• Age: 16
• Grade: 11

When 25-year-old Jo climbed down the ramp of the freighter Canadian Star to set foot in Vancouver, BC, in the summer of 1967, she’d never heard of log salvaging. But within two and a half years, the immigrant from England would quit her teaching job and join forces with one of the most enigmatic salvagers of the Sunshine Coast. Dick and Jo Hammond spent a life together chasing logs, rescuing boaters in distress, and raising their two children in BC’s log salvaging mecca, Howe Sound.

Combining Dick’s guidance and her stubborn nature to master all challenges, Jo learned to maneuver their salvage boat, drive dogs and tie knots, sing arias to the sea lions and suckle her child while chasing rogue logs.

Edge of the Sound is both a love story and a tale of adventure between a man with an uncommonly high IQ who found his niche behind the wheel of a salvaging boat and a young woman searching for her own place in the world. Their bond was the risk of the wild and unpredictable sea, classical music, the beauty of the natural west coast and the rise and fall of tides that help and hinder their hunt for logs that have escaped between forest and mill. As they work against the forces of nature, Jo Hammond learns to change and she learns to “expect the unexpected.”

Born a stone's throw from the English Channel in Bognor Regis, Jo Hammond's first job was as a dairy farmer. After studying Music and Science in a Liverpool teacher's college, she became a secondary and elementary school teacher, also a member of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic choir. She emigrated to the Sunshine Coast of BC, Canada in 1967 on a 6,000 ton freighter, sailing with a cargo of Rolls Royces, Robertsons' Marmalade, and Cutty Sark Whisky, via the Panama
Canal. After a further three years of teaching, she married a log salvor and obtained her own log salvage licence. During the following 28 years she worked with and without her husband on the log salvage boat, reared two children (on and off the log salvage boat,) performed as a classically-trained soprano, helped to start both a choir and a concert series, and volunteered as an ESL teacher.
During the mid nineteen-nineties her husband became an author and her life changed direction. After learning how to fight computers, she taught herself typing so that she could transcribe his manuscripts. Declaring a truce between the computer and herself, she began to take classes with author Betty Keller.
Jo lives in an orchard by the sea just outside Gibsons with three cats and a vast collection of music recordings. Her most recent publication, Edge of the Sound (Catilin Press, 2010), is a work of creative non-fiction for adults. She is willing to do school and library presentations, and also offers one-on-one assistance to young students who need help with creative writing.

Jo Hammond's profile page

Edge of the Sound: Memoirs of a West Coast Log Salvager