Rain spat on our boat. Again. Six weeks into our two-month expedition up the coast of British Columbia, we were used to weather like this. It was an especially rainy summer along the Inside Passage, but I didn’t mind it at all.
Since moving from Washington state to Los Angeles, I yearned for gloomy days. Aboard By All Means, a North Pacific 28, rainy days meant piling our stuff in the V-berth and sitting around the convertible queen berth in the galley with pillows and comforters. We would play card games and dominoes and read aloud from local books that we found at odd little dockside libraries that dot the coast.
Our crew—Uhane Johnson, Annie Means, Emery Hansell and I—took advantage of our few sunny days by exploring the land around us by foot or electric-powered dinghy. In Walsh Cove, we hauled a breakfast picnic up to a green ledge on the cliff where we were stern-tied to play cribbage and eat potato. Now, more than halfway through our journey, I felt like I was finally embracing life on a schedule dictated by nature rather than by days or hours.
