Storm warning continued. Wind warning in effect.
Tonight..Rain. Amount 20 mm. Wind southeast 50 to 70 km/h increasing to 70 to 100 overnight. Low plus 5.
Thursday..Rain. Amount 20 mm. Wind southeast 70 to 100 km/h becoming south 40 to 60 in the afternoon. High 8.
Thursday night..Rain. Amount 10 to 15 mm. Wind southeast 50 to 80 km/h. Low 8.
Friday..Rain. Wind southeast 50 to 70 km/h increasing to 70 to 100 then becoming south 30 late this afternoon. High 10.
On the bus into town, once he learned that Smith was a Maverick’s fiend, a white fisherman with a redneck
drawl promised us that there was a giant wave “just like Maverick’s” that broke out in front of a fishing lodge his friend worked for, out on the west coast. “It breaks best when the winds are about 70 knots onshore,” the man said. “Just comes up out of nowhere and boom, this huge roller, taller’n a cedar totem pole.”
“Which way does it break?” Smith asked, eyebrows raised. “Left or right?”
“Oh, just straight in, right toward shore.”
We were mocked by passersby outside our hotel; one woman thought we’d brought oversized snowboards. Three burly loggers in the café next door thought we were hippie tree-planters from Vancouver. Tree-planters are not particularly liked on Haida Gwaii, despite the island’s forests being logged at twice the rate that is considered sustainable.

“In the past 50 years,” says the Haida Nation homepage, “industrial logging has transformed the landscape of Haida Gwaii from diverse old forest to young, even-aged stands of one or two species. The major river systems that once provided Haida villages with salmon; large cedars for longhouses and monumental art; and, plants for food, medicines, fiber and animal habitat have been eradicated by logging without consideration for these values.”
Still, we would not be digging holes for cedar saplings.
“You guys are here to go surfing?” the loggers asked, amused at our quest. “Good luck!”
Down at the quaint harbor, another local—a Haida—said we were out of our minds, that if we wanted to go surfing, we needed to go somewhere like California or Hawai’i. He suggested that we start drinking instead, joining him at a nearby cocktail lounge, where there would be “guaranteed fights.”
Reputedly the Haida were fierce, physically large, historically feared by all other Indians in the northwest. Every Haida we met was extremely friendly, but, back in the day, the kin of these folks would routinely sail across the Hecate Strait in cedar canoes to terrorize mainland tribes, acquire slaves and provisions, and return to Haida Gwaii with the proud gaze of dominance.
“The Haida, and only the Haida, were immune from attack,” Christie Harris wrote in Raven’s Cry. “In consequence, the pride of the Haida shaded even that of their mighty neighbors [the Tsimshian and Tlingit]. They were lords of the coast, the aristocrats of their world.”
While the offer of drinking and fighting proved nearly irresistible, we declined and repaired to a Chinese restaurant where we checked the online forecast and brainstormed between forkloads of MSG. West coast buoys reported a nine-meter swell. Otherwise, things looked grim.
“It might be stormy like this the whole time,” Mulcoy said.
“Could get worse,” Bruhwiler said.
“The west coast is going mental right now,” Smith said.
“Only if it’s blowing 70 knots onshore,” I said.
Along Haida Gwaii’s desolate and savage west side, the highest-energy coastline in North America, it’s not a matter of getting swell—aside from finding a surfable spot, it’s a matter of getting to that swell. There are no roads, no harbors, no hiking trails, nothing but deep, black fjords, vertical cliffs, impassable alpine ridges of rock and snow, and ancient forests averaging 20 feet of rain annually, pelted by furious winds and enormous seas. The island’s refined, pointbreak-rich east coast is one big tease, receiving basically no swell, ever.
“I’ll say that the east, or leeward, side…is the biggest waste of prime surf geography I have ever seen,” Ben Marcus wrote when he visited the island in the late 1990s. And so, perhaps in desperation late one woolly afternoon, Smith braved 50-knot onshores and horizontal rain to surf rocky waist-high wind slop in 42-degree water at a spot that could be world-class. Considering the huge swell hitting the west coast at that very moment, if Smith could’ve flipped the island, turning east coast to west, he would have been surfing a gargantuan Malibu. Alas, in geographical terms, it is not meant to be.
The west coast’s only car-accessible zone required a careful three-hour (each way) negotiation of a snowbound, signless logging road with many forks in it; eventually we reached the inlet, though sheltered it was. There we found a couple of pebbly beachbreaks, a flawless right point, and an enticing left rivermouth, but despite epic scenery and exposure to open ocean, these “spots” were flat while the truly exposed coast outside was bombing left and right. Smith’s binoculars confirmed this. “We need jet skis!” came the consensus.

