How Did We Become Sailors?

Cape May, New Jersey – 0 nautical miles, 247 Kleenex tissues consumed

Since both Ana and I are now sick, and our activities yesterday were limited to sleeping, resetting the anchor a couple times, a paddleboard ride and beach walk for me, eating some cookies that Kate and Ben kindly bought for us in town, and watching a couple of movies, I will instead today write about how we became sailors.

 

I am from Saskatchewan, a place known more for farming than seafaring. But as my buddy David Leng has mentioned to me on multiple occasions, sailing is in my blood as I have deep Scandinavian roots – Icelandic on my Dad’s side and Swedish on my Mom’s. And those Vikings certainly were seafarers, and not too bad at farming either, plus they were tops at raping and pillaging (but I haven't tried this yet). So me getting into sailing makes a certain amount of sense, if you consider historical origins.

 

My first glimpse of sailing happened when I was a little kid and my dad got a line on this sailboat some farmer was restoring but ran out of either patience or money and needed to liquidate. He thought it would be a good backyard project, although I have no idea how we would have gotten it into our suburban Saskatoon backyard through that little gate. My dad has always been a dreamer, but a mostly practical one, and he envisioned himself fixing up this boat and I guess launching it in the South Saskatchewan River and sailing it to the Atlantic then around the world? Anyway, his hopes were dashed when we all went to this weekend psychic festival at the Holiday Inn in Saskatoon and a batty old heavily eyeshadowed psychic wearing a carpet for a shawl told him there was something wrong with the boat and he shouldn’t buy it. Which just exposes the fraudulent nature of psychics – there’s something wrong with EVERY boat. Duh.

 

Anyway, that project fell apart, but it wasn’t long before Brian Ford (a.k.a. The Legend of Fishing Lake) picked up a windsurfer somewhere and started teaching all the kids how to use it. I loved it so much that my parents bought us a Bic 250 windsurfer and let me tell you, I spent every hour I could on that thing and loved it. I learned how the wind works and how to adjust the sail to get maximum speed. I learned about centreboards and how they were needed to turn the sideways wind power into forward velocity. I also thought I looked pretty cool ripping around on the lake with my black shades and my hat turned backwards and thought it might translate into some success with the ladyfolk out there but that never happened – they were more impressed with practical farm skills like baling and combining, and I had none of those. So I’d have to find my life partner elsewhere.

 

My next experience with sailing came about ten years later when I was living and working in the Bahamas and four of us landlubbing consultants on the project (I prefer “International Men of Mystery”) pooled our funds and bought a 1979 Hunter 30’ sailboat called The Lost Shaker which I still believe is the greatest boat name ever as it comes from a Jimmy Buffet song. It came with a marina slip in Nassau and one of our boat neighbours Dan gave us sailing lessons, which only helped a bit, as we brutalized that boat and really roughed her up, smashing into coral reefs, banging the keel into rocks, breaking the prop, losing the engine off the dinghy, and having to get rescued by BASRA (Bahamas Air and Sea Rescue Association) so many times we were on a first name basis with the officers. But we had a lot of fun sailing her and it did result in some luck with the ladies (or at least one) – that’s where Ana and I met, and she was very impressed with our yacht and that’s where we first sailed together. I knew right away she was the one for me, as she too was from a seafaring nation - Portugal - and we were destined to sail the world together in the future. But not on that boat as it got sort of wrecked in a hurricane.

 

Spin forward another ten years. After living and working overseas for quite a while, we moved back to Canada in 2003, had our kids in Calgary, then moved to Paris, Ontario in 2006 which is positioned perfectly between the Great Lakes of Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and Lake Ontario. It was time to get back into sailing. It also happened that Ana’s job with WestJet wrapped up around this time so any low cost traveling we were to do in the future was going to have to be land or water based. And we’re not much for camping or motorhomes so in 2010 we bought a boat – a 2005 Hunter 33’ called Bella Blue, which was a perfect boat for us at that point in our lives. We docked it in Port Dover on Lake Erie and spent ten years covering nearly every inch of that lake, plus another season in Sarnia on Lake Huron, and two extended trips into the North Channel and Georgian Bay. The kids grew up on that boat and we really learned how to sail.

 

With rapidly growing kids we realized in 2020 that Bella Blue was getting too small for us. So we made the difficult decision to let her go at the end of summer and were boatless…but not for long. The following spring Ana found us a boat – a magnificent 2005 43’ Beneteau Cyclades called SeaLight, and we’ve spent four seasons cruising the width and breadth of Lake Ontario with our kids, our extended family, and our friends. She is now taking us to the Bahamas and is currently where we call home.

 

Where will our sailing career take us from here? This trip is a big test for us. By the end of it we are sure to know our tolerance for spending long periods of time on a boat. I don’t think we would ever permanently move onto a boat, but I can foresee some longer trips and progressively more challenging ones in our future. I would love to sail across the Atlantic to the Azores, then onwards to the Mediterranean. I’d also like to sail further into the Caribbean and maybe to South America or Mexico or Panama. And who knows, maybe cross the Pacific one day. But we’re not at the right stage of life or skill level now.

For now, we are doing what we love and gaining new sailing skills every day through making mistakes, learning from them, and getting to know every square inch of this boat.