LETTER FROM THE VILISAR
September, 2003

(Note: This little newsletter was sent back after a couple of years to our friends at the Episcopal Church where Kathleen had been the music director . It is fun to re-read it now after so many years.)

It is now 14 months since leaving Frankfurt, Germany, and the Parish of Christ the King for a life at sea. On August 15, we celebrated our first anniversary as “liveaboard” voyagers after finding and acquiring the Sailing Vessel (S/V) Vilisar in Port Townsend, Washington, last summer. At times we can hardly fathom (you will forgive the occasional nautical term) that we have been away so long and we still talk about our old life in Germany as something only recently completed. But in fact, our lives are now quite seriously different and Frankfurt seems very far away indeed.

S/V Vilisar is a double-ended, wooden sailing cutter that was built over a span of four or five years in Victoria, British Columbia, by a boatbuilder and fisherman named George Friend. The boat was launched in 1974. Originally designed by William Atkin, George Friend modified the hull to incorporate a higher prow along the lines of Allan Farrell, a well-known British Columbia designer. Trying to connect to Vilisar’s history, we visited George Friend twice in his home near Victoria. He is now 87, in poor health, frail and housebound. George had originally intended to sail off to the Sea of Cortez and Central America in this boat. He told us that he therefore built Vilisar in a traditional manner but “hell for stout and very simple” so that she would be strong, seaworthy, seakindly and remain free of mechanical problems when away at sea”. After now over a year of cruising we have been more than once thankful for this approach.

Our own general plan when first we conceived of “cruising” was to find a good boat and spend a year or two in sheltered waters while we shook down the vessel and, just as importantly, while we gained sailing experience before deciding whether it was really going to be the life for us, deciding if and when we might finally venture offshore and what our first destinations might be. Despite some fairly bizarre modifications to the plan, we have generally hewn to the overall strategy. Some of the detours, mind you, have been quite substantial. But Vilisar is everything we need and most of what we would like to have in a “world cruiser” and offshore yacht. Of course, we have had to learn enormous amounts in a very short period about maintaining a wooden sailboat that is 34 ½ long on the deck and 41 feet overall (including the bowsprit forward and the boomkin aft) and about caring for a 30-year-old, 3-cylinder, air-cooled, diesel auxiliary engine. Incessant reading and questioning is the only way and then trying to pick one solution from the twenty usually conflicting opinions that have been profferred. The only way to live cheaply on a sailboat is to do most of the maintenance work oneself, not to mention that there are very few mechanics and fitters available when breakdowns occur far out at sea. So knowing the ropes (another nautical term) is essential.


The second part of the strategy, sailing experience, has of course also required time. We decided to get sailing as quickly as possible and our first cruise last summer (2001) was to take the three children, Andrew, Antonia and William, to Seattle at the end of their summer vacation with us so they could fly home to their mother in New Orleans. Our collected sailing experience at that early stage was still rather meagre; we made up for it with enthusiasm. This first cruise was therefore rather like a monkey circus; those eager to do something often working at odds with others dead keen to do the same. Overwhelmed, Dad aged visibly. Three children at close quarters on a boat gives new meaning to the term “water torture”; to get an idea, try to recall last summer’s car journey with your own three kids. But we did it and the kids had a host of stories to tell when they got back to school. Certainly they had spent more time at sea than any of their classmates and seen more eagles, sea lions and seals as well.

When we bought the Vilisar, it came with a permanent moorage in a marina near Port Townsend. After our second cruise – to the nearby San Juan Islands in September - we decided to give up the slip for good and just live at anchor wherever we happened to be. This was partly done for financial reasons; moorings after all are expensive. More importantly, however, we had cast ourselves as voyagers and voyagers do not have permanent bases. Every registered vessel has to have a hailing port and the Vilisar’s happens to be Juneau, Alaska (a previous owner had been based in Alaska). A large sign on the boat’s stern even advertises this in accordance with U.S. Coast Guard requirements. But, we wanted to travel rather than be based in any one place. The more we lived aboard and sailed her, the more our confidence in ourselves and the vessel grew and we began to believe we might one day indeed go offshore to Central America and even beyond to the Marquesas, Fiji, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, Europe, etc. It would take years to do. But we were in no hurry. We had time.

