Ellen Besso Coaching

I’ve always wanted to live by the sea. I felt drawn to the ocean, I think it’s my Welsh roots. Although born in Toronto, I’m three-quarters Welsh, the product of a marriage between a Welsh immigrant girl and a Canadian born father of Welsh descent. My mother came to Canada from a tiny village by the sea in North Wales at the age of eight, speaking not one word of English. My paternal grandmother was also born in Wales, moved to Manchester, England at age twelve and came to Canada as a war bride after the Second World War.

In my twenties I thought living by the ocean was just an idle dream, a far cry from where I was in land-locked Toronto. Enormous Lake Ontario at the southern end of the city helped me feel less confined psychologically. Then in my early forties, after one aborted attempt to move to Vancouver over a decade earlier…(a long story)…I discovered the Sunshine Coast on a visit to my brother in Vancouver. A rural community just a forty minute ferry ride from Vancouver, it held a special draw for me. I liked the lifestyle of the people I met during our visit. Forteen months later, in the summer of 1990, we moved here.

I don’t go on the water much but I know it’s there, just a block or less away from my house in either direction. Going one way you climb down steep steps to a stoney beach where the tide changes the character of the beach each hour. In the other direction, at the end of our street, I can walk right onto the beach at the harbor.

These days all my walks end up taking me down to the seashore by the harbor where I take in the sights. I need to be around the vibrant, always changing energy of the water right now and fill myself up with the negative ions the sea gives off. There are sailboats and fishing boats, ducks and Canada geese there. Today a small truck was loaded onto a tiny barge and puttered slowly away from the marina, on its way I imagine, to Keats Island just across the bay. An unusual site.

The sea wall goes from the end of my street along the harbor and past ”downtown Gibsons’. There’s a drydock about a third of the way along, it interrupts the sea wall so we must walk up the hill to the main street, then down again to the water. There are three marinas between the bottom of my street and the government dock where the fishing boats are moored.

I make my way along the sea wall and the beach ending up at the foot of my street usually. There I gaze up and out, at the water of the harbor and at the enormous snow-tipped mountains of British Columbia’s Lower Mainland. We truly do live in paradise as my friend used to recite like a mantra each summer. I consider myself very fortunate to be here.