After my high school graduation, I saved money for college by working the following summer as a deckhand on a commercial fishing boat. It was a tough job with long hours, isolation, and a whole lot of dead fish imparting their odour on you after a few days in their company and, when the weather turned nasty, the job was downright dangerous.

There were stretches of water that had earned bad reputations, as if some malignant spirit had taken up residence in them and sought to entertain itself by sinking boats. Brooks Bay was one of these spots, often blowing gales while only five kilometres away the weather would be calm and sunny. One day there it blew so hard that the skipper had to put the engine in reverse to slow us down enough for the fish to be able to catch our hooks.

In my experience, though, nothing compares to Hecate Strait. Even the name hints at the fury to be found here. This stretch of water in western Canada, between the Queen Charlotte Islands and the northern coast of British Columbia (B.C.), boasts all three factors that make vicious storms: shallow water, strong tides and high winds. Many a seafarer has lost his life there, and, at the age of 19, it almost claimed mine.

We had headed there on rumours of fish aplenty off the top end of the Queen Charlotte Islands. The rumours turned out to be bogus, but we managed to bring in one decent catch and took it to an island village called Massett. There we had a night on the town that ended up with me almost being arrested for beating up a girl I had never even seen before. With that behind us, we headed across the Hecate Strait towards the mainland.

The ocean was glassy-calm that day making the weather reports of an approaching southeasterly gale hard to believe. But my skipper, Bill, was in no mood to waste time getting across the open water.

Our other boat, The Resilience, on the other hand, had lagged behind and the crew suddenly found themselves battling a storm while we motored along under sunny skies. The skipper, Mike, radioed us saying that he’d broken a pole so we wheeled back around to help.

We ran straight into the teeth of the worst storm I’d ever seen. It was blowing about 60 knots, which isn’t much considering 100 knot winds were known to blow there, but those winds, combined with the shallow water near Rose Spit and a tide moving against the wind, caused the waves to stack up to mountainous heights.

In a half-hour things went from fine to bad and then from bad to worse. Like a nightmare unfolding in slow motion, each passing minute erased the memory of all that existed before, leaving me with nothing but the present: the deafening roar of the water and the wind screaming through the rigging.

The clouds and driving rain brought an early night adding zero visibility to the equation. We didn’t see the half-submerged wreckage of a nearby boat, but our portside stabilizer found it and snagged it breaking the chain. With the stabilizer on our windward side gone, the starboard stabilizer dove for the bottom of Hecate Strait. This keeled the boat onto its side, submerging the starboard pole and ripping it off.

Then we were in real trouble.

With the pole and rigging dragging in the water, we ran the risk of wrapping a cable around the propeller and stalling the engine. Without power we would have no steering, and without steering it would be only a matter of time before the boat breached and rolled. In the water, assuming we had time to put on our survival suits and get free of the wreck, no one would see us until our bloated corpses washed up in Alaska days later.

When you find yourself at the whim of nature’s vicious chaos, what settles into your soul is not fear. It’s not sorrow for all the things you haven’t done, and may never do. It’s numbness -- disbelief -- as your mind backs away from the lethal reality you find yourself in. And those few short hours that passed since you last saw the sun seem like a lifetime.

With the downed pole and the cables secured as best we could, we crawled back towards the safety of Rose Spit. Without the stabilizers, the boat was pushed so far over by the storm I had to stand on the cupboard doors to keep upright. Each wave we crested would push us a little further over than seemed possible, and then there was a sickening drop into the trough, and the slow rise up.

We spent three hours like that. Three hours of being half submerged. Three hours of watching the water reach for the wheelhouse door. Three hours of waiting for the engine to stall or that one fateful wave big enough to flip us.

Eventually, with disbelief, I realized the swells were getting smaller instead of bigger as we crossed into the lee of the spit. We’d stepped out of hell back into the land of the living.

After we dropped anchor I stepped out on deck to survey the damage. Through the blackness and rain I took a long loving look at the beach and the trees less than a hundred meters away and saw something I would never have thought possible: driven by the howling wind, the waves were breaking away from the beach.