Archive by Author
The Cheap Sailor’s Port Guide to Vancouver
Vancouver is a wonderful and cosmopolitan city, and False Creek, the reformed industrial waterway bordering the south edge of the downtown core, is an interesting anchorage right at its heart. Prominent location of both Expo ’86 and important parts of the more recent 2010 Olympics, False Creek has a checkered history that is slowly being [...]
Full StoryNeighbors
We have never spent enough time in our slip to really get to know our neighbors. The fellow on the other side of our finger pier has been the only constant. Until this week, I’d never before seen anyone on the boat that shares our slip. Every other time we have come back to the [...]
Full StoryDon’t Touch The Nature
I see it’s that time of year again, where well-meaning but short-sighted folks start to sprout along with the tulips and the cherry blossoms, and take root in legislative and planning offices whispering their soft refrain into the warm spring breezes: “Liveaboards are bad for the environment! Liveaboards are bad for the environment! Crush them [...]
Full StoryCompression
Moving aboard a boat is almost always a simultaneously traumatic and liberating experience. For most people, it involves a radical down-sizing in lifestyle-related “stuff” and a significant re-engineering of the mechanics of daily living. At the same time, those necessities bring with them a simplicity that is refreshing and novel, a degree of freedom that [...]
Full StoryWhat’s up with Nanaimo?
Nanaimo is a regular stop for us pretty much any time we are going anywhere in or through the Strait of Georgia. It’s the natural jumping off point for slow boats heading either north or east, and it’s a well-protected and easily entered anchorage for anyone coming back toward the Gulf Islands from those directions. [...]
Full StoryAll ashore that’s going ashore
A particularly raucous beach party attended by a number of students from the Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building (those wild and crazy wooden boat builders!) this winter apparently raised the ire of a local tideland owner, and with it, a lot of questions in my mind about public beach access in Washington state. It’s [...]
Full StoryThe Second Wave
If last month’s tsunami wave was less than threatening to boaters in our particular corner of the Pacific Northwest, don’t get too complacent just yet: a subtler, more ominous wave is still approaching. The enduring image of the disaster in Japan is of a massive wall of water churning implacably inland, sweeping everything loose and [...]
Full StoryAnother year, another tsunami
As I woke up yesterday, blurry eyed, to the chiming of the tsunami advisory coming in on my phone, it struck me that it is just past a year since the last time we got such a message, in the aftermath of the 8.8 earthquake that hit Chile. Perhaps tsunamis have always occurred this frequently [...]
Full StoryRough day for a soft grounding
I had imagined that most of the boats left out in the Port Hadlock anchorage by this stage of the winter had had their anchoring systems pretty well tested by the harshest northerly winds and waves that La Nina could throw at them. After the great culling of the Thanksgiving storm, in which at least [...]
Full StoryOut of mind
Every winter seems a little hectic, part of the price to be paid for being out on the water and not working very hard at anything other than sailing for most of the summer. The sea seems far away sometimes, even when you are looking out at it every day. This year I have been [...]
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Marty McOmber
Scott Wilson