Jasper Marine x AETHER: Built For This
At AETHER, we believe in making the most of your one spin, and that means embracing adventure and exploration in all its forms. It’s this exact ethos that drove Jasper Marine founder, Jasper Vermeulen, to design the Defender 22. He envisioned it as the ultimate, adaptable marine tool capable of handling all manner of adventures while simultaneously serving as a floating basecamp.
Equipped with various AETHER styles and garments to shield themselves from the unpredictable coastal weather, the duo set off this April to put the Defender 22 to the test under real-world conditions, navigating their way through the Spring water along the Sunshine Coast in an attempt to reach remote, picturesque locales that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Built for This: Boat-Camping the Sunshine Coast Aboard the Defender 22 By Jasper Vermeulen
When I designed the Defender 22, I wasn’t thinking about one specific adventure. I was thinking about all of them. The boat was never meant to be defined by a single use — it was meant to be the ultimate marine tool, adaptable to whatever idea you could dream up on the water. That’s something I genuinely love doing: imagining new ways to use these boats for new adventures, going out and documenting them to inspire our clients to get out there and find their own versions. The roof tent camping trip was one of those ideas; something I’d had in the back of my mind for a while, turning it over, thinking through how it would work in practice. This April, my fiancé Noah and I went out and lived it.
We left from our dock here in Halfmoon Bay on a clear spring morning. The air still had that cool edge that April holds onto on the coast, but the sky was open and blue and the water was flat enough that we made good time out toward the islands. There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles in once you clear the harbour. A clean wake folding out behind you, nothing ahead but space and sparkling water, the rest of the world receding without ceremony. Noah and I didn’t say much for a while. We didn’t need to.
We found our cove mid-morning. Tucked behind a wall of dark rock and old-growth firs, the water inside a shade of green that takes your breath away the first time you see it. I dropped anchor, cut the engine, and for a moment we just sat there listening. Then we got to work setting up camp. The roof tent unfolds from the top of the cabin in a matter of minutes, and once it’s up, the Defender 22 becomes something else entirely: a floating basecamp, self-contained and comfortable, anchored somewhere most people will never reach by any other means. That quick transformation; from boat to home, is something I find so cool.
We inflated the paddle boards and paddled to shore for the afternoon. Setting off on foot, picking our way along the shoreline and then up through the trees, over driftwood and moss-covered logs, following a trail that opened eventually onto a ridge gone gold with spring wildflowers. The Aether boots earned their keep on that hike; log crossings, loose rock on the way up, wet ground throughout, and neither pair complained. Neither did we. There’s something about getting your feet on land after a run on the water that sharpens everything: the smell of the trees, the texture of the rock underfoot, the way the light falls differently in the forest than it does off the water.
We came out on top of a rock face right as the light started to turn. That particular spring gold. The kind that only lasts about fifteen minutes before it softens into grey was sitting on everything. We stood there for a while, Aether jackets zipped against the breeze coming off the water, looking down at the Defender 22 at anchor in the cove below us, small against all that rock and forest. I’ve looked at that boat from every angle imaginable. From that ridge, in that light, it looked exactly right.
Dinner came off the onboard barbecue once we were back aboard; steaks, simply done, eaten at the little deck table as the last of the light left the sky. There is something almost absurd, in the best possible way, about sitting on the deck of a boat at anchor in a cove with no one else around, eating a proper meal, completely comfortable. That’s part of what the Defender 22 is built for: not roughing it, but doing it right. Good food, a real bed, everything you need and nothing you don’t.
We took the paddleboards out as dusk settled in, gliding across water that had gone completely flat and dark, the trees reflected perfectly on the surface. Then we paddled ashore, gathered wood, and built a fire on the beach. Toques on, jackets zipped to the chin, we found a long piece of driftwood and sat.
I watched the Defender 22 glow out on the water and felt something I’m still working out how to put into words. Gratitude, mostly. That boat started as an idea — a rough sketch, then a CAD file, then a thousand decisions made at a workbench by a group of people who genuinely care about what they’re building. I am incredibly lucky to be surrounded by the team I have. Skilled craftspeople who share the same passion for these boats, who have joined me on this journey and helped turn something we all believe in into a brand that stands for something real. Every hour of work they have put in is floating in front of me right now, in this cove, in this light.
I dreamed this up. My team built it into reality. And now I get to offer this. This exact experience, and feeling to other people. This is what I do for a living now. Sitting on that driftwood watching the fire burn down, I thought: it feels like it shouldn’t be real. But it is. And there are so many more adventures left to dream up.
