Sarah-Jane Hayes was a week old when she bumped into a hunchback whale — or, more accurately, the sailboat she was on nudged the sleeping whale out of its slumber. It might have been a sign that she wasn’t going to have a “normal” childhood.
When Sarah-Jane was nine, she and her six-year-old brother Will and four-year-old brother Miles left Johannesburg, South Africa with their parents Piers and Joan aboard a 41’ sailboat. Anticipation was high, not for the journey ahead but to be able to open the tin of homemade fudge that their grandmother had given them to enjoy once they couldn’t see land any more.
For the next two years they made their way past continents and islands, across oceans and seas all the way up the coast of North America until they reached Port Colborne on Lake Ontario.
It was a journey filled with many wondrous memories but of all the places she’s been and things she’s done, the memory Sarah-Jane hangs onto the most were those quiet moments in the cockpit at night, cuddling up with the parent who was on watch duty. In such cramped quarters, being able to spend one-on-one time with either your mother or father was a special treat. “It was just the stars and the water and no land. So peaceful.”
After two years in Toronto, Piers settled the family in Abbottsford while he started a new job. It wasn’t the family’s happy place. One day they phoned the couple who had sailed beside them for much of the journey, parting ways when the Hayeses headed for Canada and the other stayed in New Zealand. The couple had some friends over for dinner, including someone from Vancouver. The man from Vancouver asked them where they were living.
“Abbottsford? Oh, God, no,” he said. “You need to go to this little place named Bowen Island. You’ll love it. It will remind you of home. Go there.”
The Hayeses arrived on a Sunday morning and went to a church service at Cates Hill Chapel, where they were greeted by the then-pastor, Larry Adams, and his wife Sylvia. The Adams were about to go on holidays for a month and invited the Hayes family to live in their home and get a feel of island life. It was the summer of 1997.
Today, Sarah-Jane is married to Gord Curry — “he also grew up in a similarly strange way” — and enjoying maternity leave from the family-run Snug Café with seven-month-old Elijah.
