It’s day two in Gonzales Bay, just east of Victoria Harbour.
It’s lovely here! Nicer even than Fleming Beach, from which I was evicted on Tuesday – and even nicer now that it’s not pouring rain anymore. I arrived on Wednesday afternoon to grey skies, and it rained all Thursday, so the sun is welcome – I had the sails up this morning for an hour or so to let them dry out. Mildew isn’t something I’m really interested in dealing with.
One nice thing that happened: about an hour after I anchored, an older woman with long white hair rowed out to say hello, and to offer me a shower, a dinner and the use of a bicycle, should I need one. What a far cry from the surly stares of the Esquimalt fishermen, or the studied disinterest of the older sailors at the naval base! She offered her back yard as a place to tie my dinghy, instead of the public beach, and told me to feel free to come and go though her property. I took her up on the latter, and rowed my bicycle to shore in the pouring rain last night to go have birthday drinks with Oakley and Amanda. Making my way home much later on was a bit of a trial to say the least, especially in the pitch dark with a head full of Jack Daniels – when I finally found the place, the tide had gone waaaaay out, and my dinghy was stranded about twenty feet up on the steep, slippery rocks. I managed to get the dinghy, my bicycle and myself down to the waterline without falling – at least, as far as I remember. Good thing I remembered my flashlight!
The bay is shallow – only ten or fifteen feet or so where I’m anchored – and I can see the bottom. It’s really nice being able to see the bottom, especially after so much time in the murky brownish waters of False Creek. There are large shoals in the bay, and tonnes of seabirds – the only downside is that there’s not really any shelter from the open ocean. I get to rock around on the wake of every whale-watching tourboat that goes past – but between the gentle, constant rocking, the sounds of the seabirds and the waves lapping at the rocky shores nearby, it feels very much like the east coast here. I can’t see any crabs down there, but I might try dropping the trap later on just to see if I can snag some dinner.
If the sun sticks around, perhaps this weekend I’ll get out the flippers and snorkel and give Tie Fighter’s bottom a good scrub – she’s starting to look pretty scummy down there.
Tonight, a house party. Tomorrow, shopping for Burning Man supplies. Sunday, who knows?
I’m currently skipping the open mic night at the Bent Mast to sit around and babysit the boat. Since the police visit this afternoon, I’ve mostly just done dayjob stuff, but in the past few hours the wind has blown up to what I guess to be around 35kn – ie, a little too much wind for my liking.
a "delta" anchor
I’ve let out another twenty feet or so of anchor “rode”, which is what you call rope or chain attached to an anchor. My anchor is a 35-pound “Delta” at the end of forty feet of heavy steel chain, with another three hundred feet of thick, strong rope attached to that. The way the anchor is designed it has the most holding power if the pull is parallel to the ocean floor. I almost always use all the chain, but I rarely deploy more than thirty feet or so of the rope. The chain is heavy, and so the more rope I put out, the more the weight of the chain can pull the rode parallel to the bottom, and the more holding power I get. Hopefully I won’t pull the anchor tonight, as I’m only about a hundred feet from shore and those rocks look nasty. I’ll definitely be setting the anchor drift alarm on my GPS.
In preparation for an early morning departure – or possibly a late-night emergency, if this wind continues – I’ve just come in from pulling the dinghy out of the water and lashing it down to the port wing, and rewiring the generator to charge the engine starter battery. With the wind howling, the unseasonably cold air coming from the open ocean, the heavy lifting, the pitch dark with the full moon yet to rise, the growl from the generator and the Perseids meteor shower overhead (I saw seven or eight in the ten minutes I was out there), this quiet, picturesque little bay has gone from welcoming to hostile in a matter of hours. I half expected to hear a wolf howl from the top of the cliffs, or see an angry mob of farmers weilding pitchforks and torches coming through the parking lot!
One more big post to get out of the way, and hopefully after that I can just update frequently instead of having to play massive catch-up games!
Monday night I arrived in Victoria and stayed in the harbour in front of the Empress, meeting Amanda and company for drinks. The moorage was an awesome location, in super rockstar style. I spent Tuesday morning working, but mostly cleaning the boat and enjoying the parking spot. Tuesday afternoon I went sailing with the lovely Laurel, and scoped out Esquimalt Harbour for a place to anchor. She had to be back at work, so we turned around and I dropped her off at the docks at Fleming Beach and headed back out to find an anchorage. After a few false starts, I stopped at the Canadian Armed Forces Yacht Club to ask advice – nobody had anything constructive to say, with the only exception being the bartender. She took me out to the parking lot, down a rugged, windy little path through burdocks and blackberry bushes to a tiny little beach, half covered by a large arbutus tree.
