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2008 bavaria 40 cruiser.

CAD $169,000

Length: 40.42 ft

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CAD $320,000

Length: 36.3 ft

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CAD $375,000

Length: 68.31 ft

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CAD $224,900

Length: 42 ft

Style: Center Cockpit

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CAD $240,000

1972 Hatteras 61 Yacht Fisherman

CAD $299,000

Length: 61 ft

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Welcome to Fraser Yacht Sales Ltd ., your premier destination for all things boating in British Columbia. With two conveniently located showrooms, we cater to your needs in Vancouver on Granville Island and on Vancouver Island in the picturesque Canoe Cove Marina, near Sidney.

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Sailing British Columbia: Remote North with Ellen Massey Leonard

Exploring the remote north of British Columbia by yacht and classic seaplane was a childhood dream come true for bluewater sailor, aircraft pilot, photographer, and author Ellen Massey Leonard.

Flying & sailing british columbia: the remote north.

I caught the sailing bug as a little kid, only about six years old, on a small island in British Columbia. It wasn’t long before I was daydreaming of sailing farther afield than my tiny dinghy could take me. I’m not sure why my childhood mind got fixated on the North Coast, right up by the Alaska border, and in particularly the Haida Gwaii islands, a misty archipelago sticking out into the North Pacific. But somehow it did. Maybe it was the chart of the British Columbia coast on the wall in my parents’ house. Or maybe it was the Native Haida artist who was one of my parents’ closest friends. One of his woodblock prints hung over the fireplace in our house: a stylized raven that held your gaze with the tension in its form and lines. And whenever we visited his house, I was caught – even as a six-year-old – by the palpable spirit of his art, all around us. There were cedar bentwood boxes, masks on the walls, drawings, carvings: all of it imbued with the history, feeling, and spirit of his culture. I remember his house having a sort of hush inside, that the art inhabiting the place required respect and even reverence from anyone who crossed the threshold.

However it was, I was captivated by the islands of the North Coast. In my imagination they were cold, and swept with wind and rain, heavily forested and moss-covered, and imbued with that same hushed reverence with which I instinctively approached the art of my parents’ friend. I saw the islands themselves as a truly wild wilderness, where bears and wolverines reigned in the steep hills and where beautifully carved Haida totem poles and the people who created them reigned along the shore. Of course the true history of the Haida First Nations people is also one of tragedy, of the near loss of their oral history, dances, societal structure, art and customs, from colonization, disease, religious conversion, forced separation of children from their families, and all the terrible things that have sadly followed the Western explorers all over the world. In some ways, however, these tragedies make the islands and their people even more impressive: the fact that they have held onto their culture, revived it and passed it onto their children and grandchildren, is evidence of truly awe-inspiring resilience and fortitude.

However shallow or deep my understanding of this region was as a child, the place captivated me and I wanted nothing more than to sail there aboard a small boat, anchor in a lonely bay, and take in the majesty of the place. I first got the opportunity to do so about ten years ago when I sailed north to Alaska from Washington State. However, I had a faraway goal on that trip – to reach the Aleutian Islands – and I was moving fast and covering a lot of distance. So when a friend invited me on a slow mosey of the North Coast this year, of course I said yes.

I met up with the steel pilothouse cutter in Daajing Giids (formerly Queen Charlotte Village) in Haida Gwaii, at the end of March, hardly an ideal time to cruise such a northern archipelago. Then again, maybe it was ideal? Maybe the cold, wintry conditions would add to the mystical hold this region already had on me. Instead of warm sunshine glowing on ripening blackberry bushes, I could expect leaden skies, whitecapped seas, leafless alder groves, snow on the mountaintops, and wind-driven sleet. While this is fairly well the opposite of what all of us actually prefer – especially for a sailing voyage – there was no denying that the moody, harsh weather would add to that sense of a hushed, little-known land on which a hardy group of humans had withstood the fury of North Pacific storms year after year, generation after generation.

No longer a dreamy child, but now an adult with much better understanding, I wondered as I prepared for the trip how my own art – as a photographer and writer – could ever come close to distilling the essence of a place like the Haida Gwaii archipelago and the surrounding coast. The First Nations art does it perfectly, to my mind: the lines, colors, and the spirit and history infusing that art, conveys the place and its people in way nothing else can. My art is, of course, completely different. It’s an outsider’s perspective; I focus primarily on nature photography; and it’s realist art rather than a figurative or abstract rendition of story, spirit, and culture. So I packed my cameras with a plan to focus on my own experience, conveying what I saw through my own lens, literal and figurative.

