Sailing Uphill: An Unconventional Life on the Water

Sam McKinney has spent many of the best parts of his life on the water — sailing a dory along Canada’s west coast, crewing on the deck of a river steamer, shipping out deep-sea in freighters across the Atlantic. In the middle of his life, when he sold the hull of an ocean-going sailboat which had absorbed two years of his love and labour, he looked at his boat-building shed and thought, “Hmm. With all this lumber, I could build a boat and go across the continent, instead”. So he did. In the...