Surrey-based kayaker Tom Howell published an article, “An Immovable Object,” in the October 2010 issue of the late, lamented Sea Kayaker magazine. Howell reported bivouacking out of a kayak on Tremble Island, a tiny rock smack in the middle of the mighty Nakwakto Rapids in Queen Charlotte Strait. During the largest tidal exchanges of the year, he wrote, the impact of the water against the rock caused the island to tremble like a “skyscraper in a hurricane” or like “standing on a subway platform as a train passed by.”

Like many of the best Sea Kayaker articles, this one stayed with me long after I read it. Over the years, as I paddled Queen Charlotte Strait time and again on various kayaking expeditions, I would think of Howell’s story each time I passed Slingsby and Schooner Channels, the twin entrances to Nakwakto Rapids. Always, I found myself having to bypass Nakwakto to reach some other destination, but I could never shake the desire Howell’s story had planted in my mind to sit on Tremble Rock myself someday and feel whether the island really trembled.

Such an exotic goal demanded its own expedition. I blocked out a week and a half to make a proper survey of Nakwakto Rapids. While I was at it, I would swing through a number of other kayaking landmarks in Queen Charlotte Strait I’d also missed on previous expeditions: the derelict whale research station at Skull Cove, Randy Washburne’s old kayaking cabin at Burnett Bay, the beach and petroglyph site at Cape Sutil, and maybe, just maybe, a possible Kayak Bill campsite way out in the islands in the middle of the strait.

Howell’s article claimed—and the Canadian Tide and Current Tables broadly confirmed—that the strongest current in Nakwakto Rapids occurs each year during the day’s largest ebb just before the full moon closest to the winter solstice. Unfortunately, that particular ebb occurs several hours after sunset, when it is pitch-dark and impossible to see the raging rapids. Luckily, the year’s second-strongest current, nearly as powerful, occurs during the day’s largest ebb just before the new moon closest to the summer solstice. That particular ebb occurs two hours after sunrise on a beautiful June morning.

Even in June, crossing Queen Charlotte Strait by kayak can be a harrowing proposition. A gale warning was in effect on the morning of my launch in Port Hardy, with several days of worse weather on the way. I scooted across the strait as fast as possible to reach Skull Cove, with only the briefest stop in God’s Pocket to visit my favorite midden: a sixteen-foot-tall (5 m) tower of crushed shells marking the site of an old First Nations village called Ik’ix’yulis.

The currents and chop made for an intimidating crossing of Queen Charlotte Strait, but I reached the far side just before the wind hit in earnest. The abandoned whale observatory in Skull Cove offered the perfect refuge to wait out the gale. Most of the observatory’s cabins were still intact, cheerless but clean and mercifully free of mice. An outdoor, covered kitchen area afforded a place to drink tea and watch the wind blow over Queen Charlotte Strait for the next two days.

Originally, I had planned to spend a few days exploring the bays and inlets around Nakwakto before posting up on Tremble Island to await the big ebb. I had developed an interest in First Nations archaeology in recent years, and there were a couple of sites in the Nakwakto area I was keen to investigate while I waited for the new moon.

When I arrived at the north end of Schooner Channel, I discovered there were no good campsites in the area. The shoreline on both sides of the channel consisted of rock ledges plunging straight into the depths, with nowhere on shore to land a kayak and nowhere upland to pitch a tent. I had to call off the search for archaeological sites. Even so, I still needed to find someplace to spend the night, so I decided to land on Tremble Rock a couple days early, if landing was even possible.

The currents around Nakwakto were strong indeed, but they were not quite so overpowering as some accounts on the internet had led me to fear. An hour to either side of slack, the currents slowed enough that it was possible, with effort, to maneuver a kayak through the rapids even in the wrong direction. I pointed my bow southward into the flooding current and backed my way northward toward Tremble Island, letting the current carry me backwards toward the island, paddling forwards to avoid getting swept away.

Tremble Island presented a delightful appearance. It protruded incongruously in the middle of the narrowest part of the rapids, as if the forces of earth had made one last, futile effort to hold back the forces of water. Over the decades, passing boaters had festooned the island with wooden signs proclaiming the names of their vessels, creating a Christmas tree-like effect.

Even an hour before the end of the flood, the currents around Tremble Island were still running about three knots. I could make headway, but I dared not approach the island too closely due to the rush of water against the cliffs. As slack time approached, the flow decreased until I was able to work my way alongside the island on its downstream side, which for a flood current meant the north side. There was no beach or other such traditional landing spot on the island, but the rocks on the north side formed a sort of ladder of footholds and handholds leading up the cliff. Clutching a hawser in one hand to prevent my kayak drifting away, I clambered up the cliff and tied the boat off to a tree.

