Anchored in False Creek, the sailboat
Western Vision is sleek and white, gently turning her bow back and forth to face the wind. The sails are neatly stowed away under tarps and the mast serves as the occasional perch for the Creek's birds. The only hints the boat is not used just for weekend getaways are the solar panels leaning against the deck, and the dinghy bobbing at the stern. For owner Barry, the Western Vision is not just a sailboat on the water. It's his home. He is not alone. Barry is surrounded by other anchored vessels, including yachts and powerboats, houseboats and converted fishing boats. Some, like Barry's, are well maintained and would not look out of place in a regatta or yacht club. Others show their age or could use a fresh coat of paint, and a few are little more than floating wrecks. But on a sunny winter day, each boat looks bright and alive as it moves with the gentle waves.
The waters of False Creek are the quiet heart of Vancouver's liveaboard community, where a small but diverse group of people has given up on land-bound life. Some seek a freer lifestyle, others are escaping the city's escalating cost of living. They endure cramped spaces, waiting lists for legal marina spaces and bureaucratic hassles for those who simply drop anchor in the harbour. They put up with endless chores-hauling water, dumping sewage, to keep their ships in the same spot, and are often disliked by their landed neighbours.
But the silence that Barry talks about, and the community that has grown up around the liveaboard lifestyle, has drawn her and other liveaboard boaters to the water around Vancouver. They wouldn't have it any other way. Living on boats has a long tradition in Vancouver, going back to the settlement of the city by Europeans in the late 1800s. Sailors and ships' officers lived on the water when they brought men to the rough settlement, then called Granville. Even as the loggers began to fell the trees, the dense brush took so much effort to clear that many settlers took another route.
"It was easier to actually build a float house and live on the waterfront," says James Delgado, executive director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum. "It's been a long-standing tradition."
The Great Depression forced another wave of people onto the water. The Vancouver Yacht Club, founded in 1903, was a collection of working class and professional people who loved sailing and their boats proved to be a refuge.
"Some of those folks lost their homes and ended up living in their boats quietly in the '30s," says Delgado. Most people who lived on the water did so on Burrard Inlet or the Fraser River. No one would have considered living on False Creek after it became the city's polluted industrial waterfront in the 1890s. According to Delgado, False Creek became known as "Shit Creek." The city started moving industry out of the downtown core in the late 1960s with a series of rezonings. Pollution was reduced and fecal coliform counts have been slowly dropping for decades. Granville Island was redeveloped in the 1970s, and much of the Creek's south shore was slowly turned into condo developments. As marinas and recreational docks sprouted along the waterfront, people turned again to living on the waves.
More than 60 boats were anchored in the Creek, and hundreds more line the shores in marinas. Costs for the lifestyle range wildly. A small used sailboat under 18 feet long can cost as little as $5,000, with a fixer-upper of over 25 feet starting at about $7,500. For more luxurious accommodations, prices start closer to $100,000. A typical yacht of 44 feet will cost at least $200,000 depending on its amenities. Barry is somewhere in the middle of the boating pack. He was looking for an apartment when she came across a boat for sale and reconsidered her options.
After crunching numbers, he realized living on a boat would be much less expensive than living on land.
But in exchange for cheaper housing costs, his cramped quarters forced him to cut back on her personal possessions. It wasn't hard to do.
"I've never been a pack rat," he says. The enclosed quarters of the converted Italian racing boat don't bother him.
"Even though they're small spaces, it's like you have a lot more space than if you had an apartment with people above and below you."
The cost of living on land in Vancouver is an important consideration for many liveaboards, such as Susan Roch. She started spending time on the water when she became romantically involved with someone who lived on a boat.
"I had no idea before that that people even lived in the Creek," Barry says.
When his partner sailed south more than two years ago, he missed the lifestyle. With help from her friends in the liveaboard community, he found and bought a Polish lifeboat. It had already been converted to a living space, and is as comfortable as a cabin, she says. Barry put down her anchor in Charleson Bay, east of Granville Island and lives there with her nine-year-old dog. He rows to work at a gardening store on Granville Island.
"I couldn't afford to rent a place and live by myself in Vancouver," Barry says.
