May 2011 – Late Entry

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 most of us would not otherwise have willingly experienced. This tradeoff dulls much of the sting, and for folks who decide to stick with the lifestyle, it’s a net gain.

Doing it repeatedly, on the other hand, is starting to seem a little masochistic.

This spring marks the third time we have moved aboard since we started living aboard, returning from our winter gig house-sitting, and with the experience I can say this: it’s a lot easier to take all the stuff of your daily life on a boat and move it into a house than it is to take that same stuff and move it back onto the boat.

When you move to a house from a boat, you are taking a very limited amount of stuff (in typical house terms) and putting it into a very big space, where it sort of naturally spreads out and settles in the many areas available to put it. Moving from house to boat, even if you have only the same limited amount of stuff, it all gets compressed into a very small space and starts to look like an unmanageable bundle of impossible clutter.

Last year, we actually split our time much more evenly between where we were house-sitting and on the boat, and less stuff went back and forth. This year, we actually spent very little time aboard, and moving back has been much harder. I know there are places to stow all this stuff, it has been here for three years now and we have worked out fairly well how to keep it all safely and securely out of the way. I just can’t seem to remember where any of those places are! Compression seems, perversely, to have lead to expansion somehow: we were so proud to have pared life down to this limited bundle of things the first time around, and now they themselves seem to have exploded into being too much.

It doesn’t help that we are both suffering an attack of three-footitis, so every time we come across an item that just doesn’t seem to have a place to live, we find ourselves muttering, “If only we had three more feet…” It’s a common refrain, but the idea that you can simply buy your way out of storage issues on a boat is a sure sign that you don’t understand the basis of the problem: compression! Any amount of stuff, taken from a large area into a smaller area, is just going to seem like too much. A temporary reprieve might be had if we moved our stuff from a smaller boat to a larger boat, but should we go back and forth between that larger boat and a house again, the boat is inevitably going to seem to be too small. And we’ll be looking for another three feet, no doubt.

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. I have heard people denigrate the town as uninteresting and while it’s true that there is not a lot going on for boaters past a relatively narrow strip of downtown, the accessibility of the port and the wonderful park on Newcastle Island more than make up for any other deficiencies in our view. Plus, you know, Nanaimo bars. It’s common for us to spend a week anchored out in Mark Bay, enjoying the natural beauty of the anchorage and exploring the island.

We have no concrete plans to head that direction this year, but nonetheless when I came across a message board thread titled “Nanaimo, BC Changes” I thought I would see what was going on. Nanaimo has been shaping up as the next major battleground over free anchoring and unrestricted mooring in the Pacific Northwest.

From what I understand, the town has gone ahead and installed mooring buoys in the anchorage, with all the associated costs, time-limits, and size restrictions that one generally finds with public mooring balls. According to some, these are now your only option for staying in Mark Bay. The hue and cry is mostly over the cost, the supposed size limits, and the further displacement of long-term liveaboards in favor of transients. It’s not clear exactly what motivated the change. When we were last there in the fall, there was little to suggest an impending overflow requiring government intervention, nor any great dis-satisfaction among visitors as to the existing arrangements.

That thread is loaded with misinformation and conjecture, but the park website is hardly more helpful, noting only that the mooring buoys are $12 per night. This, at least, confirms that there are now mooring bouys, but does little to clarify what they are rated to hold or to what extent they are sited to prevent anchoring on one’s own ground tackle in the bay. Various commenters appear to assert both, and are apparently refuted by other commenters, leaving me scratching my head and worrying what I’ll find the next time I am up there.

It’s hard to speculate much with so little information, so this post is mostly a plea to anyone who happens to be up in that area: What’s up with Nanaimo?

I have touched on this tension before, the desire for freedom conflicting with the outcomes of other sailors exercising the same, and I have no real new thoughts on that problem now. It remains a central question of cruising, and I suppose of the world in general, that saddens me even in its need to be asked. How do you balance it without the ham-fisted intervention of dis-interested parties?

At any rate, if anyone has any more concrete information, please post it in comments! If Mark Bay has in fact been transformed from a lovely bohemian anchorage into the nautical equivalent of a Motel Six, I will understand, but will miss those carefree weeks on the hook in an idyllic setting.