By JANE DeRIDDER Victoria Weeklies Contributor | : tall spare man swung down into his rowing skiff from a sailing oat moored in Canoe Cove. He rowed smartly through anc¢hored vessels, tethered the dinghy to a float, a then strode jup a steep hill. Only when the got close did I realize that;this sea dog was older than he first appeared to be. At the time, Bill Tellier was 81. He was living on/ his boat and had for the better part jof his long life. Unlike most yacht jowners, Bill did not rent a dock or a/slip in a marina for his 41 foot ketch,/Black Dog IT. He preferred lying at ayvichor or tugging at one of his two/ moorings — either in Victoriays Cadboro Bay or else in Canoe (ove. When he was not off sailing/ that is... “I like the privacy out there,” he said. 71 can row ashore.” Nor did Bill ownga car. “I like to walk,” he ex- plaimed. “Or else I take a bus. You dowt have to push the rascal!” he adfled with his customary twinkle. -#Boating is a disease,” Bill reck- ojied. “Fortunately a healthy one.” (The only time _ Bill ever smoked was jn light weather to see which way the wind was coming from). Bill Tellier liked to point out just how multi-faceted and challenging life afloat can be. “Believe me,” he often said, “no other sport demands one quarter as much as sailing.” Bill enumerated the skills a cruis- ing sailor should have: “Sheer knowledge of design, of boat con- struction, of ship handling in all weathers; of meteorology, piloting, celestial navigation, marlinespike seamanship, rigging, sewing, paint- ing, carpentry, metalwork and : plumbing, as well as electrical and | -ge-mechanical skills. Even cooking,” he ~ added. “Yes, and you can enjoy sailing to a ripe old age.” Bill did. When we visited Bill Tellier that particular summer in Canoe Cove, he had just finished what he called... “circumnavigating Saltspring Island ... with his 75 year old nephew Clarrie. (Clarence Smith of Bal- timore left Montreal way back when, to play hockey for the Baltimore Orioles, Bill told us. There, the five foot three and a half inch Canadian centre was known as ‘Mighty Mite.) Bill and Clarrie were having a wonderful cruise of the Gulf Islands. The weather had been perfect. They'd stopped off in Ganges, Scott Point, Telegraph Cove on Thetis Island and in Maple Bay. They were heading off 2 _.-. for another week under sail. One of a big Quebec family, Bill Tellier was raised on the shores of the St. Lawrence. (Clarrie is just one of Bill’s 32 nephews and nieces). In the hungry thirties, Bill bought a schooner, rebuilt it and lived aboard. He joined the navy and in WWII, according to Clarrie, ~. . . defused a few bombs, among other things.” “After the war, I had to find a way to earn a living,” Bill reminisced. “I decided to build a boat for fishing. I came out here to Canoe Cove looking for shore-front property. It was beautiful. I was told I could extend the shed where a 45 foot fish boat had been built here in the cove. I bought timbers from the old Enterprise Wharf at the foot of Fort Street in Victoria. The deck was rotten, the piles finished. They were breaking it up. I bought three loads of that tim- ber for footings and beams to extend the building — eight by eights without a knot in them. I stretched the shed to 100 feet long. It’s still here. That’s where I built the first Black Dog. “She was 58 feet on deck, a com- bination fish-pleasure vessel. I had a team of four to build her. There was sold Black Dog... “My next boat, West by North was an accident,” Bill continued. “I had wanted an old boat. I searched France, the Med, Holland and Sweden but couldn’t find what I was looking for so finally Ihad a boat built for mein the U.K. — an Alden design, Halmatic hull, shallow draft — one of a kind. They quoted me $60,000 but it cost closer to $100,000. It was a nightmare. I had West by North for five years in the Caribbean. I must have been there 11 years all told.” We had heard for many years about Billy Black Dog, a well-known char- sesso aoe BLACK DOG, the 58-foot ketch owned and built by Bill Tellier at Canoe Cove cut an imposing figure in local waters and the Caribbean. Mariner Gin Scouts made the trip from Long Beach, Calif. to sail in her. Later Tellier sailed Black Dog up and down the Lesser Aniillies as a charter operator. Paul Grau, the old German who for years was a squatter on Kolb Island. There was Twink Rodd. There was Bill, a fisherman, and myself. I'd been planning the boat for years. Black Dogwas a brigantine, or tops] schooner. I just call her a schooner. “We used fir planking on oak frames, gumwood for stem and stern posts, and greenheart on the rails — a hard wood so loggers could step aboard. Imade her big soI could have ahold in the centre for 10 tons ofice. “T spent the first winters at Fisherman’s Wharf in Victoria finish- ing the interior. I'd fish in the sum- mers. But the tuna fishing didn’t work out. Japanese imports killed it. So I converted her for chartering. “I took out Mariner Girl Guides, 16 at a time, 17- and 18-year olds. Troop after troop of them came up from Long Beach — 33 hours on the bus. I learned a great deal about girls. One minute they were children, the next, sophisticated young ladies. “I used to-sail to San Diego for the winter, and in April sail up from San Francisco to Victoria on one of the last of the winter gales. The squares took me