Most people who live on Bowen have, in all likelihood, been into The Snug.
You’ve also probably placed your order and been called “Blu” by Piers Hayes, one of the partners in the cafe.
“I can’t remember names,” says Piers, who calls everybody by the same name.
What Piers keeps in sharp recall, however, is a life of adventure, particularly as it relates to the decades since he stood in an elevator with a teenage girl who would eventually become his wife.
“She was as young as a poppy seed and I was as old as the sea,” says Piers, referring to their eight-year age difference.
The sign on the door of the Hayes home reads “Welcome aboard, an old sailor lives here with his life preserver.” His wife Joan (his “life preserver”) was the girl in the elevator.
“She asked me which way the elevator was going. I said ‘Sideways,’ and she laughed,” recalls Piers.
Thirty years later, Piers can still make Joan laugh as he recounts the story of their life together. The two have travelled together from South Africa to Toronto, to Abbotsford and then Bowen, and not in the usual manner.
Piers and Joan hit it off from the first moment they met in the elevator. They took up sailing, had small sailing adventures, and began building a life together when Piers got sick.
“It led to a salient moment,” says Joan. She recalls Piers declaring, “Let’s buy a boat. We need to do something with our lives.”
Though the moment has less clarity for Piers, he acknowledges it was “an epiphany.” When Piers got well, they took their 20-foot boat, and their children, and made a move from Johannesburg to Capetown. There the pair made friends with a sailing family and got talking about a big sailing adventure. They hatched the idea and made it happen over the next five years.
By the time the two families set off across the Atlantic to North America, Joan and Piers had three children (William, Sarah-Jane and Miles) all under the age of 10. The family wound up living on their boat for four years, two of them in dock in Toronto, and two of them spent sailing from Africa to Port Credit, near Toronto.
The couple agrees that the kids learned invaluable lessons from their travels and didn’t get into any dangerous situations. They recall sitting on their boat 200 miles from the mouth of the Amazon where the kids were able to see its power. They also got to spend time in the middle of the South Atlantic on the island where Napoleon had been both exiled and interred. Geography, history, astronomy, it all became part of the kids experiential learning, along with distance education programs that Joan taught on board.
Joan says the family never experienced anything life-threatening.
“The most horrific was when we got flattened when we hit a squall by North Carolina near Cape Hatteras. We could see the squall and kept dodging it. Twenty miles off shore we tried to face it and it came at us like a train. It tore the main reef sail and flattened the boat.”
Joan says she put the kids below deck and told them they were about to go through a squall, giving them instructions about what would happen and what to do. She closed the hatch and helped get the boat through the one-hour squall.
“It righted almost immediately,” she says.
Piers adds that the sailing trip was “90 per cent boredom, five per cent exhilaration, and five per cent naked terror.”
A particularly wonderful thing for the family was being able to enjoy the kindness of strangers everywhere they went.
“We were in Venezuela at Christmas and got a cab driver to take us around for a couple of days,” says Piers. “We were Christmas shopping and we left the presents we had bought in the cab with him.”
The couple trusted that the presents would still be in the cab when they returned from running errands. “When we tell people that we left the presents with the cab driver, they think we were crazy, but you have to trust your instincts.”
The couple say that travel makes a person more open, more trusting in the good of human nature. “He gave us this ice-pickbottle opener that he made by hand as a present,” says Piers of the cab driver, showing the gift that he still holds dear.
While the Hayes family was separated from their Capetown friends once they hit the Atlantic waters, the two families would re-group on occasion until they got to North America. They travelled through warm turquoise waters to islands like Martinique and Trinidad. They went to the Bahamas, Curacao, Aruba, and Jamaica and spent three months in the Cayman Islands before hitting the United States.
The other family headed off to New Zealand. The Hayes family stayed along the U.S. coast, making friends as they went. Piers describes meeting an American representative from the Rotary Club. The man, like Piers, was part of the international Rotary Club, “but he didn’t know us from a bar of soap,” says Piers.
With a spirit of generosity, and staying true to the Rotary Club motto (Service Above Self), the man invited the family into his home.
“He asked me how long it had been since the kids had had a bath,” says Joan. “Later that day, the kids were enjoying a warm, soapy, bubbly bath.”
It was something they hadn’t been able to enjoy on board the boat. Piers says that “travel spreads the gospel of generosity of the human spirit.”
He advises travellers to go off the beaten path, trust their instincts and take chances. “People are afraid of their own shadows now,” he notes. “Go where there are no planes, no roads.”
Piers believes strongly that people are good and kind. He says the less people have, the more generous they seem to be, adding: “After travel, your faith in humanity is much stronger.”
The Hayes family eventually made their way to Ontario, and then to Abbotsford where Piers worked at General Electric. Their sailing friends, now living in New Zealand, had a friend from Canada who said, “Go to Bowen Island.”
When they decided to follow his advice, Piers says they were heading to the ferry and came over the ridge along the highway from Caulfeild in the fog. They crested the hill and the vista opened up, which was their first impression of the island.
In Snug Cove, the bakery bore the same name as the bakery back home: the Oven Door.
Immediately comfortable, the family checked out the community school and went to a church service where the head of the congregation, Larry Adams, was welcoming and invited the family to stay in his home the following weekend while the Adams family was away. “He didn’t know us from a bar of soap,” says Piers.
They were impressed. Before heading back to the mainland they made a stop at the Snug. They moved to the island 20 years ago and took over the Snug nine years ago.
“I’ve never worked so hard in my whole life,” says Piers, remembering how Joan had once suggested “it would be nice to retire and open a nice little cafe.”
The night before they were to open the café, a strong wind storm hit the area. The couple were up all night, scared as they listened to screaming winds and tree after tree falling down. Four trees crashed near their home and Stanley Park lost thousands of trees that same time.
Unable to sleep, Piers decided to head to the café. Halfway across the island, he found an abandoned car under a fallen tree lying across the road and could see another tree across the road further on. He jokes that he wondered if it was a warning to them about their new business.
Piers is up at 2:30 a.m. every day to go down to the cafe.
Ninety per cent of everything they sell is made on-site, the owners will tell you with pride.
They also now have 10 per cent of the business made up of catering to groups. To keep up with demand, the couple hired an ESL student who had been studying at the language school on the island. The astute and hard-working student, Ai Kanezaki, worked her way into the position of business partner.
The couple purchased the building one year ago and now two of their kids, William and Sarah Jane help run the business.
These days, the couple find excitement in running The Snug, tinkering on the piano and singing with the choir. They stay involved with the Rotary Club, and through the collection jars in their café and personal efforts and generosity, they have helped raise thousands of dollars in support of various causes and charities championed on the island.
“It’s a great community that way,” says Piers. “Very generous and supportive.”
