Through the short days of winter, while we toiled in the Vancouver offices of our respective employers, Nik fuelled his fire buying Cruising World magazines. At lunch, he’d read articles about sailors in exotic places and come home announcing, “Listen to this! Listen to what these people did!”
“Do you think we could do it?” I asked.
“Probably,” he answered. “We’ve got more to learn, but yeah, I think we probably could.”
We began to imagine a future where, together with our children, we would sail off into the sunset discovering the world. We became obsessed with the vision of a life not defined by the norm and we seized upon sailing as the perfect way to journey down a road less travelled.
As exploration geologists, we spent months working in the bush, away from home, but when work schedules allowed we educated ourselves with further sailing courses. As required by law we got our pleasure craft operator’s certificates and our VHF radio operator’s licenses. We read books, went to seminars, and joined the Bluewater Cruising Association in Vancouver, a club that held courses, slide shows and social nights for their membership base of what they called Dreamers, Doers and Doners. We immersed ourselves in all things to do with long-distance offshore sailing, or “cruising,” as it is commonly called.
In the early ’90s, a downturn in world metal prices resulted in staff reductions in the mining sector. Our careers stalled when Nik’s contract ran out and I was laid off. Paying our mortgage, saving for a sailboat, having children, and setting off on our cruising adventure? None of it seemed possible then. We were thirty years old and every one of our ambitions was looking like a dead-end road. We recognized quickly that financial stability was the key to everything we hoped for.
The life we were living was not what we wanted for the long haul. Exploration geology work wasn’t well suited to family life and it wasn’t easy making financial plans based on intermittent employment. While many of our mining colleagues began heading for jobs in South America, we hung up our hiking boots, and retrained with the hope of gaining more control over our future.
Nik took the Canadian Securities Course to learn more about the stock market as well as a few courses in sales to test his interest. I was tired of being laid off by accountants and decided that if you couldn’t beat them, you might as well join them. I began taking business courses.
The chances we took paid off and our redirected careers began in earnest in the fall of 1993. Nik landed a job as a technical sales representative with a North Vancouver company selling specialized groundwater monitoring systems. I was accepted into the School of Chartered Accountancy and landed a position in downtown Vancouver with Price Waterhouse, a work environment that was the polar opposite to living in a bush camp in northwestern B.C. It was a big change but also a great relief to be living year-round in Vancouver, to be freed from the seasonal market-sensitive mining industry, and to be a two-paycheque family again.
With our employment situations stabilized, we began to focus on our other aspirations. Having passed two sailing courses, we confidently rented boats for a day or a weekend. After chartering a NonSuch thirty-foot sailboat for a week in Desolation Sound, we decided it was time to buy a boat of our own. We thought we loved sailing, but we hadn’t had to address gear failures and maintenance issues, nor take on the costs of insurance and year-round marina fees. We needed to test ourselves. We wondered if the responsibilities of boat ownership would prove too much for us, so, we bought a 1972 twenty-seven-foot C&C 27 to find out.
We called her Tethys, the Titan-daughter of Uranus and Gaia, and sister and wife to Titan-god Oceanus. Tethys was also the name given to a mid-sized moon of Saturn and to the first ocean formed by plate tectonics. Our new boat had an image of Saturn on its spinnaker and, with our geological background, we thought the name suited both the boat and us perfectly. Every long weekend we made the 25 NM trip across Georgia Strait to the Gulf Islands. Every summer holiday we sailed for weeks in Desolation Sound. There was no doubt about it: we were hooked. More sailing was all we wanted.
But how to sail more was the problem. We were diligently paying down our mortgage and putting every other spare penny into our Registered Retirement Savings Plans, maximizing our contributions annually. We saved, not for the far-off retirement years, but to build a cruising kitty that we hoped to use sooner rather than later. But how much money did we need? We couldn’t find an answer to that question anywhere, so we defined our own goal. We decided we needed to purchase and pay for an offshore sailboat and we needed C$100,000 put away into each of our retirement savings plans before we could go.
Most cruising sailors are retired. Very often they have been involved in sailing their whole lives and have waited to go cruising in their retirement years when their children have grown up and their house has been paid off. We were impatient. Our cruising dream was an opportunity pounding on the front door of our hearts. It never occurred to us to wait. We wanted to sail with our children, not wait until they were grown and gone. Paying off our house, however, was another matter. How could we do that quickly? We wanted to go offshore but we wanted something to come back to as well.
I spent spare time constructing spreadsheets trying to come up with the golden formula that would allow us to go sailing and keep our house, but no matter how I did the math, there was no way we could make it work. While we worried over wealth, we were lucky to have access to wisdom.
During my work in the mining industry I met a woman who did contract work in our office. She and her husband were sailors. They lived aboard their sailboat in Vancouver. They had even raised their children aboard a boat. Twenty years my senior, she was a wealth of knowledge. Nik and I were invited to tea where we met her husband and sat in rapt attention asking question after question about their boat, their experiences, and their thoughts on offshore sailing. They became our friends and mentors. We put them on a pedestal and hung on their every word.