But there are few jet skis in Haida Gwaii. Renting one was impossible. Even if we had our own, trailering it out atop that road would likely bang the thing to bits; having nowhere to launch it was another problem. Bruhwiler had considered bringing his two skis on the ferry from Port Hardy, but that would’ve been bloody expensive.
For all the world’s surfers, Haida Gwaii is a cruel and unusual place. We had a good crew for the task: Vancouver Island’s Raphael Bruhwiler really needs no introduction, a gritty lifelong soldier of the Pacific Northwest; Santa Cruz’s Tyler Smith, a Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Award finalist, top-placing Maverick’s competitor and Ghost Tree charger, is fearless; fellow Westsider Josh Mulcoy is a core coldwater freak, actively seeking juice along some of the globe’s harshest coasts—Norway, Alaska, Iceland, Oregon. “Still,” Mulcoy said, “Haida Gwaii is definitely the coldest place I’ve ever been.”
Cold was not an issue when it came to accessing the west coast. One day Raph and I lunched on Reubens and coffee in the Purple Onion Deli; soon Mulcoy arrived and the conversation returned to boats. A cute brunette named Lindsey overheard our plight; she handed me a scrap of paper containing the phone number of her friend, a local fishing-charter guy who just might be stoked to take us out yonder for a look-see.
“He’s got a killer, brand-spankin’-new Boston Whaler,” Lindsey said. “He just christened it the other day. Super fun guy, knows where to go out there—he works for the Coast Guard. Give him a call.”
A lifetime of cigarettes bespoke Chumma’s even, disc-jockey-modulated voice. It suggested that he knew his stuff, and I could tell he was keen for a real bluewater chance to test his new vessel before salmon season started.
“If it’s big water you’re after,” Chumma said, “the west is the place. I’ve spent my whole life trying to avoid the damn breakers out there.”
We arranged to meet Thursday at the dock at 5:30 a.m. Today was Monday—Thursday seemed an awfully long way off considering the severe but mesmerizing weather we were having. Locals said it would ease. The myth was, if you don’t like the weather, wait 10 minutes. Unfortunately we had to wait much longer than that.