Slack water did not truly exist at Tremble Island. At best, the water slowed to a gentle swirl lasting approximately twenty minutes either side of slack. Working quickly, anxious to finish before the ebb could begin, I hauled my gear up the cliff and then hoisted the boat up before the water started moving too swiftly again. Triumph! I had landed on Tremble Island!

Previous generations of boaters had carved trails through the dense salal. At the top of the landing cliff, there was even a cleared area large enough to hang my hammock. Having arrived earlier than expected, I camped on Tremble Island for the next several days, waiting for the big new moon ebb.

The big ebb did not disappoint. On the upstream side, the current slammed against the island with such force that the water level rose several feet up the cliff, like a ship’s bow wave, before it could force its way around, pouring down the sides of the island. On the downstream side, a tide race of immense proportions formed a few hundred yards below the island, with giant, green, cresting waves crashing upon one another. To call them standing waves would understate the degree of chaos. The waves did not stand. They appeared at random amid the turbulence, broke, and then reappeared elsewhere.

The June new moon did not coincide very closely with the summer solstice this year. If it had, the current would have been even stronger. Still, according to the Tide and Current Tables, the peak ebb that morning reached 13.6 knots. It might not have been the strongest possible current at Tremble Island, but it was still overwhelmingly strong.

It was not possible to depart Tremble Island after the ebb had subsided. At low tide, the island was fringed with mussels and barnacles, which would have made mincemeat of my hands, gear, and boat. Instead of catching the tail end of the ebb to proceed down Slingsby Channel, I had to wait for high tide and the beginning of the next ebb.

I anticipated turbulence at the mouth of Slingsby Channel, where the west-setting ebb current would collide against the opposing westerly ocean swells. (Swells, like winds, take their names from the direction of their source, whereas currents, like highways, take their names from the direction of their travel.) I had hoped to minimize the danger by paddling so swiftly down Slingsby that I would arrive at the mouth of the channel before the ebb could reach full strength. I reached the mouth of the channel just an hour and forty-five minutes after the turn to ebb, but already conditions had built to frightening proportions.

The nearest ocean data buoy that afternoon recorded a significant wave height of 3.6 meters (just under 12 feet), with the largest waves clocking in at 9.1 meters (nearly 30 feet). When these massive swells encountered the ebb rushing out of Slingsby Channel, the height of the waves increased, their faces steepened, and they began stacking up behind one another. I burst out of the channel, paddling furiously, only to confront a near-vertical wall of water rising high over my head.

Escape was impossible. There was no beach upon which to pull out, only merciless steep rocks against which the waves were exploding with tremendous force. Nor was there any way to reverse course against the increasingly strong push from the ebb. The only way out was through.

“Please don’t break, don’t break, don’t break,” I muttered at the swells as I hurled myself against the tower of water. At the peak of each wave, my bow would momentarily point skyward before smashing down on the back side of the wave. Clapotis reflected off the nearby rocks and churned everything into foam and chop, even as the giant swells piled ever higher. This was far more turbulence than I had intended to bite off, and I worried it might be more than I could chew.

The worst of the stacking waves dissipated somewhere off Lawrence Point, just under a mile from the mouth of the channel. With my speed boosted both by the current and my own alarm, I made it through the zone of terror in under ten minutes, but each of those was a very long minute.

Surf at Burnett Bay was giant, way overhead, unsurprising at a beach that once featured in one of Sea Kayaker magazine’s accident reports. (“Thrown a Curve by the Surf,” December 1997, describing an incident with four capsized kayaks, including one kayak broken and a medical evacuation.) I was worried I wouldn’t be able to land at all, which might force me to make a nine-mile paddle against the ebb back to the shelter of Skull Cove. After studying the surf for a while, I identified a little pocket, perhaps thirty meters wide, at the very north end of the beach where a group of tiny islands broke up the surf. It would take some maneuvering to enter the pocket, and even inside, the surf was still around three feet high, which is nothing to sneeze at in a kayak, but a capsize here would be survivable, which might not be the case on the rest of the beach.

I snaked through the narrow gap between the rocks to the left and the enormous surf to the right and entered the protected pocket during what I hoped was a lull. In the middle of the surf zone, powerful backwash abruptly halted my progress toward the beach. Frozen in place by the outflowing water, I was overtaken by a three-footer and broached. I side-surfed haplessly for ten meters until I capsized in waist-deep water, too shallow to roll back up. A mess of gear was swept off my deck and washed out of my cockpit. I ran up and down the swash zone scooping things up before the rip could carry them out to sea. In the end, I recovered everything except my cockpit cover and my bilge sponge, for which I substituted an old t-shirt.