So, although we used Port Townsend as a base last winter, where we also sang in a chamber choir, where Kathy substituted off and on as an organist and conductor, and where we house-sat for two months in mid-winter, we still sailed throughout the winter in the (U.S.) San Juan Islands and the (Canadian) Gulf Islands as far as Victoria, Nanaimo and Vancouver. Even today, we almost never moor in a marina, preferring to anchor in small coves or inlets away from towns, outside of marinas and away from the shipping lanes where things are quieter, cleaner, more beautiful and cheaper. Whenever I receive a large translation project to work on, we simply drop the anchor somewhere and stay until it is finished and then dispatch the finished product using an email connected to a cellphone or satellite phone and a computer.

Last October, our friend, Albert Pang, of Christ the King joined us for two weeks; you can view his photographs at www.Aphotograph.net. He was with us for our first “stormy” crossing of the Strait of Georgia from Nanaimo to Vancouver. Though we were inordinately proud of that experience and achievement at the time, and though it took three days for the adrenaline to subside, compared to what we have been through since it was in reality quite tame.


We soon realised that it would be an opportunity missed to leave the U.S. and Canadian Pacific coast without first visiting Northern British Columbia, Southeast Alaska and, if possible the Queen Charlotte Islands. This would be a big challenge to boat and crew, however. Veteran Alaska travellers never ceased to send chills of terror up and down our spines with their stories of close calls, near-death and destruction in riptides, cataracts, fog and rain on the Inside or Outside Passages to Alaska. At the same time, we told ourselves, hundreds do the trip each spring and summer and live to tell their mothers all about it. Why then couldn’t we too take v/s Vilisar on a pilgrimage to its home-port, Juneau, Alaska?

We therefore set off from Port Townsend, Washington, on April 25, 2002, and headed north to Victoria via the San Juan Islands. Although we were planning to use the Inside Passage to Juneau, i.e. mostly in “sheltered” waters and channels rather than going offshore, we were also determined to sail as much of the way as possible and to try to get offshore experience on the way back south if possible. That said, however, we did wind up motoring or motor-sailing most of the time after leaving the Strait of Georgia.

Our total Voyage to Alaska lasted 116 days and roughly 2,000 nautical miles from Port Townsend to Juneau and back to Comox, British Columbia, where we are at present. Until late June, we saw relatively few other pleasure vessels and certainly very few sailboats once we jumped from Port Hardy, at the northern tip of Vancouver Island, and continued beyond Cape Caution to Prince Rupert, B.C., and thence across the U.S.-Canadian border to reach Ketchikan, Alaska. What we did see were a lot of mountains, wooded or bare, not infrequently still snow-peaked in June. What we saw were hundreds of isolated coves and inlets and many, many waterfalls descending from great heights to cascade into the channels as we passed. Going farther and farther north, reaching at the most northerly spot, Point Retreat, at N 58 25.82’ between Juneau and Glacier National Park. This is farther north than most of the Aleutian Islands and getting close to the same latitude as Stockholm, Sweden. At the most westerly we sailed on the Gulf of Alaska beyond Cross Sound (W 136 38.48’). What we saw were fewer and fewer people, settlements and boats and more and more bald eagles, puffins, sea otters, sea lions, various types of dolphins, humpback whales, orcas (i.e. killer) whales as well as black and brown bears. We caught and ate our own wild salmon and ling cod. We anchored hundreds of times. We changed our clothes hundreds of times (in Alaska it always seems to be either getting warmer or getting colder, just starting to rain or just stopping; if you are on a boat in Alaska, it
is never actually hot). We visited Victoria, Sidney, Powell River, Comox, Port Hardy and Prince Rupert in British Columbia and Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg, Juneau, Sitka and Craig in Alaska. We were rained on and “blowed at”, we braved cataracts and riptides. We tore a mainsail in a gale and lost our GPS overboard in a night passage the length of Queen Charlotte Sound. We were sometimes frightened and exhausted, we were often cold and wet and sometimes discouraged and ready to quit. In all this, however, we were constantly knocked speechless by the landscape. “Majestic”, “grand”, “huge” and “spectacular” hardly even begins to describe the endless mountain ranges and snowy peaks, the huge clouds that accumulate around the peaks, the ocean swells and the huge foaming rocks at the entrances to harbours, fjords and coves. And if at times we craved warm summer sunshine, if at times we wished we could do without four layers of clothing to sit in an open cockpit even on dry days, if at times we were frightened and overwhelmed, all that is now forgotten and we recall only the adventure and the beauty. Several mariners have told us that our first voyage was to one of the most challenging cruising grounds in the world; if we handled that all right – by which they mean possibly that we survived – we should have no worse problems going offshore.