Indeed, mythology saturates Northwest Indian culture, and true to universal theme, supernatural entities are created to explain the unknowable, interpreted through generations via intricate art, dance, and detailed verbology. For the Haida, the most prominent figure of myth and legend is the jet-black raven, something we saw every day. Technically the raven is a hawk-sized songbird, a skilled predator and scavenger, never short on food or wit, and, mythologically, the raven is a transformer, able to become anything, anytime, anywhere. “As a transformer he is responsible for the present order of the universe,” Martine Reid wrote in The Children of the Raven. “He discovers mankind, acquires and controls food, brings the light into the world.”
Episodes of raven myth are illustrated on totem poles throughout Haida Gwaii, and the one we found of most interest, considering the violent weather we faced, was how the raven discovered a man who possessed a small box containing a ball of light, which was all the light in the universe. The raven, cunning as he was, managed to steal the ball and use it to illuminate the entire world, previously an “inky, pitchy, all-consuming dark, blacker than a thousand stormy winter midnights, blacker than anything anywhere has been since,” Bill Reid and Robert Bringhurst wrote in The Raven Steals the Light. “The world was at once transformed. Mountains and valleys were starkly silhouetted, the river sparkled with broken reflections, and everywhere life began to stir. The Raven flew on, rejoicing in his wonderful new possession, admiring the effect it had on the world below, revelling in the experience of being able to see where he was going, instead of flying blind and hoping for the best.”
Halfway into the trip, staring out at clouds and rain and distant snowcaps, listening to the wind shriek past the hotel windows, we could almost—almost—relate. We’d found fun albeit gutless waves at one rivermouth, but really, until then, searching for waves, we’d driven an average of 150 miles a day, very slowly, with no music, in a rented four-wheel-drive truck, progressively coating the cab’s floor with food wrappers and empty water bottles. Five of us in the truck for hour upon hour, fidgeting and farting and letting the comedy flow freely. “Let’s see what’s down that road” became a common utterance, the driver (me) repeatedly and abruptly veering the truck off the main road and down sketchy singletracks in dense rain forest in the middle of nowhere, usually leading to an impassable hole or horizontal tree, or to another flat beachbreak, or to the cabin of a Haida family or hippie outcast who didn’t want us there.
That night, crew morale threatened to plunge irreversibly. “We need something,” Burkard said, glumly clicking through the Internet on his laptop. “It can’t stay like this forever, can it?”
“We’re definitely due for a change,” I said.
“Check the forecast,” Mulcoy said.
And it had changed—drastically:

Wednesday..A mix of sun and cloud. Low 7. High 11.
Thursday..A mix of sun and cloud with 30 percent chance of showers.
Low plus 5. High 12.
Friday..A mix of sun and cloud. Low 6. High 13.

We looked at each other. “High of 13? A mix of clouds and sun?”
Buoyweather.com confirmed a swing in swell angle, from southwest to west, optimum for both the entire west coast and a certain beachbreak up north. Our luck had risen.
Since hiring Chumma’s boat for the next day was unlikely, we settled for the beachbreak, which turned out to be an impressive score.
Moss Landing or Hossegor—take your pick. That was what we found, only minus the crowds and traffic and topless girls, and the water was much colder, the driftwood much bigger. Aside from a brief shower, the sun shone warmly all day and the offshore wind puffed gently, grooming the consistent and overhead lines, which, based on their orderliness, had come from afar. Only problem were the extraordinary tides, which in Haida Gwaii range 25 feet. So one sandbar that was good for 45 minutes would send us down the beach to sample another bar for maybe 30 minutes, then another, and another, and so forth.
For lunch in total solitude, we lounged in the dunes and roasted sausages over a driftwood fire, and the sweet scent of woodsmoke in the lineup that golden afternoon accented what had actually been a very good day, better than most in terms of any surf trip any of us had ever been on.
“Weather-wise,” said Smith upon sunset, “we probably just got the nicest day of the year. We got sunburned in a place where that normally doesn’t happen.”

And then it was Thursday. Chumma and deckhand Gary finished prepping the Whaler as we pulled onto the wooden dock an hour before first light, the scene faintly aglow under the orange harbor lights. As luck would have it, our hours of darkness—figuratively and literally—were about to end for good. Surfing beneath sun for an entire day at an empty, hollow beachbreak proved prescient for the second half of our trip—from now until departure, we would bid farewell to the darkness, dissolved by the raven, perhaps, and quickly forgotten.

On the last day, waiting for our airport taxi, a woman in a coffee shop said, “From the looks of your tans, you’re definitely not from around here.” Actually, we weren’t quite sure where we were, I told her, but we weren’t ready to leave it behind.
“I know what you mean,” the woman said, turning her face up toward the midday sun, smiling and squinting into the warmth.
In his book Haida Gwaii, Ian Gill wrote that there is “nowhere more beguiling, more hypnotic, more intoxicating and infuriating and enigmatic, more ineffable” than where we found waves, and, fittingly, nothing could better describe our path and our eventual taste—our feast—of it on Haida Gwaii, a.k.a. Xhaaidlagha Gwaayaii to native elders, these “islands of the people” where climatic traits are not mythical, the rain perpetual, the darkness vast. Yet Haida Gwaii is no site of monotony. Nothing remains the same for long.