Romancing the Storm

It really was a dark and stormy night.

But earlier in the day we had only the promise of a storm as we approached the west coast of British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. The marine forecast on our car radio was encouraging: southeast gales, 45 knots to storm force 55, with occasional gusts to hurricane force. Waves 15 to 18 feet and rising. Wicked weather, you might think.

Not at all. It is perfect weather for the seriously relaxing spectator sport of storm-watching. And we would experience it at a premier venue, a luxurious inn built expressly to exploit the natural wonder of Pacific storms’ landfall on the North American continent.

After the four-hour drive from our home off the island’s southeast coast, we emerged from the last tunnel of evergreens onto the access road for Long Beach. In front of us was a dramatic, 10-mile-long expanse of sand, as level as a stage and rippled like corduroy from the last tide. Now the tide had turned, and thundering waves were moving toward shore. Ahead of them came sheets of water skimming across a hundred yards of flat beach before seeping into the sand, leaving only a line of sea foam.

For all the drama out on the water, the beach was surprisingly serene and comfortable. The windy tempest offshore was blocked by headlands and held aloft by a shield of ridge-top trees.

Under the moody, overcast November sky and drifts of sea mist, my partner, Maria, and I entered a storm-watcher’s dream.

The wild, sparsely populated Pacific Rim region of Vancouver Island is staggeringly beautiful, a clean and green stretch of coast known for its big beaches, big trees and big winter storms. In recent years, growing numbers of city folk have discovered what the year-round residents have long known: A good, thrashing storm is invigorating, and life’s little cares seem to melt away in the face of nature’s towering rage.

It helps to experience the storm in a place like the rustically elegant and romantic Wickaninnish Inn, which perches on a shelf of rocks on Chesterman Beach, a few miles south of the town of Tofino.

Opened in 1996, the inn was designed from the bottom up to deliver tranquillity amid tempest. All of the 46 rooms have floor-to-ceiling windows and private balconies facing the ocean. The decor runs to natural fiber and recycled wood. There are gas-log fireplaces and luxuriously appointed bathrooms--some with panoramic windows for storm-watching from the comfort of a king-size tub.

And if all this plus long walks and lazy lounging isn’t relaxing enough, there is a full-service spa.

The overall effect of bringing the outside in is most dramatic in the inn’s window-walled Pointe Restaurant, which juts over the rocks, prow-like, into the teeth of the storm.

Despite being at the edge of the wilderness, we found the Pointe’s service and cuisine to be as good as what you’d expect in a major city. And not a bit stuffy--definitely West Coast casual.

Dinner was a bit pricey for our budget--about $120 with a good British Columbia wine--so we dined there just once during our three-night stay.

The inn boasts that all the ingredients are fresh and in season, and from small, organic suppliers on the island, some of them local.

To sample as much as we could, we began with a “taster tray” of appetizers: ostrich loin carpaccio with sour cherry relish and pumpkin seed oil; scallops wrapped in wild boar prosciutto; fried goat cheese (the local veterinarian’s avocation is cheese-making); and strips of honey-smoked Tofino salmon. For the main course, Maria had the catch of the day (a buttery sea bass). I chose the more challenging wild mushroom-crusted halibut with blackberry reduction sauce. We barely had room for sorbet for dessert.

Only the tide disappointed, not putting on much of a show for our 7:30 seating. I was hoping to hear the waves breaking beneath the dining room floor. Sometimes, when the winter tides--at 10 feet, the highest of the year--are up, the sound is piped in from a microphone positioned near the wine cellar.

The storm that was approaching all day arrived during the night, and we were lulled to sleep by the rhythm of the pounding surf, which every once in a while was punctuated by the whoop-whoop and crash of a particularly powerful wave.

Next morning was windy, wet and relatively warm, in the low 50s (the average is a mild 43 degrees throughout the winter). We dressed in sweaters and rainproof jackets and met Bill McIntyre, of Long Beach Nature Tour Co., for an interpretive walk though the rain forest. McIntyre was for 23 years the chief naturalist for the Pacific Rim National Park (of which Long Beach is a part), and he has a passion for the local environment and for winter storms.

