Written by Robert Matas and published in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, March 28, 2008.

The rugged coastline of British Columbia is a deceptive lover. It can seduce you so easily with its supersized mountain cliffs, hungry bears slapping salmon out of the water, majestic eagles circling above and whales playfully breaching just metres away from your kayak. But it will betray you just as easily and without warning. A fair weather friend, it will abandon you as soon as the winds shift. Suddenly, storm clouds march in and you are dealing with swells and tidal waters moving faster than you can handle.

Kayakers, canoeists and other small-watercraft boaters for years have talked about getting government protection for existing havens along the coast and adding new ones to create a permanent chain of sheltered places above the high-tide mark where they can wait out a sudden change in weather or set up a small tent to stay overnight.

Finally, in a landmark meeting this month, a group of paddlers from kayak and canoe clubs from Vancouver Island and the Vancouver area took a step toward that dream.

Working with a district recreation officer in the B.C. Ministry of Tourism, Sport and the Arts, they sketched out an ambitious multiyear plan to create a network of camp sites and temporary rest areas, possibly every 10 nautical miles (about 18 kilometres) along every waterway on the west coast of the province.

The so-called marine trails would eventually stretch into hundreds of inlets and coves and around 6,000 islands scattered off the West Coast.

Several paddlers said in interviews they were thrilled by government interest in creating the marine trails. But neither the paddlers nor the government were prepared to talk this week about their work.

The B.C. ministry refused to provide any information about the proposal.

“It is very, very early on in the process, and the province needs to consult with all stakeholders, including the first nations,” ministry spokeswoman Victoria Klassen said in an interview. Stephanie Meinke, co-ordinator of the paddlers’ group promoting the marine trails, also declined to comment.

However, the paddlers could not hide their enthusiasm for the proposal. “We don’t need much, just a few beach spots here and there,” said a paddler who attended the meeting.

“[The marine trail] is just to safeguard those and make sure they are not taken up for other reasons. … we’re trying to ensure there are places kayakers can travel around the island or up the coast line, anywhere, on short trips or long trips, and have places they can pull out and camp.”

British Columbia has 27,000 kilometres of coastline, much of it undeveloped. The government has designated hundreds of camp sites for boaters, many in protected marine parks or at locations designated by the Forest Ministry.

However, paddlers said in interviews they were worried that they could lose them because of land-use changes.

The push for a plan to preserve and extend the network of sites followed a government initiative last fall that took many kayakers by surprise.

After 13 years of tense negotiations, the B.C. government and five Maa-nulth First Nations bands from the ocean-side of Vancouver Island endorsed a treaty that transferred land and money to the aboriginal communities and gave them self-government. After the treaty, paddlers began to fear that they would lose access to sheltered sites along the coastline.

John Kimantas, author of a series of lyrical kayaking guidebooks, a former newspaper editor and an award-winning journalist, sparked a spirited exchange on an Internet website called West Coast Paddler over paddlers’ access to the shore after treaties are established.

After an online debate of almost a month over whether the Maa-nulth agreement would affect paddlers’ access to the sites in the treaty areas, Mr. Kimantas said that the issue was not treaties but lack of protection in general for kayaking rest sites on the coast.

“Sites can be lost to fish farms, log booms, shellfish licences, resorts, commercial tenures and other development as well as treaties,” he wrote in late November.

In interviews this week, several paddlers also pointed to problems arising as fish farms expand along the coast, forest companies sell their waterfront properties, commercial tour operators take over prime camp sites and resort owners buy up some of the best spots on the shore.

As well, vast stretches of coastline have no sites for kayakers.

“I was paddling at the head of Finlayson Arm on Vancouver Island on the weekend,” Kathy van Leur, a nurse in Kelowna, wrote in a recent e-mail interview. “The mountainsides rise straight up from the water in most places, there are very rare rocky beaches and most [beaches] are quite obviously private property. Some of the few beaches, depending on which direction the waves were coming from, in rough weather would be unsafe to land on. Right at the head of the arm is a bird sanctuary where there is no boat access allowed of any kind.

“If the weather had kicked up and we had had to land, we would more than likely have had to land on someone’s boat dock and wait it out. The weather did deteriorate some, so we paddled back to stay closer to the marina where we had launched – so the lack of safe havens curtailed our paddling plans.

“This is just a small-scale example of the reason why kayakers are striving for a marine trail. We can’t just duck into a little bay, drop the anchor and wait out the weather. Frequent safe havens are essential to the sport of kayaking,” she wrote. “If the weather kicks up more than our expertise allows us to handle, we need to get off the water ASAP and camp there until it settles down. We move pretty slow, in comparison to motor-boaters, so we need access to beaches quite frequently or else kayaking in that area just becomes out of the question.”

Mr. Kimantas said that last summer, in the 360-hectare Octopus Islands marine park, a maze of islands between Vancouver Island and the mainland near Quadra Island, he landed at a suitable beach and was surprised to see a private property sign.

“I looked at my map and sure enough, the two largest islands in the group were privately owned. I kayaked all the surrounding islets looking for a beach and found only difficult rock ledges to land on. The kayak campsite I did find was on Francis Island, outside the park boundary,” he wrote in a discussion forum on the West Coast Paddler website.

Mr. Kimantas also wrote about searching for a campsite after the government closed sites for ecological reasons in the lagoons in Dionisio Point Provincial Park on Galiano Island.

The problem, he said, is that the alternative site was a rock ledge.

“I visited it last summer, and with a six-inch swell (which is minor) would not land my kayak there,” he wrote on the website. “This is billed as a marine-access-only campsite, and every time I have been there (3-4 times now), the only visitors besides me were cyclists. So here we have a marine campsite created for paddlers that’s essentially unusable and best suited for bicycle camping.”

He would like to see paddlers on the list of those that government has to notify about changes in land use. In an interview, Mr. Kimantas, who is not involved in the group meeting with the government, said the treaty moved ahead in a political vacuum as far as kayakers were concerned.

By nature, kayakers are fiercely independent and do not like organizations. They are scattered around the province and mostly non-political, he said.

The project is a revival of an unsuccessful attempt in the early 1990s to establish a single contiguous marine trail from Washington State to Alaska. The effort was reinvigorated in December, after the B.C. government ratified the treaty. Richard Bird of the Cowichan Kayak & Canoe Club said kayaking clubs took on responsibility for segments of the proposed trail in their area. In some areas, it was like linking up dots to provide a trail, he said.

Continuing discussions over the ensuing weeks led to a draft plan of what the paddlers envision and possible advantages for communities along the route.

The plan was reviewed during the meeting in mid-March. After contributions from around the room, the group reached unanimous agreement on a proposal. Now consultations are expected to begin with others who may also have an interest in the project. Maps of potential camp sites have not yet been produced.