View of the Vancouver skyline from the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club marina in Coal Harbour.

Sitting in the cockpit the other day, looking across Coal Harbour at the glittering Vancouver skyline, all glass and sharp angles, the city I’d grown up knowing seemed at once familiar and foreign.

Arriving by boat, of course, provides a much different perspective on a place known previously only by land. Neither Marty nor I had been to Vancouver before by boat, and circling around the forested expanse of Stanley Park and under the Lions Gate Bridge was exciting. I’d walked along the Stanley Park seawall many times while growing up near Vancouver, but never seen it from the water.

It wasn’t just the altered perspective that made the city seem different. I was arriving somewhere that wasn’t really home anymore, invoking a bittersweet nostalgia that expats all over must feel when they return to places that were once part of their everyday lives. I felt almost like I was remembering another lifetime, or maybe someone else’s history rather than mine.

But no, there between two hulking highrises was the Marine Building, the iconic art deco building where I worked in the late 1980s. The new convention center on the water wasn’t there at the time, but Stanley Park’s Second Beach — where as a child I did a modeling job, posing in a swimsuit on a frigid spring day for a department store catalogue — looks pretty much the same as it did decades ago.

Since then, Vancouver’s downtown has been transformed, the massive influx of Asian investment that started in the 1980s resulting in an incredibly diverse, vibrant urban core. Marty and I had originally planned to stay downtown at the Coal Harbour Marina, reportedly a first-rate though somewhat spendy ($2.10 per square foot moorage) facility, but then Marty realized we could get reciprocal moorage at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club, just across Coal Harbour on the Stanley Park side.

That’s right: two nights free moorage at a marina in one of the most spectacular urban parks in the world, a 1001-acre expanse of forest, trails and beaches. (I’m not sure what the RVYC gets out of this arrangement with the Sloop Tavern Yacht Club, which we belong to, but I suspect we got the better end of the deal.)

The RVYC’s facility was quiet and nicely low-key, with old wooden docks, rows of boat sheds and a charming-looking restaurant with an umbrella deck called the Mermaid Inn. We meant to try out the restaurant but didn’t, there being just too much good food a short walk away in the city’s west end.

After roaming around the city on Saturday and having a few of my old friends over to the boat that night, we’d planned to renew our wedding vows on the boat Sunday afternoon to mark our fifth anniversary. My dad was to officiate, using the same ceremony we had at our wedding in Dubrovnik, Croatia. But in a cascade of unfortunate events, our plans quickly unraveled.

My dad threw his back out badly, and by last weekend was pretty much housebound, popping painkillers from bed. My mom and sister still planned to come, so we arranged for a marriage commissioner (as they’re called in B.C.) to officiate. Then my mom’s babysitter bailed,  leaving no one available to look after my parents’ ten-month-old foster baby, who is crawling everywhere and couldn’t possibly be at a worse age to bring on a boat.

If sailing teaches you anything, it’s the need to roll with it. So we did. We canceled with the marriage commissioner, lit a few candles and opened a bottle of Champagne. Sitting in the cockpit, we read our wedding vows to each other and added some of our own, then walked to a cozy Italian bistro in the west end and had an exquisite dinner. It wasn’t what we’d expected or planned, but it was perfect.

Motoring away from the city yesterday morning, I realized that it wasn’t just seeing Vancouver from the water that gives me a difference perspective on it. When I moved to the U.S. a decade ago I didn’t know Marty, had barely set foot on a sailboat and had no idea where life would take me.

It’s not the way the city has changed but the way my life has, time and distance taking me far from home — physically and in less tangible ways — that makes being back in Vancouver feel different. That city was a different time, a different life.

And that’s not a bad thing. Seattle has been home for the past eight years and it’s a place I’ve come to love. Maybe that’s both the drawback and benefit of leaving a place behind — it’s possible to create a new home, even as part of you will always belong to another one.

About Deborah Bach

Deborah Bach is the editor and co-founder of Three Sheets Northwest. She is an avid sailor and long-time professional journalist. You can find Deborah aboard Three Sheets, an Island Packet 38, with her husband Marty and their cat Lily.

• View all posts by Deborah Bach →
• Blog
• Facebook