This week’s travel dream: ‘Gunkholing’ off Canada’s wild coast

Vancouver Island looks small on a world map—an “inverted comma” tucked up against British Columbia’s west coast, says Melinda Stevens in Condé Nast Traveller (U.K.). But get out on a boat where you can start to feel the island’s 300 miles of coves, fjords, mountains, and 300-foot trees and it becomes “a vast, subtle, secret-storytelling kind of world”—a perfect place to disappear. Around here, people have a word for sailing away, turning off the phones, and living off the land and sea for a few days: They call it “gunkholing.” Every dreamer, sailor, artist, and beachcomber does it, and the best possible way for newcomers to join them might be to charter the Pacific Yellowfin, as special a boat as any in the region.

Built to carry troops in World War II, the 114-foot wooden freighter is “absurdly magnificent.” Many original details survive, but proper bathrooms and staterooms have been added too. “You can drive golf balls from her deck at night, use her mini-motorbikes to race through the mountains by day, fish from her speedboats, and shimmy like loons down her 20-foot inflatable slide.” Adventures onboard all seem to start with Bloody Caesars (a Bloody Mary made with Clamato juice), and the chef ends every day with “the most astonishing” 14-course meals, featuring crabs or black cod plucked from the waves. When our group wasn’t fishing or frolicking in the water, we were often just drifting, laughing, and swapping stories with the crew.

We were surrounded by wildlife. Beavers felled trees by the shore, eagles soared overhead, and we once even followed an orca whale and her calf just to spend time with them. They “nosed the water, pushing it up like hot blown glass,” before the mother’s spout let go a vast puff of air and steam. Still, nothing sticks in the memory like the general scenery—the sight of Desolation Sound on a gray morning, say, with “low-slung vapor rising and falling” upon each layer of the endlessly receding mountains. It’s as if they were breathing.

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The Pacific Yellowfin (pacificyellowfin.com) offers private charters for groups of eight at an all-inclusive rate of $79,600 for seven nights.