“You see the bar from here?” she asked. I nodded.
“This beach is probably on the Songhee reserve, but most folks think it belongs to the base. Most of the base thinks it’s on the reserve. The property line is around here somewhere, but nobody is certain where, so it’s kind of a no-man’s land. If you pull up your dingy here and hide it under the tree, you should be ok…”
So that’s what I did for the night. Anchoring in Thetis Cove in the Esquimalt Harbour, then rowing a half-mile through harbour swells – not quite as large as the open ocean, but not what you’d consider “sheltered” either – only to sneak onto a disputed beach, hide and lock my dinghy, sneak onto and off of a naval base, and finally ride my bicycle 10km or so into town to go visit with friends. Some days the mind just boggles. After riding 10km “home” again at 2:30am, only to have to row another half-mile through the waves with a bicycle in the dinghy, I started to understand that this trip would be a pretty damned good series of workouts!
When I woke up in the morning, I realized that I had accidentally left my laptop power supply at Amanda’s house – d’oh! This meant I couldn’t actually start work until I did the row-bike-bike-row sequence again. I kicked myself thoroughly and was starting to make breakfast when I heard voices outside. Out a window (one of the only two in the boat that is actually translucent enough to see through), I saw a small powerboat with two men in it idling nearby. I poked my head out to see what they wanted, and they seemed startled to see me and quickly sped away. Uh oh.
There was no way I’d leave the boat now, so I pulled anchor and headed back towards Fleming Beach. I had noticed a lot of “NO MOORAGE” signs, but since I’d be anchoring those wouldn’t apply, and since the only “allowed” moorage around was surrounded by reserves I was willing to push the rules a bit. The “beach” in Fleming Beach is almost nonexistent – but the bay itself is very well sheltered by a large man-made breakwater. The bay is surrounded by beautiful, million-dollar homes on one side, a large cliff infested with rock climbers on another, and a lovely park on the third. I anchored, rode in, and got my power supply from Amanda’s house, sneaking a shower in the process. Now that I was clean, powered and mobile I headed to Habit for coffee.
As I walked into Habit, a beautiful blonde woman was walking out. Our eyes met and stuck, until she reached the door, and left. I shrugged and ordered coffee, then sat down and began my workday. Not five minutes later, the woman appeared in front of me again.
“Excuse me,” she said with a thick accent, “I think… we are… supposed to talk.”
Her name was Hanne, and she was visiting Victoria from Denmark, enroute to Seattle, then Iceland and finally home. We talked for several hours, and then she invited me to an open mic night at the Bent Mast. I had to be at a Burning Man planning meeting first, so I went to that – meeting many of my soon-to-be campmates for the first time – and then headed down to join them. After a few beers, I ended up playing guitar and singing a few songs and having an excellent jam with two locals. Adam, a bassist with a huge stand-up bass complete with preamp duct-taped to the side, and Vincent, who played fiery leads on a classical guitar with a small amp with the distortion circuit turned up. Hanne was due to leave for Seattle in the morning, so we talked long into then night, then parted ways.
the lovely Fleming Beach
I got a text the next morning from Hanne, saying she’d stayed in town another day. We made plans to meet that night for drinks, and I went back to my day job for the day. Later on we went to a wine bar, and then wandered around Victoria with a bottle of rum until late, having deep discussions on the nature of memory and consciousness – fascinating stuff.
Friday night was a house party at the home of one of the organizers of the Victoria contingent of our Burning Man camp this year – it was Marion’s birthday, and so a large group of folks gathered for drinks, dancing and fire play. I forgot to eat dinner, and wondered why the rum had such a negative effect on me, until I supplemented the rum with pizza and all became balanced again.
Saturday afternoon, I wandered into downtown Victoria with my mandolin and a busker’s license borrowed from Laurel. I set up on a side street full of vendors, and played and sang for about an hour, making a few bucks, until the vendors packed up and suddenly the street emptied. I put my mandolin away and wandered down to Bastion Square, where a guy was playing guitar with a mic and a little guitar amp. After hearing a few of his songs I figured I could follow his style, so I asked him if I could sit in and he said sure.
