Most of my stories start earlier than they need to (I mean, who are we asking here?). An old friend told me that once, “Not all stories need to start with when you were five.” We laughed, but it sums me up perfectly.

When I watched 30 Rock for the first time during the pandemic, there was a scene where Tina Fey’s character starts a story, and Alec Baldwin’s character tells her to start sooner. She adjusts, he repeats the demand. We were howling while watching it. So, that sums me up. A writer at heart, I’m never one to skip a backstory. I want to give you the context and make sure you don’t have any questions. Which is a little ironic, because I’d have a dozen questions for you if the tables were turned.

I grew up in a rural community about 45 minutes east of Vancouver. Mostly outside, mostly in the woods or at the lake, in the way kids grew up in places like that before screens took over. It shaped how I move through the world. I’ve never lost the feeling that the best things happen when you go somewhere you haven’t been before.

North Vancouver, my twenties, and the people who became family.

At twenty, I moved to North Vancouver and spent most of my twenties doing what you do in the city. Exploring, eating, dancing, building friendships, making mistakes, and figuring out what I cared about.

Two relationships shaped those years, and both of them left me with more than I started with.

The first was with someone who raced go-karts. Not casually, but competitively, across North America, which meant I spent a chunk of my early twenties trackside at races from Vancouver to Vegas, absorbed into his family’s world in a way that still holds. His brother, sister-in-law, and their two girls are some of my favourite people on this earth. My partner and I are near the top of the invite list to their weddings and family gatherings. Almost thirty years later, those relationships are woven into the fabric of my life in a way I couldn’t imagine life without them. I unexpectedly lost my mom in the fall of 2025, and they were the first to offer their loving help and support.

The second relationship took up most of my twenties and introduced me to sailing and travelling in Mexico. He sailed, and we spent summers on a few small 25’ and 27’ boats, sailing around English Bay. Most winters, we were in Mexico, sometimes on his Dad’s sailboat in Puerto Vallarta, sometimes in a camper, sometimes in a small hotel in a town we’d found on the map. We backpacked through Belize, Guatemala, and the east coast of Mexico together. Central America in 2010, before the phone in your pocket had all the answers, was a different kind of travel. You had to ask people things, trust the answer, and figure it out as you went. One of his siblings is still a close friend twenty+ years later.

It was on one of those trips, on a beach in Puerto Vallarta in 2005, that I read Yvon Chouinard's Let My People Go Surfing. It changed how I saw business. It changed how I thought about spending and earning money, about what companies could be for, and about legacy as a north star. I was in my mid-twenties reading about a man who built Patagonia around a life he actually wanted to live, and something clicked. Every values-led brand I’ve ever worked with, every client relationship I’ve chosen carefully (or learned from my mistakes), every time I’ve said no to work that didn’t fit—that book is in the back of my mind.

Moving to Victoria, a cyclocross bike, and meeting my favourite person.

In 2013, I loaded up a U-Haul and drove to Victoria for a job selling coffee on Vancouver Island. I found a loft downtown by meeting someone at a coffee shop who managed the building. That same coffee shop is where I met my partner, Rich.

I arrived with a 45-pound single-speed beach cruiser and, within that first year, had added a cyclocross bike and later a touring bike, mostly under the influence of the man I’d just met. Now, Rich is retired from BC Ambulance, and he’s a cyclist, a sailor, and the kind of person who will load your panniers for a 2.5-month cycle touring trip across Europe before you’ve fully processed what you’ve agreed to.

My first nephew arrived in 2011, and my second in 2014, and being an Auntie is one of the things I love most about my life. Those kids, and the friends I’ve built a chosen family with over the years, are the ones I show up for the way I show up for clients: fully, and for the long haul.

By 2014, I’d gone out on my own.

After almost three years at Salt Spring Coffee, building territories, winning accounts, and doing the work that the Salt Spring Coffee story in The Logbook describes in detail, I wrapped up that job on a February morning with no company car and no company phone and a clear sense that I was probably never going back to working for someone else.

The years that followed were spent in field sales on my own terms. Representing craft beer, wine, and cider brands across BC, building relationships with over 200 retailers, and getting local brands into government liquor stores that industry veterans told me were impossible. In 2016, I tripled the agency’s sales over the previous year. In 2017, I was closing up shop for the sabbatical we’d been planning for a few years.

1,524 kilometres, 2.5 months, and the long way through Europe.

Rich took a leave of absence from BC Ambulance, we rented the house, and in June 2017, we flew to London with our bikes in boxes. I rode 9 kilometres to brunch as a training ride on my new bike before the trip. I hadn’t ever ridden with panniers, cycling shoes, or bar-end shifters. We had an understanding that there was a chance I might throw my bike into a canal and head to wait for him in Paris.

