It all started in the 1990s

Before the internet. Riding bikes. Stick fighting in the park. Super Soakers. Ding dong ditch. Mighty mites and Roman candles. Ball tag. We were neighborhood kids, and the city was our playground. Back then, my uncle went in on a small sailboat with some friends of his and took my cousins and I sailing every summer. Being on the water was an awesome experience as a kid, and the adventures we had would stick with me for the rest of my life. It was pure and absolute freedom. I felt like we could go anywhere, with unlimited discoveries awaiting us.

These were fun times, but these were also turbulent times. My home life was becoming less and less stable as I got older. Eventually, my Mom and Dad separated when I was 11. I moved to a much larger school where I had my first experiences of being bullied… I started to rebel. I was staying out late, doing delinquent stuff with friends, sometimes not even going home or even calling. I was avoiding the changes and suppressing my feelings to protect myself.

This continued throughout my youth. I became really good at hiding my pain. I was a jokester and aligned myself with other fun people. We’d fool around in class, sometimes failing and returning to terrorize the teacher for another year. By this time, I was no stranger to drugs and alcohol, although it took a few more years for me to get deeper into them.

I felt like school was a waste, other than having introduced me to my first groups of friends. I left High school disappointed and entered the workforce feeling like I had no skills that I could use. I bounced from shitty job to shitty job. Retail. Labour. Painting houses… They all sucked, and I never felt I had any purpose or fulfillment. I was fortunate enough to land an interview at a very famous luxury hotel. I didn’t even understand the job I was applying for, but I knew it was an opportunity that I couldn’t let slip away. After four interviews, I got the job. It was great at first, but the service industry is intense. Work hard, play harder… I fell deeper into more routine substance use, but somehow I maintained, barely. Graveyard shift? Cocaine. Need to sleep? Drink until you pass out. Rough morning? Whiskey in your coffee… On weekends it was back-to-back days of parties. It didn’t matter what the substance was. You got it? I want it.

I kept this up for 20 years… But these things progress, and as I got older, it was harder to recover. I isolated at home, fooling myself into thinking I was more in control there, but it only made things worse. The missed opportunities stacked up. My hope for my potential to succeed dwindled. My depression grew. I was caught in a bad cycle, and I could see the trajectory I was on. It was going to end in disaster. I had to change.

There was one thing that kept me motivated to change during this past decade, something I could never give up. Sailing. It was in my mid-30s when my uncle decided to get back into it by partnering with someone who owned a sailboat. He had a new generation of kids in the family to take on adventures (he was always the most fun guy in the family), including his own now. I was thrilled. That summer, I immersed myself in sailing, quickly learning how to handle the boat on my own, and by the fall I was determined to buy something. My good friend and I had been sailing together all summer, and we'd meet at the bar after a hard week to hang out and chat about getting a boat. We'd look at listings all the time, but we didn't find anything for another 6 months, until one day in the early spring. Her name was Corina, a clean, cute, well-designed little US25 sailboat, and the price was right, plus she came with moorage, which was worth it alone. I called the owner to meet the next day, cash in hand, and she was ours.

We sailed on Corina for 7 years, learning the lines, fixing and upgrading, and traveling to many of the islands in and around the Sailish Sea. It was awesome, but eventually we wanted something bigger, something that we would be content with for at least a decade. I wanted to sail further, to places like Haida Gwaii, Alaska, Mexico, and maybe even Japan. Finally, we found the perfect boat. She had a sporty steel hull and a bright, well-equipped open cabin with standing headroom. Her sails were also easy to operate, and best of all, she was one of a kind, designed and built right here in Vancouver.

After I returned to work in 2021, I had to transfer to another department, and I was becoming increasingly fed up with the deteriorating conditions. I knew that I wanted to become an entrepreneur and incorporate sailing into my business somehow. I had also begun my recovery journey around that time, and I wanted to be of service to others, using my hospitality experience to those who need it the most. I was referred to an entrepreneurship course by a counselor of mine, and I jumped at the chance. It was a 10-week program created by an organization called Employ to Empower, a women-led charity, aiming to help anyone struggling with barriers to follow their dreams and turn their passions into a business of their own.

It was in this program that I developed the concept for the East Van Yacht Club. I knew that I could make a difference, satisfy my creativity, and be on the water all the time if I just went for it!