One way to give up smoking!

I gave up smoking on August 24th, 1969. As I flicked my last butt into the sea from the stern of the Alexander Mackenzie lighthouse supply ship, I was committed to at least a month of no cigarettes. I had tried to quit a few times in the past year but the habit was just too strong. Now I was being deposited on a tiny island at the southern tip of the Queen Charlotte Islands; total population several thousand sea birds, a hundred or so seals and two smoke free humans. No towns, no roads, no stores, in other words absolutely no access to tobacco.

For the next year, Cape St. James was my home as well as my work place. The three of us rotated twelve hour shifts, observed weather, monitored the light beacon and took turns going totally bonkers. The nightshifts were the toughest when you were the only one working as the others lay fast asleep on the lower part of the island. One guy had a recurring hallucination of a monster rising out of the sea and staring back at him whenever he looked out the window to check the weather. If you saw John Lithgow in Twilight Zone: The Movie, you will have some idea of how this unnerved him.

My night of insanity happened one night when I went outside to check the temperature readings. I had this strange feeling that I wasn’t alone. I opened up the door of the Stevenson screen, wrote down the numbers and suddenly looked up to see these huge yellow eyes gazing back at me. Close to soiling my Jockeys, I leaped back and watched an owl flapping its massive wings and disappear into the gloom.

I remember numerous pointless arguments. One went on for hours about whether the precipitation pelting the windows was mixed with snow or not. A heated discussion a few years prior to my time there, ended with the officer in charge out cold on the floor. The perpetrator was removed by helicopter on the next supply run.

The one thing we lived for, other than deciding which sports car to buy after our sentence was concluded, was to take out the life boat in search of glass balls used for net floatation on Japanese trawlers. Intended to be used for emergencies, the temptation was just too great after a month or two, to jump in the boat in search of Oriental treasure. Two of my fellow castaways were caught in a storm on one trip and by the time they got back to the island, the constant bashing of the waves had reduced the glass balls to small shards.

Cape St. James has had a long history serving as a lighthouse and weather station. Established in 1914, it has no doubt saved many lives over the years. Ships used it as a landmark, seeking refuge from Pacific storms and the relative safety of Hecate Strait. During the Second World War, over a hundred servicemen had tours of duty on the island after the Japanese torpedo attack near Estevan Point, raised awareness of the possibility of an all out attack on the West Coast of Canada.

In 1992, the last manned observations were taken and except for the auto weather station, light beacon and radio antennas, the sea birds and seals were pleased to have the island once again to themselves. By the way, I never smoked again.