Voyages to Windward

When Elsie Hulsizer was little, she lived on the shores of Puget Sound in Washington where she spent the summers sailing in a small open sailboat with her parents. Her parents would always start out by sailing to windward, or against the wind, so they would have an easy ride home with the wind pushing them from behind. When Elsie grew up and got married, she and her husband Steve spent their summers sailing out of Puget Sound and up the Strait of Juan de Fuca, always to windward. This challenging course took them up the west coast of Vancouver Island where they were rewarded with a cruising area of spectacular scenery and quiet anchorages that were almost all their own. They spent the next twenty-odd years delightedly exploring the four sounds, several inlets and countless islands, bays, coves and stretches of unprotected coast between Barkley Sound and Brooks Peninsula. On their trips they survived many hair-raising encounters with wild weather and foaming reefs, met interesting people and discovered the intriguing history of a coast undergoing phenomenal changes. Beautifully illustrated with her own excellent photographs, Voyages to Windward is Elsie's account of their quarter-century of discovery, an absorbing, exquisitely crafted story that will delight all sailors whether or not they plan to follow Elsie's windward course.