What does it mean to be a sailor? I think the clearest answer is that it’s something in the blood, in our DNA, more-so than what boat we own or where we’ve been. Some of us are born to sail and it becomes our way of life.
I was born to sail. My grandfather and father before me, I became the 3rd generation of sailor that I know of in our family, with my nieces growing up aboard sailboats and potentially the 4th generation sailors to come. We were fortunate as kids to grow up aboard sailboats, spending the summer months aboard and exploring the Great Lakes. Those formative years shape a boy, and make a man. Summers sailing with family, later participating in sailing camps and developing those fundamental sailing skills, one doesn’t realize at the time how tangible those experiences will become. Growing up in northern Ontario afforded us kids ample opportunity to play in nature, never far from water, running home after school and taking to the lake in a canoe for a quick bass fish, and in the summer setting up the windsurfing rigs and figuring out how to kick up the centre board and step into the back straps – flying across the lake like a rocket. All the while, without fully realizing it, learning the subtleties and nuances of how the winds would come through the hills and across the lakes, the signatures they would leave upon the surface of the water, and how you feel it on your face. A boy becomes a man.
Years go by, we go off to school, with quick visits home and a weekend now and again on the family’s sailboat…it would be many years before those fingerprints on my youth would become a firm grasp on my destiny. I met my wife in Vancouver, BC at a Halloween house party. After some convincing, we became a thing. She was intrigued by our weekend road-warrior getaways down the coast to Oregon, or out to the Island, camping out of the Delica van and surfing through all seasons of rain on the west coast. An appreciation for lifestyle above career had been bubbling up to the surface for a time, and while on a walk around Grandville Island, enjoying our backdrop of sailboats in the Harbour, I told my future wife how I was all but one of those outcasts, all but for the ridged requirements of banks and a particular lacking of liquidity of the cash kind. I had attempted to get a loan, for my savings was insufficient for my minimum standard for what I would qualify as an acceptable vessel to live aboard full-time…I would not abide the homeless abode aesthetic that floats around the fringes of the Harbour city. But the traps and the programming is strong in our walled-up society, so much so that I could – however – quite easily qualify for a mortgage loan. You see, condos don’t sink very often. And, so, I had purchased my first home at age 31 and shortly before we had met. The talk turned to a musing, “ do you think you would still want to do that?”, she said. I chuckled, “we just bought a house, I’m pretty sure those days are gone…”, “not necessarily”, she said. “I could see us doing something like that!”.
Isn’t it incredible how a vision can become a dream, and a dream put into actions…I had, for years at that point, been shaping surfboards on the west coast of Vancouver island. A boutique shop with a patent pending under my belt for a new surfboard technology…a story for another time; but suffice it to say, I had a firm grasp on hydrodynamics, GRP and composites, and ship work at the local boat yard pulling prop shafts from fishing trawlers and doing glassing work on whale watching boats. Generally experienced and competent working on engines, I had a confidence that we could handle the challenges that would be visited upon us. Of course, we never really know just how ragged our futures can get, and we’ve already told that story! But, despite the prevailing headwinds, we proved what we are made of! So, without too much more rumination, we’d formulated a plan for placing our house on the market and going boat shopping!
A quick revisit of history shines a light on the motivation for such drastic measures…by age 23, I had completed two years of Police Studies and embarked on a law enforcement career, that a few short years later would see me managing dozens of accounts at one of Canada’s largest private security companies. By age 28, I was a regional manager responsible for a healthcare contract with guard services in 5 acute care hospitals, and mobile response throughout the interior of the province. By 31, I was a VP of Sales for a competitor. I’d sat inside that room and had a good look around at what my future would look like, in the eyes of my peers, staying the course on a corporate heading. I was realizing, I didn’t admire my “superiors” and their lives were uninteresting and uninspired to me. Time is only ever running out, so it was time to run out of there!
