Before long, Anne was going out on the boat with Sam regularly. When the hospital that employed Anne closed, she moved in with Sam and they started working together. He was already salvaging logs.

Their boat was called Vulture.

“The log salvors were always hanging around the back of the tugboats when they were towing logs. You know, hovering. Waiting for logs to come out,” explains Anne. “And sometimes the skipper would call on the radio, and say ‘The vultures are behind me!’”

Sam decided to claim the nickname. Anne laughs. “It was free advertising, because if they ever said that the vultures were here, it was us.”

It was very exciting, Anne says. “We never knew when we were going to go out. We didn’t have regular hours. We had to be ready to drop everything we were doing, just to grab some food. And away you went. It was a very higgledy-piggledy sort of a life, I suppose.”

And not one likely to make you rich. Anne says she and Sam didn’t clear $20,000 in a year. They had to make compromises.

A friend once asked Anne if she missed the culture back in England. She thought about it. “At one point, we’d almost seen every single play that was on in London,” she says. But go back? No. Who wants to see another play “with all this country around you with all the wild stuff?”

When Anne and Sam met, Sam already had two sons. She was not the mothering sort, she says, and didn’t want to have kids of her own. “Where are you going to put a toddler on a boat pulling logs?” she asks.

Working on the log salvage boat could be dangerous, especially given that bad weather was when salvagers made money. Storms caused the logs towed by tugboats to come free and scatter into the sea.

“I mean, we didn’t pray for bad weather,” Anne laughs. “But we knew when the bad weather hit, we’d have work—and you weren’t paid unless you turned in the logs.”

Sam and Anne had built their own house next to the ocean in Garden Bay and had it organized such that they could drop everything in a second and head down to the boat. They placed radios throughout the house so that they could listen for a turn in the weather—or some captain’s luck.

Sweet words to hear over the airwaves were “something like ‘We’re losing logs!’ Or ‘Oh, we’ve had to drop it,’” explains Anne. “That was from the skipper who was in a bad spot and he had to drop his whole tow to get the boat back into shelter.”

Then Anne and Sam would be out on the ocean.

They had some close calls working those big spills. Anne recalls one time she and Sam were on Vancouver’s English Bay.

There had been a large spill of “massive cedars,” Anne says, and a swell had taken the logs up the beach and mounded gravel and stones against them.

Anne knew it would take a lot of power to free the logs and drag them down the beach and into the sea. Anne kept the boat in place while Sam rowed ashore and jumped down into the sand. He wrapped a chain around a log and hooked it up to the towline connected to the boat. Theoretically, when the chain was pulled, it would twist and free the log.

“So he did this and I gave it a pull, a good pull, and nothing happened,” says Anne. “So I thought, ‘Oh my golly, ought to give it a bit more than that.’”

Anne backed up the boat, letting out some towline to give it some slack. It was important to have the boat lined up with the towline. “If it pulled off to one side, you’d capsize. . . So you had to be careful.”

“So I had everything lined up and I gave it the works.”

Suddenly, the tension ruptured one of the links at the end of the towline, and the line recoiled, hitting Anne down her left side.

The next thing she knew, she was sitting in the deck bucket against the back wall of the boat’s cabin. She was bleeding from the head.

“Sam, poor Sam, came back looking as if he’d seen a ghost,” Anne remembers. But as she came round, sitting in the bucket, she felt strangely comfortable. She laughs at the memory. “I thought, ‘I don’t know why I haven’t tried sitting here before!’”

Anne was lucky. She and Sam had been working with other boats on that log spill, and an ambulance had been called. The other salvagers had seen what had happened; they made sure Anne and Sam got back to the dock. Anne was in hospital for a week with the cut on her head and a few cracked ribs. Her bruises blossomed in the perfect impression of braided rope.

While recuperating, she worried about Sam, now on his own chasing logs. “If you’re out working like that by yourself, it’s pretty dangerous,” Anne says.

For a week more, she was on worker’s compensation pay. Then she couldn’t take it any longer. She showed up at the dock to join Sam aboard Vulture. “I couldn’t do much, but at least I was with Sam,” she says.

Anne and Sam gave up beachcombing in 1978. She vividly remembers the decision. Sam had just gotten off the phone after talking to Gulf Sort and Salvage, the outfit that bought their logs. “They were going to cut our price, or something or other that made him mad,” she says. “And he turned to me and he said, ‘I think we should quit.’”

“I said, ‘Sure.’ And so we quit.”

They were ready. There wasn’t enough money in the game anymore because movers of logs were getting better at keeping them. Nowadays, logs are tied up in bundles to be transported, rather than floating loose between boomsticks.

“Another thing was the weather forecasting,” Anne says. “They brought in satellite imaging and the forecasts were getting more and more accurate.” This allowed the tugboats to plan for bad weather, which was when the big spills tended to happen.

“It was the end of an era,” she sighs. She and Sam sold Vulture. Then Sam fixed up a big sailboat, named Kivak, and the two of them explored the West Coast together for many years.