Sailing British Columbia: Setting Off from Daajing Giids

I arrived on a relatively calm day, with drifting clouds and a little bit of pale sunshine; the sail from the bay next to the airport across to the town of Daajing Giids was a pleasant, if cold, waft downwind. Nothing storm-tossed; in fact, it was just the sort of hushed, calm but wild, beauty I had had in mind for so long. The village itself was still hunkered down for the winter, with only a hint of buds on the salmonberry bushes and a few bursts of forsythia and daffodils to relieve the gray-green palate of land, sea, and sky. When the sun came out, it still had that cold – even harsh – light that the winter sun does, casting sharp shadows from the treeless branches. I knew that capturing the fickle winter beauty with my camera would be a challenge.

I began with a steep hike up a mountain behind Daajing Giids, called Sleeping Beauty, as the ridgeline looks a bit like a face in profile, lying on its back looking up at the sky. The trail up was a tangle of roots, brush, moss, and mud, giving way to snow as I climbed. The last pitch was a steep face, mostly covered in snow, and then I was atop a knife-edge ridge coated in slippery, granular spring snow. The mountains beyond were all thick with snow, the trees still bowed under its weight. Drifting clouds came and went, one moment obscuring everything except the snow at my feet, and then clearing in bits and pieces to reveal lakes, forests, and a far-off inlet of the sea. When the sun shone down onto the cloud at just the right angle, it painted a rainbow on the mist in a wide stroke. Looking out over the misty forests, I felt that yes, I had arrived in the quiet wilderness I had envisioned as a child.

The true wilderness of Haida Gwaii, however, is on the wind- and wave-swept west coast, exposed to the swell and wind of the entire North Pacific. A narrow passage, tearing with fast tidal current, cuts between the north and south islands of the archipelago and leads to the rocky lee shore of the west coast. Heading west, the currents are more favorable, meeting in the middle so that the flood takes you up and the ebb lets you down the other side.

We left Daajing Giids under just the sort of leaden skies and down-jacket weather I’d been expecting; there was little wind and so we motored through the passage on the correct tides. Coming out into the open sea, we hoisted sail in washing machine seas. The ocean swell was hitting the rocks and cliffs and bouncing back to create much steeper waves than the wind warranted. I felt a bit nauseated after several months away from sailing, but fortunately the bouncy conditions were soon alleviated as we turned into a spectacular inlet on Moresby Island. Seemingly sheer cliffs dropped into the sea, forming an entrance narrow enough to prevent the swell from entering. A shallow bar runs across the inlet partway in, and we found we had to wait for the tide to rise a little more before we would be able to cross it and gain the full protection of this magnificent, deserted bay.

Looking around, I noticed a shelving shingle beach on the north side of the inlet. A small area of level ground lay behind the grey shore, the only flat bit of land beyond the high tide line. It was the site of an ancient Haida village, long since gone. There may have been a few shell middens hidden deep under the thick moss, but otherwise there was no visible evidence that anyone had ever lived there. Yet, as is so often the case with places like this – my home state of Hawai’i is filled with them – you simply knew that people had indeed lived there; it had a settled tranquility to it – and also a sort of empty silence – that the wilderness surrounding it did not.

Going ashore, I tried to capture that sense of silent stillness – almost sadness – in a photograph. Strangely, however, I couldn’t capture it at the village site, but I could in different ways. There were all the different variations of moss – from pale green feathers draped over tree branches to the velvety green carpet underfoot  – that conveyed that sense of hush I felt everywhere. There were the immense driftwood logs washed onto the tidal mudflats at the head of the inlet, whose fantastic shapes, coupled with the sheer faces of the cliffs, conveyed the wild grandeur of the setting. And the tiny shape of the cutter, anchored before the endless forests carpeting the hills, gave a sense of the fragile toehold humans have on this harsh and yet rich and abundant coast.

