Jasper & Karen's Page

Jasper and I lived aboard Viajador (1956, Hull #33) from the time we bought her in 2006 until the summer of 2023, when we became landlubbers once again. We kept the boat, thinking we'd still be supporting beach cleanups each summer on northern Vancouver Island, but Jasper's macular degeneration has progressed to the point where docking has become fraught with peril and he is anxious about spotting nav markers, too.  Time to call it quits.

The good news is that we managed to keep her…

Spring 2020 and we're still working on fibreglass...what a terrible correspondent I've been!  Here's what's happened since last I updated you all.

We replaced all the fibreglass on the cabin, deckhouse and most of the decks--some of it was still intact, at least!  In the process, we had to replace a few sections of the deck, a bit of Cleopatra's couch and some of the gunwales that had just rotted right out.  Elsewhere, liberal use was made of products like Rot-Fix, ScuptWood and…

Hello, all--

We're long overdue for an update here.  We hauled Viajador in October, 2014 to deal with some extensive cracking of the fibreglass on the decks and cabin top, as well as some rusty fasteners that were bleeding through the hull.  Thirteen months later, we splashed back into Howe Sound (BC, CA) with a very sound hull, a brand new cabin top and not much else done!  We're currently hunkering under an inelegant but reasonably effective tarp tent, which the 70 kph winds last…

We're kitting up right now to take off on a 4-6 week venture, end of this month.  Our first destination is the north end of Vancouver Island:  a lovely large cove named "Sea Otter" which has the bad luck to be on the receiving end of all the debris being washed up the outer coast of Vancouver Island.  There, we'll spend a couple of weeks with a team of volunteers collecting and sorting the debris, much of it from the Japanese tsunami, for recycling or landfill.  Toward the end of that time,…

For those of you who haven't ventured into northern British Columbia waters as yet...come soon, while the whales are still visiting!  There is no experience that quite compares with sailing through the spectacular archiplelagos of our inside passage and finding massive marine mammals rising beside your boat for a breath of air!

The downside of the inside passage is that there are two wind directions and they're always against you.  You've got to be prepared for a lot of motoring if…