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Cruising into retirement at the USSC Marina

Retirement, says Earl Carroll, is freedom from having to get up every day at 8am. He will continue to putter, though, mostly in his workshop at the Union Steamship Marina or on his boat.
EARL
For Earl Carroll, retirement means more time on his Coronoato 27 - or possibly a bigger boat, if he can find one for the right price.

Retirement, says Earl Carroll, is freedom from having to get up every day at 8am. He will continue to putter, though, mostly in his workshop at the Union Steamship Marina or on his boat.  Carroll has been working as a handyman at the Marina for roughly 15 years, a job he said he took when he was already winding down, and in “retirement-mode.”

Having grown-up in Horseshoe Bay, Earl says he’s always felt connected to Bowen.

“When I was a teenager, whenever a Bowen kid missed the ferry there would always be a family in Horseshoe Bay who would take him in for the night,” says Earl. “I’d say I knew every third Bowen kid. I spent my summers water skiing here.”

In 69’, Carroll hit Whistler to work in ski shops and get into the racing scene where he quickly rose through the ranks. His love of skiing, and the racing scene in particular, led him to diverge from the path set by previous family members – working with BC Ferries.

“I was so enthralled with the ski industry, I meandered through just about every aspect of it,” he says. “For a while I made ski-boot liners. A friend of mine and I started a heli-skiing company so that we would get the best spring skiing, but there was not enough business at the time so we sold it. The guy who bought it from me ended up building it up and hiring me back. We were so enthused with the downhill, and were being handed some of the best young skiers in the country to train in the lead-up to the Calgary Olympics. I tested skis for Head for a long time, and worked on building the first fat skis. That’s who I was working for before I moved back here.”

Through the decades he spent in Whistler, Earl witnessed massive change.

“Back in the 70s, people got excited if there were 4,000 people on the mountain,” he says. “Then we hit a point where there were so many people on the mountain that people were getting hit every day. They needed to hire people to be out there telling skiers to slow down! The whole culture changed, it astounded me that people were coming to Whistler for work, because when I arrived, the only thing to do was ski. The whole business atmosphere, everything, just shifted.” 

These shifts pushed Earl to look for a shift in his own life, and that brought him back to Bowen.

“I came back to what I believed was a hidden gem. As the Commodore of the West Vancouver Yacht Club said to me, there are not that many places in the Vancouver area where you can have THIS,” says Earl. “And its true, this has got to be the best place locally to dock a boat. I can get out into open water from the marina in five minutes. Compared to False Creek where you have to cruise out past freighters just to start sailing, well there’s no comparison.”

Earl Carroll has a lot to say about the changes he’s seen on Bowen in the past decade and a half, and some of it is actually quite good.

“When I was a teenager, if a kid from Bowen wanted a job he or she would come to Horseshoe Bay,” he says. “Now, it’s great to see all these young kids here working hard, you can make $25 an hour doing labour on a construction site these days. A lot of them seem motivated, on-track. I hope they take their education to the next level.” 

Earl Carroll intends to stick around Bowen for the foreseeable future, spending as much time on the water as possible, helping the Bowen Yacht Club to grow a local fleet of racing boats, and perhaps picking up a project or two. 

 “Projects have an end,” he says. “And when the project’s over, I go sailing.”