We spent ten days exploring London first, guided by a friend who lived there, before we started riding. From there, we made our way through Normandy, the Loire Valley, and on to Paris, where we spent a week in an Airbnb apartment with a friend, rode around the Arc de Triomphe, and cycled down the Champs-Élysées.

Then on to Belgium, and the longest riding day of the trip: 85.74 kilometres, starting out in a thunderstorm, a ferry to England, and riding into dusk and darkness to Folkestone on the south coast.

We took the long way. I deleted social media apps, mostly skipped social media for five-plus weeks, and rode over 1,500 kilometres. Tears, rain, dancing, rosé, endless baguettes, and so much love. Back in Southampton at the end, I was about 15 pounds lighter, a hundred times stronger, and had some excellent tan lines. Our summer had been full of movement and wide-open spaces, inside and out.

After cycling, we drove 11,000 kilometres through the Southwest. Two months hiking through canyon country, desert roads, wide open skies. Between sunrise photos and Aeropress coffees and days with nowhere specific to be, the notebooks started filling up. Not with plans exactly, but with questions. What did I actually want to do? What did the work look like if it could go anywhere? How do you build something that supports your life rather than the other way around?

We came home at the end of 2017. Rich had been visiting his brother and sister-in-law in Squamish and spotted a 1985 Ericson Mark II at the marina. A 32-footer, in good shape. We spent that summer on the water together for the first time. Our trip had been amazing, but hard; our home rental hadn’t gone well, and it was a really great time to reconnect.

Six seasons on the water, and working onboard.

From 2018 to 2024, that boat was the centre of our summers. We spent anywhere from 2 to 5 months on board each year, exploring the BC coast, the Gulf Islands, and the Inside Passage up to Southeast Alaska and Glacier Bay.

Rich has sailed almost his whole life. I’d sailed in my twenties and knew enough to be useful. On board, I do my best to be a capable crew member and, without question, am always in charge of provisions.

Rich retired the year after we got the boat, and I’d spent the previous few years working out how to build something that didn’t require me to be in a territory with a car and a phone. Something that could go where we went. The answer, it turned out, was strategy and brand work. The kind of deep engagement with a founder and a team that you can do from a boat at anchor just as well as from an office, as long as the wifi holds and you’ve planned the provisions well.

Each year, we built the travel and adventure plans around my work schedule. Some years the balance was better than others. And then the pandemic came.

Pandemic projects, delays, and finding great new clients.

I was on the BC Ferries crossing to my first in-person meeting with the Bucha Brew team when BC announced we were all staying home. We had that meeting, I turned around instead of going to my sister’s for the weekend we’d planned, and spent the next ten months working closely with that team through one of the most challenging projects.

We got to the boat when we could that year. Just the two of us, anchored somewhere quiet, out of the house. We had planned to sail to Alaska in 2020, and just a month before, we were comparing life rafts at the boat show in Vancouver. That plan went on hold.

Like most of us, we spent the next couple of years watching the world slowly reopen. In 2021, I started working with k’pure Naturals and SaltSpring Kitchen Co., two brands I’d known and loved for years, and we spent more time sailing that summer, which was such a joy after all that time at home.

I joined the pandemic trend and got a Peloton in 2022. Years of territory sales had kept me active without trying. Hauling coffee brewers and wine cases, in and out of the car, all day on the road. Desk work was different, and I needed to move. I started riding, getting ready for Alaska. My partner is super fit, and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to haul him out of the water if needed. (Yes, I was pretty worried about just about everything to do with this trip.)

Cruising our 32’ sailboat to Alaska and the best trip I’ve ever taken.

We spent months preparing the boat. Rich did the heavy lifting on the technical work. I passed tools, voted on a few topics, and sang his praises when he decided to buy a commercial sewing machine and make a full cockpit enclosure to keep us warm and dry. I focused on provisions, route research (where to eat and get provisions, the occasional anchorage), the work I needed to finish before we left, and trying not to be scared out of my mind. I wrote my will. I left post-it notes on things to divide them up, just in case.

We left in early May 2022.

The trip was extraordinary in every way. The wild coast of Southeast Alaska, the North and Central Coast of BC, and the Broughtons on the way south. We didn’t sail as much as we’d thought; the winds often blew in the opposite direction we needed.

We met people who will be lifelong friends in Shearwater, BC, two couples, one of whom is a couple on a sailboat from Seattle that we met up with a couple of times along the way. The other, a couple on a power boat called Kurioso, with whom we travelled for the next two and a half months. New friendships formed in anchorages or marinas can be a special kind of gift.

Being scared and doing it anyway.

