In the summer of 2003 my wife Joy and I, along with nine others, enjoyed a very unique holiday. We were dropped off at a remote Pacific beach with enough supplies for a week. We also had with us a canoe belonging to Chris Cooper, one of our party. The fibreglass canoe is about thirty eight feet long and capable of carrying over six thousand pounds of paddlers and gear. From our campsite on Barnett Bay we made daily canoe trips. Just north of us was the infamous Cape Caution. Years before, in 1997, I’d paddled around that point in the VisionQuest Canoe Journey down the west coast of Canada. We’d experienced twenty foot swells on that day and I don’t really want to be back in a canoe on that type of water ever again. One day on this summer excursion though we did paddle towards Cape Caution as our day trip. The waters were much calmer than in 1997.
On another day we traveled south from Barnett Bay. It was a beautiful, clear August day as we paddled down the shoreline. The swells were rolling and gentle. The next channel we came to is known as Slingsby Channel. That would be our course this day. We’d explore Slingsby. Perhaps two hours into our paddle we paused in the channel to study the charts and to choose a course to our right. We wanted to explore in more detail the myriad of islands as we traveled. Locating a small entrance between two islands on the chart, we paddled to find its actual location along the shore. It was no wider than perhaps ten yards at its narrowest point and we had, by chance, come at slack tide. If the tide had been pushing against us through that gap it may well have not been navigable. Slack tide though allowed us to pull through the gap with forest and rock pinching in on either side. It was low tide and the rocks of the shoreline were high and dry. As we turned the corner the serene waters showed us an image that virtually everyone saw at almost the same instant.
Protruding from the water was a rock among all of the others and its shape provided a reflection that completed a picture. The rock and the reflection were in the perfect shape of a fish. Its head, tapering body and tail were all clearly visible. Even a suggestion of a mouth was there before our eyes. In the frenzy, those with cameras rushed to record the rock and its reflection on film. But even in that short time the tide began to run and the image became ever more distorted as the currents built over the minutes and seconds. No photograph truly caught the rock and its reflection quite as clearly as it had first presented itself to us. In painting this image of what we all came to know as “Rockfish” I’ve presented the reflection as less than perfect. That moment of perfection was fleeting and belongs in the memories of those who saw it first. My painting then speaks of the reality as the cameras saw it. The “perfect” reflection would have been too perfect anyway. You wouldn’t have believed it. This image is not one that will probably end up in anyone’s collection other than someone who was there that particular day. Only they will know of the reference of the title “Rockfish” and of the perfect reflection that we all saw for one fleeting moment. On Chris Cooper’s charts though there’s a name penciled in for the narrows between those two islands in Slingsby Channel. For every more it will be known as “Rockfish Passage”.