While housing is cheap, full-time liveaboards who anchor along the shore of False Creek find getting to and from home can be a chore.
Rowing isn't easy. Rain, cold weather and strong winds can trap liveaboards in the boats for a few days, unless they can get help from someone with a motor launch. Gusts of up to 25 or 30 knots come up the creek from Georgia Strait. Electricity is limited. Barry relies on solar panels or a diesel generator to recharge their boats' batteries. He has given up on a television because it drains too much power, but Barry has a small set that gets five channels. On some days the Western Vision is turned one way and then the other by the wind, and Barry must keep moving the panels to the south-facing side of the boat to keep them in sunlight.
Potable water is a more difficult problem than power. Every drop used on board a boat has to be brought out in a rowboat or motor launch. Barry uses a 100 gallon tank, and can make it last between four and five months.
"You're very, very careful with water. You don't waste water because you have to carry it," he says.
Every kind of waste becomes more of a problem on a boat. Garbage has to be rowed to shore and thrown away in public trash bins. Barry makes a point of not throwing away her trash in Charleson Park's bins, which could quickly overflow if all the Charleson Bay liveaboards used them.
"The biggest hassle is doing your laundry," he adds. Barry keeps a small artist's studio downtown and does her laundry there. Other boaters rely on coin laundries or the kindness of land dwelling friends. Along with boat maintenance, domestic chores take up one full day of every weekend for most liveaboards.
"I have to work a lot harder for my lifestyle than living in an apartment," Barry says.
In the winter, the work has to be done on weekends because there isn't enough daylight to do much maintenance and clean up after work. Liveaboards give up the luxury of daily newspaper delivery, and most boaters must get a post office box to pick up mail. Forget about deliveries.
"I thought about ordering a pizza once, but I didn't," Barry says.
Although her drivers licence reads "liveaboard, False Creek," he ran into a problem recently when she had to renew her passport. The federal government's new policy of delivering all passports by courier didn't allow for someone living on a boat. It took Parker days to sort out the bureaucratic muddle. Barry has simply anchored his boat, but there are other ways of living on the water full time.
A number of marinas have spaces for city-recognized liveaboards, and there are even more "sneakaboards," people who quietly live on boats not registered as full-time dwellings. George's boat has a bath tub and shower, and enough room for a pet cat. She has been living on the boat since she was a kitten and has sea legs just like her owners.
"She actually doesn't know anything else," says Barry.
The marina has drawn other animals. A heron lives there semi-permanently, river otters spend time scampering around on the docks, and eagles sometimes perch on masts while looking for fish. The co-op even has a two-story floating building that doubles as an office and common room for parties or entertaining guests. Although he gave up one car before moving onboard, George still has one in the co-op's underground lot. With the extra amenities come extra expenses. The cost of living at the co-op or another legal liveaboard marina is about the same as living in a condo in the downtown, Barry said. Joining the co-op required the purchase of a membership, along with a small monthly fee.
George lives on one of the 55 liveaboard berths at the Greater Vancouver Floating Home Co-Op, just west of Charleson Bay. The retired couple had talked in the early 1970s about buying a boat and sailing to Australia.
"I used to walk by and see the boats and say, 'Ah, someday,'" George says.
While they've given up on crossing the Pacific, they have committed to living on the water until they are too old to manage their boat.
To prepare for their change of lifestyle, they took navigation and boating courses and spent vacations on chartered and rented sailboats. Like Barry, they have given up many personal items. Most of their furniture, kitchenware and books are in storage.
"What I'm missing is, I had a woodworking shop in the basement," George says.
But the small living space has advantages.
"It takes me 10 minutes to vacuum the whole boat and clean everything."
Every boat owner feels the pinch of the small living space, and some frequently upgrade to larger crafts. George's lifestyle is closer to a land-based condo dweller's than those of the offshore liveaboards. The co-op has a gated entry with a keypad intercom system just like an apartment building. Getting onto land is a simple matter of stepping onto the dock and walking.
