I usually experience some grand catharsis when we finally sail off toward the horizon after a period of difficult outfitting. I sometimes worry that the troubles we have getting ourselves together and out the door, as it were, will eclipse the purpose and design of living this sort of lifestyle, shunting us into some undesirable halfway-world between conventional life and sailing free, a limbo that consists of the worst parts of both and the best of neither. That worry, usually strongest in the middle of the darkest hours when it seems as if we will never actually pull away, has always faded with the wind and water and sunshine that wash the soul during long days under sail along the Sunshine Coast.
But this time, that feeling has persisted, clinging tightly and ominously at the back of my head. I’ve begun to worry that the aggravation is never going to be outweighed by the moments of freedom and fleeting happiness, and that dark consideration colors everything that happens now that we’re out cruising freely and without timetables along the Strait of Georgia.
We’ve had good–great, even–sailing since we finally tacked our way out of Port Townsend in light winds two weeks ago. A week of cool, showery weather brought stiff southeasterlies, and we cruised north quickly driven before them. We skipped through the San Juans in two nights, then made the jump straight up to Vancouver in a long, lumpy day in fog and rain.
As we approached the long-awaited entrance to False Creek, though, we noticed what appeared to be an unusual number of kayaks and paddleboards milling about off the old, defunct Kitsilano Coast Guard station. As we drew closer, the skittering crowd suddenly coalesced, and formed a line across the channel. We dropped into neutral and glided slowly to a halt, the waters thankfully placid and dull after a long day fighting Fraser River chop. What we wanted was nothing more than an easy clearance into the country and a solid set in sticky False Creek muck for a long and deserved rest; what we were facing looked more like a blockade. Had the First Nations decided to close off the Creek? Environmental protesters taking matters into their own hands to protest unregulated discharges? We spun theories out of thin air as we tried to divine the purpose of the line-up.
Then, a loud hailer came echoing thinly across the water. “Five… Four… Three… Two… One… GO!” Paddles flashed into motion, water churned, and we found ourselves right in the middle of a racecourse off Kits.
Fortunately, the wave of small craft fluidly broke around us, passing to either side without taking any notice. We picked out a kayaker in the middle of the pack at random: “Go number 183! Come on, you can do it!” She looked up, distracted, then smiled, and bent back to paddling.
We spent the rest of the week in Vancouver wrestling with various post-departure difficulties and adjusting to life without the usual amenities. As is so often the case, our immediate plans were upset by a variety of factors… failure to finish some projects before leaving, international complications, simple things that turned out to be hard or impossible, loose ends that hadn’t been tied up. The intermittent bursts of rain and sun seemed to echo our moods, shifting from dark to light as we wavered between enjoying Vancouver and feeling sucked back in to the problems we hoped we had left behind.
Our moods might have improved had we simply sat there and waited for the weather to turn and the problems to work themselves out, as they always seem to, but the succession of southeasterlies that came with the rains were too good to pass up and we pulled out after only a few days, heading north, with no real destination in mind.
We still have no real destination in mind; but we are running, downwind, from the problems that are probably still lying back where we left them.