Whenever we got together they would ask us questions too, testing us and seeking answers on the progress of our sailing dream. Listening to our verbal hand-wringing about the financial side of cruising, our mentor-friend put it bluntly: “Listen, guys, there are not many people who are wealthy enough to own a sound cruising boat in the forty-foot range and own real estate, especially in Vancouver and especially at your age. You have to ask yourselves if you want to work that hard. You have to ask yourself if you want to wait that long. If you want something bad enough, usually you have to give something up to get it. How bad do you want it? That’s the only question here. I think you know what you want. Why don’t you go out there and get it?” He did what good mentors do: they pose questions that make you focus. They make you think.
The cruising dream was about travel and adventure, but it was also about simplicity. It was about boiling life down to the essentials and focusing on the most important things. The rewards in the corporate world were always the same – more money to buy more things. But I regarded free time as the biggest reward, the greatest luxury. The way I saw it, there was always one more dollar you could be making, but you never got to make another minute.
For us, it was an easy decision. We put our house on the market and listed Tethys with a broker while we searched for a well-built offshore sailboat.
We found her in Vancouver in the spring of 1996. She’d been called Romanichel by her first owner, meaning gypsy or bohemian. Her second owner repainted her black hull a dark green. He was a horse veterinarian, who told us that because of his green farmer’s jacket, and his green boots and gloves, and because he’d appear at the racetrack to tend to injured horses at all hours of the day or night, people began calling him The Green Ghost. When he learned of his nickname, he thought it a good name for his boat, and Romanichel became Green Ghost.
It was love at first sight and our new life took shape quickly.
We sold the house.
We sold Tethys.
And we bought Green Ghost.
CHAPTER 4
&
nbsp; First Steps in San Francisco
(September 2000)
Nine years after our first sailing lesson and four and a half years after buying Green Ghost, we’d thrown off the dock lines and sailed away from Vancouver. After one week of offshore sailing, the first leg of our trip was completed. The crew departed, flying back to their homes in Vancouver and Calgary while we idled at anchor in Sausalito Bay, a short distance but a long journey from the world we’d left behind. It was just the two of us now and that was significant. We had no children.
Our departure was many things: the beginning of an adventure, the realization of a dream, the result of many years of hard work. It was also a turning point. We had wanted to go sailing with children, but several months before we bought Green Ghost a ruptured ectopic pregnancy ended our hopes for our first-born child and nearly took my life. At thirty-two years old, I was left with diminished chances for natural conception.
“You’re all right and that’s the main thing!” sympathy cards and well-wishers gushed when I was released from hospital.
But I was far from all right. I was hopeless. I felt that all my children had died before I had a chance to meet them. I felt that any luck I’d had in life was lost. In a surge of grief and despair we were swept into the world of infertility and struggled in that heartbreaking rut for five years. While our cruising plans slowly took shape, our dream of becoming parents suffered torturous discouragement. A family and a sailing life – in our hearts the two paths were inseparable. Without children, what would become of our dream? For a time, a great emptiness engulfed us. We were paralyzed. Acceptance was a difficult journey. Finally, we made a choice to move forward and find peace in our fate. At thirty-seven, we began to see ourselves differently: not childless, but childfree.
Sometimes finding peace means getting a tattoo from a one-legged First Nations artist named Percy. One might argue that a sailor ought to earn a tattoo and get inked up upon arrival in some faraway port. But for me it was important to get a tattoo before departure. I believed I’d earned it in a different way. The way I saw it, with all my surgical scars, my body had plenty of marks on it that I never wanted. I wanted to choose a mark that meant something positive to me. I wanted to mark the time when I turned away from sadness and moved forward to a happy future.
Before we left Vancouver, I got my tattoo. Inked on my left ankle is a Haida-styled dolphin with two drips of salt water streaming from its tail. With a dolphin at my bow and tears in my wake, I chose to go sailing.
But what about Nik? After his dazzling display as Captain Upchuck on the trip south, I had my doubts about his choices. Alone in San Francisco after our friends departed we had a serious discussion. What I learned was both a relief and an aggravation. As far as I knew, Nik had tried two of the strongest and most commonly used anti-seasickness medications but neither had worked. What I didn’t know was that in the pleasant conditions early in the voyage, Nik had stopped taking medication. He was not drugged-up during the gale. Learning this was a great relief to me, but I was angry too. His decision was both covert and careless. I felt strongly that all people on board had a duty to maintain themselves as fully capable crewmembers. After his dreadful seasickness, I’d worried for days about our future sailing plans, not knowing how we could possibly continue. Meanwhile, Nik had quietly come to the conclusion that the next time he went to sea he would stay medicated. I resented that he had rolled the dice and left me to worry in the dark without knowing his decisions.
Staying angry for long wasn’t an option. Forty-two feet long and twelve and a half feet wide, less than three hundred square feet – that was our living area. It wasn’t new to us to live aboard our boat. What was new was finding ourselves transplanted hundreds of miles from home. We had our long-haired calico cat Tuzo. We had each other. We had Green Ghost. Everything else was different. We had no job, no car, no friends, and no family nearby. We had no Internet. We had no phone. In San Francisco an overwhelming sense of “Now what?” descended upon us. We’d taken the big step of letting go, but we didn’t really know how you went about doing the cruising thing.
