Every Christmas Day, our nuclear family heads off Bowen Island to travel into Vancouver and celebrate with cousins and grandparents, feasting, gift giving, hanging out and catching up. The weather is always different. Some years the ferry ploughs through a fierce Squamish wind blowing down Howe Sound from the north and freezing salt spray covers the cars on the ferry deck. Other years it is rainy and blowing from the southeast, as it was much of this month. Once – only once in thirteen Christmases of doing this – did we have snow, and that was back in 2008 when the whole country experienced it’s first completely white Christmas in 37 years. Alas, our little pocket of green on the west coast of BC is usually the reason why the whole country isn’t covered in snow.
This year, the weather was sunny and calm, about 8 degrees and the Queen Charlotte Channel between Bowen Island and Horseshoe Bay was like glass. I stood at the front of the car deck on the soon to be overhauled Queen of Capilano and shot this little time lapse of the voyage, which normally takes under 20 minutes. This is the first leg of every trip I do to anywhere in the world: across this gorgeous fjord.