Monthly charges based on the size of the boat vary widely-city marinas charge $10 per foot per month for boats in 21-foot slips and $11.37 per foot for boats in 26-foot slips. At the Coal Harbour Marina, rates start at $9.78 per foot for the smallest 30-foot slips and rise to $15.37 for boats in 100 foot slips. Costs can top $18,000 a year for a 100-foot slip, and that doesn't include cable television, electricity and recycling fees. But the greatest barrier to marina life is the waiting lists. To get into the average local marina's liveaboard slips there is a wait of between three and five years. The Floating Home Co-op has 50 people on its wait list, and they can expect to stay there for between five and eight years.
Paying taxes separates legal liveaboards from the offshore boaters in the minds of many land dwellers. But the lifestyle binds the two groups together. Both the marina-based liveaboards and their offshore cousins spend many weekends and vacations sailing up and down the West Coast.
People who live on the water develop a deep camaraderie. They help each other out and police their community for thieves or vandals. When they meet each other sailing outside of Vancouver, small parties break out with people lashing their boats together at anchor. The strength of the community is a common theme when the liveaboards talk about their chosen homes.
The offshore liveaboards are often called
watersquatters. "We're not squatters," Barry says, pointing out that legally anyone can anchor a vessel in publicly owned waters. The same laws apply to False Creek that apply to any inlet on Vancouver Island or the coast. He has been the target of hostility by people who live along the False Creek shore.
"People point their fingers right in our face and say, 'We're going to get rid of you,'" she says. He has also seen passersby stop to throw rocks at the liveaboard's dinghies tied up at the public dock she uses.
Barry plans to leave False Creek soon to circumnavigate the Pacific in the Western Vision. After a year and a half of sailing, swimming and working on her suntan, she won't tie up in the waterway again. People who live aboard are seen as shirking their responsibilities because they don't conform.
"I don't want to come back to the Creek because of the attitude," he says. He doesn't feel she is hurting the community by not paying property taxes.
"The city doesn't really provide me with any services either," she says.
If the city put in mooring balls to keep the boats in place or offered garbage pick-up near the shore, she would gladly pay fees or taxes.
"I work here, I shop here, I support the community," he says.
People on land or with boats in legal marinas often complain about the way some of the boats anchored in the Creek drag their anchors during high winds. Some boats have drifted into marinas and damaged docks or other craft. Other boats drift into the shipping lane that runs down the centre of the Creek and block barges and tugs.
A handful of boats sink on a semi-regular basis, dumping fuel and oil into the water. But liveaboards aren't responsible for the sinkings, Parker and Roch argue. About two thirds of the boats anchored in the Creek have simply been left there by people who don't want to pay moorage fees. No one lives on them, and a few have been abandoned and are derelict.
If the Coast Guard cleaned out the abandoned and unseaworthy boats, most of the problems with loose and sinking boats would vanish, Barry believes.
A more serious problem in many people's minds is the way some liveaboards dump their sewage directly into the Creek.
"I think that's a huge issue," says Patrick Couling, president of the False Creek Community Association. A recreational boater, Couling is one of many locals who wants the liveaboards gone.
"I am not in favour of them being there," he says. "Some of those boats out there are a definite danger." They also block the routes of dragon boat crews and rowing shells that practice on the Creek.
The city has wanted to move the liveaboards for years because of the complaints, but only the federal and provincial governments had authority over the Creek. In 1986 the old Vancouver Port Corporation ordered all liveaboards anchored offshore out of the Creek and then towed those who didn't obey before Expo 86. The city will soon have similar legal rights. The federal government is expected by May to give the city the power to limit stays in False Creek. Anchoring will be limited to two weeks out of every month for most of the year, effectively ending permanent occupancy.
"I think it will be a shame for the city," Barry says. He says she will stay on the water, and move to a different area. She can't afford the moorage fees to become a legal liveaboard boater, and the waiting lists are too long to find a place quickly even if he could.
More marina spaces are being developed, but there are only a few spaces available every year at marinas like the Greater Vancouver Floating Home Co-op. But despite all the problems and the lack of amenities, Roch hopes more people will eventually take to the water. The sense of peace, community and the need to conserve are valuable lessons for modern city dwellers. "I think that everybody in this city should spend a year out on a boat."
