Among the collages of photographs of my great-uncle Doug Davenport at his wake this year were some of him in his earlier years. Sauntering down a Vancouver sidewalk or posing over the gunnel of a boat, I couldn't help but observe what a handsome young man he was.
Nor could my girlfriend, who lingered over some of the photos a little longer than went unnoticed. Uncle Doug could have been a model, but Doug Davenport was not a model. He was a sailor.
Born in Newfoundland, Doug was one of two children of English immigrants Jack and Ada. During the Second World War, his eyesight kept him out of the air force and he spent those years with the Merchant Marine ferrying supplies to Europe and the Caribbean.
With the war over, Doug spent two years hitchhiking across the country finding odd jobs, eventually becoming a fisheries researcher at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo.
Late in the 1940s, Doug married Olive (Sammy) Sampson. They had four children: Barry, Steve, Pete and Michael. They later divorced.
In 1952, Doug was driving water taxis around Vancouver's Howe Sound. He stopped in for lunch at a local eatery and was noticed by waitress Irma (Lou) Robertson. It is a moment she still likens to a strike of lightening. She offered him tea, he declined, and they wouldn't see one another for 15 years. Lou had not been forgotten and in 1967, Doug tracked her down. They spent the rest of Doug's life together. They never married and never had children. "Don't fix what ain't broke," Doug would say.
Near the end of the 1960s, Doug began his construction of Mystic, the sailing ketch that was to be the second love of the rest of his life. She was launched in the spring of 1973.
In December, 1978, Doug was working aboard the Japanese fishing vessel the Hatsu Maru as a fisheries researcher and inspector when an explosion went off in the engine room, killing one person and sinking the ship off the southern coast of Haida Gwaii. When interviewed later by a reporter Doug said, with typical stoicism, "It was just one of those things … to the inexperienced placed in a situation like that it might [have been]more ghastly."
Age forced Doug to sell Mystic in 2006. With the boat gone, so too, slowly, went Doug. In 2007, his battle with Alzheimer's disease began; complications related to his heart and the many surgeries he had undergone took his life.
From carpentry to navigation, mechanics to meteorology, hockey to history, Doug's skills and pastimes were many. Those who knew him and loved him remain behind, for now, in his wake and in the shadows of his sails.
Matt Whelan is Doug's great-nephew.