Our furthest point north was Glacier Bay National Park. One evening, at almost midnight, we noticed the time (it was still light out) and headed back to the boat. Around 6 the next morning, Rich called to me from the cockpit, asking me to please get up.

Coming home so late, we’d left the dinghy in the water instead of pulling it back on deck. By the time I got to the cockpit a minute later, he was already in the dinghy. Katabatic winds had arrived overnight. Cold, dense air is pouring off the Reid Glacier, picking up speed as it funnels down through the inlet. The winds were howling over 30 knots, and the sea state was building fast. We were anchored on a lee shore and needed to move.

I shouted over the wind for him to get back in the boat. He resisted at first, but I was wide-eyed and asking again. He climbed back into the cockpit. I asked if he thought Kurioso were up. He laughed. He’d already talked to Kurt on the radio. They were getting ready to leave.

I lay down on the deck, hastily dressed, no bra, lifejacket buckled, and crawled to the bow while the boat seesawed in what were now probably six-foot waves. I pulled up the anchor. It came up fine until it was just hanging over the bow, twisted, too close for the windlass to help, too hard for me to reach. I screamed into the wind for Rich to “just go, man”. He noticed I was stuck and came up to help. We scurried back to the cockpit together.

As we turned out of the inlet and into the calm outer waters of greater Glacier Bay within ten minutes, I felt something I hadn’t expected. Pride. I had been scared almost every day since we left in May. And in the most intense moment of the whole trip, I hadn’t panicked. I hadn’t frozen. I had just done the thing.

The next five weeks in Southeast Alaska were filled with adventure (I was pretty freaked out in the 10-12’ swell of open ocean in the Gulf of Alaska after we left Glacier Bay for Sitka), great food, amazing scenery and evenings filled with great conversations and company.

I got COVID on the last day in Alaska, after we gathered for dinner with our new friend group. We’d met another half dozen or so folks along the way, and we’re still connected to them now. We spent a week at anchor off Prince Rupert while I felt awful, and Rich somehow didn’t get it at all. I took the unexpected downtime to finish a project and launch a new website for SaltSpring Kitchen Co. from the nav desk. The work goes where you go. That’s the goal.

Coming home, the Rockies, and a jar of sourdough starter

We capped the summer with a family wedding on the Sunshine Coast, spent the rest of the season slowly making our way home, and arrived back in Victoria at the end of September when it started to get cold.

Within a week, I had the great idea of taking a road trip to the Rockies. Neither of us had been in years. The boat had kept us on the coast for six years, and I missed road trip energy and mountain scenery. We packed up and headed out before the weather turned, spent three weeks exploring the Rockies, visited a friend in Edmonton, and stopped in North Vancouver on the way home.

It was on that stop that one of my best friends handed me a jar of sourdough starter and gave me bread-making lessons. I haven’t bought more than a half dozen loaves of bread since that fall in 2022. I absolutely love making sourdough, and it’s one of the best gifts I’ve ever gotten.

We spent that winter hibernating and thinking about what was next.

Selling the boat, six weeks in the Netherlands, and moving north.

In the summer of 2023, we were invited by the sailboat couple we’d met in Shearwater to join them on a trip to circumnavigate Vancouver Island with them and another boat. Rich had wanted to do something single-handed, and the schedule on that trip wasn’t really conducive to work, so it was a great opportunity for Rich, with the fun and security of having company.

Just the day after he left, I sent him a note, and he stopped on Thetis Island to look at a Tab 400 travel trailer our neighbours’ parents were selling. Then he sailed to Nanaimo to look at a truck some friends were selling.. he called me later, saying he thought we should buy both.

We’d met Ken on the way to Alaska. A retired doctor who pulled into Prince Rupert just after us, and we helped him come into the dock. We crossed paths a few more times along the way. One afternoon, he came aboard, looked around, and said, “You should never sell this boat. But if you do, you should call me.”

After Rich got back to Victoria from the circumnavigation he picked me up and we headed north to spend the rest of the summer on board. We spent time looking at properties again in Comox, and enjoyed a slow couple of months enjoying ocean swims, sunsets, and the quiet solitude of life on board.

At the end of the summer of 2023, we called Ken.

That winter, we packed up the trailer and headed south.

Seattle for a few days just before Christmas, with the Vancouver Island circumnavigation crew, then down to house-sit in LA for a week over New Year’s. We started 2024 in LA and then moved out to the desert for two months of hiking, riding, and wide-open roads. My sister-in-law and brother-in-law surprised us and joined us for a few weeks in their motorhome. We had a great time sharing some of our favourite spots with them, and exploring new placed together. The weather, hiking, and desert landscapes were so fun to explore again after all that time on the water.

