West Winds

Boat/US Magazine, Sept, 1999 by Tony Gibbs

When I was being paid to travel around the world, visiting exotic islands and writing about them, people I met always asked the same two questions: "What's your favorite island?" and "Do you need an assistant?"

Now that I'm retired, the second question no longer applies. As for the first, only recently did I come to realize that the Santa Barbara Channel Islands, virtually on my doorstep, offer everything I find magical about islands.

It's an intensely personal judgment, of course. The channel islands, with the exception of Catalina, remain mostly out of reach of landlubbers. What's more, for most of the year they're veiled by haze, which allows them to retain an element of mystery, making each voyage a small adventure of discovery.

All of this came into focus a short time ago when I agreed to provide my 33-foot trawler as escort vessel for Adrian Tartler, a young man who planned to kayak around four of the five islands comprising the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. It would be less than honest to say I was galvanized by his expressed reason for the trip -- to increase public awareness of the islands as an accessible wilderness area. No, I just wanted an excuse to cruise slowly around the islands and savor them.

The 22-mile trip across the Santa Barbara Channel did, however, increase my awareness -- of just how slow three-and-a-half knots really is, especially when you're crossing the coastal shipping lanes with several towering container ships bearing down on you from opposite directions. And just about the time the last of them was thumping its way into the haze, from which Santa Cruz Island was slowly emerging, the whales surfaced.

They were blue whales -- the earth's largest living creatures -- and there were four of them, surrounding our two boats. I can buy into the notion of cetacean benevolence, and nothing about these guys seemed remotely hostile. But right then I was more interested in whether these were careful whales. Whales who were paying attention. Whales who were looking where they were going.

Adrian, clearly, had no such concerns. He was wearing an expression of pure bliss as creatures that could have used his kayak as a tongue depressor cavorted around him. Eventually, perhaps deciding we were a limited form of amusement, the whales disappeared.

People have written books about the islands' anchorages, but suffice it to say that each one is a different challenge and nearly all are rewarding. Some are miniature fjords, where bow and stern anchors are mandatory. Some lie off wide, deserted beaches, where the only shelter from wind and swell is provided by floating reefs of kelp. The anchorages big enough to swing in are usually edged by steep slopes, down which night winds can rush with express-train speed.

But each provides a unique vista of a shore that time seems to have bypassed. No restaurants, no houses, no cars. Steep-sided gullies that drop down to narrow beaches. Towering cliffs whose black-rock faces are pocked by huge, circular caverns -- exploded lava bubbles from eons past.

Only for a couple of spring months are the islands carpeted with green, but the normal browns and grays, offset by the gray-green patches of oak and pine, seem peculiarly appropriate to these gaunt, windswept landscapes.

As we circled the islands, I got a new appreciation of each island's personality: Anacapa was simply a giant rock spine, a melodrama of precipices; Santa Rosa a hazy panorama of almost alpine meadows; San Miguel a beautiful alien, whose capricious acceptance of visitors could, you knew, reverse itself in a moment.

Santa Cruz seemed to sum up the other islands -- a self-contained world whose pure, non-human power simply engulfed us. It was a sensation we don't often have the chance to experience anymore. Even when human devastation was clearly obvious -- a barren hillside, where the ravages of grazing sheep won't be repaired in my lifetime -- we had the sense of a vaster presence. A sense of being tolerated, but only just.

If I had to lump all the week's sensations into an impression, it would be this: These islands are indifferent to people, but that doesn't mean we should be indifferent to them. For if we destroy them, we kill part of ourselves. If that be consciousness-raising, make the most of it.

Tony Gibbs, author of a dozen books and a former editor of The New Yorker and Yachting, also writes for Islands magazine.