After a few days sheltered against the southeasterly gale blowing outside, it was time to return through the Narrows between Graham and Moresby Islands and head across Hecate Strait for the Prince Rupert area. We took our time in the Narrows, waiting for the right tides and poking about on shore with the oystercatchers and deer. The skies had cleared, though it was still cold, and the water in the narrows was glassy calm, reflecting the forested hills, snowy summits, and the lavender colors of the sunset. Together with the cloud wisps floating below the mountaintops, the sunset light on sea and sky made for one of the best opportunities to photograph the exquisite stillness of the Haida Gwaii wilderness.

We crossed Hecate Strait at night in a short-lived southeasterly blow, so that we could sail with a following wind. It was blustery, cold, and choppy, but it was preferable to motoring into a headwind. We reached an anchorage near Prince Rupert at the height of the spring tides. Watching the water flow out and leave behind the immense structures of the piers gave me yet another perspective on the ruggedness of the environment, but one that also highlighted the rich marine life in these current-filled, cold seas, from oysters to salmon to the kingfishers and eagles.

I witnessed the spectacular life of the North Coast a few days later when we departed Prince Rupert for Alaska. Motoring out of a twisting channel to the north of the town, we came upon an enormous raft of thousands of black specks, covering a large stretch of water beyond one of the navigation markers. For a brief moment, we wondered what it could be – until it took flight. The raft was a huge flock of scoter ducks, black with striking red and orange bills and red feet. They would hurry along the surface of the water to take to the sky, each one comical in its takeoff run, but together appearing like a giant cloud. From behind my camera lens, the flock rising into the air echoed the mountains behind, and the monochrome blue-gray-silver of the sky, sea, birds, and the distant land perfectly captured the raw winter day, just starting to show hints of spring.

So far, I had focused my photography on the wintry wildness of the landscape, but when we came to Ketchikan, Alaska, I changed that. Ketchikan is today the fifth largest town in Alaska, whose main industry is tourism. It’s been the port of entry for vessels entering Alaska from the south since the town’s incorporation in 1900. It has been variously a fishing and cannery town, a mining town, and a lumber town. The Tlingit people were the original inhabitants of the area, fishing the creek that now runs through town for generations. The town that has grown up since Westerners first arrived in the mid-19 th century, however, is what dominates today. So rather than shooting landscapes and wildlife, capturing views of the town – especially in its pre-tourism winter garb – became my focus for my photographs. I wanted to show the working side of Ketchikan, rather than the tourist-centric waterfront promenade; I wanted to show the old trucks, potholed streets, and the salmon trollers tied up in the city boat basin. It seemed to round out my landscape shots from Haida Gwaii, showing both sides of this North Coast region.

Talking to the Sky

But, of course, Alaska’s magnificent scenery has a way of intervening. When I was offered the opportunity to fly a DeHavilland Beaver seaplane , of course I jumped at it.

The seaplanes in Ketchikan run full-out all summer, taking cruise ship passengers on scenic tours of the magnificent Misty Fjords, a wilderness of lakes, cliffs, fjords, waterfalls, forests, and mountain peaks. Floatplanes are by far the best access for this area, as they can set down on inaccessible mountain lakes and at the heads of fjords alike. This time of year, however, pilot Michelle was engaged in wildlife survey flights, tracking the herring spawning events: where they were occurring and when. They were very early this year, on account of sea temperatures 3 degrees (Fahrenheit) warmer than normal. For me, hitching along on a survey flight was quite a bit more interesting than taking a tour; the scientific work interested me and, of course, the flying really did. Except for the takeoffs and landings (I’m only rated in land planes), I was privileged to fly this beautifully restored DeHavilland, with its roaring radial engine, on the legs to and from Ketchikan to pick up the biologists who would be conducting the survey. On the actual survey, I retired to the back while the lead biologist took the copilot’s seat. And that gave me the freedom to photograph the stunning beauty that is Southeast Alaska from arguably an even better vantage than from the deck of a boat. I wondered, after taxiing back to the dock in Ketchikan, whether the next time I returned to Alaska it would be to sail or to fly.

Retiring to the boat that evening, however, and stoking the little woodstove against the nipping frost in the air, listening to the water lap along the hull, I remembered that yes, boats are pure magic. Especially in places like this.

Show Me More:

• How D-Day Actually Worked: Operation Details 80 Years Later
• ‘True’ Vs Technology: Adrian Morgan on Sailing Gadgets
• Dave Selby’s Confession: Secret Blackwater Sloop

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