SV ‘Gallia’, from B.C. to Santa Barbara
I can confidently say that for a period of time earlier this year, I was aware of every reasonably priced sailboat listed online between 29 and 36 feet on the planet. I was willing to travel anywhere to find the right match if I thought my partner Megan and I could sail it to our home port in Santa Barbara, California, within the year. I finally found Gallia, a 34-ft Sun 1030 sloop on Craigslist listed in Surrey, British Columbia. My initial thought: She was a solid option and looked to be in good shape, but didn’t necessarily make my heart stop as it did when I gawked at cruising boats out of my price range with sweet gadgets and long-range capabilities. To Megan’s credit, it was her gut-instinctual excitement about the boat that made me start to seriously consider it and do some research.
She was formally built under the name Crown Yachts. I liked what I saw online about these boats with their solid Washington-built construction, IOR design, rod rigging and windward performance. About a month later we closed on Gallia, sight unseen. Our plan was to spend as much time as we could afford sailing her around British Columbia before coming down the West Coast in the fall.
I flew up in July to see the boat for the first time and get her ready for the voyage. I was met with more work than I’d anticipated, with flawed running rigging, bad fresh- and raw-water pumps and general maintenance neglect over the last several years, but the idea of exploring nearby islands and inlets fueled a productive week of work to get the major things done so we could get underway and finish the rest later.
We left through a shallow, narrow tidal river where Gallia had been moored and dragged the keel through soft mud, nearly grinding us to a halt. We sailed through a narrow dredged channel to windward after the motor overheated before crossing the Strait of Georgia, on our way to the Gulf Islands. A bit rattled from our maiden voyage, we tied up at Salt Spring Island. Our adventure had officially begun. From there we made our way up past Desolation Sound — through what some locals call “the inside Inside Passage” — made up of a series of tidal rapids that must be carefully timed to transit, especially in a slow-moving sailboat.