We played for about an hour together, with his income going up significantly now that he was a “band” instead of just a guy with a guitar, and eventually the next act showed up to take over – Bastion Square apparently is a very popular busking location, and requires acts to sign up weeks in advance. The new guy listened for a while, while unloading a tonne of gear, and finally came up to speak with me.
“Listen,” he said. “My backup guitarist is out of town, and my bassist has run off with a cute French brunette, so I think it’s just me today. Do you want to sit in with me?”
I said sure, and he continued to set up his rig – a full PA system with monitors, mic stands, preamps, a mixer, etc. Then, out of the blue, his bassist showed up – and to my surprise, it was Adam, the bass player from the Bent Mast a few nights previous! We did a quick soundcheck, and then they launched into a rowdy set of energetic bluegrass and country, straight out of an east-coast kitchen party. My roots were tickled! We played and sang and danced for an hour and a half to a crowd of probably 60-80 people, making decent money along the way. I did alright I think, especially considering that I’d never heard most of the songs before, and definitely had never played any of them before! It was a lot of fun, and they asked me to come back to play again the next day – but their set would be early in the day, and I had no intention of being awake that early.
Saturday night I went to the nightclub ‘Hush’, where “Boy 8-Bit” was playing. I wasn’t impressed with his music, but the opening act “Neon Steve” had me dancing from start to finish. I ended up drinking and carousing with a great crew of Victorians until well past dawn, before starting the bikeride back to Fleming Beach and Tie Fighter. When I arrived, I found a little note written in sharpie and taped to one of my oars.
“REMOVE YOUR BOAT FROM THE BASIN IMMEDIATELY! NO MOORAGE AT ANY TIME! YOUR NUMBER HAS BEEN REPORTED TO HARBOUR AUTHORITY!”, it said.
Now, those three sentences raised my hackles a little bit, for three reasons:
“moorage” means tying to something, ie private property, which can be owned. I’m anchored in a navigable channel, ie public property, which is protected by the Canadian Navigable Waters Act and has been for hundreds of years,
“Harbour Authority”, regardless of whether they meant Esquimalt Harbour or Victoria Harbour, has no jurisdiction here – I checked, the only folks that do are the police, the coast guard, Transport Canada and the military, and lastly,
if you don’t have the balls to sign your snippy little note, I can’t muster the respect required to listen to you.
I looked around, hoping that the author was nearby so that I could discuss this with them, but they were nowhere to be found – probably a good thing, as I had been awake for twenty-odd hours and wasn’t even close to sober. I rowed out and went to bed.
I didn’t leave the boat on Monday at all, staying in and working. Tuesday was almost the same, though I met Bunny, Amanda, Lori, Mike and Will for beers and pizza, scammed a shower from Bunny, and hit the hay early again.
That brings me up to today. Today, the police showed up, along with a nice man named Bob in a red sweatervest, who served me with a yellow slip of paper essentially telling me to GTFO, citing Municipal Zoning Bylaw 63(2)(c).
Zoning Citation (click for larger)
As it turns out that the Township of Esquimalt has actually put a zoning bylaw on the books somehow prohibiting anchoring in this “water lot”. I’m aaaaalmost certain I could challenge that law and win, as it goes against federal laws protecting my rights to anchor. We actually discussed it briefly, with me mentioning the federal Act, and the municipal governer admitting that yes, in a storm, anyone could anchor in the bay, but that the bylaw prevents permanent anchorage. According to other live-aboards in False Creek (I don’t know exactly how reliable a source they are, but regardless), the Act doesn’t specify how long “safe harbour” lasts, and nobody has ever managed to challenge that in court and win.
So being the gentleman that I am, I recognize when I am not welcome and agreed to leave, saying that perhaps it wouldn’t be today, but at the latest I would get out of here by tomorrow morning. The police took my identification and phone number, ran the usual background check (clean I assume), and left without hasle.
However, being the inquisitive soul that I am, of course I had a few more questions – for one, how exactly are they kicking me out? The Township of Esquimalt fortunately puts all of their bylaws online, and so I downloaded the zoning laws and had a look. I’ll save you opening the .PDF:
63. MARINE SMALL DOCK [M-5]
The intent of this Zone is to accommodate small private docks on Water Lots adjacent to
residential properties.
