Memories return on a family boat
ISTEPPED off the sailboat onto the dock in Gibsons, British Columbia, and although it was solid, a moment of reverse seasickness made me feel as if the ground were swaying. I silently wondered if this sensation was similar to what my mother felt when she complained that her Parkinson’s made her feel unsteady.
It was an odd thought to have during a relaxing weeklong sailing trip with my father and nearly five years after my mother’s death. But this wasn’t just any sailing trip. It was my first trip in my father’s new boat, which was also formerly his old boat – until he bought it back, that is.
The boat is a 33-foot Freedom Yacht, a revolutionary design when it was built in 1982, as its strong carbon fibre masts didn’t require any stays.
I was a young adult when my parents owned the boat the first time; busy at first with university and then with my career. Still, I tried to make time to join them when I could to cruise the Gulf Islands, scattered throughout the Strait of Georgia between mainland Canada and Vancouver Island. I appreciated the short runs between anchorages that allowed time to go ashore and explore the quirky towns and thick forests of fir and cedar.
There were always surprises: a particularly stunning sunset, a vivid meteor shower, orcas breaching in the distance, pods of frolicking dolphins and porpoises surfing our bow wave.
Still, the unexpected wasn’t always good, on a boat as in life. There was the occasional anchor that dragged at night, a misread chart or a motor that wouldn’t start.
I don’t recall the last time I sailed before my parents sold the boat. I know I didn’t make it to Desolation Sound, and I know too that my mother never showed symptoms of her impending Parkinson’s disease while on it. Looking back, that was a godsend. The boat remained free from any association with her illness.
Although my father liked to talk about my mother, there had once been tangible reminders, too, in the way of photographs. Then, less than two years after my mother’s death, a flood claimed their house.
On a cold January evening six months later, an email popped into my inbox. “I just spent a bunch of your inheritance by buying back my old boat,” my father wrote. “Anyone for sailing this summer?” Surprised, stunned, I was nevertheless thrilled by his quixotic impulse.
“We’ve lost so many things over the past few years,” I wrote back. “It feels good to have ‘found’ something. Especially something with such good memories.”
If anything, his purchase was even more foolhardy the second time around. He still lived in Calgary, Alberta, 1,600 kilometres from the boat; only now the airlines required passengers to arrive at the airport two hours ahead of departure. He still didn’t keep a car in Vancouver, so getting provisions and other logistics were complicated. While he was new to ocean sailing when he first purchased the boat, he now had the experience, but not as much strength and agility.
Still, we don’t often get second chances in life. For him, it was an opportunity to have a physical connection to something he shared with his wife. For me, Desolation Sound still beckoned.
I was nearly giddy with excitement as I went below into the cabin. The couple who owned the boat in the interim had replaced the green interior cushions with ones that are navy. The icebox was converted to a refrigerator, a heater was installed, and there’s GPS now. But it felt like I was looking at an old friend wearing a new outfit.
And like a visit with an old friend, there never seemed to be enough time. We started in Comox, on Vancouver Island, then stopped at Squirrel Cove on Cortes Island, before overnighting at just two anchorages along the 60 kilometres of coastline contained within the Desolation Sound Marine Park.
Grace Harbour was a wellsheltered cove teeming with jellyfish that allegedly don’t sting. I was mesmerised watching them dance past the boat. Tenedos Bay was rimmed with sheer cliffs dropping into water so deep we had trouble setting the anchor. Where the rocks had spalled, the ledges were covered in moss and spiked with twisted red arbutus trees. Each place was different from the other, and both were unlike any other area I’d sailed. That evening, we sipped glasses of wine and gazed out at the snow-capped mountains of the Coastal Range. It was then that my father confessed that his second chance hadn’t worked out as he’d planned.
“I had the idea that by buying the boat, I would really be able to touch the memories, and that hasn’t happened,” he said. “But I realise that it doesn’t matter. I never go through a day that I don’t have a half-dozen times when something happens and I think of your mother.”
Heading toward Gibsons and our last night on the boat, my father started talking of an ice cream shop in the town that he and my mother used to favour. Hours later, we headed off in search of the ice cream shop. Mike’s Gelato was there now. My father thought it was the same place, and I didn’t have the heart to contradict him.
As we sat outside licking our cones and watching the moonrise over the water, I was content, happy to be sailing again with this man, on this boat. But what about him? Was he sorry he bought the boat back?
“Not at all,” he said. “I still love the boat. I love the adventure, the sense of accomplishment. I love the freedom.”