For a ten to fourteen day cruise, I would recommend one of two areas. If you really pushed it, you might even be able to touch on both but only if the weather really cooperated.
One area is the Gulf Islands. These are more or less across from Vancouver, BC. There are lots of funky little harbors, a couple of good sized towns, and numerous opportunities to anchor out. You could hire a boat in the US (Bellingham or Anacortes would probably be the most practical) or the Vancouver area, or most likely on Vancouver Island itself. An advantage of hiring in the US is that this will let you cruise through the San Juan Islands, too, which are immediatly southeast of the Gulf Islands. They are more or less the same chain of islands but God help you if you call the Gulf Islands the "Canadian San Juans." Very rude and uncool.
The other area is Desolation Sound which starts at the north end of the Georgia Strait. More remote than the Gulf Islands, it's a terrific place to get a feel for the whole Inside Passage environment. While there are a few small communities with docks and stores, Desolation Sound tends to be an anchoring cruise. You could get a boat in Vancouver and run up the mainland coast to Desolation Sound, or you can probably hire a boat in Campbell River on Vancouver Island and maybe even Powell River across the way on the mainland (Northern Spy on this forum could probably provide good info on that). Either location puts you right at the doorstep of Desolation Sound.
In addition to looking at charts and "exploring" these areas via Google Earth, I can recomment a good guidebook to the area to get you started. This is the
Waggoner Guide, which is updated annually.
While there are 7,326 different cruising guides to this region, the nice thing about the
Waggoner is it gives you both some navigational information as well as information of what there is to see and do in the various places. There are better cruising guides if you're interested in the nitty gritty of where to anchor and detailed navigation info, but the
Waggoner Guide is a great place to start.
There is apparently an on-line version of the
Waggoner Guide but we have never looked into this so I can't tell you if i think it's good, bad, or indifferent. If you want the paper edition you can get it from Amazon or direct from FineEdge Publications.