(1) Permitted Uses
The following Uses and no others are permitted:
(a) Boat Moorage Facility for small pleasure boats.
(2) Prohibited Uses
(a) Commercial or industrial activity
(b) Floating Homes and Floating Boat Shelters
(c) Liveaboards
(d) The mooring of more than two small boats
(e) Accessory Buildings
(3) Siting Requirements
(a) All Boat Moorage must be located within the boundaries of the Water Lot.
(4) Maximum Size
(a) No section of a Boat Moorage ramp shall exceed a width of 1.5 metres.
(b) The combined length of a Boat Moorage Facility [wharf, ramp, landing and
dock], measured from the shoreline, shall not be more than 21 metres.
(c) The area of a dock or float shall not be greater than 18.5 square metres in
area.
Wow. Damn. They do have me there.
Still, I’m betting that if I had the time or interest to challenge this bylaw in court, I’d actually have a case – as I understand it, the feds frown on bylaws that go against federal laws.
My second question was, of course, the subject of fines – Bob let it slip that if I refused, they would fine me $100. I noticed that aside from the yellow slip of paper in the photo above, he was also holding a ticket book, open to a new page, and I think he was a little disappointed that I was both polite and accommodating. I wondered afterwards just what the frequency of fines would be. Staying the night in Victoria Harbour cost me $58-something – if staying a week in this sheltered bay would only cost me $100, I count that as a deal! So I checked, and:
8. PENALTY
(1) Every person who violates any of the provisions of this Bylaw or who suffers or
permits any act or thing to be done in contravention of this Bylaw, is punishable in
accordance with the “Offence Act”, and shall be liable to the penalties hereby
imposed.
(2) Any person who violates any of the provisions of this Bylaw shall upon summary
conviction thereof be liable to a penalty of not more than ten thousand dollars.
(3) Each day that violation of this Bylaw is caused to continue, constitutes a separate
offence.
Yep, looks like I pretty much have to move.
So anyway, back to work for me. I will likely head back to the Bent Mast tonight for the open mic night again, which was fun last time, and likely will head over to Oak Bay or somewhere around there tomorrow morning. Or maybe later today? Who knows. At least this brings me finally up to date, and now I can start updating the blog in a more timely fashion.
I definitely need to get my camera back in action. Somehow I managed to completely lose the battery charger during my move onto Tie Fighter, and despite tearing apart both the boat and my storage locker, I cannot seem to find it. Just now I logged into eBay and purchased a charger and a pair of new batteries for a grand total of $22 including shipping from China; we’ll see if they actually arrive before Burning Man.
So! The next chapter of yesterday’s massive update. After two epic sailing adventures, both with crew but both with significant solo-sailing time (ie, crew sleeping, cooking, whatever), I figured it was time to really push myself and head out on the epic adventure of the summer: wandering the islands alone, going wherever the winds blow. I had also promised my friends in Victoria months before that I would be sailing over for a visit “any day now”, but the weeks of work on the boat piled up and the summer was slipping rapidly away from me. Having a destination, however fuzzy, would be a good kickstart to the adventure.
I tried to leave on Thursday, July 30th, but the wind was nonexistent. Then I tried to leave on Friday, but errands and work got in the way, and I left quite late – I made it as far as Kitsilano Point, where I anchored for the night. I rowed to shore at about 10pm, pulled my dinghy up the beach through a few small groups of drunken fratboy types, padlocked it to a signpost and went to have beers with Jason Stormchild. Lesson learned: don’t leave your dinghy on Kits Beach at night, or some drunken asshole might piss in it. Ugh! Seriously, that’s the second time I’ve had to clean the bodily waste of a sub-human out of my dinghy – the first time at least it was a harbour seal, which, while disgusting, was at least somewhat forgivable. Sort of. I guess.
