The ebb off Point Wilson starts working two hours before it shows on the surface, and when it shows, it shows like a fight in a bar — sudden, everywhere, hard to say who started it. We rowed into it at 5:40 on a July morning, nineteen feet of glued plywood called Bufflehead, because the tide table said that for the next six hours the Strait of Juan de Fuca would be moving our way, and because the boat has no engine to argue otherwise.
Bufflehead is a gaff sloop built in a Port Townsend garage in 1978, from plans that were meant for a lake and say so right on the title block. My brother-in-law Sam bought her for roughly the price of her trailer. Her auxiliary power is two nine-and-a-half-foot spruce oars and whatever the two of us had for breakfast.
The arithmetic of the strait
Victoria sits thirty nautical miles northwest of Port Townsend, which sounds like a day and is actually an equation. The boat makes four knots on a good point of sail. The current runs to two and a half in mid-strait — west on the ebb, east on the flood — and it does not observe your schedule so much as issue one. Add the summer westerly, which fills in after lunch and does not negotiate, and the crossing becomes a window with the strait holding the sash.
The plan, worked out on a kitchen table with a pencil and the humility of people who have been wrong before: leave on the young ebb and let it carry us west of the rhumb line all morning; cross both shipping lanes before noon; be under the Canadian shore when the flood turned, so it would hand us up toward the harbor instead of sweeping us east into Baynes Channel, where the water runs like a river with opinions.
You don't sail across the strait. You solve it, and the answer keeps moving.
The hole in the middle
The wind quit at 11:20, in the outbound lane, which is the strait's idea of a joke. One minute we had six knots of northwesterly and a boat that steered; the next, the sails hung like laundry and the water went to pewter, a long slow heave rolling in from a fog bank parked out toward the Pacific. Somewhere inside that fog a ship sounded its horn — one long blast every two minutes, arriving flat and enormous, like a door closing in a house the size of the county.
We got the oars out. A nineteen-foot boat rows at two knots if the rower is angry, and I was. The ship came out of the fog eight minutes later, a container vessel stacked six high and making eighteen or twenty knots — from a smudge to something with its own weather in about the time it takes to reheat coffee. We were never in her path; the hand-bearing compass said so on three separate checks, and the compass, unlike me, does not get scared. She passed half a mile off. Her wake, when it finally reached us, was almost friendly.
The afternoon westerly arrived the way it always does, which is to say all at once, as if someone had signed for it. Six knots, then fourteen, then a hard twenty with the last of the ebb still running against it, and the mid-strait chop stood up short and square. We tucked a reef into the main, put the rail down, and Bufflehead — a boat designed for a lake, sailed by two men who had promised their families this was reasonable — put her shoulder in and went.
Landfall
The flood caught us close under the Canadian shore, exactly where the pencil said it would, which surprised nobody more than the pencil's owners. We carried the eddy inside the Trial Islands, past kelp beds lying combed flat in the current, while a floatplane came over at two hundred feet on final for the Inner Harbour, close enough to see the passengers not looking at us. We phoned in to customs from the dock, salt-stiff and stupid with relief, nine hours and forty minutes out of Port Townsend. The officer asked if we had anything to declare. Just the oars, Sam said.
The forecast for the return leg had the westerly at twenty-five for two days, gusting higher in the afternoons, which for a boat like ours is not a forecast, it is a verdict. We had planned to stay one day. We stayed three, and the strait can take that as the compliment it is.