Family summer evening ride and tour of Victoria's Fisherman's Wharf Floathome community

 

     The family that motos together, stays together. 

We have had some stellar summer weather and I stare out the window from my air conditioned office and wish I was sitting on my bike soaking up summer and waiting for the day to be done so we can venture forth and enjoy two wheeled family time. These are the days that  the clock ticks by slowly and time seems to stand still, how come on rainy days time seems to speed up?

My gear hangs patiently waiting for me and I stare at it all day thinking 3-2-1 BLAST-OFF!!! It's a great conversation piece at work. I have wondered if I could get my bike up to my office and sit on that instead of my steno chair - now that would be a conversation starter!  (only kidding).   When people ask me if the gear belongs to me and what I ride, I usually see a look of surprise and even a look of shock come across their faces after I say,  "Yes and a Honda Shadow" Most people say, "Wow, that's cool" or "Good for you."   Then they ask me how long I've been riding and I say almost four years and that I was a late bloomer.   It's weird because they seem genuinely shocked and I see it as just an ordinary thing that lots of women do. It's not like I am a trail blazer or suffragette - those were amazing women. 

But I digress from the intent of my post.  This summer day was like every other summer day, ripe for riding and adventure, I talked the moto family into going for an evening ride under the pretense of getting ice cream.  (They always fall for that one). So off we went.

Victoria is a very eclectic, vibrant, and beautiful city with history at every turn in the form of architecture and cool little pockets of diversity.  We are called the Garden City and are famous for our parks and scenery, we also have one of the oldest Chinese communities in Canada, Chinatown is beautiful. I forget how lovely it is during the day to day grind.  My daily commute is through the heart of downtown and at 8:30am it's a beehive of activity and during peak tourist season it is hard to navigate around the downtown core and at times downright dangerous when on a bike.  (I avoid anything with a rental car sticker on the bumper) tonight we decided to live on the edge and drive through the tourist mayhem and taxi cab/tour bus chaos,  to head to Fisherman's Wharf for ice cream and to look at the local float home village.  

My little motorcyclista and I doing my must have moto selfie.

Awhile back I shared with  my blog followers I used to live on a floathome for 10 years in the harbour, I have been scouring my picture box and somehow they are buried somewhere in the depths of my basement.  Yes I am a hoarder and they are somewhere down in the basement of doom.  Anyway  here is my house the "The Resting Cloud" in it's current form - a Mexican Restaurant.  This breaks my heart because they have changed it so much, it used to be beautiful when I owned it, it was loaded with hanging flower baskets and railing boxes and spectacular in the summer and not this hideous colour scheme. 

An artist friend painted a picture of my house as a gift for us & this is what it looked like in it's glory days.

Our house was moored up in Cowichan Bay when we first bought it and we later towed it down to Victoria. That was a surreal experience seeing your home floating out in the ocean. The only things I took off the house that day were my wedding pictures and jewellery.  The captain said it was bad luck to take things off. Motorcycle Man sealed up the doors, rented a large bilge pump and rode on board all the way from Cowhican Bay to Victoria.  It was an 8 hour trip on a beautifully calm day. The floatation for the house was  two steel hulls built by a shipwright and the house structure built on top of that.  It was a one bedroom house that was all totalled 750sq feet of compact living with all the amenities of any other land based home with a few minor alterations. We had to be concerned with weight and weight distribution, so that meant no overtly heavy furniture.   The bedroom & bathroom where upstairs and surrounded by outside deck space. The main level had a dining room, living room and galley kitchen, an interior utility room and exterior ulility room. The main floor was designed in the shape of a cross with the dinning room being the window you see from the front, the  livingroom in the middle and kitchen on the opposite side.  There was a beautifully built wooden ship ladder to the upstairs and under that we had a small 2 seater breakfast nook with a built-in table that had a drop leaf top. It was a compact tidy lifestyle and in retrospect less complicated and simpler than our current land based life. We also had a composting toilet so we weren't flushing out into the bay. Initially we heated the house in winter with a little kick butt wood stove and had propane for a demand water heater and stove.  Eventually, we converted the heating system to a single efficient propane fireplace which was our sole source of heat.  We survived the Blizzard of 1996 and were snug as bugs in a rug, and fared better than our land based neighbours who had no power or heat for several days.  It was lovely being able to turn on the heat and not fiddle with kindling and waiting for it to catch and waiting an hour or more for the house to warm up.  We lost the romance for the wood heating during our first winter and the house being cold after sitting all day with no heat and coming home to a freezing house after a two hour commute and by that time we were too tired to light the fire so we spent many a cold night under heavy duvets. By the way for those of you wondering if we pay city taxes, we do pay property/city taxes just like every other home owner. 

A floathome is not a houseboat, because they aren't self propelling and are moored to a wharf system and hooked up to city services.  You will also note that I don't take close up pictures of the community, I won't walk down the docks because I want these folks to maintain their privacy.  

Generally floathomers are tight knit little communities, because you never know when you are going to need the help of your neighbours, particularly on a stormy night when you are out all night retying slackened lines and praying for the docks to hold together if it was really stormy. And yes, it can get pretty scary when winds are howling at 90km/h and there is a swell on.  The house does a dance  with the roll of the ocean and it can be a little unnerving at times.  

Living onboard a floathome was not without it's challenges, but the uniqueness of it  far outweighed those challenges.  A family of swans and Canadian Geese routinely came for snacks and would give their honking calls to let me know they were waiting for goodies.  We had this one Canadian Goose family with two babies, we named one Gos and the other Ling (get it gosling) We've had otters up on the deck and I have to say they are cute looking, but don't let their cuteness deceive you, they are nasty little buggers if you get too close and they are destructive too.  They went up under the siding of my friend's house ruined the inside and it was pretty disgusting. 

There isn't much space between the houses and you pretty much live in each other's pockets, but over time you get the hang of  living in close proximity to others. You develop the habit of looking down when passing by windows.  I wish tourists would do the same, sometimes it was more than a little invasive.  One night I was watching tv in my livingroom and I felt the house move as if someone stepped onboard, and when I looked up there was a fellow with his nose pressed against the window. He skiddadled pretty quickly when I sat up and looked at him, he had to come a fair way onboard to get to my front window.  Another time two women walked right in without knocking because my front door was open and they thought the house was empty.  Nope. Most of the time though people were pretty good and if they were really curious I usually invited them in for a tour of our tidy little sanctuary. We moved back to dry land when our wee girl was almost a year old because she was starting to toddle and I didn't want the constant worry of her falling overboard. 

I have lived on land for 16 years now and I long for those cozy winter nights and cool summer evenings sitting on the balcony of the Resting Cloud, sipping wine and watching the comings and goings of the harbour and would trade it all for my floathome and kayaks. (keeping the bikes of course)  

After our little stop & tour of Fisherman's Wharf we hopped back on the bikes to chase the sunset. It was magnificent!

View from King George a Terrace looking out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca

The Olympic Mountains of Washington State  in the foreground.

Towards the end of ride up to Mt Tolmie to look over Victoria, in the distance is Mt Doug

This shot is looking towards the Mainland (Vancouver) 

All in all it was the perfect family evening ride!  We left a little after 6:00pm and arrived home after 10:30pm feeling very contented and ready for bed.  Being with the people you love, riding, eating icecream, sunsets, warm temps, it doesn't get any better than that. I LOVE SUMMER!!!