Saturday, bright and early-ish (ie. somewhere around the crack of noon), I left Kits Point and headed out to sea. Heading across the Georgia Straight I caught some excellent wind for the first hour or so, but then it died utterly leaving me with slowly luffing sails and almost no forward speed – so I had to fire up the engine and motor for a couple of hours. This was actually the first exciting part of the trip, as I found myself further out to sea than I’d ever been, somewhere around fifteen kilometers from land! At this point, in the beautiful, thirty-degree summer sunshine, at least three kilometers from the closest other human beings, I found myself unable to come up with any decent argument for pants, and so I spent the next couple of hours letting Steve the Autopilot steer the boat while I lay out on a towel reading a book.
the anchorage at Clam Bay
Eventually I made it across the Straight, and headed towards Porlier Pass. My Canadian Tide and Current Tables showed me that the next slack tide (ie when the tide would be neither coming in nor going out) would be at 8:29pm, which was a good solid two and a half hours away. I tacked around for an hour and a half, but then finally grew impatient and decided to go through the pass an hour early. This was a mistake I won’t make again – the pass was a series of eddies, whirlpools and standing waves, and a couple of times Tie Fighter was spun around nearly ninety degrees by the current! I learned my lesson, and made it through to a crowded anchorage at Clam Bay where I spent the night. I put on my swimsuit, planning to jump in to cool off, but when I went to dive in I saw to my surprise that the water was absolutely full of jellyfish! Seriously full, like a jellyfish every two to three feet – there would be no way to avoid them, so instead I played guitar for the jellyfish for an hour or two, then went to sleep.
The next day, Sunday, I made my way south, past the Secretary Islands, past Salt Spring and the Pender Islands, and finally to Sidney, where I decided to rest the night before making the final leg of the trip to Victoria. When I left in the morning there was excellent wind, which lasted up until about noon before dying off for a few hot hours, then coming back up… in the opposite direction. This meant that while before I could “run” south with the wind, now I had to tack back and forth up the channel. Tacking is slow, but it makes for fun sailing – you trade good sailing speed for actual progress though, as you have to basically go diagonally back and forth across the channel to make any headway. I had hoped to make Victoria this day, but after tacking around for hours and hours I kind of blew the schedule, and so around 6pm I decided I’d had enough for the day and pulled into Tsehum Harbour for the night.
Monday I got up early and set sail for Victoria, to an absolutely gorgeous day. Beautiful 25kn winds, tonnes of other sailboats out, a spacious semi-protected bay with low swells… I found myself with a big smile on my face, ripping across the bay at 8kn with one hull barely touching the tips of the waves. Then I heard the sort of sound that could only come from something under tension suddenly coming loose – kind of a loose, non-metallic “spaaaang” sound – and the windward hull dropped into the water with a thud. I looked up to see that my big genoa headsail was looking a lot baggier than it had been moments before. As it turned out the top of the sail had torn; the big steel grommet that the halyard attaches to had been pulled right out of the sailcloth. Reading up on this, it usually only happens when the halyard is pulled far too tight, but I don’t think this was the case – I may have been pushing the sail a little too hard, but honestly I think the sail was just getting too old. There’s signs of degradation around some of the other seams as well, and it’s “blown out”, meaning the material is stretched out making it difficult to properly trim for the best power and efficiency. Sails have a lifespan of about five to eight years usually, less under heavy use, and as far as I can tell my genoa was at least ten years old, possibly fifteen or maybe even more.
a cutter rig at sail, flying (right to left) yankee, staysail and mainsail. this is not my boat.
It actually turned out quite well in the end, as it forced me to put up a combination of my storm jib and my staysail – but when I did this I realized that what I had thought was a storm jib, or perhaps a small genoa, was in fact a “yankee”! I had been sailing Tie Fighter as a sloop, using the larger genoa and the main, and occasionally the staysail for novelty, but adding the staysail really didn’t seem to have any benefit over using just the genoa and main and usually just blocked the wind, taking the power out of the genoa. Once I put up the yankee with the staysail, the benefit became obvious, and Tie Fighter took off like a shot, hitting speeds of up to 8.4kn! The two sails worked together flawlessly, as though they were designed to be used that way – which, of course, they were.
