Dec 05 2009
The Newsomes of SV Demelza
Elizabeth and David Newsome
I suspect that friends of David and Elizabeth Newsome reckoned they had simply gone crazy. How else do you explain that new kayak they bought? or the long absences from their Alberta farm?
Farmers – especially livestock farmers – are tied to their land by knots that the most ingenious of able seamen are not able to fathom.
The Newsomes raised beef cattle on their farm northwest of Calgary, and there were always things that needed to be done. You couldn’t just decide to take a long weekend without a lot of arranging to do. Ranchers are often find themselves as tied up as a calf at branding time.
And yet here I found them – at the gorgeous crescent-shaped bay on the southwest side of Isla San Francisco in the Sea of Cortez, happily drinking coffee on a crisp December morning aboard their Vancouver 32 sailboat, Demelza.
Isla San Francisco
“We’d been going off to kayak on the British Columbia coast for some time,” Dave said. And before one of these trips in the spring of 2003, he said to his wife, “Plan on spending a bit more time out there this year. We’re going to look for a boat.”
Dave, with his crinkly eyes and wry smile, is the sort of guy who you know once he takes a bit in his teeth, he’s not going to let go.
A couple of weeks later they found Demelza (a veteran of a circumnavigation of the worl), put an offer on her, and prepared to see where she would take them. They would sell their cattle operation (they typically raised about 200 pair of cattle at a time – a cow and her calf) and begin a crash course in seamanship. The sale of the operation would finance their new boat and their new lifestyle.
Shortly thereafter, disaster. On May 20, 2003, in the midst of securing financing for their boat, the he Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) announced the discovery of the first non-imported case of a BSE positive cow in Canada.
BSE became the most hated acronym in Canada. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy was a mouthful, but its common name was enough to strike terror in the hearts of consumers everywhere: mad cow disease. I was a journalist at the time for CTV National News and did my share of reporting on this strange disease that caused the human brain to go soft and mushy. Neurological tissues from infected cattle could produce a human form of the disease, known as Cruetzfeldt-Jakob Disease. An outbreak in the UK in the 1990’s had absolutely destroyed the British beef industry, and that was just what Canadian farmers were facing.
No matter that the CFIA had only found one infected cow, or that there had been no reported cases of CJD in Canada. By reporting on the find, markets around the world immediately closed their borders to live cattle and beef exports from Canada, including Canada’s largest customers – the U.S., Mexico and Japan.
The Newsomes found themselves in the strange situation of having cut their docklines to their past, and had no better option than to make the best of it.
Demelza's Damsel with Dorado
In 2007, Dave and a friend sailed Demelza out from its berth in Sydney, a small coastal community on the southern part of Vancouver Island, headed out Juan de Fuca Strait, and took a sharp left at Cape Flattery. Battered by 35 kt. winds, they learned quickly how to hand, reef and steer the open ocean. When they got to San Francisco (the California bay, not the one in the Sea of Cortez), Dave’s life had been forever changed.
He single-handed his way down the outside of Baja California, and made his way into the Sea of Cortez.
On the morning I met Dave and Elizabeth, they were talking about their trip (by car) back to Canada for the Christmas holidays.
“I have a big family to cook Christmas dinner for and grandchildren to hug,” Elizabeth said with a big, friendly grin.
And then they return to SV Demelza and the warm waters of the Mexican Pacific coast. They have no fixed itinerary. A couple of days ago I heard David on one of the ham radio nets responding to a question of where they are headed next: “We’re not sure – maybe French Polynesia. Demelza knows the way and we might let her take us there.”