Valdes Island Deer Hunt, Remembrance Day Weekend 2016

My black-tailed deer season has been pretty mediocre, both in experiences and in success.  The area near me that I usually hunt has been cut in half this season, and every season from here on, by the purchase of that land by a group who aren't keen on folks shooting guns on that property.  Of the two hikes that I like to make in search of deer close to home, the newly-closed option was the one I preferred.  It offered some nicely-aged clearcuts with just the right amount and height of regrowth to attract deer without obscuring them from sight.  The one option that I was left with this year has no such juicy clearcuts, and consists mostly of super-thick chest-high salal bushes and ten- to fifteen-foot tall evergreens.  The rough idea is to walk through the area on the small trail that winds through it, and hope for deer to cross in front of you.  That gives you about a second-and-a-half to two-second shot window, provided you happen to be in exactly the right place at the right time.  You need to be inside about thirty yards, because this is a shotgun- or bow-only area, with no slugs allowed.  What usually happens in this area is that I have several near-miss encounters during the bow season and early shotgun season, with deer crossing either too quickly for a shot, or just out of range.  I'll then get frustrated and start going down proverbial rabbit holes, following deer down their little trails through the salal, having occasional close encounters that don't amount to anything, because of brush noise and obstruction.  I did find a great duck hunting pond while going on one of these quixotic journeys through the underbrush; so it's not always completely fruitless.

This season, I had my usual close calls, with none of them working out; and lacking the clearcut option of years past, I needed a new plan.  A week or two into the firearm season, the woods near my house turn into a warzone of quads, dirtbikes, 4x4s, and inexplicable multi-shot outbursts of gunfire.  So having not secured any venison nearby for the first time in four seasons, I concocted a bold plan.  Two years ago, I traveled with a friend to nearby Pender Island to "hunt" at a guy's small farm.  The farmer just wanted people to come to his place and offer some deer deterrence and a measure of population control.  We were successful in arrowing a very nice buck, but the hunting experience was lacking in adventure, being that we were just walking around a small property., amongst outbuildings and equipment, very near a well-used paved road.  I felt more like an animal-control agent than a hunter.  Taking this idea and attempting to improve upon it, I decided this year to find an island to hunt that was as unpopulated as possible, hoping to keep the "lots of deer" element from the Pender hunt, and subtract the "lots of humans and buildings and roads" aspect.  After some research, I settled on Valdes Island as my target.  It consists mostly of public land and woodlots, with a large, but empty and easily-avoided indian reserve at the north end.  The island is 16km long and about 2 km wide at the widest point.  Most of the southern two-thirds of the island is wide open to exploration, which is exactly what I was looking for.  A quick read of a recent wildlife survey showed that there are both deer and cougars on the island, which isn't perfectly ideal, but I compete for deer with cougars all the time anyway, so no big deal.  The part that was a problem, however, is that there is no ferry service to Valdes Island.  So of course, I decided to buy a kayak and paddle across 8 km of ocean to get there.  That would be the second time I had ever been in a kayak in my life, and the first time in about ten years.

So there I was, on November 11, 2016, looking across at Valdes Island from the kayak launch at Yellow Point, just south of Nanaimo.  The significance of the day was not lost on me as I looked across at the fog-shrouded island far in the distance, wondering if this would become a day of remembrance not just for those lost in war, but also for a foolish man in a tippy little boat.  As luck would have it, just as I was set to launch, a bunch of kayakers with actual experience paddled in, and set about questioning the wisdom of my plan.  Mercifully, the sight of the rifle strapped to the top of my kayak had them taking their leave of me soon enough.  A couple of them stayed for lunch on the shore, however, and I was almost certain that under their watchful gaze, I would surely flip over immediately upon entering my boat.  I didn't, though, and I actually had a great time paddling to Valdes, checking out the many seals and seabirds, and fish trying to evade said seals and seabirds.  The trip only took about an hour-and-a-half, and before I knew it, I was concentrating on not flipping over while getting out of the boat on the beach at Blackberry Point.  I set up camp at 3:30pm, and a whale breached directly offshore behind me while I did so.  I ran to get my camera, and succeeded in capturing 1930s-Loch Ness monster-quality photographic evidence of my whale sighting.  With an hour and a half to explore before complete darkness set in at 5pm, I traipsed off into the wilds of Valdes Island.  I quickly found a spooky old cabin directly behind my camp, which looked like it would fit right in at Camp Crystal Lake.  I found the main "road" that makes a rough loop of the island, which is an old logging track that has the classic deactivated logging road strip of grass growing down the middle of it. After quickly acquainting myself with some of the possibilities for the next day, I headed back to camp having heard, but not seen, the first couple of deer of the trip.  I ate my cold chili out of the can, having not been able to fit my one-burner stove into either of the kayak's hatches.  I then settled in to listen to about five hours' worth of podcasts before I could get to sleep.  I also tried an advanced maneuver where I put cold water in a bag of freeze-dried chana masala and left it overnight, hoping it would rehydrate by the time I woke up.  It did.  But it was not good.

