Indian Arm

Apart from an 80-minute gym class in high school, I've never Kayaked before. I've always wanted to try a kayak-camping trip though, so when my friend Mike told me he had bought a Kayak and was keen to go to Indian Arm, I didn't need any convincing. Indiam Arm is a 30km fjord that that goes North from Deep Cove, in North Vancouver. It's sheltered and a perfect place for beginner Kayakers, although apparently later in the summer you have to contend with a lot of wake from powerboats.

Mike was so enthusiastic that he basically planned the whole trip, including route, camping spots, rentals, and tide tables. I checked with some of my friends and we quickly had a group of 6 ready to go. Evan and Ian had done some kayaking before, but the rest of us were beginners.

One of the best parts of planning the trip was the amount of food we could bring (including an ice bag with cold food) - WAY more, and better food than I would ever be able to bring on a backpacking trip, because the boat's carrying your gear, not you!

Except for Mike (owns) and Ian (borrowed), we rented our Kayaks (2 doubles - one fibreglass, one plastic) from BC Dive and Kayak on 4th. It was significantly cheaper to rent there instead of at Deep Cove on the water, or even from MEC, but it meant we had to load them up on Mike's car and drive them out to Deep Cove. For some reason we only had one car so we had to do 2 trips from Vancouver to North Van. That was a huge hassle; in the future we'll bring enough cars to do it in one trip.

FRIDAY: We got all of our Kayaks and gear to Deep Cove, and spent a while figuring out how to pack everything into the Kayak's storage compartments. We had quite a few dry bags of varying sizes, for our critical-to-stay-dry items, and also a Pelican case for things like cameras and a phone.

After all the delays, we only started paddling around 6pm. Sunset was around 8:45pm so we hoped to get to Twin Islands, our first campsite, before then. The weather was beautiful - clear and sunny. Mike immediately ran into a problem - his Kayak was from Costco, and didn't come with a rudder. It was designed for playing around on a lake, but not a long distance trip. Every paddle stroke he took made his boat twist back and forth, so he was working about twice as hard as everyone else to go half as fast. Despite this, we got to Twin Islands at around 7:45pm, and had lots of time to set up camp before it got dark. There was a school group on one of the islands, so we took the other one.

SATURDAY: We woke up around 8am the next day and didn't get camp cleaned up and breakfast done until around 10am. We packed the gear into the kayaks and got in the water for our second day of paddling.

We paddled along the east side of Indiam Arm, and passed a lot of private beachfront homes. It didn't feel very remote yet. After about an hour we made it to Buntzen Lake Powerhouse, which is an old decommissioned power station with ancient architechture. We didn't get out of our kayaks, but we paddled around, taking a good look and a rest. Lunch break was about an hour later, at a convenient little beach we found.

After lunch we kept paddling north (still on the east side of Indian Arm). There were fewer houses, and the walls of the fjord got more cliff-like. We hit Granite Falls at 2pm, one of the official campsites. It was actually quite busy with other kayakers and powerboaters. We checked out the waterfall, and looked around for a campsite, but decided to keep paddling and try to find something more secluded.

The tide was coming in, so since we knew we wouldn't get stuck, we paddled into the Indian River estuary, and as far up the Indian River as we could before we got stuck. We got fairly far, and stopped to walk around. We considered camping there but decided to go back to the estuary, where we had seen a good point to camp on.

SUNDAY: We woke up relatively late the next morning too, to discover that the tide was quite low. Whoops. I guess every beginner kayaker has to make that mistake at least once. It would've been fine if we left at 7am like we planned! We got into the water and paddling around 10:30am.

Our day was basically a long and tiring paddle out along the west side of Indian Arm. We saw an unbelievable number of jellyfish floating in the water - you could paddle for hours and there would be hundreds floating by you every second. The west side had some very steep cliffs that we paddled along, and also a few waterfalls. We stopped for lunch on a rock with a very steep beach, but the tide was coming in so fast that we had to keep running back to the kayaks and pulling them up so they wouldn't float away! We were still eating very well - our ice bag was still cold. The last few hours of the trip were extremely tiring because we were fighting a slow tide against us, and we were all exhausted from 3 days of paddling. Every time we went around a corner we thought we'd see Deep Cove, only to see... more shoreline. We finally got in to Deep Cove around 5:30pm.

So despite the tiring paddle out, it was a great introduction to kayaking, and a really fun trip!