On Stranger Tides

This is another one of these blogs that I should have written and posted a month ago, but never got around to. To be fair, I wrote it up once but I didn't like it, so this is take two!

I no longer live in Vancouver. I've moved to Richmond.

Let's Tarantino this for a second and go back to January. My roommate whom I've been living with since moving to Van city decided that UBC wasn't doing it for him and he wanted to meet some cute French guys... so he applied for (and was accepted to) an exchange in Paris. I was happy for him, except that now I needed to find a sub-letter. Which I did. He ended up moving out a month or two later, then I found another sub-letter. At this point original roommate told me, "school ends in May, but I want to do some travelling in Europe while I'm here, they can stay until August." I was like "cool", then told this to my second sub-letter. Shortly after she moved in, original roommate decided that he was running out of Euros and he needed to come back sooner.

I was faced with two options, either I could tell second sub-letter, "you're actually going to have to move out next month," or I could find my own place. I've wanted my own place ever since I had a few roommates back in University I didn't see eye to eye with on issues of cleanliness, so I decided that I would pick the "flying solo" option.

I went on padmapper.com (great site if you're looking for a new pad, FYI) and started sending out emails to various landlords. Only one person got back to me, and then a day or two later (after a failed attempt at setting up a viewing) let me know that someone had just rented the place.

Back to square one.

Sort of.

See, when I moved to Vancouver my father suggested that I buy a boat and live on it. Not surprisingly, I found a million reasons not to do that. But the idea was there. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. The more I fell in love with the idea, the more I read about it, and realized that it wasn't as big a deal as one might think originally.

I kept my eyes on craigslist for a few months (starting a while before I knew I needed a place to live) and saw a few interesting options. Then I saw her. Isabella. She was a good size, in good shape, and the asking price was well within my budget. I started emailing the guy selling it, and set up a meeting down in Point Roberts to see it. I read a few articles about what to look for when looking at a boat beforehand, then went over her with a fine toothed comb.

Two days later I made an offer. One week later I owned a boat.

Which was great, but I had almost no idea how to sail! Somewhere in the middle of this I got my "Pleasure Craft Operators Card", but that didn't mean I felt confident motoring, let alone sailing, a 30 foot sailboat around! On top of that, now I had to find a marina to moor it in Canada (if I didn't want to have to get my green card from the USA), and find insurance. As it turns out, moorage in the lower mainland is hard to come by. In the end I only found one marina that didn't have at least a two year waiting list. It turned out to be about 30 seconds from work, but on the downside its an hour or two long motor trip out to the Georgia Strait. It ALSO turns out that insurance companies aren't super keen on insuring 30 foot sailboats to males under 25 with virtually no boating experience.

Two sailing lessons and two weeks later I had it all sorted out, and was ready to move Isabella to our new home. A friend of mine from community group and I parked at my new marina and biked the 30 some kilometers to Point Roberts, tossed our bikes on board (and bungied them down), then set out to sea. 6 hours later we finally stopped in Steveston to clear customs, and a few hours after that, I was tying her up to her new dock.

Epilogue: I'm now at my new marina, have been living aboard for about two and a half weeks, and am looking forward to the next few years living aboard Isabella.