We’d been refitting Grey Matter, our 21 ton Steel Bruce Roberts pilot house for a year, calling Quadra Island our temporary home. Life was slower and focused, with big moves on the horizon, 3000 miles of water between us and our destination. We’d installed an inner stay furling system, removing the old cable and Hank-on method, with renewed wire and the ability to manage all sail handling from the cockpit. Safety would be paramount for a two person crew. Attrition was not an option. I’d inspected our rigging and renewed all terminals at deck level. Rig scrutinized from top to bottom, new sails, batteries, solar, and spares befitting a global circumnavigation…we were ready. We would rise to the challenges…
One round of re-plating under my belt, welding skills improving leaps and bounds, we would finally drop hook in Mexico. Battered and not beaten, I would jump on flights out of La Paz northbound to captain survey boats on remote stretches of river where pipeline infrastructure lay at the bottom and the mercy of the spring floods. There’s nothing quite like backing a 27’ aluminum boat down the shoreline into 6 knots of current with trees boiling past, and backing off the relative safety of a trailer into waterways often closed to the public by local PD’s and coastguard. But critical infrastructure doesn’t wait for the flood waters to recede, so we proceed! This work was interesting, difficult, and rewarding. There was a world where a future could be made in that business, as easily as the friendships that lead to the opportunity. Good people and good honest hard work. But then a pangolin mated with a Szechuan duck and all bets were off. It was an angry bird-flu with a vengeance, a sort of biological cocktail from an isle of dr. Moreau. It was a new normal of an old story, “now how in the hell am I going to make money?!”.
With our boat and futures swinging in the breeze, the La Paz Waltz as it’s known was cruelly symbolic of our life at that time. A stark contrast, the certainty of the beauty that surrounded us, with the uncertainty of the future that awaited us. There were a few things that I knew. We were safe where we were, and that was not necessarily the case somewhere else, or “home”. After all, we were home…Grey Matter was our home. I also knew sailing, first and foremost, and sales. And I could see the writing on the wall for the boat market. So we quickly set a course for researching and embarking upon a new destination: social & economic security. Our home was Mexico, it kinda always has been for me…well, at least since I was 21 when I first opened a roadside taco stand inside my heart. So, I began talking with local yacht brokers, and we began down the path of residency, and establishing a business. It was a process that took more than a year to make good, but a gamble and a pivot that ultimately saw us realize our destination: security. We now knew where our home was, and our home now knew us, and we could once again rise from the ashes of chaos and uncertainty that certainly claimed many personal connections I had through that epoch.
Brokering was an opportunity to reconcile my life-long background on sailboats with a viable lifestyle in the industry. It was fast apparent to both my wife and I that the sailing industry was my true professional calling, in contrast to all the professional experience I’d amassed in industrial manufacturing, para-military, non-profit, light manufacturing, tourism & hospitality…this was a natural fit and it was very apparent. I may have been a convincing fish on a bicycle, but man can I swim when given the opportunity! We had built a business, and established a personal brand for trust and service in a very incestuous world, where reputation will sink you faster than a previously-chartered boat if you don’t steer a clear and honest course.
Fast forward several years, and we’ve expanded our business as reputable dealers for Rainman Watermakers, a Precision Sails partnership, importer for marine supplies, SAMS SA accredited Yacht & Small Craft Surveyor, and the launch of our offshore sailing school. The culmination of a lifelong passion for sailing; and the amalgamation of my experiences living aboard full time over 4 years in 4 countries, getting a deep and personal look into the needs and wants of boat buyers through every step of their journeys over several years, and continuing to develop my technical knowledge of yachts and yacht systems as a surveyor. Building on that foundation of manufacturing, composites, metal fab & welding, marine electrical and systems installations…with a perspective of what it actually means to have owned a boat (well, two now) for nearly a decade and having spent most of that time cruising & living aboard. Where the reality is, “You can’t just call time out and stroll on into the beach if you don’t like the way things are goin’” – Point Break
I give to you that experience.
