Home. I’ve got mixed feelings about being ‘home’. Home being our house. I came to believe that the boat was home. A moving home with a different back yard every day, but home none the less.

My friends are all asking what the trip was like. It was exciting, boring, fun, frustrating, challenging, relaxing, enlightening, fulfilling and exhilarating (but not all at the same time). Oh, I forgot one; expensive!

Groceries were our biggest expense. We found prices comparable to the US in Vancouver and Campbell River. All other places were probably 20% higher that what I am used to paying. Stores in remote areas had prices more than twice what I am used to paying. I paid $7.00 for a pound of butter more than once. Fuel was higher than in the US too.

I was amazed by the remoteness of the west coast of Vancouver Island. Even the north coast is sparsely populated. More than once we went for 3 days without seeing evidence of other humans. Although I am not the most social person in the world, I like to know that others at least exist! For several weeks we didn’t even have FM radio.

I was surprised how my body reacted to the motion of the Pacific. I didn’t mind the swell even when the waves were 11 feet high and 10 seconds apart. It was the weird movement in the troughs that we occasionally encountered that got me sick. We made a mistake of heading out on a stormy day and had to endure 5 hours of 9 foot swells, pouring rain, 30 knot winds on our nose and heavy chop. Not fun.

I was dissapointed by the weather. We had weeks on end of rain. Not periods of rain. Rain all day long, day after day after day. We ended the trip with 6 weeks of sun and there were smiles all around.

We’ll do some things differently on the next voyage. We will get satellite radio and install speakers in the cockpit. We want to install a washer/dryer (keeping my fingers crossed on that one). I was frustrated by a lack of laundry facilities at the beginning of the trip. By the time the end of the season approached I had the laundry ordeal under control. We want to install an instant hot water heater. We currently have a 12 gallon hot water heater. It takes forever to heat up. I need to learn how to feed us while we are out in the weather and the swells. When I’m not feeling good and the boat is moving all over, I don’t like to go below to make food and get water. We got too hungry and probably a little dehydrated because I didn’t have grab and go food available. Our last passage was more than 90 miles and was at night. By then I had learned a little about making easy to grab and eat food available but I think that I can do a better job next season.

We didn’t use our crab pot very much. Prawning was more fun but by the time you buy a trap and get a license, it is cheaper to buy directly from a commercial fisherman.

Overall we really enjoyed the trip. We found a few great hiking trails, one that really kicked my ass. We really like being out on the trails, getting our muscles stretched out. We met some awesome people and hopefully have made some lifelong friends.

The biggest challenges were making repairs on the go (Ken was my hero more than once on the trip), dealing without when needed, learning to cook when all the ingredients needed to make dinner weren’t readily available, and keeping the cats occupied to prevent boredom.