We flew home for a month in the spring to prepare the boat, and Ken came up to see it. He’d been wanting to downsize after his Alaska trip and have something easier to single-hand. It was exactly right for him. We sold the boat over a great meal at our dining room table, flew back to the desert, and carried on. Spring in the desert was a first for both of us.

From Borrego Springs to Death Valley, through Nevada and Utah, Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, up through Idaho and Oregon and home. That summer, we missed the boat but travelled with the trailer, visiting friends and family, including Thetis Island, and a week in Comox with friends who are more like family.

That summer week in Comox, we kept talking about what was next: a bigger boat, and the idea of selling the house to move somewhere quieter, smaller, and more in line with our next adventures. We wanted to explore sailing in other parts of the world, but not necessarily crossing oceans yet (me). We kept looking at properties in the Comox Valley and started looking at boats in Europe.

I bought a Lonely Planet guide to the Netherlands that week, and a month or so later, we left to spend the last of the summer and six weeks in the Netherlands and Belgium. Exploring boat ownership in European waters, visiting marinas, talking to others who’d made the move, cycling, working, and of course eating pastries and great food. We had a great trip, and that winter we started paring down, getting the house ready, with the idea that we might be moving.

Moving to the Comox Valley.

Now, in the spring of 2025, we’d been casually looking at properties in North Vancouver, Salt Spring Island, and the Comox Valley for almost two years. On Easter weekend, we were in the valley visiting friends and looking at properties with our Realtor. We saw a townhouse, and hadn’t really thought it was going to be right. Rich wasn’t sure he was ready for something like this, but he was looking for something with less maintenance. We saw it twice over the weekend, and he decided on the way home to call our Realtor in Victoria to meet us when we got home.

We went over the details that afternoon, built our list, and got ready to list within a few weeks.

The house sold on the second day. He had built so much of it with his own hands, raised his kids there, built a suite, and provided below-market rent to young people for years. A life fully lived in that house. Watching him let it go and seeing what it opened up for him was something I was proud to support, but I never pushed the timeline.

We’d been on our way to Salt Spring Island for the weekend to skip the showings and open house schedule when he accepted the offer. So we looked around the island more, and in the next couple of week went back to North Van to look at condos, and to Comox. We saw the townhouse again, went for lunch, and went to the office to write our offer together.

This was an exciting new chapter.

Our first home together is a really big deal for me. We were packed up and heading north to the Comox Valley a few months later. Closer to the mountains, to wild spaces, closer to the kind of life I’d been working toward for years. The next big goal for me was building a new brand, reviving my online presence (I’ve been working under the radar during all these adventures since 2017), and developing the strategy for my next chapter.

Sadly, I unexpectedly lost my mom a few months after we moved in, and I couldn’t have asked for better support from my clients. Both Melanie and Alina at SaltSpring Kitchen Co. and FOLKLIFE, my active clients at the time, were so gracious and supportive. It continues to remind me what’s important, to question my legacy, and why knowing that working with great people will always be the most important thing to me when choosing my projects and clients.

Balancing what works, and having a creative outlet.

I think about creativity and brand building all the time. On trips, I drag Rich into specialty cafes, small shops, and local bakeries, talking to the owners, asking about the business, learning about the community and what they’re trying to build. It doesn’t feel like work. It feels like the same curiosity I felt on that beach in Puerto Vallarta in 2005, reading about a man who built Patagonia and decided that business could stand for something.

Work and life aren’t really separate for me. A business should support the life you want to live, not consume it. Seaworthy exists because I figured out, slowly and with a lot of kilometres between the ideas, what that actually looks like.

I launched it on the spring equinox 2026. New name (I started as Galactic Sales Studio because I bought a pre-built site and visual brand from a friend who had designed a brand called Galactic), same thinking, and a lot more to build.

So what’s the point of sharing all this? I used to use social media as a bit of a journal, and while I was most active from 2009 or so, I had a lot of friends and connections who liked reading my stories. I launched a food-focused website (restaurants, coffee shops, and client stories) to support my craft liquor sales agency, and wrote a monthly food column for Monday Magazine in Victoria. I later took the website offline for our sabbatical. My social media use slowed, and after building Seaworthy, I’m heading back to building a personal site to start writing again, which isn’t just for work.

If you’ve read this far, maybe you, too, are a long-form person in a short-form world. This is a story no strategy would ever suggest you write, but a friendly, personal chance to get to know me, or help you decide if we might be a good fit to work together.

I’ve been working part-time for the last few years to accommodate our travel schedule, and in 2026, I’m focusing on my work and growing my business. I’m always asking my clients to dig deep and clarify their goals. I’m doing the same this year, and getting back outside, away from my desk day-to-day, not just on the adventures.

Thanks for reading my story.