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By Kim Kavin — Spring 2006
BARKLEY SOUND, BRITISH COLUMBIA—My husband and I spent our honeymoon here on Vancouver Island. More precisely, at a gorgeous wilderness lodge on Barkley Sound. The lodge sits on 70 undeveloped acres accessible only by seaplane or boat. We flew in from Seattle and landed in a world where boats are as much the fabric of daily life as cars are anywhere else.
Now, as the editor of Voyaging and the charter/cruising editor of our sister magazine, Power & Motoryacht, I’ve become somewhat pampered about boats. I cruise aboard the finest new launches. I hear endless pitches about luxurious fabrics and new helm electronics. I sometimes catch myself thinking I may never again want to be aboard a boat without satellite TV, innerspring mattresses, and at-rest stabilizers.
But then, I make it to a place like this, a place where the bears can outnumber the humans on any given day, and I meet a few of the locals, and I realize that I—and maybe a lot of us—have lost sight of what boating can really be all about.
I had this epiphany on our honeymoon’s second day, when we took a nature cruise led by a local named Charlie Everard. He uses his 16-foot aluminum boat powered by a Yamaha outboard to show camera-carrying tourists the area’s sea lions, whales, and scenery. He’s even got a few bald eagles trained so that when he tosses a rock cod about ten feet off the boat’s side, they’ll swoop from the treetops and delight everyone with a close encounter.
As our exciting morning ended, we got to talking about boats, and Charlie asked if we wanted to cruise past his house to see his fleet. We soon were winding slowly through the inlet to Jane Bay, where Charlie is among a half-dozen squatters with floating homes on the forest’s edge. They pay something like $200 a year in taxes, which basically gives them the privilege of staying undisturbed. There are zero services—no roads, no electricity, no nothing. Charlie runs his lovely house off a generator, the fuel for which he picks up on his 25-foot aluminum boat by rafting up to a supply barge.
His fleet includes a half-dozen other boats, all intended for specific purposes. There’s the 16-footer we toured in, which gives him an income. He also uses that boat for fishing, but he takes his 25-footer to town for groceries, since it has a covered helm that his live-in lady friend prefers. None of his boats has a GPS or chartplotter, since he knows the waters the way most of us know local intersections. He’s never seen UltraSuede, and he could care less about teak decking. It’s easier to clean fish guts off his aluminum cockpit.
If somebody had shown me a photo of Charlie’s fleet before I got to know him, I might have quickly moved on to brochures of sexier new models. But what I learned, seeing a slice of Charlie’s life, is that all of the newest gadgets sometimes have precious little to do with the reality so many of us seek when we take to the ocean.
The way Charlie sees it, boats are tools designed to help us build freedom into our days. Many of us get to taste this only on weekends, but he’s used his tools to build a life on the water.
I sure enjoyed being a part of it for a few hours. And that tells me something important, I think, as my husband and I set off to create our future together.
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