As we entered the dense growth, the stormy weather was left behind. Inside it was dry and still enough to hold a lighted candle.

As we walked, McIntyre explained the structure of the local weather: In the winter, low-pressure systems out on the Pacific spin off one storm after another. “Sometimes they arrive only hours apart,” he said. “You can be in the teeth of the storm at noon and have blue skies at 4, in time for a beautiful sunset.”

In the first section of the trail, mossy cedar slabs formed a corrugated surface across a wooded bog. This was part of the old supply trail between Tofino, at the north end of Long Beach, and its nearest neighbor, Ucluelet, 21 miles south. The beach road now joins the two, but north of Tofino the shore is a craggy wilderness, reachable only by boat or floatplane.

It was an easy half-hour walk through cedars and hemlocks to where wooden stairs followed a forest stream descending to the sheltered sands of Florencia Bay. As we got closer to the open beach, gusts of warm wind puffed up the trail. “That’s the southeast winds,” McIntyre said, which come from the counterclockwise pattern of winter storms off the British Columbia coast. “They bring the storms, but they also bring the warmth, as well as the rains. We’ve got the warmest winter temperatures of anywhere in Canada. But we also get 10 feet of rain per year,” perfect for the rain forest.

Down on the beach, we could see the surf crashing out on the headland, tossing mist into the tops of the trees, but the beach, like the forest, was oddly calm. “The southeast winds don’t blow against the shoreline,” McIntyre explained. “They blow almost parallel to it.” The forest and the headlands shelter the sands even further.

“It’s a far different story out on the water,” McIntyre went on. The southerly set of the Japan Current encountering the opposing winds sets up huge, steep waves. Since 1803 at least 240 ships have foundered along this coast, known the world over as the “Graveyard of the Pacific.” To see the primary storm waves up close, we took a fork in the trail over to Half Moon Bay and Wya Point.

We descended a boardwalk that zigzagged down through Sitka spruce. These trees thrive in the salt- and magnesium-rich environment next to the sea, and their ranks protect the cedars and hemlocks behind. Since the tall Sitka take the brunt of the storm, many list crazily on the ridge that slopes to the beach. “A drunken forest,” McIntyre called it.

Out on Wya Point we found a safe spot from which to watch the waves. “Wow, awesome!” McIntyre cried as a powerful Pacific swell crested and broke on the rocks. It’s hard to judge wave size in such an open setting, but McIntyre has been doing it for years. “That’s 40, 50 feet [in height] out there,” he said. Even with the sky overcast, the peaks of the waves were an arresting electric blue. When Maria mentioned it, McIntyre explained that the color was from diatoms, a form of algae.

The wind whistled over our heads like vortices from a landing 747, not quite reaching us. In little rocky nooks below us, pillows of cappuccino-like sea foam piled up 3 and 4 feet thick. It might look like pollution to some, but it’s a perfectly natural phenomenon.

Sitting on sheltered rocks, we relaxed and enjoyed the picnic lunch we’d brought from the inn.

After a short but stunning walk to the Amphitrite Point lighthouse, we said goodbye to McIntyre and returned to the inn and an afternoon of indolence.

That evening, we were reading before the fireplace in our room when the lights flickered and went out (not just here, we discovered later, but all over Tofino). In the glow of the fire, it was only a pleasant shift in ambience, not an inconvenience. When the lights came back 10 minutes later, we switched them off. Once again the sounds of the surf worked their somnolent magic.

An odd silence woke me around 3 a.m. I walked out onto the balcony and was startled to see a sky full of stars above the protective eye of the Lennard Island lighthouse. The storm had passed.

Midmorning, in case any traces of stress might yet reside in our bodies, Maria and I treated ourselves to a session in the inn’s Ancient Cedars Spa. Maria chose to get covered in seaweed, thoroughly massaged and acupressured, and soaked in a hydrotherapy tub.

I was persuaded to try something called a hot stone massage, which turned out to be a much less searing ordeal than it sounds. Smooth basalt stones, heated to 140 degrees and lubricated with oils, were massaged into my body. At an early point in the process my initial reluctance disappeared and deep relaxation set in.