Randy Washburne’s cabin at Burnett Bay was one of the kayaking pilgrimage sites I had wanted to visit for many years. Randy is one of the grandfathers of modern sea kayaking. His cedar shingle cabin, handbuilt in 1985, has been a haven for kayakers for decades. Randy has aged out of kayaking and cabin-building, but the kayaking community has adopted his cabin as their own. Inside the cabin, forty years’ of journal entries rest on the table like a kayaking time machine.

I settled in, hung my wet things to dry, and set about killing mice. Two decades’ experience in cabins on the BC coast had taught me always to expect mice, so I had brought a pair of mousetraps. As soon as the sun went down, snap! snap! snap!, the traps began their grisly work.

The traps turned out to be a less clever idea than I had thought. There were so many mice I barely got any sleep. Once an hour, all night long, just as I was dozing off each time, another trap would snap shut on another mouse, forcing me out of bed to dispose of the carcass and reset the trap. By the end of my two-night stay at Burnett Bay, I had killed no fewer than thirteen mice.

Weirdly aggressive deer were the other “problem animals” at Burnett Bay. There must have been a rut in progress, because the male deer were behaving like absolute maniacs. They were charging up and down the beach, menacing and chasing one another, rearing up to strike with their hooves. Due to their poor eyesight and low intelligence, they mistook me, a human, for a participant in their rut. A challenger! Intolerable! Every time a deer spotted me walking down the beach, it would charge. Deer would come running across the beach from as far as a quarter mile’s distance and post up in front of me, daring me to make a move. Even my most intimidating shouts had no effect. I had to arm myself with a driftwood club to drive them back.

After a weather day at Burnett Bay, I faced another crossing of Queen Charlotte Strait. From yet another Sea Kayaker magazine article, “Storm Islands Rescue” (August 2011), I had learned of a “persistent ebb” in the northern half of Queen Charlotte Strait. In early summer, the daily flood current is much weaker than the ebb. Sometimes the flood does not materialize at all. Alerted to the phenomenon, I planned my crossing of the strait for times of flood current only, lest I be carried too far out to sea by the persistent ebb. The plan served me well between Burnett Bay and the Storm Islands, but poorly between the Storm Islands and Cape Sutil. South of the Storm Islands, the ebb bias disappears, so I ended up bucking an exhausting flood for many miles.

Rumor had it that Kayak Bill, a hero of mine, once overwintered in some of the islands in the middle of Queen Charlotte Strait. I have a fairly good eye for Kayak Bill campsites, with their distinctive driftwood and stone architecture, but I was not able to find any sign of him in the islands. There were unmistakable indicia of human habitation, but they did not bear the hallmarks of a genuine Kayak Bill site.

Prospects improved once I reached Cape Sutil. Guidebook author John Kimantas once called Cape Sutil the second-best beach in British Columbia, behind only Rugged Point. Cape Sutil was, indeed, a lovely place: a quiet, sandy beach with marvelous views across the channel toward Hope Island and points east. There were hikers from the North Coast Trail on the next beach over, but they did not make the climb up and over the headland to visit my private beach.

My only visitor was a large gray wolf, who appeared on the beach shortly after dawn. If only this guy knew about the deer at Burnett Bay! Unlike the malicious deer, the wolf was a respectful visitor. He trotted back into the forest as soon as he caught me looking.

At the north end of the cape, I found three petroglyphs that had been on my radar for years: two beautiful human faces and a mysterious pair of indented dots. They were the only remnants I could find of the once-prosperous First Nations village of Nahwitti, destroyed by the British in 1851.

From Cape Sutil, it was just a matter of barreling down Goletas Channel back to Port Hardy. I had selected a counterclockwise route for the expedition specifically so I could cross the dangerous Nahwitti Bar on a flood rather than an ebb. Even so, I was surprised how turbulent the conditions were in the vicinity of the bar and the associated reefs. I avoided the worst of it by hugging the Vancouver Island shoreline.

The flood petered out a few miles outside of town. Rather than fight the rest of the way, I pulled over at Songhees Creek for one last overnight. Shortly before dawn, I launched on the tail end of the early flood and rode the rest of the way back to the marina.

Of course, I would have been delighted to discover that Tremble Island really does tremble, or to find a hitherto unknown Kayak Bill campsite, or to find some cognizable trace of the ancient Nahwitti village. But an important part of exploration is learning what’s not out there, in addition to what is. I don’t mind knowing that not every wonderful thing I imagine exists in reality. The things I did find were wonderful enough: the powerful rapids, the historic kayaking cabin, the petroglyphs, the whales and wildlife. After so many transits of Queen Charlotte Strait, I may finally be starting to understand the place.

—Alex Sidles