When others head to the gym for their morning workout, Karen Millen paddles her rowboat from her Westbay Marina float home to the Inner Harbour.

“It’s just so calming and nice in the morning,” she says. “The seals are curious. They come up and check me out.”

Then it’s time to sip coffee with husband, Doug, from their front row, ocean view seats.

“The water’s always interesting. It’s never static,” she says. Karen watches a seaplane take off from her dining room table. Then she notices a harbour ferry approaching the marina bouncing in on small whitecaps.

“Every time you look out your window, something looks different,” she says.

And she’s got plenty of windows.

Karen designed their home and the couple moved in to the development five years ago. The yellow-cedar house was the first home built in the development and sits at the end of one of the docks. The couple wanted to make sure their view wouldn’t be marred by another float home.

Today, there are 26 luxury float homes in the village, along with dozens of transient and live aboard boats in the marina.

Karen opens her patio doors, leading to her modest flower and herb garden. Fresh sea air blows into her three-storey float home, bringing a disembodied voice with it.

“Karen, do you want us to come over now?” a neighbour yells from his boat hailer.

“Permission to come aboard,” Karen jokes. But she doesn’t live in a houseboat or a boathouse despite her nautical reference. Her home doesn’t move.

The Millens didn’t have the sense of community they wanted in the Oak Bay neighbourhood they moved from.

“I could have bumped into my neighbours in the grocery store and not known they were my neighbours,” she says.

“Being at the end of the dock, you bump into people and you chat and pass the time, and I find that old-fashioned, like living in a small village.”

Janice Hayward and Ron Harris let themselves in. Their energetic pooch, Winston, makes himself at home, and nestles into a sunny spot on a corner of carpet on the floor.

The couple live aboard their 14-metre sailboat year-round.

“We lived in Swartz Bay when we had a house, and you could walk down the street and there was nobody out to say ‘hello’ to,” Hayward says.

Hayward and Harris moved to Westbay to regain a sense of community, but it was really their love for sailing – and each other – that made them give up give up their house and everything in it.

They started spending more time on the water than on land and dove in to the live-aboard lifestyle. Sailing is their primary passion, which the two says outweighs the things they gave up, like a bathtub, or room to stretch out.

“I don’t need a thousand copies of National Geographic, I just need the last one,” Harris says.

And they don’t need more than the 420 square feet they live in.

“Living on a sailboat, you learn to dance,” Harris says.

Doug and Karen’s home is five times the size of their neighbours’ boat and says they couldn’t live in a space that size. Harris and Hayward agree it’s not for everybody.

The two teach sailing and give workshops around the city about what it’s like to live aboard. But their seminars are less about living aboard and more about living your dream. Both couples say they’ve found theirs.

When the Millens were building their float home, a friend teased, calling it a “pondo.”

“I don’t see myself ever in a condo. I’ll go from here to the seniors’ home,” Karen says.

Hayward feels the same. “If we can’t sail because one of us is not physically able to, we’ll go to a power boat, and then it will be the power boat to the grave.”

lweighton@vicnews.com