I blew a couple of hours just sailing aimlessly around the bay, but eventually decided to set out through Cordova Channel and make my way to Victoria before the day slipped away again. I probably should have checked out the tide and current charts again though, as I spent the next three hours battling the wind and current in the channel making probably less than one kilometer per hour tacking back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
That’s when it all started to get bad, actually. The wind blew up a bit, and maaaaybe I went a little too close to the shore. When I went to tack away I found the wheel difficult to turn, and when I did get it to turn Tie Fighter had lost her momentum and got stuck in “irons”, which is what it’s called when the boat is pointed directly into the wind and comes to a complete stop. I found myself at this point harnessed in, leaning far over the back of the boat, boat hook in one hand and my knife in the other, pulling long strands of kelp off the rudder and cutting them. I was drifting slowly towards the shore, and at that point I drifted right over top of a crab trap. My easy answer was to start the engines, but the batteries were dead – so I had to pull out the generator, hook up the battery charger, start it up and then return to the stern to continue cutting away kelp, racing to finish all of this before the wind and current took Tie Fighter up onto the rocks on shore! Fortunately I managed to get it all done in time, the crab trap freed itself without getting stuck around the propellor (that would have required a swim), got the engine started and I motored away safely.
The wind shifted again, so I stopped the engine and tried to sail my way out of the channel, just on principle. The next two hours were a battle against the wind and current, and about fifteen tacks back and forth while I got the hang of tacking a three-sailed boat solo. The practice was well worth the effort though, and I’m now much better at handling her under stress! Finally the channel narrowed to only a few hundred meters wide, and while I could see the end, I was tired of tacking every three minutes and so I gave up and motored out.
In fact, I motored for the next couple of hours, down the coast towards Victoria, where Amanda was waiting to go for beers. I had estimated a 7pm arrival, but when I rounded the horn and went to pass between Vancouver Island and the Chatham Islands, I noticed eddies and whirlpools and standing waves, just like Porlier Pass from two days prior. I decided to avoid that, and made my way out into the open ocean and around the Chatham Islands instead. The water out in the ocean was a bit larger, with rolling swells around four feet in height, making sailing more like riding a horse than driving a car. I continued along, and as I was coming up on the Trial Islands just south of Victoria I noticed that off in the distance there seemed to be a lot of whitecaps for about a kilometer. On a hunch, I put on foul weather gear and battened down all the hatches, and as Tie Fighter came up on the whitecaps the sailing became a lot more interesting. I have no idea why – perhaps tides, or a current pattern, or some kind of squall way out at sea – but the water suddenly became six foot breaking waves for the next kilometer! Waves were breaking up over the deck, splashing over the bow only to be caught by the wind and come whipping back at me. I had been out in big weather once before, and knew Tie Fighter was up to the challenge, so I harnessed myself in and enjoyed the ride. Not one square foot of deck was dry by the time we pulled out of the range of breakers.
Finally I pulled into Victoria around 8:30pm. I just wasn’t interested in trying to find an anchorage after the long day, so I pulled into the harbour, got on the VHF and booked a space at the wharf in front of the Empress Hotel in downtown Victoria. As I pulled in, a single guy in a massive sailing trimaran, folks on two boats on the wharf called out to their families to come watch me try to dock. I brought her around, settled her neatly into the spot and tied her off, which brought a round of applause from the onlookers. I bowed, and one of the men yelled out.
“Ninety-three percent!”
“Only ninety-three?” I yelled back.
“Yeah, you caught your dockline on your vent there…” he called. He was right, I definitely did. I thanked them.
I went below, shut down the engines and packed up to go meet Amanda for drinks. When I came back up on deck he yelled again.
“Hey – we couldn’t see that boat behind you from here – didn’t realize you parallel-parked her! Ninety-eight percent!”
Wow. Three of the craziest, busiest, happiest months of my life. How to compress them into one post? WHY compress them into one post? This seems silly, but I think the best way to re-jumpstart my blogging is to get this all out of the way in one post, and then go back to more regular updates. *sigh*.
At my last major post, I was about to speak at the Open Web Vancouver conference at the Vancouver Conference Center. My talk went pretty well, I guess – I mean, I definitely didn’t win any awards, but nobody walked out either. I met some great new folks and had a good experience overall. I know now that speaking at tech conferences is almost exactly like doing live-pa techno in front of a big audience – the more prepared you are, the easier it is to let go and just be yourself.
Since then, there’s been… God. Seriously, where to start?!
I’ve had repeated, profound musical experiences on the boat, jamming with friends. Picture if you will a mirror-smooth False Creek, with the boat anchored about fifty feet offshore. Dan Ross playing guitar and singing, Chad Taylor playing muted trumpet and providing some percussive backup and myself on mandolin and backup vocals – folks walking past, double-taking and sitting down on the seawall to listen, applauding between songs. Making music on the boat with friends has given me far more joy than I ever imagined it could. Actually, making music on the boat at all – I’ve been spending on average about eight to ten hours per week sitting on my deck, playing my guitar and singing. If there is a greater peace than playing music on the water, I haven’t found it yet.
