Hesquiat 2016 (Part 1)

Introduction

Welcome to the blog post(s) of our recent 2016 Hesquiat trip. As a blogger I have been trying to juggle the time to write posts of our multi-day trips upon returning and think I may have come up with a workable solution. Believe me, blogging takes a considerable amount of precious time and on a few occasions after returning home from trips or paddles I have seriously thought about stopping writing altogether. But then I look at the blog page view counts which is now at over 84,000 visits and I find myself torn about shutting the blog down. 

In the past I would write notes and then hopefully sometime in the future start sorting through the thousands of photos that Robyn and I take and try to piece together the story line from memory. It was simply becoming ….. Arrrrggggh!

However, for this trip I decided to actually write the daily posts (without editing) in MS Word on my iPad each night while the events of the day were fresh in my mind. Robyn helped out tremendously by putting together a Goggle album of a few hundred of the several thousand pictures that we took when we arrived home and posted them via Facebook to give our followers a little visual of our trip. And so, as I open my Word document from the trip I am so pleased to see that the most of the work has already been done. All I need to do is a little bit of editing, update some items and add a few photos. 

So with all that said … Welcome to Hesquiat 2016!!

Planning

Earlier this year Robyn and I were invited by Beverely Hipolito to join a trip that she was planning from Tofino to Hesquiat Peninsula during the summer. So we gladly accepted and the planning process began with a paddle / planning session that was held in April at the Genoa Bay Cafe. 

Beverely describing the route that she would like the group to take on the trip.

On this trip there would be a total of eight paddlers including Heather Jones, Tony Playfair, Reale Emond, Jeff Follis. Our eighth paddler Katelyn Porter would join the group at a later date.

The plan was pretty simple. We would be departing Tofino on  Friday July 15th and be returning on Sunday August 1st. For 16 days we would head north on the exposed outside of Vargas and Flores Islands and make our way towards Hesquiat Peninsula and maybe make it around Estevan Point if the condition’s were right. Visiting Cougar Annie’s Garden was definitely on the bucket list and up to the planning session I had only heard the name before and knew nothing about her. 

Hesquiat 2016 paddlers from L to R: Reale, Beverely, Heather, Tony, Robyn, Jeff and Mark (me).
Katelyn would be joining the group closer to the departure date.

Along the way we would by spending multiple nights at locations to explore on foot, fish, do day paddles or basically just spend the time relaxing. Of course it would all be weather dependent and on the West Coast of Vancouver Island that means you can pretty well get a little or a lot or everything thrown at you. 

Now .... time to start dehydrating food and research Cougar Annie's Garden

A short paddle from the kayak dock in Cowichan Bay to Genoa Bay for the planning session in April