264 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 80 PART 2 MARCH 2022
In 1965, he and Sally bought a house with 22 acres of farmland on the
North Alouette River in Haney. They ran a smallholding, keeping some pigs
and two cows in succession, Buttercup and Blossom. They kept horses, and
Jamie became a successful beekeeper. On one occasion when Jamie was
required to list on a government form all the statutes under which he was
authorized to act, he gleefully included the Apiaries Act, which has since,
soullessly, been renamed the Bee Act.
Jamie and Sally canoed down the Yukon River, twice: once with friends
and later with their children. They also canoed down the Danube from Ulm
to Vienna. They had a two-wheeled dolly, and when ending a day’s trip at a
village, they would put the canoe on the dolly and trundle it through the
streets looking for accommodation. On one occasion, arriving after dark,
they asked where they would be able to store the canoe for the night and
were directed to a small room. In the morning, they found they had placed
their canoe across the altar of the local chapel.
Jamie commuted to the office in his Morgan, a convertible made in England.
It had a frame of wood and very hard suspension. David Purvis said
that it had all the inconveniences that money could buy. They sold the
Haney property in 1979 and bought a yacht, Pacific Jade. The family lived in
the Greenbrier Hotel on Robson Street until Pacific Jade was refurbished,
when they all moved aboard. They spent that winter living on the yacht in
False Creek. Jamie and Sally lived on the boat for nine years on and off,
spending some winters ashore in short-term rentals. They spent most summers
sailing up the coast and in the summer of 1982 sailed to Hawaii and
back as a practice ocean run. For their ocean voyages, Jamie had to learn
about marine navigation, in particular the use of a sextant, the nautical
almanac and sight reduction tables. The tables fascinated him to the point
that, when he realized that before they were available navigators had to
make their own calculations to determine the results of their sightings, he
taught himself spherical trigonometry.
Diana Reid joined Lawrence & Shaw in 1980. She says that Jamie was her
mentor and she thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated working with and
learning from such a scholar of the law. She recalls that, although he truly
loved the practice of law, especially the areas of succession, trusts and fiduciary
relationships, his true passion was sailing. The pull of the sea would
win, but there was a significant obstacle that had to be overcome. Jamie and
a partner at KPMG were executors of the will of a prominent businessman,
whose affairs were complicated during his lifetime and even more so with
his death. Months and then years began to tick away, and Jamie and Sally’s
departure date to sail around the world was quickly approaching. Eventually
it became clear that the client’s estate could not be wound up within