The boating life
Q&A with Chris Holloway

Daniel MacIsaac
Northern News Services

NNSL (May 10/99) - One of the original houseboaters on Yellowknife Bay, electrician Chris Holloway converted his wife to boating life, is raising his six-year-old daughter there and is getting set for his 15th spring thaw -- and breakup.

YKlife: As a newcomer to houseboat life, myself, I'm curious about many aspects of houseboating -- what's the best part?

Holloway: Not having to deal with the city. No, seriously, it's just watching the ducks go by, and the occasional beaver.

Living on the water is just nice, and instead of looking out my window and seeing my neighbour's bathroom window 10 feet away, I get to see the lake.

YKlife: Speaking of bathrooms, exactly how clean is the lake water?

Holloway: Well, because I drink the water here, I'm the last person who would pollute it.

I came home last winter and there was a notice on my door saying not to drink the lake water, and I looked over and saw the guy putting up a notice on my neighbour's door. He said there was nothing wrong with the water, but he said you just shouldn't drink untreated water -- in case something like a muskrat has just swam by. But he also said the bay water is better than that found in most cities.

YKlife: Everyone describes Yellowknife summers as incredibly beautiful but also plagued by flies and mosquitoes. How worried should I be about living on the water then?

Holloway: In fact, there are less mosquitoes out there -- I can sit out on the deck with no bug dope, and only get one or two bites, and if a breeze blows, there's none at all.

If I sit out on a deck in Frame Lake South, I get eaten alive. The bay's one of the few places in Yellowknife where there's very few mosquitoes.

YKlife: Maybe you can relieve another fear I have -- dealing with the impending ice breakup. How bad will it be?

Holloway: You can walk on the ice for a long time yet. It melts from the shore out, but a channel to Joliffe Island gets made right away -- so you can go canoeing around the island while people are still walking on the ice.

At first there's usually a bit of hopping around on the ice. We have a 12-foot aluminum boat for (our daughter) Madeline when the ice gets questionable, and even my wife, Claire, can jump in so I can just push from the back -- and if my foot goes through, the boat's right there.

Sometimes we'll stay in town for a day or two if the breakup is really bad -- but in 15 years I've never gone through the ice.

YKlife: So are there any negative aspects at all to life on the bay?

Holloway: Oh yeah, you have to live with the weather in the fall -- we're pretty exposed to the wind here -- lugging the propane, the honeybuckets, generating your own energy.

But the real reason I live on a houseboat is because I don't want to live in a $100,000 trailer or in a cookie-cutter house at the end of the airport.

But what I'd really like is a house with a couple of acres of land around it, but you can't have that up here. Maybe somewhere outside Edmonton.

YKlife: But wouldn't you then miss being surrounded by water?

Holloway: That's true -- I really do like the water, and (growing up in Vancouver) I've been surrounded by it all my life.

YKlife: But how did you get your Yellowknife sea legs in the first place?

Holloway: I moved up here 25 years ago, and because housing has always been ridiculously expensive here, after the first five years I thought it was a great idea that as a single guy, I could live in a shack in Old Town.

There weren't any houseboats then, though I worked on boats and things in the summer -- and, just being young and foolish, I just started building one.

And then a friend came across a barge used by Con mine on Prelude Lake. It was a little wooden barge full of styrofoam, but he put a little shack on it and lived on it for a couple of years until he got married and moved. So I rented it and eventually bought it from him.

He had it parked over on the other side of the bay, but I moved it over here next to Joliffe because it's better protected.

YKlife: How did your current houseboat come to be?

Holloway: It was a fish packer on Lake Winnipeg. A guy named Ed Linberg put a semi-trailer on the back end and towed the whole thing up to Fort Simpson. He operated it as a tugboat for at least 10 years in the 1960s and 1970s and then as a ferry at Fort Simpson before the government started up its own ferry service.

I bought it from him and tore off the cabin, but it's still a boat, and all I have to do is put a motor back in it.

YKlife: Where would you take it if you could?

Holloway: I'd like to take it down to the East Arm (of Great Slave Lake), but work is going to keep me here this summer.

YKlife: So obviously you adjusted easily to houseboat life? What did Claire think about it when you got married?

Holloway: She knew I was living out here, and it wasn't a problem for her -- because she's a little nuts herself.

YKlife: What about your daughter, Madeline?

Holloway: At school she sees how other kids live and says, "When are we going to get a house on land?"

Obviously, bicycling is not a strong point, but she is getting to be a good swimmer.

And she loves to go skating at the Snow Castle in the winter.

YKlife: Do you guys ever go fishing off the boat?

Holloway: A couple of years ago, I picked her up from school and she said, "Daddy I want to go fishing."

She kept winding in her line kind of slowly and getting it snagged on the bottom. I helped her reel in one of the snags, and there was a jackfish at the end of the line.

YKlife: What are some of the more unusual events you've witnessed out here over the years?

Holloway: There was the time when we all showed up in our canoes at this one houseboat and they showed a movie on the side of the boat -- because it was coloured white.

And one time when the city was arguing that the boats weren't fit for navigation, we had considered having a houseboat race.

YKlife: How many are there out there now?

Holloway: Fifteen.

YKlife: Are Yellowknife's houseboats a unique phenomenon in Canada?

Holloway: Not at all -- Vancouver has hundreds of them, and there are lots right up the B.C. coast, including the Canoe Pass Houseboat Community. Some of the houseboats there are floating palaces worth $300,000 to $400,000.

Seattle has a famous houseboat community on Lake Washington and in San Francisco they're everywhere.

YKlife: So what's been your finest houseboating moment?

Holloway: I don't know if there is one -- it's all been good.

I'll tell you it's good to see people out in their boats and kayaks and swimming around, and I can remember a couple of years ago it was so warm it was still possible to jump off the boat and right into the water -- in September.