Echo Bay & Billy Proctor's Museum, Gilford Island, The Broughtons, B.C. 09.07.2013

Ok, the seafood production is slowing down!  We had both the shrimp & crab pots out overnight with no yield! Shoot! 

To make matters a little more frustrating, Bruce tried some salmon fishing, not productive either! Darn it! 

In the early afternoon the clouds faded and the sun came out making this leg of the journey very pleasant.  We headed NE along Sutlej Channel, through Pasley Passage – along the north side of Stackhouse Island, into Penphrase Passage, south down Raleigh Passage – between Burdwood Group Islands and Pearse Peninsula across Hornet Passage into the head of Cramer Pass,

 

finally landing at Pierre’s Echo Bay Lodge & Marina for the evening.   

 

Pierre came out to meet us at the head of the dock & really put out the red carpet!  What a nice charismatic owner.  During the season they have with weekly pot lucks and theme nights including Saturday night pig roasts!  But as we have come to expect there are few visitors in the islands at this time so all those extras will have to wait until the high season of July/August.

 

At the docks this evening are a total of six boats.  We got to visiting with Roger & Chris from M/V Resonance which is a Selene 47.  They currently live in Victoria but previously they lived in Edmonds in a subdivision called “Wind ‘n Tide” which is where our oldest daughter Shelly and our son-in-law Nick live!  What a small world!

 

In the morning after breakfast we took the trail from Pierre’s and walked out to Mr. Bill Proctor’s museum which was about ½ mile from the bay.  

 

We have been reading Billy’s book “Full Moon Flood Tide” which Martin lent us at the beginning of our journey.  This book is a computation of short stories of the history of people and sites in The Broughtons.  For example, we come upon the remains of an old structure on pilings and look in Billy’s book and find out that it used to be an old sawmill!  This has made our travel in The Broughtons so much more meaningful!

 

Bill Proctor’s Museum houses Billy’s “collection of items including Chinese opium bottles, Chinese and Japanese beer bottles, engine plates, tools, arrowheads, bone fish hooks, a 1910 mimeograph machine from Minstrel Island, a crank telephone, a scale from the old Simoom Sound post office, and thousands of other artifacts of the coast’s past.”  The items he has collected are fascinating.

 

 

A few steps up the hill from the museum, Billy built a replica of a hand logger’s cabin with all the wood coming from a single cedar log that Billy found as driftwood out in the Channel!  Just so that this generation can see how the hand logger’s used to live back in the early 1900’s.

 

We spent a wonderful couple of hours visiting and listening to Billy’s stories.  He’s in his mid 70’s it will be interesting to see what happens to his museum when he is no longer with us.