Bernard the German

Finally! Grant Lawrence reads aloud each chapter from his outrageous and award-winning book "Dirty Windshields - the best and the worst of the Smugglers tour diaries" (Douglas and McIntyre, 2017) in a brand new podcast available now. 

Hermit of Desolation Sound is Grant Lawrence's latest true life adventure series, starring Russell Letawsky, the hermit philosopher who lived off the grid in a dank shack on West Coast of Canada for over a decade. 

Bernard the German's colourful and adventurous life comes to a tragic and unpredictable end in Fiji.  

Bernard the German and Darragh the Irishman barely survive what turns out to be Cyclone Thomas, a Category 4 tropical storm. They find themselves closest to Fiji, where life changes in ways the big German could have never have predicted. 

Bernard the German's dream of sailing around the world is threatened when he is diagnosed with cancer, but thanks to an Irish lucky charm / skipper-for-hire named Darragh McCarthy, together the two misfits attempt to cross the Pacific Ocean. 

After a serious health scare, Bernard the German decides to sell his hand-built eagle's nest of a cabin in Desolation Sound to follow his second dream: sailing around the world. 

Bernard the German rushes to help a Desolation Sound neighbour whose cabin has erupted into flames. 

Bernard the German is viciously attacked by several of the creatures that roam the dense woods behind his Desolation Sound cabin. 

Bernard the German shook the Alberta dust once and for all and moved his young family to the West Coast where he took up work at the docks, always possessed to own a waterfront cabin in the wilderness. A one-line ad in the newspaper led him to Desolation Sound, BC.

When Bernard the German arrived in Canada in the late 1960s, he was immediately the target of anti-German bullying in the Alberta capital of Edmonton. He eventually took matters into his own hands... or feet... as it were. 

You'd have to go back to the late-1940s war-torn aftermath of penniless rubble and hunger in the oldest town in Germany to fully understand who Bernard the German really was, and how he eventually made it to Canada in the middle of the swingin' '60s. 

After a tense stand off at the Okeover government wharf, host Grant Lawrence and his friends thought they had left the menacing Bernard the German behind, until the huge man shows up uninvited in his boat in front of the Lawrence cabin in the wilds of Desolation Sound.

Host Grant Lawrence meets Bernard the German for the first time at the Okeover government wharf at the edge of the BC wilderness near Desolation Sound. The German's towering presence is instantly intimidating and leaves Lawrence and his friends cowering. 

Bernard the German is the tragic tale of the giant of Desolation Sound, a true story of an ox of a man who died just as he lived- very remarkably, while following his dreams right to his grave. This 10-part series will take you on an adventure around the world, from the war-torn rubble of post-war Germany, to the coastal wilderness of Desolation Sound, B.C., to the dangerous but alluring tropical climes of the South Seas. Told in a fast-paced serialized format, this epic tragedy will appeal to anyone with a thirst for wanderlust.