A VOYAGE INTO CANADIAN HISTORY:
THE QUEEN CHARLOTTE ISLANDS
Story and photography
by Eric Anderson & Nancy Allen

The books in the library of the Island Roamer leave no doubt where it’s heading: Land of the Ocean Mist reads one title, A Journey Through Time and The Last Great Sea are others. The 69-foot ketch is, in fact, roaming the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, the southern part of British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands, an archipelago of 100 or so islands that have been called the Canadian Galapagos. They are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

A limited number of visitors are allowed into the area -- by boat or floatplane as there are absolutely no roads. Randy Burke whose company, Bluewater Adventures has sailed the area for 30 years was grandfathered in and his ketch, Island Roamer, is one of the few signs of civilization in the vast park.


The 12 passengers about to explore this wilderness are, as the saying goes, a motley crew. There’s an ex-colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force and his wife, a psychologist, and a cardiologist and his wife, a community development expert. All are sailors; they are studying the boat’s canvas and, thank God, nodding in appreciation of what they see. There are two married social workers “with expertise canoeing close to shore,” hugging like honeymooners. Sitting bedside them are an architect and his wife, a massage therapist, sailors also -- he “went to the South Seas for two years in search of romance but found it and his future wife on a Vancouver 3rd Avenue bus.” Peering out to sea are Southern Californian writers wondering if they’ve brought enough warm clothes. Wielding one of the boat’s many pairs of binoculars is a former business security advisor who retired because he “got tired looking through keyholes.” He’s traveling with a companion who is married to the advisor’s cousin. The companion, checking out the boat’s cockpit is a one-time Boeing ergonomic engineer aged 86 who started boating in the Boy Scouts and ended up licensed for 65 foot craft.