Rain spat on our boat. Again. Six weeks into our two-month expedition up the coast of British Columbia, we were used to weather like this. It was an especially rainy summer along the Inside Passage, but I didn’t mind it at all.

Since moving from Washington state to Los Angeles, I yearned for gloomy days. Aboard By All Means, a North Pacific 28, rainy days meant piling our stuff in the V-berth and sitting around the convertible queen berth in the galley with pillows and comforters. We would play card games and dominoes and read aloud from local books that we found at odd little dockside libraries that dot the coast.

Our crew—Uhane Johnson, Annie Means, Emery Hansell and I—took advantage of our few sunny days by exploring the land around us by foot or electric- powered dinghy. In Walsh Cove, we hauled a breakfast picnic up to a green ledge on the cliff where we were stern-tied to play cribbage and eat potato tacos. Our time was spent trying to embody a way of life inspired by Canadian travel writer Muriel Wylie “Capi” Blanchet, author of The Curve of Time. Now, more than halfway through our journey, I felt like I was finally embracing life on a schedule dictated by nature rather than by days or hours.

To celebrate the centenary of Blanchet’s voyages, we embarked on an expedition of our own, visiting locations detailed in the book. Apart from her sensational descriptions of landscape, wildlife and trials on the water, what makes the story so special to us is Blanchet herself. She was an idol of female independence and harmony with the natural world who was far before her time.

After her husband died at sea, she chose to homestead in British Columbia with her five children on a 25-foot trawler, rather then moving back to her parents in Quebec. She largely lived off the land, in a style she described as “onboard camping.” A staple of her lifestyle was letting time feel slippery while she was out on her summer voyages in the 1920s and 1930s. In her flowing, yet economic style, Blanchet opens the preface of her memoir with, “Time did not exist; or if it did it did not matter.”

Our captain, Annie, had been planning the trip since she was 14, and put together our female crew of four in college just over two years ago. Ever since Annie first read The Curve of Time, the idea of recreating the voyages enchanted her. We were just as enthralled with the idea as she was. Annie’s parents graciously loaned us their vessel, so as novice boaters, we prepared for the voyage with wilderness safety courses, boating safety courses and a few days of onboard training with her father.

The boat, a 2008 vintage, is just under 28 feet length overall with a beam of 8½ feet. Marketed as a trailerable trawler, the model was discontinued because most couples found it too small. We barely managed to squeeze a four-person crew on board: Emery and I slept in the V-berth, while Annie and Uhane slept in the galley foldout. Despite the coziness, we still felt as though we were glamping. We had a solar panel on the roof to provide extra power, a stovetop, a refrigerator, a small television, and a Microsoft tablet with navigational software.

We quickly became accustomed to the equipment. We navigated through shallow waters and rapids, watched movies on nights when we were docked, and used binoculars to spot logs, coffins and soccer balls that popped up on our sonar. We made our way up the Inside Passage rather quickly, then slowed down around Desolation Sound, awestruck by its beauty. Fog hugged the inlets and islands, then dissipated by afternoon to reveal a landscape that compelled us to explore. River otters played in the shallows, and seals would follow us around in our dinghy, poking their smooth heads out of the water to look at us with curiosity.

On our last morning in Walsh Cove, we woke up bright and early with excitement for the rest of our day. We would start heading south, toward Princess Louisa, for the last leg of our journey. After coffee, we shuffled into our respective positions: Uhane was ready to undo the stern tie, while Emery and I were ready to pull up the anchor once Annie started the engine. But when Annie turned the key, nothing happened.

Immediately, the crew snapped into problem-solving mode. We made sure the boat was in neutral, a mistake made once before in Prideaux Haven. When our boat wouldn’t start back then, we frantically measured voltage and looked through battery manuals. Luckily, we saved some embarrassment by figuring out that we had the boat in the wrong gear before calling C-Tow Marine Assistance.

On this day, though, something was actually wrong. We measured the voltage across each battery. They were both the same, 10 volts, too low for the boat to start (the voltage shouldn’t drop under 12). Annie flicked off all the switches, and we waited for the charge to start rising again. It slowly crawled up until it reached 11 volts, but stagnated there. It wasn’t unusual to wake up to a half-drained battery on cloudy days; on sunny days, our solar panel would help hold the battery at 12 volts. We had been anchored for a couple of nights now with constant cloud cover.

None of us had cell service, our satellite phone had broken one week before, and the dead battery prevented us from getting to a dock. Annie and Uhane took the dinghy around to neighboring vessels to ask if they had satellite phones; they didn’t. One boat was leaving later that day, so its crew could send help once they reached cell service.

I sat down, thinking all there was to do was wait, but Annie anxiously paced.

“I want to be doing something. I don’t like sitting here,” she said. She proposed that she and one other person backtrack in the dinghy to Waddington Channel to try and find cell service, and call the tow company.

It seemed like Annie had a classic case of “go fever.” A term coined at NASA after the Apollo 1 fire, go fever overtakes all those in such a rush to get things off the ground, that they overlook small details and circumstances. It comes upon everyone at one point or another, so there is really no shame about it. My partner, for example, recently caught a bad case while gardening and wound up chopping down a whole swath of precious bamboo. As I learned, sometimes the only way to help someone with go fever is to let them go.

It had stopped raining, but ceaseless gray clouds still stretched across the morning sky as Annie and Uhane prepared the dinghy. They packed snacks, a radio and layers of clothing. Our dinghy maxed out at two people and 4 knots, so Emery and I stayed behind. We weren’t sure how far they would have to go, but we estimated it was a couple hours out of Walsh Cove and into Waddington Channel to where we last had bars.

In case there was service on just the opposite side of the cove to where we entered, Uhane and Annie set out that direction first. Emery and I watched them grow smaller, reach their destination, hesitate in the water, then turn to motor to the other side where we originally entered the day before.

I had just sat down in one of the chairs in the pilothouse, and Emery had started journaling on the bow, as the sun began to peek through the clouds. I leaned over to look at the monitor where the voltage was shown. It quickly climbed out of its 11-volt plateau.

“Emery!” I shouted. We looked at each other in excitement, then made a beeline for the bow to wave down our friends, with the dinghy still in sight. They pivoted toward us just as our engine sputtered to life. We threw our arms up in triumph, and then, as if on some celestial cue, the gap in the clouds quickly closed, and we were left in dim light once again.

With all of us back on board, we laughed at the absurdity of the situation. Once we got out to the channel with cell service, we called off the C-Tow boat summoned by the other vessel.

In the village of Lund, a mechanic told us the boat was underpowered overall, and the way our batteries were connected to the solar panel was atypical. Instead of being able to switch from the house to auxiliary battery with an isolator switch, the boat always used both batteries. When one battery died, it sucked charge from the healthy one, keeping them both at a charge just a little too low to turn over the engine.

Even with a new battery, for the last two weeks, we operated with headlamps at night and started the boat at least once a day, even if we were anchored. The mechanic had no idea how five minutes of sun had jump-started our battery, given that the dead battery was “very dry.”

Our idea of what happened in Walsh Cove was as improbable as it felt. Reading Blanchet’s writing, one comes to understand the natural world less as an abstract and separate entity waiting to be discovered, and more as an all-encompassing agent, a decider and determiner. Living on a boat intensifies this quality to its true extreme. Our small crew had all spent a good deal of our lives outdoors and had experienced the sublimity and insignificance of being at the whim of the natural world, but on the water, we were surrounded by one more degree of uncertainty that we were challenged to navigate. 

This article was originally published in the April 2023 issue.