Pesuta

Still hanging in there

“I’m stranded here,” my mother said when I called her one evening last week.

An eye infection in her good eye has left mom totally blind, in a sea of darkness in her room at Birchview Home.

It made me think of Pesuta. She’s been stranded for ninety years, since 1928, the year mom was born.

Named Pezuta at birth in 1918 in Raymond, Washington, she started life as a 264-foot-long schooner before becoming a Canadian around 1926. Steam-powered, in her prime Pesuta was three storeys tall. But like many old schooners in the early 1900s, she was converted into a timber-carrying barge. A hard worker, she could load herself and carry 800,000 feet of logs. Towed by a steam-powered tug, Pesuta’s job was freighting logs across Hecate Strait on the Queen Charlotte Islands (now Haida Gwaii) to lumber mills in the province.

Tugs Agnes, Daring, Myrtle, and Standar, manoeuvring Pezuta to a berth in the Willapa river for finishing her superstructure and fitting her out (Photo: By Unknown, Willapa Seaport Museum)

Wreck of the Pezuta, at Queen Charlotte Islands in 1928 (Photo: By Unknown, Willapa Seaport Museum)

Hecate Strait is one of the deadliest bodies of water in Canada. On December 11, 1928, Pesuta was being towed by the tug Imbricaria when they were both struck by a wicked storm in the shoals on the east coast of Graham Island. The tempest of gale-force southeasterlies and pounding waves snapped the towing cable. Pesuta collided with Imbricaria, her logs drifted free and she listed in the shallow water. No lives were lost and Imbricaria was saved. Pesuta wasn’t so lucky. Her hull was a total loss; she couldn’t refloat. They salvaged parts of her machinery and a scow load of fittings, then abandoned Pesuta.

The trail starts near the Tlell River bridge

Through Naikoon Provincial Park

At high tide, the river rises up to the forest

On the other side of the Tlell is Haida House, old buildings, a farm and an orchard

From my "Natural Totems of Haida Gwaii" series

Were Pesuta’s logs salvaged for this nearby cabin?

Plush powder room

Alone

Over the years, powerful waves and punishing winds drove Pesuta ashore. Her timbers are rotting, her metal is rusting, she’s sinking into the sand and she’s listing hard to port. But her bow is intact and, like mom, she’s high and dry but holding her own.

Pesuta on her 100th birthday year

Be careful around her sharp side

Her weathered face

Solid bones

Eye to infinity

Just thinking

Pesuta’s been described as a “stunning wreck that ranks among the most approachable on Earth.” Sitting on a long beach of pebbly sand and treasured agates in what’s now Naikoon Provincial Park, Pesuta attracts lots of visitors. It’s an easy seven-kilometre hike through the rainforest and alongside the gentle waters of the Tlell River to get to her. There, Pesuta’s view, could she see, is of sand dunes, soft and undulating as a feather comforter, and on the other side, a lookout over the Strait to infinity.

Navigation

Magellan found the two old photos of the Pezuta on the Willapa Seaport Museum site. Here’s a link to the Haida Gwaii Museum where you can see another old photo of Pesuta when she was still afloat.

In James Houston’s book Hideaway, referring to the cottage he and his wife Alice bought, he writes of gentler days in the Tlell River area in the 1950s. The couple were avid flyfishers not hikers, but he does mention the Pezutta. “Cape Ball is not too far north of the old shipwreck of the Pezutta, which lies exposed on the beach, one of the most hauntingly beautiful places I’ve ever seen.”