I knew that we were in trouble. ........We were almost to this rocky little island and I remember looking at a log resting on the bank and watching to see if we were making progress. And we were drifting back; the current had taken over. That's what drew us into this point where apparently the water is coming from one side and the other—there are about three currents pushing together. It was just this great big whitewater mess. That's where we dumped. Johnson:... We came up on this standing wave. We got into it crossways and it just rolled us over. Out we went. I told Deb to hang onto the kayak. We gathered up a little bit of our stuff, which took quite a while, ten or fifteen minutes to get up into the kayak. We shot off one flare, probably the best $12.95 I ever spent. The current was picking us up and we went just zooming by the island. She was saying something about trying to swim for it, and I told her, "No way, stick with the boat."
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