“…all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by”

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

Over the weekend, it was the Pender Harbour Wooden Boat Festival. There are events for a couple of days but the best things (in my opinion…) are the boats themselves, all classics, most of them beautifully restored. The former B.C. Forest Service boats are just splendid. You can see the White Spruce behind my Ottawa family. These vessels were used to patrol and police logging operations from 1913 onwards. The little boys loved walking the dock and asking permission to board selective boats. I loved imagining another life, in which I lived on one and gunkholed up and down the coast at leisure, putting out a crabpot to catch dinner, trailing a line for salmon. (Luckily we had sockeye salmon at home yesterday so came back to fish tacos even though I don’t have a boat…or at least not a wooden boat with skylights and nautical flags.) There were old NFB films showing in the Music School, vintage moments in coastal history, including a sweet one about the school boats taking kids from remote communities to tiny schools. Pender Harbour had a school boat in the old days.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

There were plenty of gulls. Plenty of guys talking about hulls, selling marine gear from tables in the parking lot, and a young man was singing old Gordon Lightfoot songs to a small audience which included us, briefly. Every year I buy a raffle ticket for the cedar strip canoe made by the boat-building class and every year I don’t win it. I loved the Western Yew, built for the Forest Service in 1946 and owned for a time by former Prime Minister Kim Campbell. And I loved the Gaia, built in Sweden in 1921, and used to smuggle refugees from Denmark to the Shetland Islands during WW11. After we’d come up the ramp from the dock, the little boys were still looking at boats.

I was too. An easy day for dreaming in salt-scented air, the gulls wheeling overhead, and the creak of ropes, the rumble of old engines.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

Note: the poem is John Masefield’s “Sea-Fever”