I sail a Bavaria 40 along the BC coast, kayak the inlets, and hike and cycle whatever’s within reach of the water. Some of it goes to plan. A lot of it doesn’t. This is where I write about the real version of an outdoor life in your fifties and beyond. From the cold mornings, the questionable decisions, the fog that refuses to lift, and the reasons I keep going back out anyway.
None of this is new to me. I grew up boating with my parents, I learned to sail at twelve, and even guided kayaks twenty-ish years ago. I’ve been on a bike my whole life, mountain biking since back when the sport barely had a name, and I spent my twenties and thirties hiking and skiing between all of it. The boat is the recent part, which felt less like a reinvention and more like finally owning the thing I always wanted.
So the stories here are the unpolished ones from someone who has actually been out there a while: the day I went in the water off the boat in February, the trips where the weather won, the slow business of learning to read a sailboat when you already know the coast by kayak and keel. My trail dog Fergus features more than he strictly needs to.
Alongside the writing there’s photography, because you cannot spend this much time outside in this kind of light and not point a camera at it. The coast here does something to fog and grey and early morning that I have never managed to capture anywhere else, and after a while it seemed a waste to keep it all on a hard drive.
That’s where Uncharted Prints comes in. It’s a small, carefully made collection of Pacific Northwest coastal wall art drawn from these trips: the inlets, the working harbours, the moody water, and forest trails this part of the world does better than anywhere. If a particular image stops you, it’s very likely available as a print, ready to put the same quiet on your own wall.
Honest stories from the deck and the trail, photography from the places they happened, and a few practical guides for anyone eyeing the water themselves.