The next morning, just before sunrise on Saturday November 12th, I had the entire day ahead of me to explore my new deserted island kingdom.  It was glorious.  I discovered that there is a vertical wall of sandstone that roughly bisects the island lengthwise, and it was at the foot of this cliff that I saw my first Valdes Island deer.  The encounter went as many of my black-tailed deer sightings do, with the deer and I in close quarters, discovering each other's presence at roughly the same moment, and the deer bounding off into salal oblivion.  Heartened by the sighting so soon into the hunt, I walked along the base of the tall sandstone cliff, among a jumbled assortment of fallen boulders, some as big as houses.  I reasoned that deer would frequent that zone, it being a high point where they could browse salal with their backs to the rock, and have only one direction to worry about predation coming from.  I also wanted to find a spot where there might be some kind of mini "pass" up and through to the other side of the rock, so that I might get on top of the cliff.  After one failed attempt up a path that proved too steep, I found just such a pass.  Almost immediately upon reaching the top of the cliff, looking out over the side of the island that had previously been obscured to me, I saw a natural meadow.  It looked exceedingly "deer-y."  I could almost smell the deer in there.  And sure enough, as I approached the meadow through the underbrush at its outskirts, up sprang one of the largest blacktail bucks I have ever seen in my life, urban deer included.  It had been bedded just at the edge of the clearing, completely swallowed up by bush, and I had walked to within 20 yards of it before it jumped up to my left and abruptly departed the scene.  I was both immediately disappointed in the missed opportunity, and excited at the quality of deer that I had just seen.  Only three hours into my hunt, I would surely be seeing more like him, right?  The remaining seven hours of daylight passed, with me crawling, stumbling, falling, and crashing through coastal rainforest in search of another chance like that.  And it never came.  I saw many does and curiously, many fawns, both single and in pairs, with no accompanying doe.  In fact, I saw close to a dozen does and fawns that day, but none together in a family unit.  The doe season on the island had ended on November 10th, the day before I arrived, so all these female deer added up to nothing in terms of opportunity for me to get some meat in my kayak.  Of course, all the doe sightings were in favorable conditions, with me sighting them well before they were aware of my presence, unlike the two buck sightings I had had earlier.  I held my scope up to each one of them, dialed the magnification up to the maximum, and stared holes in them, hoping more and more each time that if I concentrated hard enough on the tops of their heads, maybe two little spikes might poke out.  It never worked.  I hiked back to my camp after ten hours of exploration, dumped a can of cold chili into my half-eaten bag of cold chana masala, mixed thoroughly, and ate the most disturbingly delicious meal I had ever had.

On the morning of my final day on Valdes, I went to check out an old houseboat to the north of my camp.  An old man, who is the sole year-round occupant of the island, to the best of my knowledge, used to live there.  I had run into him the day before, as he was making a trip to the north end of the island to get firewood.  He told me he had moved there in the 1970s, built the houseboat shortly after, and lived there until about 2004, when he built a cabin at the south end of the island and moved ashore.  So naturally, I wanted to snoop around his old place.  It was partially aground, with planks set up to access it from the shore.  I got to within 50 yards of it, and quickly found that it was overrun with cats.  Not wanting to experience the inside of a place that has been the sole dwelling of cats for over a decade, I declined further exploration of the houseboat.  I hiked back up to the cliff-bottom, hoping to replicate some of my buck-finding success from the prior morning, but I found only more does.  One of which refused to move, even as I advanced on it completely in the open, to a distance of about ten yards.  Only then did it slowly turn and mosey off into the salal.  I hadn't seen a buck since the prior morning, and it was becoming more and more evident that the closest I was going to come to venison on this trip was some cougar-killed fawns I had seen the previous afternoon.  The weather had been wet and windy for most of the weekend, and now on my final day there, it was getting even worse.  I was getting concerned that if I stayed any longer, I might be stuck there indefinitely.  So I hiked back to camp, literally packed it in, and got in my tippy little boat and shoved off.

The paddle back to Yellow Point was considerably longer and scarier than the paddle to Valdes had been.  There were fairly large waves, and rain that was being lashed at me by a driving wind.  I had to angle the kayak much further to the west than I wanted, to avoid going completely broadside to the waves.  This resulted in me arriving back at Vancouver Island 2km to the north of the kayak launch, at which point I had to make a 90 degree turn directly into the wind, and paddle straight into the waves the rest of the way back.  Which actually turned out to be kind of fun.  For a short time.  Then it got really tedious and tiresome.  I was quite pleased with myself upon reaching Yellow Point that I had gained some great experience in a variety of conditions so early in my kayaking career.  When I first looked out at Valdes Island on the Friday that I set out, it looked like I might as well have been paddling to the mainland for how far it appeared.  Now I know the bounds of my little boat much better, and I'll have more confidence in it and my ability with it in the future.  Those goofy-hatted Mountain Equipment Co-op types that looked at me like I was going to die that first day turned out to just be a bunch of wusses with no concept of adventure.  Fortunately.

So I'm still deerless this season, but there are still 20 days left to go as I write this.  I'm once again confined to the salal bushes I know well, rather than the dreamy, far-off salal bushes of adventure and wonder that I found on Valdes Island.  I'll definitely go back there again, next time during the doe season in the first 10 days of November, and this time I'll bring my shotgun and bag a limit of the ducks I kept seeing the whole time I was there.  The next time I go, I'll bring a knowledge of the island that I earned through hard work this time, and I'm sure it will bring about greater success than I had this time.  That's how hunting works; you get better and unlock new places, opportunities, and techniques through persistence and dedication to getting lost and being frustrated.  That's half the fun of it.  I'm sure as I'm lurking around in the underbrush in the next few weeks, soaked to the bone and cursing every deer that gets the jump on me, that I'll be wishing I was doing it on Valdes Island, or in the latest place I find to dream about for next year.  Even before my fall deer season is done, I'm already wondering what exactly a guy in a tippy little boat can find in the sheltered bays and roadless areas of the west coast during spring bear season.