“Oh, you must see the Delta!” locals told us in San Francisco. “It is so beautiful up there!”
While we shopped for boat supplies in the chandleries, we picked the brains of local sailors and took their advice on local cruising. We headed inland to the confluence of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers. We found it unusual to be in such shallow water. In British Columbia, most of our sailing had been in deep water; we’d venture into shallower water only for anchoring. But here, cruising up a river basin, we travelled for two days in depths that would be considered decent anchorages in B.C. We proceeded into Grizzly Bay, a place we’d been told was a lovely stop. We pressed on up a narrow channel farther than we should have. With our depth sounder showing one foot of water under our keel and with clouds of mud being churned up by our propeller, we felt sure we would run aground and we chickened out. Grizzly Bay was not for us.
This was a problem because sundown was near and we had no backup plan. The winds had been building all day and by late in the afternoon they were blasting inland at fifteen knots. We looked at the chart and decided we would go upriver to Honker Bay where we could seek some refuge from the wind behind a couple of islands.
Nautical charts provide a great deal of information about the water but very little information about the land. We were used to reading nautical charts for B.C. where an island was actual land. We didn’t understand that in the Delta area, islands were barely land at all. Islands shown on the charts were mounds of mud just high enough above the water’s surface to grow grass. Locals called them “toolies” – they were not islands at all and they offered no protection from the building winds.
Our options were diminishing as quickly as the light. We had no other choice but to anchor in Honker Bay behind the toolies fully exposed to the building wind. It was embarrassing. We looked like total novices anchoring in this place that was not an anchorage at all.
The wind built to twenty-five knots by the time darkness fell and a horrific chop developed. Green Ghost was bucking so dreadfully at anchor that neither one of us could bear to sleep in the bow so we curled up separately on the settee benches. It was back to the sea berths again.
We fully expected that our anchor would drag that night but we weren’t too worried about it. There was a mud bottom and a wide expanse of gently shoaling water astern. There wasn’t another boat for miles. In this uncomfortable spot, that was hardly a surprise. Nik got up and checked our position every couple of hours through the night. We did drag, over one hundred feet. With our heavy ground tackle, an oversized sixty-five-pound plow type anchor on an all chain rode, Green Ghost had never dragged anchor before. It wasn’t until morning that we saw a nearby hilltop lined with massive power-generating windmills. We made a mental note for future reference: anchoring within clear view of a wind farm (and completely unprotected from the wind) was not a good idea.
Our second day up the Delta got us safely into Potato Slough where we dropped the hook and spent nine days peacefully at anchor in a very un-peopled part of the world. As for the boast that the Delta was beautiful I wasn’t so sure. The place was flat. From the deck of our boat we looked out at the levees that surrounded the below-water-level farmers’ fields. In the near view, there were piles of dirt. In the distance, there were radio towers and power lines. Beautiful B.C. with its snowy peaks and deep fjords had spoiled us.
At Potato Slough a man in his mid-sixties came alongside in a small open Boston Whaler.
“Hi, I’m Chris!” he said.
We introduced ourselves and a lengthy conversation ensued. His forty-three-foot sailboat was tied up in a marina not far away. He explained to us that he had cruised for ten years with his wife; they had circumnavigated the Pacific and returned home to San Francisco. His wife had recently passed away and he was finding it difficult to manage as a single hander. Standing in his tender and hanging onto the toe r
ail of our boat, he asked about our plans.
“We’re going to cross the Pacific to Australia,” we told him.
“But you’re so young,” he replied. “I can’t figure out how you’ve done it. How can you afford this boat, this trip, at your age?”
We explained that we’d sold our house to buy the boat, that we had enough money to get to Australia, and after that we didn’t really know what would happen, but we believed we would figure it out when we got there.
“Ah, retirement by installment then! Sounds like a good plan because you’re the perfect age for this,” he said. “It’s physical – it gets harder as you get older. But you’re still young and strong. I can’t believe you’ve figured it out at your age, but you have. You’re going to have the most fantastic time!”
The following morning, he was back and after another lengthy conversation he asked Nik to help him bring his sailboat out of the nearby marina and sail it up to Potato Slough so that he could anchor nearby. We were taken aback. Both Nik and I tend to be slightly introverted and reticent around newcomers, letting our Canadian reserve rule us a little too readily. We both found it a bit strange that this complete stranger wanted to take Nik away in his Boston Whaler to points unknown, leaving me behind, alone on Green Ghost. Somewhat reluctantly Nik agreed. The trip took much longer than I expected and for a time I wondered if I would ever see my husband again. But all went well and soon Chris was anchored beside us in Potato Slough.
The next day, in thanks for Nik’s help, Chris invited us to his boat for coffee. The day after he was back alongside Green Ghost in his tender, inviting himself aboard for the return favour. We chatted daily for a week. He gave us what he called “constructive criticisms” about our gear and our plans. We gave him company.
Green Ghost, Blue Ocean Page 3