I met Debbie Peterman! I met Debbie Peterman! But more on that later…

YVR. Vancouver. The L.A. of Canada. And this weekend, boat heaven. L and I are here for my Xmas gift redemption: checking out the 2014 Vancouver Boat Show at BC Place and, more importantly, Granville Island, home of the floating portion. Boats galore! I was expecting a dozen or so boats based on the website, but there must have been over 50. Cats, tugs, trawlers, cruisers, lots of sailboats and a few ostentatious floating palaces. Oh, and a whole lot of used car salesman types… it was grand.

We spent the whole day there checking out millions of dollars of boats Fromm a 57′ Hanse with more beam than my apartment to a 39 year old CHB trawler that was perfect for 2 friendly couples. I took exactly one picture. It was a 50 or 60 foot power cat that was a palace on floats. Owned by an Edmontonian it seemed. Blech.

The lovely man from Island Cruising tried to talk us into a 40′ Jeanneau and the nice man from Jeanneau tried to talk us out of buying all together. The charter guy said charter, the sales guys said never put a boat in charter and the Catalina guy ignored us. It was fun, fun, fun.

As the day wound down we headed back to BC Place for the static displays. We chatted with Shari and Ian from Nanaimo Yacht Charters, schmoozed the authors at the book display and popped in to Le Boat to talk Europe. And lo and behold, there was my all time favourite customer service person: Debbie Peterman. Ms. Peterman works for Le Boat out of Florida and has been my point of contact person for all our European canal boat trips. She has helped make each trip the perfect experiences they were. And I got to meet her!

The next morning we popped back in to tour around again. Talked to Dawn at Cooper boating about the Broughtons and Alaska at picked up some flyers from real estate agents.

It’s off to Nanaimo on the ferry now and part two of the lets-spend-some-money January tour.