About the Author

Muriel Wylie Blanchet (1891–1961) was born and educated in Montreal. At eighteen she abandoned a promising academic career to marry Geoffrey Blanchet. In 1922, the family moved west and settled on Vancouver Island where they purchased the Caprice for six hundred dollars. Four years later Geoffrey Blanchet was presumed dead when he never returned from a day trip on the Caprice. But the boat was recovered, and two years after being widowed, Muriel Blanchet embarked on the first of her family’s fifteen voyages along the coast. In the winters Blanchet lived on Vancouver Island, home-​schooling her children and supporting them by writing for magazines such as The Rudder, Pacific Yachting, Blackwoods and Atlantic Monthly. Blanchet was in the process of writing a second book, this time about their Vancouver Island home, when she died at the age of seventy.