right up in four days every time. “But the charter season is so short in B.C. — four ‘months is about all. Then I ran into Irving Johnson on Yankee. He told me about year round chartering in the Caribbean.” So Bill took his schooner Black Dog to the Caribbean and sailed her up and down the Lesser Antilles on the Trades. “In the tropics,” Bill said, “the sun and the mould get to you. You lose energy after five or six years. Keep- ing up the varnish is a lot of work. Then I made a horrible mistake. I acter in British Columbia boating circles, but it wasn’t until we too were chartering out of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands that we finally met him. With a native lad as crew, Bill had a busy charter season each year, mostly repeats and referrals. He could spin a yarn to keep his guests happy. He took charters on tours of old sugar mills, taught them to snorkel on coral reefs, and to spear lobster. Like other charter vessels in British and US Virgin Islands, West by North visited two or more anchorages in the course of a day. “A mining engineer, one of my regular charters, once brought aboard a multi-millionaire friend who told me, ‘I admire your lifestyle. I’m a slave to my possessions.’ I’ve never forgotten it,” Bill said. “T’ve a damned good life. No point making more money. I couldn’t use it.” He was wearing an old, holed jersey. “I’m frugal,” he explained. “This is for when I’m by myself. The other is for when I go ashore.” Bill continued his yarn. “I soon found that West by North was just too big. I sailed her back to British Columbia and sold her. Then I got this fella .. . this small boat...” She was a ‘CT 41’ production boat from Taiwan, except all the exterior woodwork, fittings and fastenings had been shipped inside the un- finished boat as cargo. Bill was going to be certain everything was put on right if he had to do it himself. Bill enjoyed his ‘Small Dog’ as he called this Black Dog. He could manage the upkeep himself. He could sail her single-handed, sometimes in company with the Farrells on China Cloud, sometimes in company with his friend George Wood on Pelin. a ‘ SoS ' i yi Into the Deep Blue, Victoria Weeklies June 17, 1992. Page 3 Billy Black Dog — half a century later, still messing about in boats More often he spent his time sailing about on his own, or“... just messing about...” In the winter, Bill said, “I hiber- nate, with maybe a land cruise by BC Ferries to see a sister in Vancouver, or to take in a boat show.” Bill fitted a sheet of plywood over the salon table for a drawing board/work bench for winter projects. “T even eat off it,” Bill said. He equipped the boat with a diesel heater to make his porridge and his tea, and a Honda generator to charge the ship’s batteries so he could watch the wrestling on telly. A letter from Bill with a February postmark reads, “With the longer days I get the urge to turn to boat maintenance and sailing. I want to get on with fixing a furling mains’l for quicker and easier handling. There is always something to do. It looks like an exciting year.” You would never guess that three years previously Tellier was ~. . . just an old carcass that’s had it,” as he put it. Angina was doing him in. Dr. Young, Bill’s doctor and a fellow member of Royal Victoria Yacht Club, referred him to a heart specialist who “also had a boat and was a RVYC member. Dr. Fraser referred him to Dr. Ralph Smith, another boat owner and fellow yacht club member, con- sidered one of the best heart surgeons in Victoria. “He was gruff with me until he heard about my way of life,” said Bill. “You really live on a boat? he asked me.” Perhaps because Bill was leading the life they secretly aspired to, those doctors decided to put Bill right. In January of ’84, Bill underwent double carotid neck surgery, six days later, a quadruple bypass. “I thought that was it,” said Bill. “When I woke up, I saw a vision in white. I asked if it was the angel Gabriel. But it was a nurse, and I couldn’t have been given better care. I’m just like new now. I feel good for another 20 years.” Weather permitting, Bill rows ashore most every day. “Good for my heart,” he said. As well as a history of heart disease, Bill admitted to a back problem. “Ex- ercise. That’s the answer. I’ve got to keep moving and not lift heavy things.” Nevertheless, we caught him one day wrestling with a mooring out in the bay, using Black Dog’s anchor windlass to shift it for a friend. Then one winter, the weather was particularly bad. Bill got fed up wait- ing for spring to come. He caught the flu. It was only because George Wood came by to check up on him and took him home with him that Bill pulled through. : _ “I may consider renting an apart- ment for a few weeks — just for the coldest part of each winter so I can get to a movie or a museum more easily, so I can go walking between raindrops. . . sort of get myself used to the idea, so when I find I can’t sail any more, Ill be able to move ashore. “I've been working on plans for a new boat,” Bill told us. “A scaled- down version of my old schooner, Black Dog, that I spent 10 years designing. Even today I wouldn’t change any of her lines.” Holding the little hammer he uses for model making, Bill showed us a beautifully constructed half model of his “next boat.” “Of course, I'll probably never build it... buta man’s got to dream...”