Playing With Boats

Still life with plastic catamaran.

I’ve set you up for a big answer, asking a question like that. I hope it’s not a letdown, but I might take the “Hillary Option” (Sir Edmund, not the one who’s married to Bill) and answer my question by saying, “Because they’re there.” This statement of Hillary’s about Everest is almost too good to be true, and perhaps he never said it, but it will do for me, because really, I just like boats. Always have. Probably always will. Because they’re there.

Not sure where it comes from, this boat thing. There’s no history of seafaring in my family, no boatbuilders, no admirals, no captains in the China trade. We’re inland Germans on my father’s side, the Volga Deutsche, moving back and forth between Germany and Russia as politics dictated. Well, ok, the Volga is a river, and there are boats on rivers. And on my mother’s side, there are Swedes, who have done a bit of boating in their time, and may have known a few Vikings. But these are faint and distant influences. My parents were ardent canoeists, but for them a canoe trip was as much about the journey, and what might be around the next  bend, and spending time out doors, as it was about how you got there. Me, I don’t care so much about where I’m going in a boat as I do about just being in the boat, and I’m frankly as interested in how the boat was made as I am in where it’s going.

All I know is that I’ve always liked boats. As a child growing up on the West Coast in Vancouver, we often went to Horseshoe Bay for a picnic. Over in West Vancouver, it’s a busy harbour where you catch the ferries to Vancouver Island. After lunch, the family would head to playground, all five kids, where there were the usual assortment of swings and other apparatus. I might have swung once or twice, but soon it was down to the docks for me, walking up and down and looking at the hundreds of fish boats and pleasure boats in the harbour. My parents always knew where to look for me when it was time to go home.

So, this blog will be about boats: boats I like, boats I don’t like. Boats I’ve built, boats I’d like to build. Books about boats, and pictures of boats, and more or less random thoughts about boats. I hope I’ll fall into conversation with some of you out there who, whatever your age, experience and station in life, are still playing with boats.