Yarrrr!
I’ve gone on three epic sailing adventures, the third of which is still ongoing – as of this writing I am anchored in this lovely little bay, surrounded by million-dollar waterfront houses and a beautiful cliff infested with rock climbers. More on that in future posts – but suffice to say this ongoing solo-sailing adventure is not without its trials and tribulations.
The first of the three epic sailing adventures was with a beautiful woman named Miya who I met at Burning Man in 2008, and who had come to visit me several times over the past year. Her confidence in my sailing ability was appreciated, though perhaps unwarranted, as we left Vancouver and immediately ran into eight-foot breaking swells just off Point Atkinson, enroute to the Sunshine Coast. The sailing got a lot better after the first day, but we still had to spend a few days on Bowen Island with engine trouble – mostly waiting around for a mechanic, until we tackled the problem head-on with the manual and some elbow grease, finally solving it ourselves and getting the engine back up and running. We then cruised up the coast to Secret Cove and Smuggler Cove, where we spent a night before returning to Vancouver. It was an amazing trip; the ocean opened my eyes and put a good fear into me, and the company was exquisite. The parting of ways at the end was wistful to say the least.
Drew and Laurel spinning fire on the boat at Diversity
The second sailing adventure was with yet another beautiful woman, Carrie, who joined me on a trip to the Diversity Festival on Texada Island. Technically we were supposed to sail with a crew of six, but Vancouver being the city of flailers that it is, the crew slowly called in to cancel until it was just the two of us. The winds were against us the whole way there and back, forcing us to motor around 90% of the tip, so it’s debatable whether or not we actually saved any money travelling by “sailboat”. We did get the sails up once or twice, but not nearly as much as I would have liked. The festival itself was excellent, with us arriving in full pirate regalia to great fanfare, spending a weekend surrounded by beautiful people and great music, and rolling out again on Monday with a grand exit. Sunday was a bit crazy, as the wind suddenly went from 5kn up to 25-30kn, and Tie Fighter danced in four-foot swells for the night – I now have a lot more faith in my anchor than before. Another boat nearby actually did slip their anchor, and came within a few feet of hitting us, but we held steady and Monday was much calmer. Another thing learned: rowing a dinghy in calm waters is one thing, rowing through four-foot waves as they break on the beach is another thing entirely! I made very good use of the drybags my sister gave me for my birthday.
The next weekend after Diversity was the Emrg-N-See Festival just outside of Salem, Oregon. I went to this festival with Trent last year, and it was probably the best festival I’d been to to date – it was as though someone had sent a personal invitation to every single gorgeous, blonde, dreadlocked, dubstep-loving yoga instructor on the west coast. I cannot express how many times I had to stop and shake my head at the sheer beauty surrounding me. This year was similar, though somewhat diluted, as though every guy who went last year went home and explained the situation to every guy he knew. I know I did, which is why I was surprised that the crew going down fron Vancouver was much smaller this year. Regardless, I definitely got my fill of amazing dubstep and bassline music, on very excellent soundsystems. I also got to take a tablespoon of dancefloor dirt out of my nose every morning, which I am choosing to look at as preparation for this year’s Burning Man expedition.
The weekend after Emrg-N-See was Sequential Circus 5, an electronic music event that I guess I’m sort of in charge of. I say that with some reservation, because the show couldn’t happen without every one of the seriously talented and driven people involved – we’ve got the whole thing pretty much down to a science now, and even with six live acts on a small stage, we continue to be efficient and competent, and we still have a good time doing it. This SeqCirc was probably the best music to date, though we were up against some very stiff competition. The capacity of the venue is about 180 people, and we had about 100 people, so while it was never packed, it never felt empty, and nearly everyone who was there at midnight was still there at 3am when we turned the lights on, so I count that as a win. The next Sequential Circus, SeqCircSix, will be in January.
After recovering from SeqCirc, having a few sailing missions out and around English Bay, and basically settling down and focusing on dayjob work for a while, I took off on my first big solo-sailing trip, headed for Victoria…
