“Nikki, give up the tiller for a second. You gotta see this.” Ev Goussev, co-owner of the yacht Gray Wolf, shoved the binoculars in my hand.
“Just there. That beach. That’s bear territory, for sure.”
A shady stretch of sand lay a quarter of a mile to our starboard. Looking through the lenses, I could see the tide gently rippling past the remains of old logs and bracken washed up on the shore.
Scanning left and right to see if there was any life out there, I almost got lost among the trees. So many trees, so thick, so old – so untouched by humankind. For sure, this place was inaccessible by land.
Beyond it were hundreds of miles of dense forest, grizzly bears and uncharted wilderness. I guess some people might view this a desolate wasteland. I’d describe it as an untainted paradise. I wondered how many people had even seen this beach.
Meanwhile, with a dying wind, we were struggling to make headway against the 2-knot ebb. From recumbent bike seats at the transom, crewmembers Maisie and Andy were toiling on pedal drives connected to propellers at the stern of Gray Wolf, a replacement for the removed Beta engine.
is Jeanne and Ev Goussev’s family boat, a 40ft monohull built in 1995 from cold moulded cedar by Lyman-Morse in Maine. She has an unstayed rig we affectionately referred to as ‘the tree trunk’, a tapering, hollow stick of hand-laid carbon that bends in the wind like a branch so that she depowers hermain independently, increasing twist and spilling air on each puff. Just over a tonne of water ballast adds a little extra when it starts blowing.