Thus professionally noodled out, we drove into Tofino, about five minutes up the road. The picturesque, pocket-sized fishing village sits at the end of a peninsula that juts into the calm, clean waters of Clayoquot Sound. With forested islands everywhere, every inch of the town looks out on a majestic expanse of nature.

For a place with a year-round population of just 1,100, Tofino has an impressive selection of fishing and charter boats, whale-watching Zodiacs, art galleries, gift shops, bookstores, cute churches, working docks, coffee shops, cafes, restaurants, B&Bs; and pubs (two, anyway). They are here to serve the high season (between Easter and Canadian Thanksgiving, which comes in early October), running full tilt catering to the 800,000 people who visit the area each year.

Last month, it was just us and the locals: fishermen, crabbers, surfers, artists, unemployed loggers, environmentalists. It was Tofino at its best, a character-full little place that sits at the end of the road, not on the way to anywhere.

Originally Tofino was just a logging and fishing center, but it started to change in the 1960s. That’s when the hippies arrived, drawn to the back-to-nature possibilities of the island wilderness. And then came the American draft dodgers. These folks didn’t stay in town but moved out to the islands and points farther north, coming in only for supplies. In time, however, married with children, they moved back to Tofino to be closer to schools and medical services. As they became part of the community, the town changed, becoming more globally conscious.

Also, the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve was set aside in 1970 “to protect a nationally significant coastal environment.” The park generated more interest in the area, and tourism took off. Today aquaculture (salmon, oysters, scallops, mussels) and eco-tourism have replaced logging as Tofino’s prime source of income.

Visitors come for the beaches and fishing (halibut and salmon), and to see the trees. Clayoquot Sound, around Tofino, contains the largest stand of old-growth temperate rain forest left in North America. Some of these trees are 1,000 years old.

Walking around Tofino, we got hungry for plain old cheeseburgers and fries. The Dockside Marine Pub looked like a good bet, built over the calm water of the sound near the fishing docks. Our view through the big porthole-shaped windows was of a cluster of tiny, tree-topped islands; on the nearest one, a lovely old wooden ship had been hauled ashore and turned into a quaint shelter.

On our last morning, when it was time for us to leave, we made a final leisurely circuit of Chesterman Beach, just outside the inn. The tide was nearly out, and half a dozen surfers and an intrepid kayaking duo were testing the water. Farther along, we found the tide starting to uncover a bridge of sand reaching a quarter of a mile out to small but inviting Frank Island.

Our timing couldn’t have been better. We walked out and explored the island’s rocky coves and tidal pools, keeping a careful eye on the sand link behind us. The tide rises quickly here, and we didn’t want to be stranded. If we had to be left high and dry somewhere, let it be within the civilized comforts of the Wickaninnish Inn.

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GUIDEBOOK

Storm-Watching on Vancouver Island

Getting there: Alaska and Canadian airlines fly from Los Angeles to Victoria, B.C., with a change of planes in Vancouver. Round-trip fares start at $254.

Tofino is a five-hour drive from Victoria.

When to go: Storm season is November through February. Peak tourist season runs from June 1 through October. Most hotels, inns, B&Bs; and campgrounds operate near capacity then, so reservations are advised.

Where to stay: The storm-watching package at the Wickaninnish Inn, through Feb. 28 (holidays excluded), is about $380 to $500 per couple; extra nights from $150. The price includes two nights’ accommodations and a guided nature tour. Similar nature packages will run in spring. Telephone (800) 333- 4604, (250) 725-3100.

The Web site for the inn, a Relais & Cha^teaux member, has a wealth of information, including real-time satellite views of the weather: https://www.wickinn .com.

The Tofino area has dozens of beachside and village B&Bs;, hotels and inns, as well as cabins on islands in Clayoquot Sound. For a list and more information about the area, see the Tofino Chamber of Commerce Web site, https://www.island.net/~tofino/index.htm.

For more information: Tofino Travel InfoCentre, tel. (250) 725-3414.

Canadian Tourism Commission, 550 S. Hope St., 9th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90071; tel. (213) 346-2700, Internet https://www.canadatourism.com.