Since moving onto his boat at Porpoise Bay government dock seven years ago, Jim Eldred, 58, says he's lived in the shadow of a local bylaw that limits the dock's liveaboards to one individual - a position that had already been filled.
"We've been threatened, ever since I've lived here, that these are their rules, their bylaws, that they're allowed one liveaboard here," he said. "[It was:] 'These are our rules and we'll enforce them when we want.'"
But while the risk caused him some distress, Eldred said that living on the boat - for approximately $200 a month in moorage - seemed a savvy financial decision to stretch the disability money he gets, after a workplace accident shattered his ankle 15 years ago, leaving him hardly able to get around, let alone work.
And beyond that, he said, he loves the dock lifestyle.
"I really love living here. I love the water. I love looking at the eagles. I love boats."
But in early September, the District of Sechelt gave Eldred and five other liveaboards - all save one - notice that they needed to leave the dock by Nov. 1.
Yet if Eldred paints dock life in rosy terms, District chief administrative officer Rob Bemner says Sechelt has had nothing but problems with the dock since inheriting it from the federal government a few years ago.
"Certainly in the year that I've been here, we've gotten nothing but complaints," he said.
These complaints, he said, include drinking, partying, drug dealing, sewage being dumped straight into the water, liveaboards without insurance and unpaid moorage.
"Taxpayers are probably owed somewhere in the vicinity of $9,000 in dues for [liveaboards'] spaces there," he said. "I'd say at least 75 per cent [of liveaboards] are not paying."
Eldred said he fell behind on his moorage just prior to receiving his eviction notice. His neighbour, fellow liveaboard Travis Tattrie, 27, said that he, too, is behind on his moorage. But Tattrie, who said he hasn't been able to work for a couple years due to car accidents and workplace injuries, noted that the District overhauled the moorage payment policy in June, suddenly requiring liveaboards to pay a month ahead of time.
"For the whole time we've been here, we'd let [moorage] get up to say eight or nine months behind, go in and pay it completely up to date, and that was the cycle that we were under," he said.
As for partying and substance abuse, Eldred said those problems occur only when dock people are drinking "outrageously." He described one group of "semi-liveaboard" young people last summer who, he said, drank and used drugs heavily.
Speaking of the same group, Tattrie added: "They would kind of hassle everybody that walked by them. And they had dogs urinating on the wharf and stuff."
But that group, he said, was the exception, not the rule. "It wasn't your normal situation that we have down here with the normal people that live down here," he said.
But Bremner said the dock continues to have a terrible reputation in the boating community.
"I don't know how many people I've talked to who are boaters in the area who said this is the last place on the Coast they would go," Bremner said. "What we're trying to do is to make it so it's a destination, so when people do come in, they want to come and moor at our dock."
Eldred and Tattrie, however, counter that with or without liveaboards, the dock is no boaters' paradise: it's nearly 20 miles from Skookumchuck Rapids, there's nowhere to buy diesel, the sanipump hardly works, and with no grocery store nearby, boaters have to take a cab into town for supplies.
"So unless you're just going to the bar, you wouldn't come here anyway," Tattrie said. "There's no reason to come down this inlet."
For determined boaters, he said, Narrows Inlet and Salmon Inlet remain more logical destinations.
"Well they've got nothing either," he said. "It's just as nothing as this, but it's only halfway down. And it's nicer to look at."
But Bremner said that beyond the complaints, the unpaid moorage, and the zoning - which he says Sechelt could technically change to allow for more liveaboards - the District simply doesn't have the personnel to oversee the liveaboard situation properly and make sure, for example, that everyone is insured as per their moorage agreement.
"If [Sechelt liveaboards] don't have insurance, the taxpayers are going to be paying for it," he said. "We have an asset that is really the federal government's that we take care of, that we - at this point in time - aren't set up to deal with on an on-going basis to make sure that all the conditions are being met."
Meanwhile, with Nov. 1 looming, Eldred and Tattrie say they haven't been able to find room at another marina and have nowhere to go.
"If they could wait 'til the springtime, if they could tolerate us 'til then, we'd have a much better chance to find a new place to find moorage, as well as we're not going to be thrown out into the elements," Eldred said.
Failing that, Tattrie said: "I guess I'm just going to sit here until they untie my boat and push me off. "