On the way back south we sailed the Outside Passage and offshore on the Gulf of Alaska and on the Pacific itself to reach the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia. We used our short ten days there to visit the sites of ancient tribal villages of the Haida Nation in this remote archipelago. Our visit included, on the one hand for example, bathing in natural outdoor hot springs with views to the mountains from damned up springs coming from the bowels of the earth or, on the other, standing in silence surrounded by old mortuary totem poles at the site of the first and last recorded Haida village, wiped out by the great smallpox epidemics of the 1880s when the Haidas in the Queen Charlottes declined from 20,000 people to only a few hundred demoralised and scattered remnants.

We did our first overnight passage the length of Queen Charlotte Sound (approx. 150 miles) with 3-4 metre waves hissing up behind us in the night and porpoises playing around us. Their eerie breathing so close to us in the dark first gave us the creeps until we could figure out what the sound actually was. We finished our trip by coming south again on BC’s Inside Passage on the side of Vancouver Island facing the continent. We were headed for Comox on the Strait of Georgia where we planned to visit with fellow voyaging friends that we had met earlier. Even in these protected waters we were able to make each day’s passage in gale-force following winds, winds so strong that on the penultimate day, we put a two-foot rent in our mainsail during a controlled jibe.

Once we dropped our anchor at Comox, we found warm August days and a time for rest after nearly four months of continuous, intensive and frequently arduous cruising. We were healthy and fit but very weary. Andrew and William had to be brought to the airport in Seattle to fly home (Antonia had spent six weeks with us on from Port Hardy to Juneau). They had already missed two weeks of school but failed altogether to register any remorse whatsoever. Once they were gone, Kathy and I were alone again aboard our floating home for the first time in 14 weeks.

We needed to address the task of refitting and painting Vilisar. After a year of nearly continual cruising, which had been preceded by several years of mild neglect at her dock in Port Townsend, Vilisar was in dire need of paint and varnish from mast-top to waterline and from stem to stern. Certainly she looked somewhat battle-scarred compared to the pristine cabin cruisers that so frequently roared past us leaving us rolling in their wakes.


We are nearing the end of the third week of this work, slower this first time through the refitting process since we had to learn how to do each individual step. But in a few days we will begin sailing farther south. We have decided not to make for Mexico this year; by the time we could get ourselves ready and procure some extra safety equipment for the boat, we would have missed the storm-free period down the Oregon and California coasts to San Francisco and San Diego. And besides, we have barely begun to scratch the surface of what can be seen by boat in British Columbia: Jervis Inlet and Princess Louise Sound, for example, or Desolation Sound and the Broughton Archipelago. We will therefore live aboard Vilisar this winter in Victoria, get some temporary jobs to build up our cruising kitty and hope for more translating projects. In between, we will make short winter cruises to the Gulf Islands, Vancouver, etc.

Looking back, there have certainly been days when we wished we had been elsewhere, when we have been cold and wet and miserable. I recall Kathy going below off watch when we crossed the length of Queen Charlotte Sound at night in 35-knot winds saying, “I am reviewing my life’s plan and I not sure that there is a place for a sailboat in it!” Voyagers live on the financial edge too, it seems. But, we recall, we had days like that in Frankfurt too. Who doesn’t? But withal, we are having a great time. When we decided to take up the sailing life we said we would keep doing it as long as it was fun. Well, it’s still fun.